Also you’re doing a Friday the 13th prequel series. I liked Hannibal, and it’s not inherently impossible that their creative flexibility couldn’t match the boldness of your artistic vision, but you’re maybe not starting from the best place to make that argument.

My theory is that a lot of people misread his whole act. He’s really a pure stand-up guy at heart, and while he’s not above mining his personal life for jokes, the whole thing was always treated pretty light and breezily because when you slow down and address actual pain, the comedy tends to stop for a while.

Yeah, I didn’t watch the first set, I won’t watch this one.  It’s my favorite kind of reboot!  In that I’m not actively annoyed by it.  Go nuts, Maze Runner adaptors!

That’s the one fact that was the key to explaining why his movies mostly suck for me. If means making himself look good even under make-believe circumstances trumps whatever is best for the story.

This presumes people en masse are basing their lives on a good faith reading of the text and not interpreting the text in such a way that it gives a divine seal of approval to whatever they already think.

Important, yes, readable in only the most technical sense. Like most anthologies, it’s very uneven.  No non-specialist would ever crack the Book of Numbers if they didn’t believe god wrote it.

You can absolutely prove the non-existence of a thing if the thing has enough defining characteristics. If I say there is a such a thing as a “blork,” a visible creature that obeys the laws of physics, only exists in my house, doesn’t move, and is bigger than an elephant, then it only takes a quick examination of all…

The tension between what Xavier theoretically wants and the fact that most of their superpowers are about stabbing things or making them explode is kinda baked into the concept, and there is no version of the comic or any adaptation that doesn’t undercut its message a bit as a result. But watch either Rogue or…

I’d bet money the show ends up endorsing Xavier’s position as much as any other adaptation. Rogue and Cyclop’s big feints toward rejecting it are clearly born of justifiable frustration and intense grief, not some clear-headed analysis of the situation, and “they need me” is the ultimate revelation of the one…

What pedigree? It seems like the same mix of B and C-list creatives (give or take a well past his prime Russell Crowe) and unknowns that defined Morbius and Madame Web, and it very much has a similar stink of “who do we own the rights to but has never been interesting enough to be in one of the eight proper Spider-Man…

I feel like he has the “acting is a job, not divine calling” attitude that is more common among both British and character actors.  That doesn’t mean he doesn’t take it seriously, but it does make it harder to get really pretentions about.  He seemed genuinely worried about Jeremy Strong.

Yeah, it’s pretty weird and also seems like a recent invention? No tries to do a Danish accent for Hamlet or does Romeo and Juliet with Italian pronunciations.  

It’s probably not exhaustive, but Wikipedia’s entry for Found Footage has 13 movies between 1961 (when the first entry is listed) and Blair Witch in 1999 and 14 between BW and the end of 2006. I think you can reasonably argue that the next good one didn’t happen until 2007, but the seven years after Blair Witch had…

I looked it up once, and while I can’t remember the exact numbers, there were like ten movies using the found footage conceit released every year after the BWP for every one before. It exemplifies a lot of both the strengths and weaknesses of the genre, but it’s also one of those movies that had such a ludicrously…

The youngest Gen-Xers are, what, 45 now? Whatever the demographic is, I promise it’s not that.

Yeah, and at this point I’ll take depth of research and preparedness over a quick back and forth. I learn a dozen new things about every person he interviews, and I get to see a normally poised and camera-ready celebrity’s panic response. If the trade-off for that is that the banter doesn’t seem quite as natural…

Yeah, I don’t want to pile too hard on the guy because he seems like a decent dude, and if you asked any 62-year-old to give an off-the-cuff response on the kids these days, I doubt many of the answers you get would be brimming with insight.

Still, there is no way that millions of strangers being able to express their…

The ease with which social media can make people famous definitely has some substantial pitfalls, but it’s also a lot more democratic and has far fewer barriers to entry than existed at a time when Harvey Weinstein’s social circle had a near monopoly on access to the wider public.

It’s come with some downsides, sure, b…

Or ever, really.  “People like stupid shit” is a timeless truth.

I have a female friend who, when it became clear that some guy really wanted her to know that he went to an Ivy, would ask which school he was talking about and then pretend she’d never heard of it. Maybe one in twenty would take it in stride, three or four would catch on that she was fucking with them, and 75-80%…