*breaks Stephen's glasses*

Oh come on, North Korea, if the Soviet Union had Christmas, you can have it too.

They do drop a handful of references, actually, but they're almost meaningless.

I wouldn't be surprised. Also, go Semites!

That would have been amazingly dumb.

That detail about her parentage had better be played for laughs or something considering how obvious it is. There needs to be some character in the scene with Rey to balance her shock with a "well, duh".

Ridley was one of my favorite parts, to be honest. Unlike Luke she actually starts her role in the franchise as shrewd and capable. Luke was barely those things even in Return of the Jedi. And she has pretty remarkable screen presence in my personal judgement.

That's for young Narrator to decide.

May the Sodebergh be with you

Dunst had one of the best performances on TV of any actress full stop this year. Frankly, my sympathies were utterly with her character, in spite of everything.

I meant specifically among American conservatives. His international support base overall is a lot broader than the phenomenon I was talking about.

I think the only types who really like him are the paleo-conservatives and maybe a certain brand of libertarian. The rest of the conservatives just use him as a foil to make Obama look wimpy.

I saw most of the first season a while back, but was unable to finish it at the time for personal reasons. Thanks for reminding me! I think it was getting really quite good and dramatically strong by the end of the portion I saw.

Not very loyal to his friends in Iran or China, who Trump claims he wants to fuck up, but I guess there's no reason for Putin to take Trump's boastfulness and threats particularly seriously. Trump would fuck up America, which is what matters, I guess.

I personally find it hard not to take the obsessive struggle for vengeance and control that rages between the Monster and Victor as a representation of a fundamentally internal conflict, at least in a broad sense.

I don't necessarily disagree with a lot of your analysis of his character here. I suppose the difference is that in Shelley's novel the Monster himself sort of served as the doctor's "other half", sort of capturing the pathos and imaginative rebellion implicit in Victor's work. Ava doesn't really fulfill the same…

I should note a friend showed us all that scene at film club and it was indeed great.

In the strictest Aristotelian sense, at least, I would think that a tragic hero was at least someone whose qualities and virtues a whole are highly admirable, which is a large portion why their downfall should evoke "pity and fear". That may be irrelevant to a more modern sense of tragedy, though, and in any case I…

People won't stop giving us the shakedown, even though we are not having a nervous breakdown.

Making a tragic hero out of a violently misogynistic tech guru runs the risk of establishing something heroic in misogyny itself, though, which is something I would be more willing to overlook if the film was a more overall powerful work of art than I think it winds up being.