Jessie Ware's What's Your Pleasure? had to be my album of the year. Of all the disco-flavored pop music that came out this year, I thought this one was the top of the lot

Bungle forever.  Also:  I wish I was a better person but I can’t Grimes again post-Musk.  

On one hand, you can’t force people to like things they don’t like, but on the other... it gets kind of frustrating to consistently look at these lists (and the other lists they put out through the year) and see essentially no coverage given to any heavier music.

I really liked all of Phoebe Bridgers’ work up until Punisher, which for some reason does absolutely nothing for me. Listened to it once, thought, meh, and never went back to it. Not sure what it is about it but it just falls flat to me.

Having come of age during the era of ultra critical snobbery I appreciate where you are coming from but when music critics start using terms like “universe-building” I, for one, yearn to see the bar raised back up a bit.

I think the first movie was okay. It suffers from being slavish to the book. That’s all. Emma Watson is a good actress. I think she’s very intelligent. She became the breakout because she grew into being a stone cold fox, while the other two grew into being taller versions of the kids they started as. She gets more…

No. Pottermania was already a global phenomenon when Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire came out the previous year. The books were so huge that the filmmakers frequently just assumed the audience had read them and could supplement the onscreen plotting. Now, obviously some more people saw the movies who never read…

Not really.  It was popular among YA readers but I think the movies pushed it to mainstream 

Chamber also has a murder mystery plot which lends itself pretty well to film, I think.

For the first two films, the movies were just an ancillary source of revenue. I worked at a movie theater over that winter break and witnessed hundreds of kids showing up, dragging their parents in, then quoting scenes and lines from a movie they had never seen before. The books were that huge.

I think Chamber of Secrets is stronger then the 1st one. It’s a bit long but does feel like a novel on film. Visually it’s stronger and has much better visual effects. 

The books were already a world-dominating cultural phenomenon by the time this came out.

It’s weird to look back on the early Harry Potter movies and realize that, for all their big, fancy visuals, the performances are probably what made them actually work. But at the same time, I think Columbus’ sort of uninspired directing and visual design is perhaps the only place they could’ve done their jobs.

I disagree about a lot of this. I think the first Harry Potter was pretty good and I would contend it’s far more responsible for the franchises popularity then the books were. 

The Harry Potter films were an important part of developing my understanding of what a director could bring to a property, because of how dramatic the difference between Columbus and Cuarón was. Though it was perhaps a sign of things to come in franchise world that Cuarón’s was the lowest-grossing entry in the series…

Obligatory Top 10 Highest Grossing Movies Of 2001 Post:

This. Absolutely this. 

Philosopher’s Stone.

I take a lot of the points about playing it safe, but I think that’s way too harsh a review. The giveaway line is “Every time my kids have wanted to watch The Sorcerer’s Stone—and they’ve wanted to watch it a lot—“  Of course they have - it’s great fun.  The early books are pretty lightweight themselves so I wouldn’t…

I love the Harry Potter movies. They’re one of the few things from my childhood that I have a modicum of nostalgia for—which I haven’t been able to say for the books for many years. I can’t defend the first movie as good—although, I will go to the bat for Chamber of Secrets, which is good and people will figure out.…