It also helps to launch your “everything app” into a frontier environment where there’s no competition (from other social media, banking, investment, shopping and job apps) or can launch it someplace where an authoritarian government has given you a monopoly. (Speaking of which, it doesn’t help if you’re trying to…

Because killing Chewie was a pretty obvious committee decision imposed on R.A. Salvatore, who did the best with the mandate he was given that he could. Hence a moon falling on Chewie while saving Han's kids, but the subtext was clearly a bunch of people behind the scenes deciding Chewie was the most/only expendable…

Extragalactic invaders? Oh, obviously it’s the Tof. Who else could it be? And well overdue. They just need to bring Jaxxon back to fight them.

My parallel universe is the one where they figured out they could do period superhero films well in advance of Captain America: The First Avenger and Captain Marvel and made a Hulk film going back to his original, pre-TV origin story: a 1960s Cold War thriller set on a remote above-ground nuclear weapons testing…

Yep. I was doing a Very Sporadic Rewatch, and one evening I was, like, “Hey, I’ll watch a B5 episode,” and when I sent the old browser to HBO Max the show was gone, gone, gone like somebody’s wife in an old country song.

One of the classic examples of that is Stephen Soderbergh’s The Limey, which uses footage from Ken Loach’s Poor Cow for flashbacks filling in Wilson’s (Terrance Stamp's) backstory.

And I like this explanation because TMP isn’t actually bad, it’s just weird: like Robert Wise somehow missed a memo and thought he was making 2001 and not a Star Trek movie. It’s got some of the franchise’s visually grandest moments juxtaposed against some of the franchise’s unintentionally campiest.

“Fast forward to 1982...”: also keep in mind that Montalban was the star of one of the hottest shows on television (Fantasy Island) and a popular advertising spokesman (most famously for Chrysler and their “rich Corinthian leather” interiors). He was arguably the biggest name attached to Wrath of Khan.

Richard Dreyfuss and Stephen Spielberg.

Last week I finally got around to watching John Carpenter’s version of Christine, a movie I probably didn’t get around to for decades because of it’s critical reputation, which turned out to be underserved. That’s one where Carpenter vastly improved on the source material in my opinion, being able to completely avoid…

He would, but he spent all his money buying a social media platform and was high when he made the hiring decision.

I won’t pretend to be an expert at sous vide despite having a pretty cool Anova that I don’t do enough with, but I’m pretty sure that’s the opposite of how you want to do sous vide meat and have it come out decently.

Yes!

One of my favorite things about the original—and one of the things that makes it such a unique horror movie—is the way Leatherface seems increasingly upset that these strange weirdo teenagers keep coming up to his front door so that he has to kill them instead of finishing his housework before the rest of the family…

I’m not a fan, though I caved when they did Stephen King and Molly, Thing of Evil, which I took out of the box as soon as I got them and put them in a prominent position on the desk where I don’t write so they could watch me not writing and cheer me on in my ongoing attempts to not write.

Yeah. I didn’t hate MSON, but I thought it was two good movies and a third okay movie crammed into one film, and (ironically) the least interesting of those three movies was the Baby Tony origin story that gave the whole affair it’s raison d’être. I’d have been much happier watching a movie about the Newark riots. Or…

The Coens’ True Grit also works because it’s an adaptation of Charles Portis’ pretty brilliant novel, while the 1969 True Grit is a pretty good John Wayne movie (what it’s not, for whatever it’s worth, is much of an adaptation of the novel).

It wasn’t a quarantine hobby, I’ve played since I was a teen, but quarantine *was* more time to start playing again after a long hiatus where I rarely picked up a guitar. And playing more during quarantine was the excuse I needed to give myself to get a new Gretsch I saw a deal on. So, yeah, guilty as well.

Sort of a Romeo and Juliet thing.

Misogyny, racism, and a touch of myopic ignorance. I was kind of blown away (and felt like I’d been pretty stupid) when I learned about Yoko’s pre-John Lennon career—Fluxus, being mentored by John Cage, collaborations with artists like Ornette Coleman—and realized she was the Serious Artist and part of what drew…