I feel like you can easily write all that stuff off. Child prodigies exist in the real world. The force is super-strong in Rey, and she’s heard stories about what the Jedi could do, and she’s desperate, so she gives the mind trick a shot. The lightsaber is associated with a traumatic event between two of the galaxy’s…

Yeah, sure, fuckin’ a! That sounds great. And I’m not being sarcastic. But even within the framework of what TFA started, “Rey is obsessed with having important parents because that would make her important, finds out they were nobodies, and ultimately accepts that and chooses to be important” is a really excellent…

If you want to sub “changes,” I’m fine with that. I thought when I saw it and still think now that TLJ is the best of the ten Star Wars movies, even with its glaring weak points, but I understand why others disagree.

I mean, maybe not? I liked TFA and I hope to like ROS, but the trailers have made it crystal clear that they’re walking back what I believe is the most important thing TLJ did: making Rey a nobody. She’ll be a palpatine clone or some shit, and it’ll be fine, but it’s a step backward from where Johnson was trying to…

He’s not wrong. ROS is going to walk back half of the advancements TLJ made, and it might even make more money in the short term, but in the long term basing your decisions around your loudest and most-demanding fans is rarely the path to generating good art.

It’s been a huge pleasure being less funny than all of you for almost fourteen years now. In conclusion: go fuck yourselves, one and all.

Yeah, it’s a very real possibility that if GSW is, like, 10th in the West in March, they just go “you know what? Fuck it, we’re punting” and shut it down for the rest of the season. Why risk Curry and Dray’s health to maybe compete for the 8-seed and get destroyed in the first round by one of the LA teams, or Denver,…

Possible but I think it’s unlikely they bottom out completely, barring absolute catastrophe. Though I guess with the new lottery odds, they don’t have to be bottom-four to luck into a top pick.

This is definitely true. And as Nate Duncan pointed out on his podcast with Hollinger today: early trends tend to mean more when they match up with expectations. As I pointed out, everyone expected GSW’s defense to be bad ... and it’s bad. They just expected that the offense might offset that more than it so far has.…

It’s a perfectly cromulent word.

Houston is a blue city and Texas is a blue state that’s been stolen via gerrymandering and voter suppression tactics.

The best thing about this is that it will eat away at him way, way, way more than things like “credibly accused of being a Russian asset” or “revealed almost daily, often by his own idiotic admission, to have participated in criminal activity.”

This is cogent analysis and I expect it to get more stars than my initial comment. Here’s your first. :)

Two thoughts which effectively contradict each other:

Not to defend how ridiculously seriously football people (particularly coaches) take themselves too much, but the players do play a sport in which life-threatening injuries are a day-to-day possibility and in which they get a scant sixteen games each year to show off what they can do.

For sure. There are no special effects or weird synth scores or anything to make it feel dated. It just feels like a period piece with really compelling characters.

Yep, somebody pointed out my error - mea culpa!

Noted and mea culpa. Hard to remember all the different dates when it’s not my team.

Rosebud is a sled.

DeNiro is so goddamn good in Mean Streets. You spend the entire movie just wanting to slap the shit out of him. He plays “that fucking guy who ruins everything running his mouth” to perfection, and yet it’s still an absolute shock when he gets what’s coming to him in the end.