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For all the griping about how critics just don’t get the stuff that fanboys love, a show of the numbers suggests that reviews from Tomatometer and Metacritic ranked critics are more friendly to movies based on comic books than maybe any other single genre. Jim Emerson elaborates on his findings.
Rumsey Taylor on the “brand ambience” of Mad Men: “When Draper is describing each of these products, you’re held rapt by his words, and how they pronounce, with consummate precision, their transcendent significance. It’s all bullshit, of course, but what wonderful, wonderful bullshit.”
Last night at Largo in Los Angeles, “Maya Rudolph and Fred Armisen performed a series of light and effortless vignettes co-written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.” According to Vulture’s Nick Confalone, the performance felt “like sneaking a peek at P.T. Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love notepad, exploring that movie’s notion that there’s someone for everyone, even though everyone is a little bit weird and fucked up. Whatever the future for this show, last night it made us grin like an idiot and tell our friends, ‘Love is awesome, right?’” Wonderful bullshit indeed.