I love the episode after R&R break up when Chandler's smoking again and they try to go skiing but the car breaks down - his manic Poseidon Adventure charade is fantastic. Shit is that episode funny. And the closing bit has one of the funniest little subtle comedy bits the show ever did.

Isn't that early Season 3?

The eavesdropping-outside-the-window bit is ludicrous and so much more brilliant than it should be. I love almost all the performances, but the film really belongs to Denisoff and Acker who truly truly soar.

Actually, whatever the complete and total opposite of dismal is is this movie. But go ahead and curmudgeon yourself out of a great time . . .

I'll be that guy and say, WHAT? It's perhaps not the best Shakespeare adaptation of all time, but I'd disagree that about Whedon as a sytlist - generally as well as in this film. There are lots of neat sight gags, the space is used and filmed incredibly well (including in the sequence represented by the still above).

Like I said, I'm a pretty tolerant guy, freedom of religion and all that - usually I'll avoid somebody's work only on an individual basis, and their behavior/beliefs generally would have to be pretty extreme. Scientology's not a religion, it's a hate group that steals people's money and actively works to make people's…

Exactly . . . I hate to admit it - being a tolerant kind of guy and stuff - but it's hard for me even to download his shit, let alone actually purchase it. The joy his music brings hardly comes close to compensating for the huge amounts of pain his "church" causes everyday people. Fuck Beck.

Well, I just looked it up and that's Ep5, but I'm sure I didn't see it until after Christmas, so it must have rerun in January or something like that. But yay, it'll come up here in just two weeks . . .

I'm not really sure why I remember. Some people had been telling me good things about the show, but I'd also been reading a lot about how it was a Seinfeld rip-off, so it took me half a season to give it a shot (was it on at the same time as the Simpsons or had the Simpsons already moved to Sun . . . I can't…

@avclub-22eda830d1051274a2581d6466c06e6c:disqus, it is pretty shitty, but I also get why they wanted to keep it a secret for a while, keep it their own thing, with that crew.

I remember my first episode very distinctly - The One with the East German Laundry Detergent - which is such a good episode in so many ways that, despite myself, I was completely hooked. It helped that I already loved Seinfeld and ER, but boy is that a good episode of mid-90s TV.

Except, Lena Olin, Juliette Binoche, naked.

Well, I was pretty much exactly in their age group when the show came out, and while I knew these characters were wildly exaggerated, for the first few seasons, at least, a lot of their storylines actually resonated quite a bit with me and my friends, up in the wilds of northern New England, no less. I never thought…

Not just nominated, he won a Golden Globe last year for season one.

You're mostly right, but that Monica/Chandler secret actually goes on for about half a season, maybe a bit longer. Joey finds out fairly early, but he has to keep the secret for a long time (and the episode when he finds out is pretty awesome).

Well, first of all, nobody's raised on it . . . they have to be taught that shit, then accept it, then internalize it, then believe that auteurs are actually something that exist.

I always kind of like the video for Big Bang Baby - stupid as all get out, but fun stupid.

True Romance?

I saw it at a festival last month, and the sold out crowd sort of says you're right - old folks, teens, lots of slightly nerdy/slightly hipster types, couples, etc. It was packed, and everybody was laughing and there was much applauding and cheering at the end (it was great, by the way). Black and White Shakespeare…

Her character in This is 40 was pretty one dimensional, but I still found her surprisingly funny -  maybe it was simply blank ennui, but it seemed like well-played deadpan to me.