That quality of total immersion is precisely why Order of the Phoenix is my favorite book in the series. it comes closer than any of the other books to capturing what it would be like to spend an entire year at Hogwarts. the movie disappointed me largely because it failed to capture that, so I'm dying to see the…

I wouldn't have hated the movie - I might have really liked it, in fact - if the ending had remained intact. as it is, the creators sabotaged the movie by slicing off the best part of it.

The book feels rushed and the prose is not Rowling's best. What the movie did was to give me a better sense of what she was trying to accomplish - a nightmarishly tense mystery story with high stakes. Paradoxically, by capturing that element of the story better than she did, it helped me to appreciate the original…

The film version of Goblet of Fire drastically lifted my opinion of the book. The Magicians series is altering my view of the novels, not by improving them but by showing how much more there is to these stories than what we were given. Week by week the show is creating a world that you feel like you could comfortably…

Imperial Conquest (1997): https://archive.org/details…

Todd VanDerWerff actually made this point back in August, in a great article warning that Trump's chances of winning the nomination were higher than most people realized at the time: http://www.vox.com/2015/8/1…

Melissa said she wasn't invited back for the reunion, it sounds like there may have been bad blood between her and the creators.

can we get rid of Kirk, he is my least favorite character after Richard's mustache

This episode had the sharpest writing and some of the best lines of any episode in the season.

I'm actually glad to see the show treating religion as an obsession equal to magic, since that was a strong subtext in the novels. It was never fully spelled out, but I read the books (especially the first one) as a critique of the kinds of religions that tell you you're special, chosen, powerful, and destined to be…

okay, so if I love watching presidential election campaigns and enjoy Shakespearean drama should I watch this show?

Agent Carter is going away? noooo. that header photo is pretty fantastic though.

Mayakovsky nailed the accent, but he shouldn't have been clean-shaven. he needed a beard, a big beard. however, I liked the lighting in this episode. it was very Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. the long-awaited "foxes in the snow" scene was surprisingly tasteful, even visually lyrical.

some of my favorite Belle & Sebastian songs are the ones where they sing about Belle & Sebastian.

I actually never saw that movie. it's… for British eyes only!

Return of the King winning in 2004; one of the few times in recent memory the best movie really did win.

this is one Studio Ghibli film I haven't seen but have been wanting to see. I tend to love their slice-of-life movies like Whisper of the Heart and From Up on Poppy Hill, and it saddens me that there's not more of a market in America for even the studio's most acclaimed films. I also enjoyed this director's Pom Poko,…

Todd VanDerWerff had the best review: "Fuller House made me feel like I was an empty burlap sack shaped like a man, and I was full of bugs, and the bugs moved me around." He later added, "Four and a half stars."

can't wait!!

President Trump Deserved an Emmy for His Work on the Apprentice