Rob

Jonathan Bailey

Oh my God, this is all so undignified. Shut up, all of you, SHUT UPPPPPPPP.

The oner is effective when there’s a ton of highly choreographed activity moving in and out of the frame. In Adolescence, you’re watching some grim cop refill their coffee and then walk down a drab hallway to their desk. It saps the tension rather than creating it.

Made it through the first episode of Adolescence and I really think TV needs to call a moratorium on the one-shot episode. If your pilot is 65 minutes and you haven’t made any cuts, that’s not a good thing.

Requesting a temporary injunction against the celebrity memoir industry

Because as everybody knows, TV ratings work retroactively and viewership can be rescinded based on who ends up winning the awards.

I’m sticking with Severance for now but it’s the kind of streaming show that sent me back to the ragged, scrappy embrace of daytime soaps a few years back: expensive, deliberate, polished, tweaked, and art-directed to death.

I saw it in a theater and I wouldn’t call myself a hater but I didn’t like it much.

I realize this is true of most TV shows, but the women on Severance are so much more interesting than the men.

*bangs gavel*

I’ve seen enough.

September 5 is one of those movies that’s more impressive for what it doesn’t do (i.e., ladle on a bunch of only-in-hindsight “perspective”) than for what it does (offer a lean, technically seamless reenactment of a situation we journalism majors likely already studied closely in college).

I knew for sure the architecture critics and architects would hate it!

Ooh I know I know

Get one (1) drink in me and listen to me go off about how Julianne Moore’s soap training is a big reason why she’s as great as she is. (The Room Next Door, in which the dialogue is doing a lot of heavy lifting, is evidence of this. She sells it exquisitely.)

I was deeply moved by The Room Next Door *and* I want to see Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley in a parody of it. Both things can be true.

Celebrities don’t actually die in threes but Bob Uecker/David Lynch/Joan Plowright is *quite* the triad.

Timothée Chalamet stuns as Julia Houston in Smash

Losing my mind at this exchange

People are being awfully quick to judge on this one.

Surely Melissa Leo has a dartboard with Jamie Lee Curtis’s face on it for stealing all of her grizzled everywoman roles.

The “inspired by true events” title card at the end of The Girl With The Needle is a real life ruiner, isn’t it?

It’s listed at the Common exclusively for now (with a prerecorded cast Q&A for some reason)?

One irritation I do have with the end of year platform release is when they all expand at once. For example, The Brutalist, Hard Truths, Room Next Door, Last Showgirl, September 5, and Girl With A Needle all open in Boston today for some reason.

“Dry January,” or how to market your $14 mocktail menu to people who can’t go to sleep without gummies

The incessant “Dry January/kids are California sober now/Fortune 500 execs are microdosing” messaging is really getting oppressive, like a 21st century temperance movement only somehow more annoying.

Everybody’s dunking on that Mangold DGA nod but A Complete Unknown is one of the movies that exceeded my expectations this season—it’s sweeping and extremely well-mounted. Plus of course the guilds go for a movie in which an artist outsmarts the executives and the audience.

Los Angeles is by far my favorite American city to visit—these images are so painful.

hOW cAn i mAkE tHis aBOuT mE

SAG nods goofy af but the one that stopped me in my tracks was Kathy Bates for The Great Lillian Hall over Jessica Lange…who plays the great Lillian Hall.

SAG Awards have increasingly become a fun way to see who's the best at sending screeners.