re: the people giggling. Sometimes I think people just follow a herd mentality (big surprise), so that they hear that the multiple endings are a source of criticism and repeat it, and it becomes a vicious circle. Even with my issues with the ending sequence, it’s not that I don’t think all the moments are needed (they…

I think the biggest problems with the endings is, as you mentioned, the editing. There are too many fade to blacks, slow motions, and triumphant rising scores spread throughout them. These are cues we’ve been taught to recognize as end-of-film techniques, so that when we see them deployed in succession during scenes…

I’m leaning that the monitors are the people trying to help Wanda and monitoring what she is going through, and we haven’t been shown signs of what is doing this to her yet.   I’m also guessing that Vision is still dead and he is part of her fantasy as well.  

This is so bizarre. I haven’t been watching but I read the interviews with the creators and I could’ve sworn they specifically mentioned that they tried to make Vegas someplace that wasn’t so overtly “bad” that everyday people would be willing to live there.

Rewatching these movies with my son literally this week. Lost World has some really great set pieces that are so Spielberg, but it takes so long to get going and keeps getting bogged down in between the action sequences. It’s a bit of a slog.

It’s frustrating because the parts of the narrative that don’t involve Tony (ie-his direct relationships/interactions with actual Spider-Man supporting characters) come off really well at understanding the character and creating interesting personal dilemmas that felt very Spider-Man. 

If one felt the need to perform but thought the recipient disliked the public nature, why not a private live performance with small accompaniment?

It’s frustrating, because by and large I do think the movies did pretty good jobs of adapting the main plots in order to fit in a 2 hour film. They just always seemed to leave out a bit of exposition or character building that would fully connect the dots, and in each case it always felt like just a line or two of…

As the Skrull cows were from their very first appearance in Fantastic Four #2, I think it’s better to say Marvel was originally left field and has been progressively watered down too much since then.

I love Azkaban, but I’ll always be disappointed that it didn’t delve into the Marauder’s history. At the time I remember people saying they’d get to it in a later movie, but that never happened. That plot point was meant for that particular story to introduce- the rest of the novels had their own exposition to take…

 I love Ocean’s 11.  There was a few years there were it was in constant rotation on my TV when I just wanted background noise, which inevitably led to me procrastinating whatever I should’ve been doing.  I need to rewatch it again. (and again and again)

Works for me!  But should we include Lust for Life then, too?

re: Berlin trilogy- While Low and Heroes definitely share a sound and were recorded relatively close to each other, Lodger feels different, has more of a time gap, and explores (weirdly) a much more traditional rock approach to songwriting. I’ve always sort of felt it doesn’t really belong with the other two. 

If it’s about paying separately for music from one recording session, there’s a lot of “double” albums that were released this way. Use Your Illusion, System of a Down’s Mesmerize/Hypnotize, Everclear’s Songs from an American Movie, Smashing Pumpkins Machina/Machina II, Justin Timberlake’s 20/20 Experience, Metallica…

So when you say not a double album, does a recording session that was split into two separate releases count? So something like GnR Use Your Illusion?  Because these two releases seem more of this vein, even if she didn’t announce a whole other album about to be released when folklore came out. 

I understand there might be deadlines (or maybe you had this article in the can for awhile now when it looked like no other superhero movie was going to be released), but I have to wonder if you shouldn’t have delayed this article to consider WW1984 in a few weeks. I’m skeptical that Old Guard is going to be more “impo…

You are misunderstanding the question. It wasn’t about the executive who decided to finally release it to streaming, it’s about the executive who decided to delay it in 2019 before there was even a pandemic. Hindsight being what it is, but that move cost them a lot of money now.

If you can wait and have access through your local library, Hoopla should get these all for free within a year. The first wave of trades of this era hit in the last two months.

Thank you for the information.  It is appreciated!

Thank you for writing this. As someone not too versed in the real life events and who is feeling very sympathetic to the show’s Diana, do you have any good sources to point me at re: “behind the scenes the complexity of how someone like that could be an utter nightmare to coexist with”? I’d really like to know more…