Sure, but are superhero movies intended to be art? Or are they simply intended to make money?

For guys like Coppola or Scorsese, Netflix etc. will be willing to throw buckets of money at them—they want name brands that will get and keep people subscribed to the service. They’re willing to take a loss if necessary. See Scorsese getting a budget of $160m for The Irishman, versus $40-50m for Silence under a…

1) is absolutely true, but 2) arguably isn’t. The Godfather more or less created the modern mafia movie genre. It didn’t exist at the time it was released.

I don’t think Bernie’s religion is unimportant in a symbolic sense. But in a practical sense—he’s argued against identity politics, against the idea that a politician’s identity shapes how they govern. So by his own admission, his Jewishness doesn’t change how he does his job. So when he’s arguing that identity isn’t…

Bringing Out the Dead is diverse by Scorsese standards—an all white lead cast, but a lot of the supporting cast is black or Hispanic. And I think The Departed may have had one or two black actors. But yes, it’s consistently silly how white his films are even when they don’t need to be. Nobody would expect The Aviator…

And A Quiet Place and Crazy Rich Asians are getting sequels now. I’m sure they’d do one for Bohemian Rhapsody, too, if they could figure out how.

Yeah, and people will pull out Captain America: Civil War or Iron Man to suggest that superhero movies can contain allegory or a deeper meaning, but the treatment of these “deeper” issues is inevitably pretty shallow. It mostly boils down to “Maybe U.S. imperialism is kinda bad.” The critique can’t go much further…

“Consistently” is a stretch. The MCU got 18 movies in before they had a solo lead who was a non-white man, and 21 before a woman got to solo-headline. The DCEU has done better (4 movies in for a female lead, 6 for a non-white guy), mostly because they started later.

Ironically, the reason Coppola doesn’t have the money to self-finance now is that he did self-finance movies when he was younger, and they flopped. He’s probably smart not to do it again.

It would be a very boring thing if we were only able to have only one type or genre of movie.

The westerns of th ‘50s and ‘60s, the exploitation films of the ‘70s, the slasher films of the ‘80s, and so on were all very financially successful and they didn’t stop great cinema from continuing to be produced and seen.

Yeah, the other things sound kinda shitty, but this seems like a fair trade to me. And personally, if I was at Carly’s level of wealth, I certainly wouldn’t charge my friends to sing at their kids’ weddings occasionally. I get that it’s a different calculus for non-wealthy people who actually need to make that money,…

And in historical fiction specifically, they’re both likely reading/visiting the same sources for research. Which, even if it doesn’t contain the exact same elements—like a black packhorse librarian—it can spark the same thought processes that might lead two different people to creating black packhorse librarians.…

They would have to prove that she’s the specific reason they didn’t get in, which would almost certainly be impossible to do (and in most cases, isn’t even a real thing—there’s almost never a precise number of spots to fill in any given college class).

They’re state-level laws, although California does have one.

Harry’s long had an acrimonious relationship with the tabloids because of the role they played in his mother’s mental health problems and eventual death. My guess is this is less a Meghan issue than a Harry issue.

I don’t know either. Even if our legal system weren’t corrupt or biased in any way, it still would be incredibly ill-equipped to deal with most sexual assault cases, because of the “beyond all reasonable doubt” standard of guilt. Non-invasive sexual crimes leave very little evidence. Invasive assaults leave more…

Yeah, if we’re to take his defense seriously, this is a man who—in the 21st century—had to be informed by staff that kissing women on the lips isn’t appropriate in a professional setting, and who accidentally but consistently grabs women’s butts during photo ops. 

Groping is virtually impossible to prosecute even within the statute of limitations. Unless someone witnesses it happening, it doesn’t leave evidence. Had these women reported what happened to them at the time, it’s still a very long shot that it would’ve ultimately ended up in court, let alone ended up with a…

Smith also won her special election—even as someone less well known, with a very short record—by a wider margin than Franken won either of his elections. Franken significantly underperformed Klobuchar in election margins, too. People tried to paint him as super-popular in Minnesota, but the fact of the matter is that,…