IIRC, the problem with At the Mountains of Madness is he couldn’t get the studio to greenlight unless he guaranteed a PG-13 rating, and he felt he couldn’t do that because you can get slapped with an R for “psychological horror,” but there are no hard definitions. Movies re-edit violent scenes all the time to drop…

Gandolfini played the accent thicker as the series went on; the pilot is basically “Jim Gandolfini pretends he doesn’t pronounce all his Rs” and I think by season 2 even it’s notably heavier.

https://zubindoshi.com/misc-projects/sopranos-family-trees/

There are all sorts of questions I had shortly after the finale aired that Jarecki got to punt on because he didn’t want to potentially interfere with the progress of the criminal cases against Durst. I don’t recall being aware of the accusation that the infamous ending was misleadingly edited, but that might be part…

By 1968, the year in which this episode is set, she had competed against at least 59 male chess players (28 of them simultaneously in one game), including at least ten Grandmasters of that time, including Dragolyub Velimirovich, Svetozar Gligoric, Paul Keres, Bojan Kurajica, Boris Spassky, Viswanathan Anand and…

At the beginning of the show Ross, Chandler, and Monica were sometimes divided from Joey, Phoebe, and Rachel because the former group generally had steady jobs and the latter didn’t, but Chandler had a middle management white collar position nobody understood and Monica was an aspiring chef; I think it’s reasonable to…

I’ve seen people reference this and ... I mean, I haven’t seen or read every interview or piece of standup he’s ever done, but in all his filmed standup specials, my recollection is that if he brings it up it’s as “we’re not planning to have kids.” In one he explicitly then says “what, never? I dunno, people change.”…

This ending only exists, most likely, because the people running the test screenings ignored Fincher’s request. The original cut ended immediately when Pitt fires his first shot, straight to black. Fincher instructed that the lights in the theater needed to stay off for a couple of minutes to allow the people watching…

I can’t tell if this review is being very delicate about what Aretha’s childhood was like and glossing it with the “well, it’s the Dewey Cox template,” or if the movie itself is just like “well, her father was a difficult person and her childhood was hard sometimes here’s Jennifer Hudson” (in which case it should’ve…

If you restrict it to “starring people whose parents were stars” you’d lose a bunch of stuff but still have probably the bulk of Hollywood stuff to watch. If you decide you want to cut out “starring people whose parents worked in the film/television/theater industry” I think you get a clearer picture of the extensive…

1) T.S. Monk in general seems to be getting more tightly controlled about the use of his father’s name (which is his as well, of course). Until a couple of years ago the premiere competition for young jazz musicians was named after Monk; then very abruptly (from an outside perspective) the Monk family disassociated…

I remember liking the “moment of Zen” thing though I think I wasn’t watching full episodes; other than that at this point I don’t have real memories of the Kilborn shows, but in a way I think they were useful context for what came later. A lot of people responded to the peak of the Stewart era like the point of the…

The thing about being academically precocious is it’s a limited road. I wasn’t going to go to college before I hit puberty, but I was way ahead of my peers in a few areas. I basically had a huge head start because I could read very well before I turned four, and I had a huge appetite for it. However, in my late 30s,…

Hi! Yeah, I agree; Boyd is just a bit off about everything, slightly out of sync with his surroundings. I suppose he’s the smartest person he talks to on a daily basis and he knows it, and that can get in the way of remembering other folks have their own ideas as well. Hope you enjoy the rest of the series.

Yeah, I definitely had that in my mind from reading/hearing references to it, but the funny thing is that I think if you had asked me exactly what tiddlywinks was I would have been pretty confident saying it was the British name for jacks, which I guess is the kid’s game I knew that fit the almost nothing I knew about…

Because the point of the story isn’t “I punched out a famous guy who’s way older than I am.” The point of the story is that Kyle said Ventura, one of the most famous people from the SEAL/UDT community, told Kyle that the SEALS “deserved” to lose men in the Iraq war (which Ventura was publicly opposed to), and that’s…

Tolkien being the most apt reference because of Frodo and Sam being an excellent example of [this whole conversation]. Like, nobody should be upset if people enjoy perceiving Frodo and Sam as queer-coded, doing fanfic stuff to that end, etc. There’s certainly as much there, if not more, than there is between any other…

I mean, it’s perfectly reasonable to have convictions that basically foreclose enjoying well-made, even great, works of art.

So everything after the 0:18 mark on Loki’s counter oughtn’t matter, right, because as I understand it the whole schtick of the TVA is keeping track of different “variants” and this Loki is genuinely from another timeline where those other things didn’t happen. (Which means he didn’t undergo whatever character growth…

(I haven’t watched any of them, but)