I’d go with The Sittaford Mystery, which is fun (a séance and a bunch of people snowed in in an isolated house, Mouse Trap-style), has a clever, elegant solution, and hasn’t been done to death in multiple adaptations.

Hallowe’en Party has some good elements—one of its pleasures, of all things, is all the discussions of quarry gardens—but it’s one of the last novels she wrote, and Christie is really showing her age (79): the plot recycles elements of earlier mysteries, it is full of complaints about how things aren’t like the good…

The mystery is why it’s so dull

The showrunner for Colbert’s Late Show for six years was Chris Licht, the guy who then went on to run CNN for a while with a strategy to have it skew more conservative, before he was fired after that disastrous Trump townhall.

It would have been trivial to make a convincing fake mustache to match Cavill’s pre-shaven facial hair in MI6. They’d just need to give it a couple of days for the stubble to grow back.

Eh, I like the film and all, but it’s fundamentally a feature-length commercial for a popular IP, unlike anything Kaufman has ever come close to doing.

I went back and had a look at the Vanity Fair oral history of the show (I won’t link it given how broken links are on Kinja, but it should be easy to find), and it’s clear that Friends was always conceived as an ensemble. Marta Kauffman, one of the creators, even says about one of the original motivations for the…

A good addition to https://cabin-pressure.fandom.com/wiki/People_Who_Aren%27t_Evil,_But_Who_Have_Evil-Sounding_Names

Matt LeBlanc and Courtney Cox deserve a lot of credit for rolling with Friends not being just about them.

You’re almost certainly right, and that’s been the widely accepted narrative ever since he left the show, but I would make a very, very slight caveat that there might be more to the story than we’ve been previously told.

He also doesn’t have a single writing credit to his name

I don’t think it’s that unreasonable. By analogy, if I was going to train to run a marathon, I would probably want to figure out pretty early on how long a marathon actually is.

Yeah, the early 2000s cartoon is the definitive take on the Ninja Turtles for me (and likewise, it was not the version I first grew up with), but I’m always happy to see another one.

he got his first lead role in a series 13 years after Wired came out

You already said as much. But whether you or I see it doesn’t matter in itself. Those two tickets aren’t going to make a difference. I was disputing your assumption that:

As with pretty much any film. I’m certainly not a “hard No” because of the subject matter or style.

I never played with Barbies, but I’m certainly open to seeing the film if it is actually good.

I think for the joke to land it would have to be heightened further, for example by moving the line to encompass most of the Pacific up to and including Hawaii.

Now I want a version of Dune that takes place around a municipal water board.

I think the notion of the four elements is pretty deeply embedded in our culture, and most kids will have been exposed to it in some form. (I guess kids today are too young to remember Avatar: The Last Airbender, but I’m sure it features in more recent media as well. For example, I bet any kid who plays video games…