Brad Pitt's role seemed more complex to me, anyway: I mean, he helps Solomon, but he takes the time to give him a lengthy speech about the principles informing his decision to help him before he actually says yes. Meanwhile, Solomon, who is risking his life by even asking, has to just wait out this white guy's moral…

Season four isn't quite my favorite season—that has to go to seven for sheer power alone—but I think it's maybe the most perfect season, with nothing clumsy or unnecessary, and that it pulls that off in part because it's a breather (only on The Shield would this season count as relaxed) season between escalations.

I always took his respect for her as genuine, too, and I think he has something for her that he never seemed to have for Gilroy or Carl Weathers (it isn't that I don't know the character's name, it's that he's Carl Weathers): a kind of chivalrous admiration. Vic wants to be the righteous white knight—see his intense,…

My sister's boyfriend-at-one-point once smuggled in (with the help of his friends) a whole sheet cake for someone's birthday, along with paper plates and silverware. You have to admire the audacity.

I keep unintentionally stealing copies of Dune from people—once a friend who then grew distant and moved away and once a guy I met on the bus who decided to loan it to me the next day whether I wanted it or not. Unfortunately for him, I find people I don't know insisting I borrow their possessions slightly…

Yeah, that too. He clearly attracted at least some genuine affection from his employees, and, in Kimmy's case at least, with good reason.

Yeah, I wondered about that too, but it seemed inconclusive. But either way, Jordan at least tried to salvage Donnie from the wreckage, which matters to me, even if it doesn't remotely off-set the huge amounts of damage he did.

I haven't, but I'm always up for films about notorious British murderers, so it's going on my list.

I thought Belfort had at least a few humanizing moments towards the end, particularly when he says "first on the list was Donnie" and then there's the bit with the napkin, which is a really much-needed dose of genuine friendship.

I cried embarrassingly during "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?" Close relationship with sister, yes. Remembrance of when older sister grew out (temporarily) of wanting to spend time with self, yes. Add in the fact that my sister also has magical ice-creating powers and it was all just too close.

If only you had played the game in the bathroom!

Yeah, I read Childhood's End for the first time recently and there was so much that impressed me about it—the scope of the alien architecture, the extrapolation into the world ruled by the Overlords—and then it's like, oh, we're doing this, then. (There's also an uncomfortable moment where Clarke assures us that in…

I really liked Longford, and I think Broadbent's performance of deliberate, cultivated innocence really makes it. The scene where he says that he owes Myra Hindley so much because she gave him an opportunity to forgive is really beautiful, and it's hard-earned after everything that's happened. And Serkis is…

Lonesome Dove is one of my favorite books of all time. There's a clear-sightedness to McMurtry's writing (as @disqus_hde7I14XwM:disqus points out re: women) that really impresses me. So many things happen in that book but we have this distant, dramatic perspective on it, where we see action far more often than we…

I think Pillars of the Earth was the first book I ever really thought, "Wow, there's a lot of rape in this," and considering how much pulpy horror I've read in my life, that's really saying something. It's not a bad book, and I kind of like that it's an epic historical novel with the narrative push of a potboiler,…

The Goldfinch is on my to-read list right alongside "reread The Secret History." Donna Tartt, you only write a book approximately every decade, why can I still not keep up with your work?

I'll add a plug for Le Guin's (unsurprisingly) gracefully written nonfiction, especially the collection Cheek By Jowl, with its wonderful long essay about animals in children's literature. It's a slim little book, but absolutely delightful.

The plan for this month is to finish Jennifer Egan's Look at Me, having previously read and loved A Visit from the Goon Squad, and then round off the rest of the Megan Abbott novels (dark, women-driven noir) and Mark Harris's Five Came Back. And I continue my slow odyssey through Anthony Trollope with Can You Forgive…

That's a wonderful description of Aickman's style. I think one of the things that strikes me—and it struck me especially about The Inner Room—about that boiling technique is how the horror initially seems contained in a single object or situation and then suffuses outwards until it's the entire environment. You…

I forgive two of those—Dany's "I am but a girl" is clearly a shtick she uses for political maneuvering and I took "my name is Reek, it rhymes with ___" as conditioning (which made its repetition horrifying rather than annoying for me), but I remember thinking at one point that if "words are wind" came up again I was…