I thought of Arnold initially as another example of a muscle man who was rarely asked to do anything romantic, but you’re right, True Lies has a very romantic core, and I also re-watched Kindergarten Cop last year, it has a very traditional romcom plot. And although Arnold is not exactly a great actor, he retains his…

46 days of taping, but I have to imagine there’s production meetings and things like that, to say nothing of the prep might be involved, e.g. to practice reading the clues in advance so you don’t stumble across a word you don’t know how to pronounce and look a buffoon. And although the football season is only 5 or 6…

The Body isn’t as horny, is it? Like, from what I’ve seen surface in my socials, they photograph a lot of guys, and sometimes they just have interesting bodies (like a 300+ pound defensive lineman) rather than being conventionally hot. Whereas the Swimsuit Issue has been very-thinly-veiled yank material for decades.

I thought Loki was competently directed, but it didn’t strike me as particularly visionary. The suits at Disney have such a big hand in everything it’s not always easy for the creativity of the director to break through, for better or for worse. Even in non-MCU TV shows, episode directors tend to show up to something…

Surely the pool of available voice talent is not so shallow that you need to hire one of the most beautiful people in the world for their completely average voice.

Eating an apple is a shorthand for breezy nonchalance of an extremely confident person. Deployed to good effect in Wrath of Khan by Kirk eating an apple while ostensibly trapped in the genesis caves, while having an unrevealed escape plan, and again in Star Trek (2009) with Kirk eating an apple while beating the…

I truly love reading a withering A.A. review, almost as much I love (and miss) a Vishnevetsky take-down.

A news article (journalism) is fair use, they just need to credit where they got the image from.

Yeah but those aren’t characters with any kind of redemption arc, the trope is when it’s an unsympathetic character (or someone who has been ignored most of the series). It’s not so much it guarantees the character will die, it’s that *every time* that type of character gets killed off, there is a preceding episode…

I was a big fan of Master and Commander on its release. This was back in the days of bit torrenting xvid files in 700mb chunks and imaging them onto a pair of CD-ROMs. I remember that the gritty action in the movie absolutely slammed, lots of splintering wood, and the spirit of adventure to the story was an absolute…

“Launched across the room like an angry bird” is the greatest simile I’ve ever heard. I need someone to fling me across a room so I have occasion to use it.

Dan’s death was a very touching and I thought well handled moment. It should have been a red flag that he got a spotlight episode to highlight his most endearing qualities, in TV that pretty much always foretells an imminent death (though in other shows, it tends to be characters that have been largely ignored and/or…

Chloe realizing that their case of the week always analogizes to Lucifer’s celestial problem of the week, and using it to is to diagnose what Lucifer won’t tell her, is such a delightful instance of “lampshading”. It’s particularly clever because the audience is exhausted with Chloe and Lucy being separated by simple…

Interesting. I had heard the news that this was the last season, but hadn’t heard the news that it *wasn’t* the last season anymore, and I that has made my day. 

I’m not sure what you mean by drop-offs. The truck always stays upright, so you can bounce around and plummet off ledges without fear of anything bad happening to you—except that if you’re climbing a mountain, and you hit an angle the wrong way, sometimes you can bounce backwards, lose traction and plummet back to the…

I played Valhalla at launch and enjoyed it greatly for maybe 20 or 30 hours, before I just moved on to other things, and haven’t felt a strong enough itch to get back into it. My problem is that I am a compulsive completionist, I never met an icon on an open world map that I did not want to immediately dispense with.…

Yeah, didn’t he somehow use “chainsawing” as a sexual verb, that was really something. But I remember that incident coming after his relevance had already faded quite a bit, and after he had made some spectacularly awful attempts at comedic acting. I could be misremembering, but I don’t remember it being the trigger…

I have heard a lot from comedians afraid of the “cancel culture” consequences of making a tasteless joke in their attempts to be edgy, but I am struggling mightily to think of an example a comedian who has actually suffered that consequence.

It’s not just Cavill’s character, there are half a dozen other characters that appear in both timelines, who are ordinary humans.

My take is not a hot one, the show does almost nothing to tell you when it is switching timelines (or even that there are different timelines), and not a single person visibly ages in between the two timelines (or so much as changes their hair style). They also cast someone as Ciri’s mother who looks so much like Ciri…