Given how much I hated Agustin last season, it's fascinating how he's become (for me) the most watchable of the three leads, by a significant margin. You could argue that he's been "humbled" from season one, but I honestly think they're just writing him better, which is a nice change of pace.

I rock a beard. My husband rocks a beard. We are two handsome bearded fellas. (And we may be what's wrong with America today, hoorah!)

Blissfully Yours, for me: the characters are drifting in and out of sleep, and maybe I am too, because it all starts to blur together, and I don't care, because I'm so happy.

Okay!

But the responses to this thread are making claims about conservatism as some kind of constant vis-a-vis art; i.e. they don't make art because there is something mentally or emotionally fundamental about conservatism that deters them from art. I'm arguing that it's contextual, which is why I brought in a…

I think we're talking past each other: much of what we'd consider conservative here/now was considered dissident then, i.e., these were the artists who were blacklisted, arrested, and sometimes shot.

Also, I think a lot of great art has always come as a reaction/rejection of tradition, while of course being conservative means, almost by definition, embracing tradition.

Right? I feel like she could wilt a wayward tree just by touching it, but chooses not to, because she's (barely) secretly a forest guardian or something.

She was on the jury that year, and if Tarantino's comments (via Ebert) are any indication, she fought tooth and nail to get it awarded over objections from some members of the jury.

Tropical Malady, without a doubt (Although I'm a bit biased here: it's not only my favorite film from that competition, but it may very well be my favorite film, full stop.) Still, as you said, it was a strong year for competition, which makes the award going to Moore even more disappointing (although not really a…

Yeah, I was fully anti-Agustin in season one, but I was really enjoying him this episode.

On the other hand, if the third party were still a threat, Adnan's insistence that the Truth is Out There would be way counterproductive, no? He never fingered Jay as the guilty party, only that he didn't understand why Jay "lied" to get him thrown in prison. That's a pretty open door to third-party suspicion for…

Weirdly, I loved the conventionally tedious parts of Pym, and thought the book ground to a halt whenever the "plot" took over.

Futuristic Mobile looks like present-day most other places.

It does have (I think) the funniest line in the show's run: "You speak German, right? What's ayn rand? Is that like, 'a rand'"?

"The Devil's Hands" is, for me, the quintessential Futurama episode (and a perfect series finale that turned out not to be one.)

Which I think might be the cleverest part of the film, right? The movie's about the mother's barely-concealed resentment of her son and her eventual breakthrough into love and acceptance, so the fact that we kinda hate him at first, and barely realize when he switches over to sympathetic hero, puts us in her position…

Here's an even more contentious opinion: Adz is my favorite album of his, provided you jettison "Impossible Soul"* (which is musically, lyrically, thematically closer to All Delighted People, which I did not enjoy very much.) I switched it out with "From the Mouth of Gabriel," which fits Adz better than ADP, and I'm a…

In fact, that, for me, is a large part of the melancholy running under the Bethesda games: when I hit on something in the corners I didn't expect, and it opens up that world and that world's relationships in a new, meaningful way, and I realize that if I hadn't been dicking around in that corner just to avoid…

More than just affable, though: his show was as genuinely weird as you could get on late night network television, and if it'd have been on a little earlier in the evening, when they cared about viewers and advertisers, they'd have pulled it a long time ago. This was a guy who'd go from an all-puppet episode (even the…