It's… fairly long. But he's right in saying that the nature of whatever's considered 'great' now is rather different to the 90s.

"We weren’t as great as the greats but we were the best of the rest."

RHCP form the triumvirate of bands I have an irrational loathing for (Smashing Pumpkins and Greenday being the other two) so I give this Hatesong my seal of approval. It really is them at their worst.

"The instrumentalists of the Chili Peppers are pretty much the definition of less than the sum of their parts"

For some reason this reminds of The IT Crowd where a couple of tech guys manage to convince an exec board that the cube they're holding is 'the internet'.

Agreed. TV is pathologically against depicting real work, but in this instance some prolonged scenes of Noah actually committing to his professed craft wouldn't have gone amiss. Seeing his writing process and his frustrations could have been revealing. Sometimes it's ok to keep the 'boring' bits in a drama.

In my defense the edit came quite a bit before you replied. Shistleblower does have a nice ring to it, though.

Yeah, my heart sank when we got a glimpse into Noah's prose, because great authors in films and TV are always, in fact, terrible. And so it proved.

It's a good direction, but they need more of it. One epilogue scene per episode isn't enough to get any narrative momentum going and the effect is invariably underwhelming.

The season's much more consistent than the first, but the drip-feed of the present timeline is still annoying where it should be compelling. Don't have Oscar give something to the lawyer without showing us what it is. That's not even a cliffhanger.

Agreed, I'm not getting the 'whitsleblowers cause more harm than good' theme at all. Even the annoying journalist is being played more sympathetically as the season's progressing. The original guy who leaked the docs is a hero by the show's standards.

Dull episode. This is what apologists used to call 'table-setting', but if an episode feels like that it's failed.

I can't see anything I've written that contradicts the thrust of my argument. However, as back and forths like this really don't work on Disqus, I'm happy to walk away from this particular conversation. Best wishes.

I wouldn't go as far as he did (Avengers 1 and Cap 2 were decent enough) but yeah, still don't think it warranted the troll accusation. This isn't an appreciation thread after all. If he *is* a troll it worked given how many replies it got.

In fairness, Mr Jobs wasn't the poster who thew the T word around.

Well exactly, he probably made ten times the money for a week's worth of filming those than the notoriously stingy Marvel would pay him for a couple of features. Even from a business point of view it makes sense.

"Fine, Ultron was fun and Guy Pierce was cool. Now, on to the 'mediocre movies' part of your trolling thesis…"

Welcome to the double-edged sword of franchise mania: established, A-List actors don't want to commit to 17 movies before the first has even begun filming. (Except Samuel L Jackson, who will star in literally anything.)

Yes, good example. I wonder if we can include Ledger's Joker too? The film even toys with a backstory before mocking the idea.

"The weakest part of Psycho comes at the end, when the doctor mansplains the pat psychological reasons for Norman Bates’ psychotic break."