Also, the adjustments in color-timing in the Final Cut bring out details in the locations and effects (like the opening cityscape or Ford's apartment) that were obscured by the earlier versions. And I agree that blueish interiors and goldish exteriors were the core palette of the original versions of the movie.

Eric Wareheim directed a bunch of episodes of Master of None, and he really is good.

You know how you make a story about a person with a mental illness killing themself at a young age even sadder?

The Ghostbusters themselves are a little less more schticky, and that business with the Statue of Liberty is kind of dumb. But the silly horror setpieces - the abandoned subway, spirit photographs bursting into flames, flashlight-eyes, the Titanic disembarking - are all pretty terrific.

Susan Sontag wrote two great books on that subject. Her big contention was that we talk about illness in terms that are implicitly moralistic, and that you can't separate metaphors about "strength" and "victimhood" from their corrolaries, "weakness" and "guilt."

Fun fact: The only time politicians care about people with mental illnesses is when they're scapegoats for mass shootings.

It was less fun to watch than the Avengers. That puts it in a league with most of the other MCU movies, but people can get really intense about these things.

You could make a strong case for Terminator. But I've seen Predator more recently than Terminator, and I would still rather watch Predator than Terminator right now.

Same here, but I was about 9. Each of my three older brothers has a list of movies our mother made them to take me to see. I think my oldest brother has the absolute worst (Home Alone 2 and Harriet the Spy) but also the absolute best (the Rocketeer). I think my middle brother got stuck with Street Fighter, and the…

I've spent a fair amount of time on those sites, and I acknowledge it's a weird experience. The transactional nature of the whole thing is very overt (even compared to a strip club, for instance), and I think that's really part of the appeal - there are lots of reasons guys get off on giving women their money. …

I do love when people describe a particular group as being fixated on some abbreviation or other. I could certainly imagine a poly person saying "what the fuck is 'NRE?'"

That's kind of how long-term relationships work sometimes - one partner does something they don't love with the expectation that the other partner will acknowledge that when asked to do something they don't love, and so on. It just gets squicky-sounding when you start applying it to sex - although I do love to…

That's becoming a more and more mainstream view. Another generation, that joke from "Homer Goes to College" won't even make sense.

A friend of mine went to med school a few years after I did and hooked up with a few of her classmates. I really couldn't help recommending she not not to shit where she ate - she was way too cool to hook up with medical students, for one thing, and having to go through a grueling education process with intense…

I knew a woman who married a guy who didn't want kids, assuming that they were young (in their mid 20s), and he would eventually grow into the idea of having children. It's quite possible (I know another couple that needed in vitro fertilization because the moron husband got a vasectomy when was 20 and then changed…

I did one of those Mortified shows years ago, reading some emails I sent a girl I had a crush on. What really struck me as an adult was how teenage-me created this dense meshwork of neediness and passive-aggression - I was basically badgering her with self-pity, which is an awful combination. That absurd neediness…

Honestly, first date vs second date seems like hair-splitting.

I assume that the show is legally protected by its parent company, since a lawsuit that interfered with the performer/writers' ability to produce their show would directly affect the parent company's bottom line.

I liked A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night - besides being cool to look at, I appreciate that it was kind of about gender without really being about anything. Young independent directors seem like they put themselves under pressure to say something, and I respect a movie that's constructed out its director's random…

It is really weird that the framing device presents everything as television - first the kid is watching TV, then the power goes out so Ernest Borgnine tells the kid about some television episodes he wrote. It's literally a movie about people enjoying television.