Sometimes, writing about popular culture feels frivolous, as it did this weekend. I heard the news about the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords and others over a late brunch with a friend. This being Washington, our waitress turned out to know a number of Giffords’ DC-based staffers. The whole bar went quite, and we watched the subtitles on CNN. But I woke up on Sunday morning and... 

So, I’m torn over the news that Jason Segal intends to revitalize the romantic comedy by shooting to make a movie with the substance of Annie Hall. There are days I think romantic comedies really just need to be put out of their misery. And other days when I don’t think Woody Allen’s extraordinarily specific vision is enough to turn a genre around that continued on to disaster despite... 

Hey all. I just got some sad news about a loved one and I’m not quite up to finishing the snarky post about Sandra Lee I had planned for you tonight. If Alyssa indulges me, I’ll put that up later in the weekend. In the meantime, make sure you see this completely amazing and bizarre video that’s been floating around Twitter today: It’s fun enough in a vacuum, but if you want... 

AV Club is making fun of Nicole Richie for getting a hip-mom sitcom. While I definitely find the daughter-of-privilege-jumps-the-creative-process-line thing annoying (one of the Kardashians recently did it too, landing on One Life to Live), I actually don’t feel as vexed by this news. More so than her buddy Paris Hilton, Richie’s drug problem appears to have been serious and debilitating... 

Folks, is this turning out to be too fast? I get the sense that I’m running a bit ahead of people here, so if folks want a week off to catch up, or have requests for things you’d like me to discuss, let me know in comments. Of course, if we’re all on track, that’s fine too. Part I here, part II here, part III here. Spoilers through Part IV of the book below, but please try not... 

I don’t quite have enough to put all my thoughts in order here, but I’m interested in the near-simultaneous news that Paul McCartney’s teaming up with HP to post a large archive of material online, Ed Burns is making a low-budget movie for television, and Kristen Bell is insisting that she’d bankroll a Veronica Mars movie out of her own pocket. There are obvious and substantial... 

Perhaps only the news that Jeremy Renner will co-star with Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible 4 as a way of handing off the franchise from the older man to the younger could compel me to see the movie. I love me some Jeremy Renner, but I find Cruise almost impossible to stomach these days, both because of the bombast of his acting (Julia Roberts juts her chin when she’s angry and tenses up... 

But I’m left exceedingly cold by the trailer for Fair Game: The thing is, Joe Wilson’s speaking up against the administration’s claims in the lead-up to the Iraq war is news. The government’s retaliation against Valerie Plame is news. But so much of the manner of the story is about exceedingly petty Washington infighting that’s been rehashed so many times that... 

I wrote about The Imperfectionists, a book I sorely wanted to like, and didn’t: Journalism isn’t dying because the people who work in the industry are all cravens and fools. It would be convenient and comforting if that were true because then all you’d have to do is swap out the bad folks for good ones, and everything would be fine. But that’s not remotely the case. Rachman’s... 

I think the guys at I Watch Stuff are basically correct to declare that “Is anyone else as pleased as I am that a generation’s greatest actress has descended into becoming Hollywood’s female Darrell Hammond?” in response to the news that Meryl Streep is going to play Maggie Thatcher. I tend to think that Brassed Off (about a brass band in an English coal town) is perhaps...