Movies I really liked that the majority of people didn’t, ranked by intensity of dislike, with my personal ranking in parentheses:

(A lot of the time it’s still steroids)

He is not new or specific to “today’s popular culture.” I saw him open for the Strokes at the Aragon Ballroom (about 5k seat venue in Chicago) when I was in college, which was back when the Strokes were an exciting new beat combo, shortly after the turn of the century. All I remember about the show is that the sound…

I didn’t know this but I’m weirdly happy that I do now, because years ago I posted a comment to the effect of “You know, there’s a pretty obvious argument Pharrell and Thicke could make about how the singer isn’t really behaving aggressively, he’s just telling the woman what he thinks she wants and inviting HER to…

Sure, but five minutes after Tony figures out the icing problem he’s wiping the floor with an effective terrorist militia and surviving a dogfight with a couple of F-22s. I think we’re supposed to take away that the suit is pretty intuitive. On the one hand, the suit is what lets Tony be effective in the field with a…

And at this point the question really is ... why didn’t Tony just make suits of some kind for everybody? Iron Man II starts with him being very protective about it but by the end of that movie and going forward he’s reconciled to Rhodey having a suit, and surely he’s not actually letting his best friend trust his life…

I (part Puerto Rican) have mixed feelings about that sort of thing to the extent that I feel like I can’t really judge without taking in the movie (show/book) and trying to understand the context for what it’s trying to do. One prominent example where I think I was wrong: I suspected in advance of Black Panther coming…

Reminds me of when, improbably, ABC greenlit two different shows with the word “Bitch” in the title and then decided that actually they weren’t that kind of network, leaving us with just the “B”. (I assume many remember “Don’t Trust the B,” which was good; the other was “GCB” which started life as “Good Christian…

This scene is the only thing I remember from this movie.

Yeah, I would read it as a kid when my parents were done with the magazine, I think she would talk about interesting puzzles sometimes. I know there was a long discussion of the Monty Hall problem (I just checked, and she was explaining it correctly).

“legit scored 240 on an IQ test?”

Yes. The average person’s perspective on the medieval period is shaped by the perspective of intervening centuries which were very pleased to look back on the era with a great deal of self-congratulatory condescension. (Plus just genuine ignorance from a lack of data.) I think this basically holds true today; everyone…

I don’t trust Martin’s sensibility about sexual violence at all (and yet the show managed to not improve on it!), but there’s a nuance here that gets lost because we don’t have a great vocabulary for it. Daenerys suffers rape because she’s been put in a situation where she’s not in control of her sexual consent unless…

Since Robert Durst’s trial has been postponed I assume Jarecki is continuing to not comment on the various questions the finale raised about what exactly happened when and when the Jareckis had what on tape, though if I recall correctly he assured us that anything relevant had already been shared with the police.…

I have to say that the Tenet ads I see, specifically “BIG MOVIES ARE BACK IN CHICAGO” piss me off to a near-murderous degree.

I wish they kept the second half of Gaius Helen Mohiam’s line about what an animal will do in a trap. Maybe they thought the singling out of only certain people as “human” in Bene Gesserit terms would be uncomfortable? But the essential statement of purpose is so striking:

See, I think that’s one of the strongest things about the comic. But I appear to be very unusual in that I quit Preacher for roughly the same reasons people quit The Boys, but I read all of The Boys and liked it, with reservations, until the end.

Oh, this is also the episode where Bartlet plays a bunch of chess games. I have mixed feelings about the plot/character decisions behind the Toby-Jed dynamic around this time (basically Toby thinks Jed is afraid to be his authentic self while campaigning and keeps poking him inappropriately about his abusive father),…

“Halfway through the series”. Aside from Bartlet’s approach to using the military in foreign policy, which is a pretty steady ramp-up over the course of the seasons, what you’re talking about happens after Sorkin left. There are three eras of the show: pre-9/11 (when I think it was good), post-9/11 (when there were…

The bits I’ve seen of the show all seemed very mean-spirited to me, but I know somebody who’s appeared on the show to talk about living with a serious medical condition that is also ... easy to imagine being made fun of? ... and apparently they had a great time and felt really supported. <shrug>