I'm 48.

The show definitely had the asterisks in the title onscreen (I double-checked), and the movie definitely does not. However, as I noted, the movie did use them in all the advertising. So it's debatable.

I think the average viewer would probably enjoy this more than something I gave a D, yeah. It's certainly memorable—movies that are merely super-dull don't inspire F-level vitriol.

That's actually addressed in the film.

It's not even really that the ending is so bad in itself. (Some people love it; the film was reportedly wildly applauded at its Venice premiere last year.) It's that the ending retroactively makes everything that preceded it seem even more pointless than it had seemed already. Which is saying something.

In case it wasn't clear from the review, I think Deep End and Moonlighting are both terrific. And when I've been underwhelmed in the past (e.g. Four Nights With Anna), the films have still been of interest. This got an F because by the end I felt it had completely wasted 83 minutes of my life.

This is, I'm pretty sure, my first F ever. And I've been reviewing two films a week on average for the last four years or so.

Because adjusting the budget for inflation isn't meaningful. I wasn't comparing it to contemporary budgets. Whereas adjusting the gross provides a sense of how big a hit it was for those who don't know/remember what the average gross was in 1983.

I'll be 48 next week, for the record.

Not always.

I stand corrected. The word "prestige" takes on a decidedly different meaning later in the book, but I'd forgotten this initial definition.

The woman he was told was his sister was in fact his biological mother, and the woman he thought was his mother was in fact his grandmother.

I guess it's not very subtle, but it is weird. A bartender who claims a hooker working his bar is his wife? Unless he's acting as her pimp and getting a cut of the profits (which seems fairly implausible for this bartender, given what we see of him), doesn't make a whole lotta sense. (That's my rationalization for not…

Who wielded more influence is difficult to ascertain, but this film doesn't much resemble Kramer's work formally.

If you want to nitpick, sure. Obviously I mean that The Revenant is currently in theaters.

Why not just watch the film?

Other way around. You get to the end and try to figure out a way to circle back to the beginning.

If Leone were still alive, and he had made a new Man With No Name film starring Tom Hardy (or whoever), and there were elements of that film that would clearly be more powerful with Eastwood in the role he originated and with which he's strongly identified, I'd be making the same argument. The notion that we don't…

What I'm imagining isn't a "nostalgic legacy movie" (a phrase that seems to fairly ooze contempt for anything older than about five years ago). And there's nothing I can do about people unfamiliar with the franchise. Maybe I should have explicitly stated that I was thinking of viewers like myself for whom…

That's probably true, but has little to do with the article, which is arguing that it might have made for a better film, not for a more critically and/or commercially successful film.