I must not have screwed up my last assignment as a substitute too badly, because I’ve been allowed back into the building for this week’s Open Thread.
Aside from pop culture, it’s been an eventful week for Overthinking It. We celebrated our fourth birthday on January 22, experienced half a day’s worth of downtime the next day (all that partying must have crashed the server), opened up discussion forums, and launched a new design, which has inspired passionate discussion from both admirers and critics.
To both camps, I say: Thanks for caring enough about the site to spend time giving us your feedback. We read every piece of it and take it seriously. This new design is a work in progress, and we’ll be tweaking and improving it as we go. First, though, we’ve gotta solve the problems with Android phones.
OK, that’s enough about us. Onto the pop culture!
The widest release is man vs. wolves survival thriller The Grey. I have to admit, I haven’t heard a single thing about this move. Let’s have a look:
OK, not interested. I’d probably enjoy Man on a Ledge more (I like a good heist film), but there’s nothing too groundbreaking there either, and if you’re interested in a romantic comedy, Lionsgate has helpfully counterprogrammed One for The Money, an adaptation of the first Stephanie Plum novel by Janet Evanovich.
Overthinkers who wish to spend their hard-earned entertainment dollars subjecting movies to a level of scrutiny that they definitely do deserve would probably be better served checking out The Descendants, which opens wide, or especially the fascinatingly weird-seeming Albert Nobbs, which opens a little wider.
On the music front, um, what? There’s a new record from Leonard Cohen called Old Ideas
On the TV front, we haven’t mentioned yet that Justified is back. It’s a great show, though it’s got tough work cut out for it this year in topping Margo Martindale’s Emmy-winning turn as the powerful, terrifying backwoods matriarch Mags Bennett. The first two episodes have been villain-of-the-week deals, though there have been a few moves at setting up larger, serialized storylines. Man, was she ever good.
With the forums open, we were wondering whether these Open Threads are even useful anymore. Maybe we should turn them into more of a pop-culture roundup, but we don’t pay attention that closely, and you can get that stuff from dozens of other websites out there. Should we keep publishing these? Sound off on that or any other topic, for this is your… Open Thread.