Vaughn really rescued that franchise after Ratner and whoever the hell directed X-Men Origins: Wolverine drove it into a ditch. I actually like DofP, but I don't think that Singer has had a good grip on the MacAvoy and Fassbender versions of the X-characters.

I don't know if it's the first modern popcorn flick—when I think of that I tend to either look earlier to Star Wars and Jaws or later toward franchise films like X-Men or the Star Wars prequels—but it was definitely a turning point for Bay. Armageddon is basically a snobs vs. slobs movie, with NASA as the snobs who…

I don't remember how, but one of my brother's friends got an advance copy of City of Angels without the final special effects—the big climax was just a slideshow of storyboards. It might've been the most disappointing movie of my life to that point, and not because of the missing effects. I never bothered to go back…

Yeah, but he's a corrupt DEA agent who basically acts like he's a crime boss. The only reason he has to be a cop of some sort is so that it isn't safe for Jean Reno to hand baby Natalie Portman over to the cops.

The Jameses is tricksy! And false!

"Only good" is a bit of an eye-of-the-beholder judgment, but I'd say that The Rock is the only Bay movie to be considered good for actually being good, if that makes any sense. Bad Boys and Armageddon are really enjoyable bad movies. Transformers is partly good—the first half is basically a decent Spielberg knockoff,…

The President sat on it.

He'd probably need a Wolverine-like slow aging factor, since the character in Apocalypse was around Prof X's age (and had a heavy Eastern European accent).

Was it ever stated that Ben Hardy's Irish Streetfighter Angel from Apocalypse was actually supposed to be a Warren Worthington III? It could just be two different guys with the same mutation of white wings sprouting out of their back, who both just happen to be blond, and who coincidentally get the nickname of Angel,…

Laura says the name, but they never identify which of the kids in the picture is supposed to be Gideon.

I kind of love that this is a one off. It would be fitting if this was a finale for this X-Men continuity, with a new continuity starting up in 5-10 years at a total reset, but that's not a realistic expectation. After the giant bumble of Apocalypse, I no longer have much investment in the McAvoy/Fassbender/Lawrence…

As for the second one of those, the secret lab was in Mexico City, staffed by Mexicans, which is why Laura's first language is Spanish. I did like the fact that IIRC they didn't subtitle any of the Spanish spoken in the movie. Wolvie don't understand it, we don't understand it.

X-24 worked better thematically (old banged-up Wolverine has to confront a nightmare version of his younger self) and in the moment of the reveal (claws popping into Xavier's chest) than he did in the movie as a whole.

Oh definitely—SATC came out just two years after Clinton signed DOMA, and it's doubtful that you could have made that show with four gay men and had the breakout hit that SATC became.

I liked him back when he was refusing John Ashcroft's orders to violate the Constitution. Y'know, back when all anyone knew him for was trying to make Whitewater a thing, before he got popular. Now he's doing this wannabe J. Edgar Hoover thing, and the kids seem to dig it, but I can't identify with his work anymore.

Part of the reason Sex and the City had such a large gay following was that it was largely written and run by gay men. There was actually a criticism of the show that much of the time the characters behaved more like thinly-veiled gay guys than women.

"So, Bobby was more qualified than General Mattis?"

Both extremes want America as it currently exists weakened or destroyed so that they can remake it in their image. There's also some crossover appeal for Putin between the old Soviet worshippers of America's hard left and the wannabe oligarchs of America's extreme right.

"Is Denzel a friend of yours? How about you set up the meeting?"

If we're going to survive these dark days, we're for sure going to have to learn how to multitask. Because if we can't keep more than one thought in our heads at a time, we don't deserve to survive.