Produced by Tim Burton, but actually directed by stop-motion mastermind and Coraline director Harry Sellick...

What I’ve been telling people is to not treat Shang Chi as a kung fu flick ala Jackie Chan, and more a Wuxia family drama film with the budget blown up to historic proportions, it sets the expectation better I think

It’s not necessarily about “new ideas”. A lot of factors could contribute to why it fails, if it does. Maybe auteur director doesn’t necessarily adapt well to the Marvel machine. Maybe there are studio mandates that changed the director’s vision that we didn’t know about.

oh man, you nailed it. I just made a shorter reply referencing O’Neal specifically, but you hit on another important thing I missed: as a pop culture nerd I appreciated that writers felt knowledgeable about things they were criticizing/appreciating/anticipating/snarking on. I used to feel like the writers here knew…

Pretty much all of the old writers are gone, also. Sean O’Neal’s bone-deep cynicism and snark in Newswires usually felt genuine and funny, but it feels like everyone after him had to adopt that as the house-style, regardless of whether the subject warrants it or the writer is good at it.

Your subjective opinions are objectively wrong.

As someone above mentioned, the issue above is not the snark, but the quality of the snark.

Priceless

Oh it for sure generally is defensive and insulted but when it comes to Barsanti the torrent of insults is never unjustified, he just...he sucks so much at writing and that’s allegedly his job. Your reply to me in three words contained better snark than he’s managed to capture during his entire tenure here.

no

False choice: it can be worse and you can still like it more. I love Blade Trinity. But it’s also a very bad movie. 

Actually, this might be the least-douchiest thing he’s ever written. Completely inessential and pointless, sure, but on the obnoxiousness scale, this really only gets maybe four or five out of ten possible Barsantis.

This looks amazing. A devastating parody of how we’ve turned the bright, happy of toys of childhood into dreary commodities that all seem to fit into the same easy to digest shape. What was once the purview of children is now for sad adults and what a more ridiculous character to try and adapt into the style of a…

It probably does count, but I was thinking the superhero aspect  overshadowed the science fiction elements, whereas this is in the future and/or with advanced technology, in space, potentially including aliens.

For me, Heretics and Chapterhouse are his crowning achievements. I read the 6 books original series 3 times, but those 2 final books i always keep close, diving in at random from time to time. It makes book 1 and 2 pale a lot in comparison and it shaped my worldview profoundly. As for what his son wrote with Anderson,…

I rather liked Heretics and Chapterhouse because they really shook up the narrative and introduced us to a completely different set of characters, (Except  for one rather hapless ghola.)

Of course despite the Butlerian Jihad being attributed to a fictional person named Jehanne Butler in story, it clearly is a reference to the real Victorian philosopher/novelist Samuel Butler who wrote an 1863 essay “Darwin Among the Machines” that predicted that machines would eventually surpass humanity because…

Or as I like to refer to them, “Herbert the Lesser” and “Earth’s Worst Living Science Fiction Writer.”

Absolutely, definitely not the latter.

Future humans are made of antimatter (or as Herbert calls it, fuqablat), so technically they are negative humans as compared to the present. Read Hegemony of Dune.