Do we think that Tyrese had to clear this feud with the marketing department?

Who doesn’t love The Lion King?

All of this horror news makes me long for fall to come. These 90 degree days are the worst. The main items of interest:

I tend to think of BttF as the purest cinematic expression of ‘80s Reagan Republicanism (okay, maybe besides Top Gun). There are no systemic problems, all social unease stems from a few bad actors, nothing ever really changes over time, and everything boils down to issues of personal responsibility, and small towns,…

Really? Ariel is black?! You are surprised ?!

My eyes will need to adjust to this trailer. It’s odd to see familiar elements of Hong Kong’s wuxia films next to scenes that move and sound like Disney. The dialogue seems to imitate the broad plucky sound of Disney’s animated features from the 80s forward.

So the choice to place Mulan in a Hakka household is quite curious.

I loved the subplot with Steven and Robin, but the rest of the season felt like a diminished retread of things we have already seen. The period detail is far more on-the-nose than before, and the main narrative strays from scenes of everyday life much more quickly.

How many Bond villains are based on ideology or religion in the first place? It’s not really the Bond formula, he doesn’t fight terrorists.

The scenes with Peter and his friends were charming enough to carry me through this movie, but I had a hard time becoming invested in the action sequences. The elementals are so amorphous, both visually and conceptually, that the fights have very little moment-to-moment logic.

There has been always been a term for this kind of game: adventure. Adding exploration in there gives it some specificity. But relying on an amalgam of two basically dead series, one of which barely belongs in the genre, is weird.

I mean, we could call them both “ability-gated single-location adventure games,” but that’s even more ungainly than “Metroidvania.”

My girlfriend spends more time playing video games than I do and she has no idea what “metroidvania” means. It’s not vernacular – it’s jargon.

“There, two young orphans are looked after by a young governess by whom most of the story is narrated by.”

Yup, totally agree. I was going to post something similar. I loved Hollow Knight, don’t get me wrong. But I would say it was that it just did everything really well, as opposed to some big innovations or anything.

Fan communities may be more vulnerable to tribalism because so many of them are turned inward. When I started reading comics in the 80s, part of the fun was that they were claiming a piece of the larger culture, alongside film and prose fiction. Titles like Sandman and The Invisibles weren’t just insular fictional…

I’m not a producer, but it seems like maybe they could make some different choices and make this for less somewhere else. $170 million for the first go at this material does seem pretty risky.

Ia! Ia!

This is the only kind of prequel apologia that I can deal with. It never occurred to me that an adequate horny teen romance was hiding somewhere in that ponderous digital action.

According to the linked article (if not the graphic) Vermont and Massachusetts are both Ratatouille country. Perhaps that is an error, but so it says.