God bless the goddamn Onion

"By: Benedict" signature is still cracking me up

Dammit the site is being assy about not being subscribed again. Is there any way around that? I could just pay I suppose.

iphone

incognito mode

whoever the new management is has REALLY shitted up the site in the last year btw

The website's been horrible for years, IMO, especially the AV club - just way too much content all over the fucking place and all this other stuff that you wouldn't even know was there without clicking on the teeny tabs that take you to the subsections (film, tv).

Ya but now it's all SEO-Ed and pay walled to shit

it's kinda lol but mostly sad considering how great some of their satire of stuff like huffington post has been

okay it's not like I actually like the AV Club layout but complaining about the tabs in the era of tabbed browsing really just strikes me as willfully refusing to put 2 and 2 together

They're so small! They look like they're part of the banner ad! I didn't notice them for ages. Also note that you for some reason can't get to the film section by clicking on the word "Film" in current reviews. Which is under another ad for the same thing, not to mention the entire site is sandwiched between two vertical ads for...the same thing. Major features like Dan Savage are buried way at the bottom so that they look like more ads, or maybe part of a web-ring. The whole thing is just desperately ugly and cluttered.

AV Club works supremely well in Google Reader, so i rarely visit actual page.

the Community handwringing is doing more to drive me away from AV Club than the layout ever could

i think the sepinwalling of every single TV show is kind of OTT but they still have good content, particularly as it relates to film and tv pieces like 'random roles'.

The AV Club newswire is still my main reason to continually visit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeqwDLsZJn8

Well played chaps http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-study-finds-the-onion-has-never-been-more-popu,31505/

Did anyone see the Onion movie? That was hilarious!

i never really visit av club but ya random roles & stuff like that is p cool

random roles is my shit

Risky Business (1983)—“Barry”

Bronson Pinchot: We didn’t know it was going to be a big hit. We thought Tom [Cruise] was the biggest bore on the face of the Earth. He had spent some formative time with Sean Penn—we were all very young at the time, Tom was 20, I was 23. Tom had picked up this knack of calling everyone by their character names, because that would probably make your performance better, and I don’t agree with that. I think that acting is acting, and the rest of the time, you should be you, but he called us all by our character names. He was tense and made constant, constant unrelated homophobic comments, like, “You want some ice cream, in case there are no gay people there?” I mean, his lingo was larded with the most… There was no basis for it. It was like, “It’s a nice day, I’m glad there are no gay people standing here.” Very, very strange.

i like commentary of the damned too, and sometimes my year of flops. i rarely bother with their normal reviews tho

http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-boondock-saints-ii-all-saints-day-2009,43714/

In the solo half of the second commentary, Duffy talks a lot about how the real test of a good sequel is whether it “throws a curveball” at the audience by putting a twist on the first film instead of just repeating it. He goes on to describe practically everything in BS2 as a curveball. The FBI investigator is female rather than male this time? Curveball. This one focuses on her crime scenes by putting in earplugs instead of listening to music? Curveball! A third Boondock Saint who is Hispanic? Also a curveball! Delving into Il Duce’s history instead of leaving it entirely unexplored? Total curveball. That said, he seems to be pretty sure his audience isn’t bright enough to handle all these curveballs, particularly during the flashback scenes:

“The reason I was concerned is because it’s so foreign to Boondock fans. To suddenly be in 1958 New York where everything’s different. It was another curveball that we were throwin’ atcha, yes, but this time, it was visual. And it was sound, and every—you could just take these out of this movie and put them in some other movie that was a period piece, and it would look, y’know. It was something Boondock fans were not used to, suddenly being thrown back 50 years into the past. So I was extraordinarily concerned about that.” But the fans really wanted to know about Il Duce’s past, he says: “That’s another cue I took from the fan base, and another curveball that they provided for me, sort of free of charge.”

those Random Roles interviews are some of my favorite on the internet, but the TV coverage...Jesus. the Community reviews especially, I looked at one lately and it seemed like the writer was trying to get it all out before he burst into tears at the loss of Dan Harmon

The TV coverage is all awful and all in desperate need of harder length limits IMO. Or just an editor demanding that you have something to say rather than systematically listing every joke in an episode of the Simpsons and explaining why it proves that it was the most cutting-edge show on TV at the time or whatever.

yeah, the 'classic tv' pieces i've read there are pretty useless.

I will make an exception there and say they had a couple pieces on old Sopranos episodes that were pretty good, but yeah by and large it's just so superfluous, especially for the 20-minute comedy shows they spend so much word length on. kinda think Todd Van Der Werff is one of the worst writers on the internet

boring recaps are really the bread and butter of online entertainment journo these days tho.

very true. fucking sepinwall

The TV reviews are all just larded with these horrible space-filling J-school personal journalism intros. I don't read Pitchfork, but I assume that's an influence?

Random Roles is fun but i hate the intro paragraph that always says "The catch: They don’t know beforehand what roles we’ll ask them to talk about" like it's not going to be their 4 most famous roles plus one obscurity from their imdb page that has a funny title or character name

that's not really true.

I think it's frequently "We've heard you have a great story about this film" and frankly I'm fine with that. The Johnathan Rhys-Davies one is great at giving the impression that you would not regret an evening in the pub with him.

xp yeah, there's 25+ separate roles in the JRD interview.

i'm just saying, it's not like the thing where they put their iPod on shuffle and any of thousands of possibilities could pop up, you can generally guess what roles they're gonna talk about with one or two wild cards

the template is the same in that they always open with whatever the actor is promoting and then proceed semi-chronologically through their career while getting in at least one iconic role along the way, but theres been a lot of them where i havent even heard of the majority of the stuff they talk about

ehh ime they cover every iconic/famous role, unless the actor's got too many to fit

If only there was some link to hand that we (or you) compare your experience to...

there's been a bunch of instances where they skip some of the actor's biggest parts, usually because they were saving them for the end and they ran out of time

People who complain about the AVClub layout clearly have not seen Pitchfork lately, which looks like several layers of subway posters in various states of peeling decay arrayed in the most unreadable format possible. Maybe it's a generational divide, and if I were 16 it make perfect sense, like Raygun at the time, but I find it so user unfriendly it's ridiculous. AVC is a model of restraint and organization in comparison, esp. considering it is constantly being updated with useful content.

the funniest AV Club Community fan support club thing was the listicle of "shows that recovered from bad seasons" that didn't say anything about Community but was totally like implicitly 'look guys it might be ok!'

tv writing these days is really pretty bad, particularly "recap culture," which i find kind of odious for some reason

the funniest AV Club Community fan support club thing was the listicle of "shows that recovered from bad seasons" that didn't say anything about Community but was totally like implicitly 'look guys it might be ok!'

― Shuwopley (some dude), Tuesday, March 5, 2013 9:23 AM (52 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha when i saw that pop up on twitter i assumed it would be somehow hopefully pegged to community, hilarious that it turned out to be the structuring absence of the piece

hahahahahaha that. when exactly DID the AV Club become Community's biggest supporter/fanbase source? it didn't seem that way early on and then seemingly overnight it was everywhere on there

Somewhere in the indeterminate future, Walter White has a full head of hair (or a wig?) and a beard. He’s got a New Hampshire driver’s license in the name of Lambert. He may not have come from New Hampshire, but he’s solid enough in his backstory that he doesn’t hesitate when asked the driving time—30 hours. (It’s about 2200 miles from NH to ABQ, so that’s pretty close if you stipulate 70 mph highway driving.) He idly arranges his bacon in a mirror-image S pattern...

update: sharp-eyed commenters with long memories point out that this is a 52, indicating that it has been two years since Walt's 50th birthday in the pilot

tv writing these days is really pretty bad, particularly "recap culture," which i find kind of odious for some reason

― zero dark (s1ocki), Tuesday, March 5, 2013 10:15 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i raise you amateur behind-the-scenes-ism

haha pp

tv writing these days is really pretty bad, particularly "recap culture," which i find kind of odious for some reason

― zero dark (s1ocki), Tuesday, March 5, 2013 10:15 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i raise you amateur behind-the-scenes-ism

― lag∞n, Tuesday, March 5, 2013 9:14 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, 100%. i think u said something about that on some other thread, basically i long for the days before people knew the term "show runner"

I'm pretty broken up abt Dan Harmon t wd, not sure things will ever be the same

I feel like the attention and analysis can have a debilitating effect on some shows too, like suddenly they become gripped with a certain self consciousness, like they're playing to the recap seats.