EVA

Yo, yo, yo, let me speak on this: I totally understand the reaction new viewers of JUSTIFIED are having to the first season. The show's reputation doesn't line up with the first batch of episodes at all. I watched the show live from Day 1, but I remember dropping out after the 3rd episode and not coming back until the end of the first season. The finale had my ass back in the seat for next season, and it hasn't moved since. (But, boy, it got antsy in season 5.) Okay, here's the story on the development of the show, for anyone who gives a fuck: It was originally conceived to be more of a procedural series of stand-alone episodes; the idea being they would be making one-hour mini-Elmore Leonard movies every week. Boyd was originally killed in the pilot, as he was in the story the pilot was based on, but they recognized Goggins and Olyphant had great chemistry together, so they wrote in an out that would allow them to bring him back as a recurring nemesis for Raylan if he was interested. Needless to say, he was, but he was already committed to PREDATORS at the time, so they couldn't use him full-time until that was done. At some point between the pilot and Goggins' full-time return, the high-ups at FX got a look at the early episodes and basically said, "WTF ARE YOU DOING?" They politely encouraged Graham Yost to embrace the type of serialization FX is known for and to utilize the fuck out of Goggins, and thus the back end of the season was reconfigured around the Crowder family, and the rest is history... You probably know this, but Elmore Leonard got his start writing Westerns (3:30 to Yuma, Valdez Is Coming, Hombre). When Westerns started going out of style, he jumped over to writing modern crime novels...but basically kept writing them like was still writing Westerns. As Craig mentioned, Raylan Givens conducts himself rather anachronistically as an Old West lawman, and a great deal of the show's drama and humor is derived from people being incredulous at his actions. The very first scene of the series is Raylan issuing a classic "get outta town by noon or I'll shoot you on sight" ultimatum to a disbelieving thug. Alicia Witt is great on the show, btw.

Yeah, I mean, I lived for this stuff when I was a kid. The science of actual sharks and the marine biologists who study them were plenty cool enough for me. No made-up shit was necessary to hold my attention. It's actually slightly infuriating to think that any kids watching tonight, instead of learning something useful, are going to think that this "Submarine" shark really exists.

I happened to stop on this SHARK OF DARKNESS thing just as it was coming on, and my first thought was, "I liked Shark Week better before they did all this hokey dramatization stuff to spice up the history and science." Shortly thereafter I realized, oh no, this is all 100% bullshit. Shameful.

If Hiddleston wasn't so delicious in the part, Loki would be shit, too. All of his master plans are dumb. Really, Joss saved that character. Because, while Hiddleston was good in the first Thor, Joss is the one who gave him license to go full-on preening ham in AVENGERS and become the version of the character that had people in orgasm at Comic Con. Still, he's more entertaining than "strong," per se. The Winter Soldier is their only really strong villain (caveat: still haven't seen GOTG yet. dammit.). And even then, he's more of a henchman than the main villain in his own damn movie.

I could care less either way, but the Marvel echo chamber around here is hilarious. The damn Lego movie just got done riding Batman's coattails to $250 million and we've got dudes in here estimating the top on The Motherfucking Batman versus SUPERMAN at $300 mil. smdh

The schools are going to help the players get that money. The schools have been aware that there is simply too much money being made for the players not to be getting any for a while now and have advocated on their behalf. The only thing stopping them were NCAA bylaws. Now that this injunction prevents the NCAA from enforcing those bylaws, the schools are going to do something more reasonably approximating "right" by the players. Which will quell much of the unionization sentiment.

I imagine it will have the opposite effect. This is a loss for the NCAA, not necessarily it's member instituations, particularly the Power 5 conference schools, for whom this ruling dovetails nicely with their recent Autonomy victory. These two major developments line up neatly with the 5's vision for an Autonomous future, which is essentially preserving the status quo, or at least the present course to whatever their ideal status quo is.

Episode 7, you say? HE'S COMING SOON.

The original Batman film series was weird, in that they were ostensibly "sequels" but there really wasn't much continuity between them aside from the same core of actors used in the supporting roles (and of course they junked Billy Dee). Like, there's an offhand reference to Vickie Vale in RETURNS, but that's about it.

Not really sure the best place to put this, but I'll drop it here. Super bizarre excerpt from Grantland's review of the movie by Wesley Morris: Wesley Morris: Pulitzer Prize winner, Vince Russo fan.

It reached the point where the cost of production outweighed the ratings, and HBO wanted to be rid of it. Around this same time, David Milch was developing JOHN FROM CINCINNATI for them, and they sold it like Milch wanted to end his old show so he could focus on his new one. Which Milch and everyone else on the show has called bullshit on a million times over by now. Milch always wanted to do at least one more season or a couple of movies to finish the story. Be glad you got into the show now, because people who were fans 7 years ago had to suffer through constant "They still might make the movies!"/"Oops, no, they're not!" stories. That carried on for years until the sets were finally destroyed a few years ago.

Dan Feinberg at Hitfix covered it in his Take Me To The Pilots series.

Allison Pill is gonzo as the teacher. I've never played any of the Bio-Shock games, but apparently SNOWPIERCER cribs a lot of its world from the first one.

While I agree that the structure of the story sort of leads to a weird last 20-30 minutes, I also agree with Tarantino's perspective that it was necessary. If the story is "White guy frees Django, then leads him by the hand to rescue his wife, the end"...well, that's not so great. That's, like, 90% of Hollywood's unfortunate attempts to address race in film. Black folks ascendant because of the kindness of good white folks. To avoid that, I think it was necessary to 1) put Django back in chains and require him to orchestrate his own escape and finish the job of rescuing his wife on his own, and 2) to have him put back in chains because the good white guy ultimately goes into business for himself, placing his own petty concerns ahead of Django and Hildy when the deal was done and they were about to get off scott free.

I also think moving BvS to March gives them more time to focus on marketing whatever that August movie is going to be. A Shazam movie with Rock seems to be everybody's guess, but whatever it is, it's going to pale in comparison to BvS and need all the help it can get.

All jokes aside, I think this is more a factor of WB realizing what we were talking about in this thread during Comic Con: Two years is too damn long for this movie to come out. Granted, a bump from May to March isn't a huge difference, but it does shorten the window for how long they have to keep this hype train rolling while they have, literally, nothing else between now and then. Obviously, the holiday season of 2015 would be the optimum time, but that's already fairly well staked-out by the last HUNGER GAMES movie and this little thing called STAR WARS. *If* JJ Abrams can get Disney to move Star Wars to May 2016 like he wants, don't be surprised if WB bumps BvS into that spot.

It used to be, but it's increasingly becoming part of "blockbuster season." CAP 2 opened the first week of April last year and obviously did very well. I think one of the latter entries in the FAST & FURIOUS franchise opened in that window and did really well, also. Snyder's own 300 opened in March and killed it, as well.

Welliver is a greatly underutilized actor. He gets a lot of work, but seldom anything interesting. After seeing DEADWOOD, I couldn't believe LOST brought him in and, basically, immediately threw him away. One of the DVD sets had a bonus feature that was him impersonating David Milch auditioning himself impersonating guys like Pacino, Walken, Duvall, and DeNiro for the role of Al that I thought was hilarious at the time I saw it. I mean, I don't know how many more Walken impressions you need to see in 2014, but I bet his Duvall holds up. ("Beautiful girl. Argentinian. Dark hair, like the pate of a horse.")

I read this the other day. Haven't seen GUARDIANS yet, but Thanos does come off pretty ineffectual for a supreme big bad to this point. He gambled the Mind Gem on Loki to win the Tesseract and ended up with neither, on top of whatever he does that doesn't work in the new movie.Then again, I think most of Marvel's movie villains have been pretty ineffectual. I think they have WWE's issue where they constantly make the heels look overly weak to put over the faces.

Oh, shit. I couldn't remember what the 2nd episode of JUSTIFIED was, so I looked up: It's the one with the escaped prison band! #WorstofAllTime2ndEpisode You have to at least stick around for the 4th episode with Alan Ruck as the dentist. That's probably the best example of early first season JUSTIFIED.

I told you it takes a while for them to figure it out. It doesn't start picking up steam until Walton Goggins comes back full-time from making PREDATORS. It gets really good by the end of the season, and season 2 is an all-time great season of TV.

Except it's a masterpiece, too.

Give the lady what she wants Plus, Olyphant employs about half the cast of DEADWOOD over the course of the show, so it's like a feel good reunion sometimes.

I figured this one would separate the men from the boys. I'm not going to be able to finish it tonight, but I do intend to finish it at some point in the next week or so.