There are some really excellent performances going on. Coon has been pretty good, but she isn’t even close to my favorite (so far). Baranski, for example, is killing it, and so for that matter is Morgan Spector as George Russell.

I’d still prefer it to be a lot more Succession than Downton Abbey. And I continue to be particularly disturbed about the heroic portrayal of George Russell, given the harm his type of business man caused for ordinary people in this age (all those hundred dollar bills basically come from anti-competitively low wages…

Hah, I also compared this to Bosch in my comment in the last thread on Reacher.

I think the problem with that explanation is that they are still all sentient humanoids, and in fact are sometimes portrayed as capable of interbreeding (lots of half-whatevers in D&D). Interbreeding would typically mean they were in fact the same species.

I’d nominate Mazes and Monsters (1982) as a watershed moment. For those who haven’t seen it, it portrays fantasy RPGs as being for damaged losers who get obsessive about their favorite game, and then it destroys their lives. It is based on a rushed novel which was based on inaccurate sensationalist newspaper articles…

So I think of Thurber as an OK comedy director. Red Notice was awful, but movies like Dodgeball, We’re the Millers, and Central Intelligence were basically competent, albeit not exactly special. Skyscraper was a little more action and less comedy . . . and not that good. Mysteries of Pittsburgh was by far his most…

I never got past designing a spaceship, and yet that was a very enjoyable summer!

I sang Prince Ali to both of my kids when they were young. So good (not my version, but the song itself).

Yeah, it is a classic exposition song (the sort of song that makes me not too keen on musicals generally), and to me a mediocre version of one at that.

Truly the herpes of movies.

Bel-Air, Joe vs. Carole, Marry Me . . . .

The gist of the cases cited by the judge is that while authors might find value in mixing real figures, and real fact about those figures, into their works, they then have to be careful about how they treat those figures. And the basic question is whether in context, the people reading or watching the content would…

We’ll always have the pantless duck.

Indeed, and in fact when you think about both Presidents Roosevelt (and one First Lady Roosevelt), and the roles they played in the economic history of the United States, that was quite a lot of collective revenge by “old” New York against “new” New York!

Personally, I was hoping with it being an HBO show now, this would be a lot more Succession, and a lot less Downton (US), in terms of how it portrayed the uber-elite Americans of the relevant age.

I’m irrationally looking forward to the next episode of Space Force, given how much of the first season was not remotely good. But I thought it ended relatively strong, particularly in the last episode of the first season.

Are you thinking of the M. Night Shyamalan movie The Village?

Particularly if at least one is actually upper class, and picking up the tab.

Just a guess, but I am thinking around the fourth movie, they bring back the original cast for a mild reboot called The Cut and the Run, and it then becomes one of the top movie franchises of its era.

So I have always understood the Germanic/Nordic folklore version of dwarfs, as incorporated into the Snow White story recounted by the Brothers Grimm, to literally be a different species of sentient being from humans. Like giants, elves, fairies, mermaids, and so on. It was the sort of tradition behind Tolkien’s…