My question is, at a certain point in the (d)evolution of The Simpsons, doesn’t it stop being “uncharacteristically bad episode of a great show” and start being “especially bad episode of a show that’s usually still pretty okay”?

“See, the story opens with these mysterious explosions. Nobody knows what’s causing them, but it’s upsetting all the buffalo. So the military is called in to solve the mystery.”

Oh, wait. Fucking duh. I just realized a perfectly reasonable way to explain my biggest objection to the “Paimon all along” idea.

Hmm, interesting. That still feels wrong to me, but if the idea is that Charlie doesn’t know what she is all along and part of the story is her finally realizing and ascending to her/his/its true self, I can kinda make sense of it.

“It’s like poetry, sort of. They rhyme. . . .”

To me the midi-chlorians are such an elaborately terrible idea that it’s almost impressive. Like, Lucas has mentioned that they’re based on mitochondria, to represent how muticellular life arose from single-celled organisms working together in tandem, just like society arises from different people working together for…

I think it’s the same guy, with some genius ideas and some real shit ideas and no ability to tell the difference, only he got so rich and revered that everyone stopped being honest with him when he proposed some hot garbage nonsense.

Also, Bob’s belief in his inherent specialness and his insistence that he work alone is presented as his character’s principal weakness, which both turns Syndrome into a villain and allows Bob to fall into his trap. And it’s resolved in his final-act realization that the reason he embraced that philosophy is because…

The Sundance cut ended the same way, though, so presumably the tweaks were made by the filmmakers because of their own anxiety about the original ending, not any dictates from A24.

So a spoiler question: I’ve seen a bunch of people arguing that the ending of the movie establishes that Charlie was Paimon all along. I . . . didn’t get that sense at all? Certainly, the idea is that the cult had prepared her to serve as Paimon’s host all along, but to me it seems reductive to suggest that this…

It’s fascinating that Aster mentions In the Bedroom, because that’s exactly the parallel I thought of as a criticism of Hereditary.

Jumping in late here because I just watched this episode, but Gelula is actually massively talented. She starred in a film a couple years ago called First Girl I Loved that didn’t get much of a release, but she was so, so good as an awkward teen girl coming to terms with her first gay crush. “Lesbian coming-of-age…

Hereditary is not “scary.” It is horribly mis-advertised. The trailers make it seem like it is about the spirit of the dead grandma terrorizing people and it isn’t like that at all.

Yeah, because that’s definitely a real thing. Don’t you have a pizza parlor to shoot up, you fucking QAnon lunatic?

I think of Kenan a lot like how I thought of Joe Biden during the Obama presidency: I can’t really imagine him going on to bigger things, but damned if his weirdo ass isn’t the best at the underappreciated but vital job he has right now.

Frankly, I think the whole “grief” thing is a crutch. You can’t have a horror movie these days without a protagonist who’s burdened by X tragedy, so that by fighting the monster they overcome it. It’s a cheap, easy way to evoke dread.

On the one hand, I’d argue that the Babadook isn’t just a metaphor, in the sense that to the characters it’s clearly an actual demonic entity, regardless of what it symbolizes to viewers of their story.

Erana’s Peace was much nicer than all these dusky basements and whatnot.

As his ex took umbrage with, there were times when he was painted as a feminist hero. It turns out, he’s just a guy.

Oh, sure, that’s sort of my point—that the premise may lend itself to the sort of characterization that I’ve grown tired of where Whedon is concerned. Though the reference to “relationships, addiction, and being too dang old for the detecting game” suggests that it could be something more adult, a story about the contr…