Balaban's beard game has always been strong.

It's my understanding that Rowling wanted Cuarón from the get-go, based on his stellar work on A Little Princess. So, the first two Potter films were something of a compromise…Rowling got her verbatim adaptation of the books, and the studio got their "safe" director.

Record is not the medium. The "Record of the Year" Grammy is not awarded for the best piece of music released on vinyl, it's for the best-produced song of the year.

*Pedantry incoming*

Long thread as usual, but I'd like to congratulate the staff on some of their choices. "Mexican Radio" — brilliant.

I thought not, but it was pointed out to me that you can hear it playing very faintly on a boombox in the background, when they first walk into the Bellmaker's inner courtyard.

The final Til Tuesday album ("Everything's Different Now") is actually my favorite Aimee Mann album.

"The Sun Always Shines on TV" got some decent airplay on pop radio, which is nice because it's freaking awesome.

It’s Lorde’s “The Dreaming,” albeit with a glossy clubbiness that puts it firmly in 2017.

YES, people slag on the second film, but I think that's mainly because all of the intriguing things that it set up were completely nullified in the third film.

That scene was incredible, I was totally blown away by it.

I have seen The Great Wall, and people seem to be confusing the "white savior" trope with the "Western audience surrogate" trope. Wall is definitely the latter. I believe that Asians are the most criminally under-represented group in Hollywood, but this was one of the most Chinese mainstream films I've ever seen.

Excuse me! U-571 sir!!

Once Upon a Time in Mexico featured one of the greatest lines of dialogue in history, delivered by Johnny Depp:

I quite liked the way it was depicted in Magnolia — an extremely bright but otherwise normal enough kid gets put on a pedestal, and then exploited, by the adults around him, and subsequently becomes a fucked-up burnout by middle-age.

Just said basically the same thing in reply to a different comment upthread. Curse me for not reading further.

The Karl Freund original — yeah it's really campy by today's standards, but wow is it well-directed.

Yes, it seems like nobody ever talks about that one, but I thought it was great! Maybe because I had some diminished expectations or whatever, but my daughter wanted to stream it a couple years ago, so I said, "OK, sure." Ended up liking it way more than her! (To be fair, she was a little young for the material at…

I really liked his work in Sky Captain as well.

The falling POV shot was in the trailer, and it was so incredible that I thought, "Well, the film can't be THAT bad…it takes great skill to realize a shot like that, so there must at least be some good action in this film."