Given the passionate defenses of Spin, we’ll do that next. Are folks ready to start reading this week? Or should we give everyone a few days to get their hands on it and start next week?

It makes an odd amount of sense to me that as an alternative to playing a somewhat evil dolt on The Office, Rainn Wilson would move into grief:

Without being too crude about it, he was never going to be a leading man, but his face distorts well both into mania and hurt. I can’t tell for sure about his role in Hesher, which looks like it may include some ill-advised fire-arms purchasing, but it looks like there may be some continuity between him there and him in Super, as men who can’t reconcile themselves to the world after it’s grievously injured them.

I’m more curious, actually, about what this role means for Ellen Page’s career. I thought her chemistry with Joseph Gordon-Levitt was the best thing about Inception; she did a nice job of embodying a moment in most people’s lives that movies tend to skip over, when they’re more excited about the world’s possibilities than afraid of its disappointments. This feels like a retreat to Juno for her, maybe even a retreat past that to a more naive time. Page is a little too old to play Hit-Girl, and there isn’t a ton of that ferocity on display here. I hope, now that Tilda‘s not happening, Page finds something else great to do. I want to see where she’s going.

Friends, Romans, Countrymen, I need to tap your collected wisdom. Should I give How I Met Your Mother a shot? The show falls in the category of things I got interested in at a point when I was already tremendously behind in the series, and was not available for me to watch obsessively on Netflix Instant Watch.

But it strikes me as kind of fitting that the show is going to meander on for another two years. Normally, I think shows really ought to know what their end game is, that the show’s creators should know who the damn mother is and how the main character meets her. But I’m sort of amused by the idea that in the show, as in life, nobody has any idea whatsoever until they actually get there, that the writers will stumble on the right woman, and so will we.