Living in Los Angeles, you see a lot of celebrities. And shortly after you move here, you learn to not see them, even as you acknowledge their presence. For instance: I attended a Captain America: Civil War screening in hopes of gathering snippets for what became this piece, and as
I didn't realize I was a feminist; I just was one. Of course, getting to the point where I would say so took some doing. I spent a lot of my life not wanting to be described by the term. Of course I thought men and women were
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The summer after my high school graduation, I did whatever I could to slip loose of the bonds that had thus far held me. If I could find an excuse to leave behind the home where I had grown up, I took it. I found a job in a town
So a couple of years ago, I made a typo. It wasn't the world's worst typo – I just switched an actor's first name for the character they played. And because I kept very weird hours back then (often going to bed at 6 am
Let me submit a proposition to you: the problem with the 22-episode season isn't the number of episodes; it's the relative timidity of the networks that still traffic in such large numbers of episodes, which are wary of trying to create artistic TV. (Or, corollary, the
At the recent TCM Classic Film Festival (which I talked about in the last newsletter), I ended up taking in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, thanks to missing another screening. I hadn't seen the film since college, when I had confirmed it to be one
I actually completely forgot I requested press credentials for the TCM Classic Movie Festival. (I'm also just now realizing that is actually the "Turner Classic Movies Classic Movie Festival.") When I abruptly realized it yesterday, after a long-ass week, in which I slept and wrote too
When I interviewed him recently in connection to The Girlfriend Experience, Steven Soderbergh said something that struck me as true of almost all of the arts. (Please go read that interview. I genuinely believe it's one of the best things I've ever done, and, like, nobody
When I left my office today, it was out the back way, and I almost immediately ran into a teenager I mistook for a homeless person. He was pacing in this endless loop, occasionally stopping to look up the sidewalk, eyes wide with fright. He was dressed sort of grungily,
The thing that happens when you're a critic is people accuse you of being biased. The most recent prominent example, for instance, is the theory that critics gave Batman v. Superman poor reviews because they were being paid off by Marvel. (If that were the case, I would
There's been a lot of criticism of AMC's Fear the Walking Dead this season. Some of it is completely fair, like how the series continues to be a little slow-moving. Some of it is understandable, but rooted in personal preference, like the arguments over whether the
I'm not a good fan. This is, I think, on the face of things, probably not what most of you would expect. Maybe? I'm still most famous among some readers for writing really gushing, over the top Community reviews, which absolutely read like the ravings of