True, although the arts were plenty vital otherwise, but cinema is harder to pull off on the sly. Tons of great literature before and after the 60s, but you can circulate that informally under the censor's nose. Harder to mount a production.

Well, the political situation changed. A lot of the filmmakers in the late 50s and early 60s were working under Khrushchev's Soviet Union (and a period called "the thaw", where censorship was more relaxed), but Brezhnev reversed a lot of that when he took office, and by the end of the decade he outright invaded…

I wanted to like Sideways but it was actually the screenplay that I disliked most. I nearly walked out during Virginia Madsen's monologue about pinot grigio grapes (but really it's just an overarching metaphor about us, seeee?)

I know, but it hews really closely to the book, especially in tone and language. If anything Payne buffed out some of the book's harsher edges.

Not even an electrician per se: I guarantee you that Russians living near the Caucasus know how - and on very many occasions have had to - jury-rig their own electrical systems. It's a basic survival thing.

the scorn and patronizing pity of his wretched Paris Je T’aime segment

Nope, that's a lazy defense.
Let me put it this way: we agree to accept, within the Marvel universe, that Tony Stark is such a preternaturally gifted inventor that he does things completely implausible in the real world, right? So why is it that we cheer when he puts together a physics-defying flying metal suit, but…

I think you can pull all this off with a good sense of humor - the films that laid all this groundwork certainly have one - but the show doesn't seem to exist in any world, much less a well-developed one. Everything seems to be taking place in an odd vacuum.

Eh… But the show isn't developing any of this plausibly, even with the suspension of disbelief. I haven't seen anything to convince me that Skye is especially talented, and using lazy screenwriting shorthand to have her 'hack' into convenient plot devices isn't doing it for me. If it's doing it for you, well…. good…

Yeah, I pretty much cackled my way through this entire episode. So happy to see this show taking off as well as it is.

Heh, although I don't know if they were ever quite "tough-luck", or much of a couple outside the internet's fever dreams.

What a weird question, and an even weirder way to assess it. Plenty of great artists have turned out to be evolutionary dead-ends. We still read/listen/look at/appreciate them on their own.

I dunno, there are a lot of bad, low-budget works in that span of RuPaul's imdb page, and I can bet most of them are not labors of love. I have to imagine he thinks of paychecks as 1. anything that brings in more money than time spent, and 2. anything that allows him to keep his brand in the public eye.

Favorite moment in the Othello sketch: when the high-five turned into a "Hey Nonny Nonny". That's some high-level comedy right there.

I agree, but - and I don't know if this was necessarily the case here - every interview I've seen with RuPaul is similarly strange, like all his answers are somewhat terse and rehearsed. I'm sure he gets a lot of the same questions, but as much as I like RuPaul, I've frequently been disappointed with his interviews.

Seriously. Team Bolin all the way. Season 1's ep where he and Korra attempted to date was my favorite.

I loved the "I knew this would happen" line.

I like silence. People are so bombarded that silence is what unnerves them.

One of my favorite things about Spider Baby - something that modern horror doesn't appreciate enough - is how long it lingers over its set pieces instead of rushing from one thing to another. That dinner scene over the roasted cat could be interminable, but the whole time, there's a fucking roasted cat sitting in…

Haven't seen the movie, but I love the play.