Exactly.  Getting through the Beast story without making the whole show stupid has been my main hope, and I'm feeling pretty good about seeing that hope realized.

A stark contrast to every other time depicted in ASOIAF.

Well, this will probably be great.

I don't know whether Yojimbo's actually (kinda? sorta? maybe?) based on Red Harvest or not, but I don't really care, because the movie got me to read Red Harvest, and that book is fucking awesome in every single respect.

@PhonyPope:disqus that's what I thought, too, but I'm trying to imagine how the firecracker thing might be funny if he hadn't dropped trough.

@avclub-7e72b5fe1ad8fd5b388a5260ba7c07fe:disqus , in fairness, I did hear an interview with the guy who wrote the article on NPR, and there was something said about the money.  I can't remember exactly, but it was more or less your point, as I recall — that the kind of movement you'd expect to see in the betting…

@Roswulf:disqus , I guess my intuition that Williams would handle McEnroe pretty straightforwardly is based largely on how outmoded* Mac's style has become in the 'power baseline' era.  And the things that you'd usually expect to doom a woman playing a man — pace and quality of serve, especially — don't apply to…

45 minutes at a time is ridiculous.  If it's not happening after 20, maybe 30 minutes, a polite head-tap is in order — for both participants' sake, really.  Because, look, sometimes it just won't happen, and that's OK, and it's not necessarily anyone's fault.

So, I never knew that he'd just recently come off demolishing Margaret Court; that certainly casts things in a different light for me.  I guess it's conceivable that how thoroughly he beat Court could've convinced him that he didn't need to train, but … man.  That reporting is about as strong a circumstantial case for…

I dunno.  I'd probably take Serena Williams (age 31, I think) over John McEnroe (age 54).  This maybe doesn't defeat the general point — Serena's pretty clearly an all-timer, for one (though, in fairness, most folks rank McEnroe at least in the 2nd tier of all-time greats in the men's Open Era); for another, they…

The fact that others find the firecracker stunt funny makes me think that the junk-out-whipping totally killed my ability to find anything Andre did afterwards even mildly amusing.

To me, the scene that defines Carmella is when she goes to see the old psychiatrist; he tells her what she must do in order to be a decent person ("Take only the children — what's left of them — and go.").  That she fails to do so dooms her, and probably her children, too.

Hannibal didn't just set the gold standard for TV cinematography, it systematically wormed its way into the gold standard's trust, learned its most intimate secrets and forbidden desires, twisted those desires into a desperate, hungry madness, loosed it upon the world, and then, when it tired of the gold standard,…

"the bridge should be better than it is" — that's pretty much where I'm at with this show.  I said last week that my hope is that the show can just get through the serial killer nonsense without too much idiocy and then turn into the more interesting show it sometimes looks like it might become.  That's still my hope,…

All we need now is for Jeremy Renner's Mayor of Tampa to come in.

I don't want it to bother me, but c'mon, The Bridge.  You're telling me that at no point in her time in the El Paso PD did someone — Stottlemeyer, creepy mustache dude, someone from HR, anyone — say 'Hey, she's a pretty good detective and all, but let's never let her handle witnesses/suspects on her own'?

That's OK.  He'll make more.

OK, 'occasionally' … what are we talking here?  Once a month?  Once a week?  Every few days?

I was going to take issue, but the part where they're all in matching outfits playing banjos and doing the choreographed dancing sold me.

Hoary can also mean 'stale'.