I’m a dude, but I feel like I can add onto what you’ve said:

Yeah, “A Beginning Song” would probably make a top ten list of Decemberists songs for me. That melody is beautiful, and the lyrics are some of the most personal and heartfelt that Colin has ever written (not usually a quality that I’d use to describe his lyrics). It’s just really bittersweet and captures that feeling…

How dare you blaspheme against “The Mariner’s Revenge Song,” you heretic!

I’m still in shock that someone could put together a playlist that is meant to represent The Decemberists and leave off both Leslie Ann Levine and The Legionnaire’s Lament.

Hard agree. The Decemberists are a really foundational group for a certain cohort of Millennial, and they really laid the basis for my tastes moving forward. If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t have gotten into early Sufjan and Bon Iver, but also because of them they let me embrace some more of the narrative driven pop…

My Indian extended family, in India and America, enjoyed it a lot. They treated it as a standard reality show, nothing more or less, that was fun for them because it involved Indians and Indian culture.

A lot probably depends on how well Tenet’s America-last approach succeeds financially. If it ends up making solid dough in the rest of the world and maintaining anticipation levels in the States, that’s good reason to try the same for Dune in December - barring a miraculous COVID-19 recovery in the fall that would…

It’s a reality tv show. It’s not there to educate anyone on how things should be, or give us a narrative that will teach us something.

Media:
2012-2015 - we love Taylor Swift
2016-2017 - we hate Taylor Swift, she’s definitely a Republican and she said she had a great year on Instagram, burn her
2019-2020 - we love Taylor Swift, her new album is a masterpiece and we’re going to pretend us dragging her relentlessly in 2016-2017 for the most innocuous…

I think she overuses prosaic detail as a proxy for genuine insight. It’s a variation on a hook, I get it, especially for someone who churns out the sheer volume of work that she does. I do think she nails it sometimes. “You made a rebel of a careless man’s careful daughter,” “it turns out freedom ain’t nothing but…

She should definitely be persona non-grata forever, but that doesn’t mean her work didn’t exist. You can easily say, ”It’s great to have a woman centered work that isn’t from a complete monster.” or “There’s room for more than one Arthurian take that has a female central character.” If we get fifty versions centered…

Seriously, my first thought was like “damn, no respect for Marion Zimmer Bradley, huh?”

While I have no doubt that Gomez is less of a hack than Barsanti, that’s the issue with the ‘oppresion olympics’-style politics isn’t it?

Now you gotta decide whether it’s more woke siding with the Blacks or the Jews as the more oppressed minority, especially what with all that ongoing BLM/systemic racism/white…

HARD PASS

Hope this turns out for the best but God it's bleak. Is the Glee cast cursed or something?

Surely I can’t be the only one who thinks that scrubbing things clean and pretending no blackface ever happened is worse than acknowledging how culture has changed by putting a warning before the episode.

“So we’ve decided that no one will actually turn into an animal until the last five minutes of the film. We want this to be accessible to people who haven’t read the books.”

It’s fascinating how Disney paid millions for the rights to these books and then decided to remove the main thing that makes them interesting. The entire hook of the Artemis Fowl novels is that the title character is a supervillain, but in the movie, he’s not. He’s just some kid who misses his dad. Remove the…

I give this movie all the credit in the world for one of the most sophisticated lessons I’ve seen a children’s movie deliver, and a refutation of so many other cliche children’s stories: sometimes, having a dream, believing in yourself and working really, REALLY hard is still not enough to guarantee you’ll get what…

“This film is going to be a disaster! I wish there were some excuse for shunting it to streaming that won’t look like an admission of failure.”