I recently did a read-around of Macbeth with some friends, and man, even just a read-around brings out the fantastic weirdness of it.

If they had some really brilliant people doing set design, this would be a golden opportunity for a ton of reader easter-eggs—appropriate books on the shelves and paintings on the walls and whatnot. Some of the more striking Raven King anecdotes would make for amazing cold opens that would all tie together at the end.…

I fear the footnotes are doomed, but I'm also hopeful that this will be good. The trailer at least seems to have both the sense of fun and the ominous overtones that characterized many of the best parts of the book.

Not usually, just in Season 1.

If this show follows the same plotting beats as Veronica Mars, he will seem to be a perfectly nice boyfriend until suddenly it turns out he was a total ratfink all along. He does seem almost too good to be true, but it would be nice to have evidence that there are other zombies out there who are good.

And I like the idea of that a whole lot. But they handled it really weirdly, making it part of the A-plot here but simultaneously being super coy about how yessiree this is weird shit, and also backing off it hard for the rest of the season, with one or two exceptions. Just inconsistent. If it'd been eerily hovering…

Agreed all around! This was also by far my least favorite of the episodes. The whole business with the kid being a deadly weapon was NEVER adequately explained—I also assumed it is ultimately meant to tie into the Iron Fist series, but being randomly dropped into this episode as a mystical element in an otherwise…

I sure hope so. I thought she was criminally under-used in the backhalf of Daredevil, and I wanted to see more of her. Rosario Dawson is great with that sort of quiet charisma deal.

Yeah, off one listen, it still sounds distinctively like her own work, just built out a bit more. She's definitely experimenting with a few things, bringing some new sounds into a familiar structure, but not wildly departing from her old sound or rejecting the musical persona she's constructed. I totally enjoyed…

No kidding. Bunting is the flip side of that horrible racist nanny from last season, except instead of despising baby Sybil for her Irish commoner side, she despises baby Sybil for her aristocratic mother. I wouldn't want either of them raising a kid with some kind of dual heritage.

Philip Glass is scoring the film? That is totally surprising. And it does make me a little more interested in the movie.

Watched it just this evening while wrapping presents with my sister. Satisfying as ever. So much quoting along with the film.

Rizzo: boy, this is scary stuff. Should we be worried about the kids in the audience?
Gonzo: nah, it's all right. This is culture!

I don't even love her shows particularly, but I appreciate so much how she talks about her success. She's a great voice to have in the mix.

I don't even think of this film as having a "war of the sexes" so much as some pretty delightful sparring across class and gender lines. The charm of it is partly that the lead characters don't immediately hate each other—there's misunderstanding and irritation, but they're both pretty frank about their motives and…

I don't know when it comes to China, but if you want spy novels that are hugely critical of Western countries, some of Graham Greene's work is perfect for this—at the least, the good/bad dichotomy is way more ambiguous and fraught. The Quiet American is a perfect example. Greene, Le Carre, and Eric Ambler all write…

I remember that episode! I loved it. Also, I loved how the brothers took such pleasure in their callers' names. How they were spelled, what language they came from, they just really loved names. They were just so genuinely human.

I guess they finally realized that, according to this show's absurd timeline, Isis the dog is actually at least twelve years old (probably more like thirteen or fourteen) and should've died last season in our Obligatory Minor Character Death. Julian Fellows is probably kicking himself for missing the chance to throw a…

I'm so sad this show is such a colossal waste of Donal Logue. And it seemed so easy! Ben Mackenzie as good cop, Donal Logue as crooked cop, GO. It takes a special kind of stupid to screw that up.

A thirty-page sample was released online a few weeks ago, and made me anticipate the glowing reviews the book has gotten. Can't wait to read it in full this week—I've never been so glad I had a plane flight coming up (some uninterrupted reading time!).