If she's not socially progressive enough for you, fine. The assertion, which is accurate, is that she is much more socially progressive than the Republican candidates, who are frankly pretty close together (Cruz and Kasich) or functionally close (Trump, because he'll just blow with the Republican winds once in…

Disagree. In the 2005 Fantastic Four movie, two of the four main cast members actually read the comics: Chris Evans and Michael Chiklis. Not coincidentally, they were also the most fun to watch by a country fucking mile. Eeyore Guffalufugus or whatever had none of the low-key insanity of Mr. Fantastic, even though…

I continuously forget that not only did they make a Thor movie, but they made an awesomely fun Thor movie where Idris Elba was a live-action Jack Kirby sciencification of an obscure Norse god. If you can make a popular Thor movie, pretty much anything is fair game.

A-fucking-men. Fantastic Four is not tricky. Fox is just incompetent at producing superhero movies because, in spite of billions of dollars of evidence to the contrary, they're afraid that if they're "too goofy" they won't put asses in seats.

I view it more as a swipe at comics than at Trump.

A wizard did it.

I know you're joking, but Fantastic Four with Robin Wright would be fantastic. I can think of a few older actresses who would really nail the part, and you'd just have to age the team up a little (which would also get you out of doing their backstory, and let you play with a huge rogues gallery).

I mean, agreed, and I think that the foundation of any government should and must be consent of the governed, but I can see the argument to the contrary.

I guess that's true—Yancy Street and all that. I don't think the gang was meant to be a "street gang" the way we think of it today. More Michael, Duquan, Randy and Namond at the beginning of season 4 of The Wire than end of season 4. Tussling with other groups of yoots, but not actually engaged in anything criminal.

Hot take: Kate Mara is not a good actress and rarely fun to watch. She is the weakest casting in this movie, which is compounded by the fact that Hollywood appears congenitally unable to write a strong female character in a superhero movie (or otherwise, most of the time).

Council of Reeds vs. Congress of Kangs vs. Parliament of Dooms would be some Peter David on Captain Marvel-level mindfuckery.

That's not quite fair. A lot of more recent FF stories have highlighted that Grimm was a decorated test pilot before getting blasted with Cosmic Radiation. He's not in Richards' league brain-wise, but only a handful other people in the universe are.

Yes, she is. She was correctly deduced that gay marriage would hurt her in 2004, and acted accordingly. I'm sure she bears no meaningful animus to the homosexual community, she just doesn't have particularly strong principled support for it either. Which is identical to Obama, by the way. This is very different…

I agree with you, but recognize that this is a value judgment we're both making that's pretty culturally loaded. In our Anglo-American tradition we both value freedom highly, and generally think of freedom as the freedom to do as we please. FDR's Four Freedoms Speech has a couple powerful examples of an alternative…

Nicely stated. I think that is the most interesting interpretation of Doom: what if he was as competent a ruler as he is a scientist, but as ruthless a ruler as he is a villain? You wind up with this pocket dystopia that the world can't touch, very much like North Korea, but very much more morally grey.

You can leave out everything except "supergenius scarred horribly by his own machine who blames Reed Richards for it." We live in a world were IRON MAN is one of the most bankable movie properties ever—no one should have any issue with Doom's profile.

Yup. If you wanted to do the analogous thing, you'd actually make the story less grounded. Fantastic Four is at its peak when Reed Richards is a Rick-Sanchez level irresponsible scientist hurling his family into alternate dimensions, except instead of being traumatized the family fucking loves it and starts playing…

Have you watched it recently? The entire thing with Clevon is about how he's really dumb (they even give him a borderline retarded IQ) and breeding while the smart are not breeding. That's not a eugenicist subtext—it's surface text. The premise is that the dumb have outbred the smart, and that dumbness and…

You're right. Clinton just revitalized it and made it a cabinet-level position. Bush subsequently demoted it, of course.

I guess it's fair to call her a moderate Republican if you define Republican as one holding the views of the party circa 1958, though even in that case she's waaay more socially liberal.