That's a valid point, certainly, though not the point I was taking issue with.

The film does explore that, at length. It's not a Death Wish situation where he was cool with the status quo until they went after his family; Turner's gradual moral awakening constitutes the spine of the entire film. The rape of his wife is merely the dramatic final straw.

Yeah, this is one of the aspects of geek culture I've always had the hardest time understanding. Whereas I appreciate the notion that being awkward and unpopular is nothing to be ashamed of, all too often geekdom seems to see it as an affirmative virtue.

Barton's predicament must've been informed by the Coens' writer's block on Miller's Crossing, but I always saw him as very un-Coen-like in his commitment to patronizing "common man" realism and contempt for Hollywood spectacle. For all their indie egg-headedness, the Coens have always been about the sheer joy and…

To me it's a movie like Brokeback Mountain that's impressive precisely because it's an utterly conventional take on an unconventional subject. It's Braveheart, basically — a crowd-pleasing historical epic — and what's remarkable is a) the implicit assertion that someone like Nat Turner deserves a crowd-pleasing…

Ah, I didn't realize Marguerite was based on the FloFoJen story too. Though after being disappointed by the Florence Foster Jenkins trailers, I did think the Marguerite trailer promised the sort of story I'd hoped the Streep film would be. I'll have to check it out.

G'ah, that's true. I can't think of a way to sidestep the implications of that without seeming kludgy and pandering. Though I can imagine them going with "The hot con man falls for Rebel Wilson!" and thinking it's somehow a feminist affirmation because he doesn't end up with the charming, feminine one.

I dunno, I think you can evoke similar themes by having it be a showdown between, say, Rebel Wilson as a crass, self-taught grifter who thinks men are pigs and nickel-and-dimes them with petty, humiliating cons, and someone like Helen Mirren as a high-class con woman who expertly plays to men's egos and charms them…

Isn't the idea that the monster retreated to its lair because it was seriously wounded by Nancy and Jonathan's trap? I assumed it went there to recover, and after snacking on Will's life force or whatever, it was fit enough to go out hunting again.

To get back from the Upside Down they just went back through the gate, right? And with the drop box, I assume that's part of Hopper's deal with the spooks. I expect we'll discover in season 2 that Eleven went willingly back to the lab to protect her friends, and that Hopper is somehow involved in her care now — sort…

Yeah, that was the other big failure of the film. And the worst part is, they set it up all along so it seems like there will be a big third act: "Oh, no, Pam Landy is in trouble! We just have to go to Manila to 'lock in' not-Bourne's enhancements, and then we'll come back and save Pam from . . . no? We're just gonna…

"The Bourne Legacy, which had the gall to remove Bourne from the equation entirely, replacing him with a new lab rat played by Jeremy Renner. But was that such a disastrous move for the series?"

Well, one of the main reasons rape is such an inflammatory subject is because we live in a society where the threat of sexual violation is used to keep women in line. So insensitive jokes about it actually contribute to that culture of oppression.

Exactly. The bar Montana would've had to clear to not get fucked is really, really low. She could've gotten away with basically everything except thoughtlessly betraying an explicit ovaries-before-brovaries agreement with one of the other villains, a good friend of hers with whom she apparently shared her deepest…

I love in that bit how Marshall takes his wedding ring off and slides it around on his pen as he's speaking. Such a great little piece of business.

Yep. And despite the uncomfortable stuff about how being revealed as transgender inevitably destroys Montana's life and career, it's kinda-sorta mitigated by the fact that her TG status is only the vehicle for her destruction, not the justification for it. That is, she's brought low not because she's an icky…

"The point I'm trying to make is that QUIZ SHOWS are beating us! There's a lady cooking sausages almost tied us last week! A guy at my tennis club said it should be called The Sun Also SUCKS!"

Well, I don't want to oversell it as some hugely meaningful statement on race or anything like that. It mostly just wallows through the main character's ever-worsening depravity for an hour and a half. But I did did find the psychology underpinning the depravity pretty interesting and unexpected — it's about a…

That's interesting, because as someone who's seen the movie, I thought the trailer seemed pretty accurate. It's not like it shows the main character starting off as some delicate ingenue. But maybe it's not explicit enough about the fact that she's more an agent of chaos and corruption than a victim of it.

What if I told you I've seen the film and it's pretty much the opposite of that?