Yeah, the thing about this movie is that it really works no matter what the viewer wants. If you want a nonstop action movie where you don't have to think so hard, you get it. If you want to think harder, there are messages about feminism and environmentalism and capitalism and oppressive regimes etc. to think about.…

I don't think most converts care altogether too much about the actual doctrine. (True in any religion, but especially in the LDS church.) Like most religions, their missionaries target people who are getting dicked over by life (lonely, poor, recently divorced, single parents, stressed-out, etc.), and who tend to join…

In other words, do LDS movies fill that same spot of reassuring the faithful that everything they've been taught to believe is correct?

My understanding is that part of the reason that SLC ended up developing such a thriving underground scene is that it was basically the only place for miles that you could go and find a significant number of people who weren't Mormon. If you weren't Mormon in Utah in the '70s or '80s and went looking for other people…

They're also insanely intense about conversion—every man and some of the women serve as missionaries for two years where they're sent somewhere on the globe to try and convert people.

One of my favorite quotes on Batman is—when discussing Batman's sexuality, Alan Grant essentially saying, "Look, I didn't write Batman as gay. I can't think of a single guy who made a Batman movie or wrote about Batman who wrote him as gay. Well, okay, maybe Joel Schumacher."

In my experience with depression and anxiety, there's sort of a cycle where people who are depressed/anxious/don't want to feel their feelings tend to try to block them out by bingeing on TV/staying on the internet/playing video games for hours at a time/etc. . . . which tends to cause their problems to spiral because…

The impression that I get is that the films were in development around the same time, so there was no way they could have changed it after the Exodus backlash unless they went back and re-shot the whole thing.

Yeah, it's essentially a fantasy film; they can cast whomever they want. It doesn't have to be "realistic." But if you go the unrealistic route, there's still no reason that all of those actors should be white.

While You Were Sleeping and The Family Stone are closer to actual Christmas movies than Christmas-adjacent movies, in my opinion.

I think that's what makes it work, though. The best Christmas movies (Elf withstanding) are the ones that have actual human emotion and stories foregrounded, with the Christmas stuff relegated to the background. The actual "Christmas content" of It's a Wonderful Life isn't Christmas trees, it's the fact that George…

I'm a vegetarian, so personally it's not for my cup of tea . . . But I applaud you on the name/comment synergy.

Along the same lines . . . Leslie Knope's waffles.

I'm sure it was exactly what the show's ad team was going for—but it's a little weird that Amazon higher-ups either initially signed off on it or never checked it. With traditional TV shows, ads can pull this stuff with very little blowback because people probably aren't going to blame it on the network—but Amazon has…

Times change; popular views on things change. That's normal. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the horror was still too fresh and Nazis were barely depicted in American films at all—they were thought to be an unfit subject for entertainment. Then as we moved into the '70s and '80s, things switched, and Nazis…

Yeah, I don't really understand the people here who seem to be arguing that they can't see why the ads are controversial. Of course they're controversial—that's why Amazon used them. The wanted something that would force people to look up from their phones and pay attention. It obviously worked.

Haha, I actually had a second paragraph that I deleted to keep from getting too long-winded—it pretty much said that, verbatim.

"Incrementally better" is really the best we can hope for, no matter who ends up in the White House. Dems are going to be hard-pressed to win back the Senate unless miracles occur, and even if they do, they'll probably lose it again in 2018. Even if we got a more progressive candidate in the White House, there's zero…

Most predictions suggest that whoever wins the national election will have to take 40-45 percent of the Hispanic vote. The only Republican president of the modern era who's even managed 40 percent was W. in his second election, when he was running on a platform that included relaxing immigration laws. If you think…

That's true of his later stint in the reserves, but he did do four years in the actual Air Force right after law school. He was stationed in Germany in the '80s, and was there as a military prosecutor, so I doubt he saw much actual combat there, either, but it was legit service and he did actually leave the country,…