This is dumb as hell. I don’t know what “people” you’re referring to in your post, but the Black people who were involved in this situation in 2005 damn sure knew this shit was racist (not “racial insensitivity”—it was “flat-out racism”). This behavior wasn’t less racist 20 years ago than it is now.

“Like if you saw a viral video of some person shouting the n-word at someone on the street, you might wonder what set them off.”

Nah. Because first of all, even taking it at face value, that’s a shitty, immature, unprofessional reaction to someone deciding to quit a job and giving you notice. And second of all, would they have wanted the same dick-cutting-off and lynching imagery if a white character had asked to leave? Or was it just for the…

The story I heard is that after his father died, he just wanted out. And that they had to graft aspects of what would have been his arc onto other characters.

This bums me out. It seems like Carlton Cuse was the bigger problem of the two and, at least based on how he responded to Maureen Ryan’s queries through a PR person rather than straight-on, less willing to engage in real introspection about it. It’s clear that Damon Lindelof has thought about these things in the years…

Not that it excuses anything, but Lindelof is surprisingly candid in the excerpt from the book on Vanity Fair. He says he doesn’t recall ever saying, “He called me a racist, so I fired his ass,” but he readily admits to contributing a toxic, sexist and racist work environment that “hurt” the cast and crew and caused…

Uhhh when castration in that manner is a feature of lynchings and they’re specifically talking about hanging him from the highest tree possible...it’s a race thing. Maybe the anger came from a place unrelated to race but they sure took it there.

Well, yeah, which is why the person quoted goes on to say as much: “but she also figures that Cuse wasn’t even bringing up racist imagery on purpose and was just so used to being able to do whatever he wanted that it didn’t occur to him to consider otherwise.”

Lindelof and Cuse essentially say “How could I know I was a dick on a show I was running if nobody told me?!”

It’s really not anti-comedy. I like Tim and Eric and all that jazz as well, but this is pretty legitimately just comedy. If you don’t find it funny, that’s fine, comedy’s subjective, but there are legitimate setups and punchlines and good lines. The difference might be that the show essentially focuses on one…

You can just not like it without insinuating that it’s only stupid sheep who do.

I like the show, but it can get really irritating at times. I don’t know anyone else that likes it. The formula for most of the sketches seems to be: initially funny concept that overstays it’s welcome so far past the point of being funny that it becomes funny again. It works for me in small doses, but I would never…

I’ll admit, I watched the trailer above and thought there’s probably an inside joke(s) I’m missing from not having seen the first couple seasons.

His performance often straddles the line between “worst thing about the sketch” and “by far the best thing about the sketch”

I’m also not sure you could say that any of those movies entered the “zeitgeist” in the sense that people were buzzing about them, they had recognizable parodies, other movies referenced them, etc. If you go back a couple decades you find things that left imprints all over popular culture - not just stuff like Pulp…

It’s less about “it’s easy for films to get lost when they go straight-to-streaming” as much as it is “These outlets are giving 9-figure budgets to produce movies that don’t just lack staying power, they don’t even make any level of impact on initial release.”

The main reason I disagree with his statement is that a lot of “niche” stuff goes straight to streaming, or is only streaming in a handful of theatres in the U.S. (foreign films not in English, some animation, etc.), but that doesn’t mean they’re bad, per se.

I also sometimes just want to watch fascinatingly bad,…

I mean, I hate Tarantino with a passion.

There’s a reading of the series that’s very Eurocentric, particularly with regards to how orcs were described (“dark” and “slant-eyed” squaring off against the tall, blonde “Whiteskin” riders of Rohan) as well as the evil men of Haradrim and the Easterlings - swarthy, dark skinned, again “slant-eyed”, riding…

The worst part is that racist chuds are convinced they ARE the ones being terrorized. It’s nuts.