“I feel robbed! I went to this thinking it was going to be a sad story of a deformed man who had to work as a circus freak, not an action movie!”

But not funny ha-ha.

Like in Brave New World, which dated its calendar Before and After Ford, so too shall we name our era After Nolan, and weep for the poor souls who had to live in the Before times.

But don’t feel too bad. Billy goes on to have adventures in a park filled with dinosaurs in Seymour Skinner’s incredibly original “Billy and the Cloneusarus”!

My parents (in their 80s) loved it. I was visiting them recently and we watched both The Holdovers and Oppenheimer (which I had already seen in the theater). They loved The Holdovers, but were baffled by the Nolan-ness of Oppenheimer like how Oppie is making love to Jean Tatlock in the middle of his hearing.

“You can’t just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!” — Robot Devil, Futurama.

Apparently Dominic Sessa (who played Angus) is only 21 and was an actual student at the prep school they were using for filming! Maybe preppies just age faster or something.

Farmers actually use spreadsheets! Farming is basically running a business.

King Rat is also the most personal book for him because it deals with POWs in Japanese camps in WWII and Clavell was such a POW. It’s interesting that Clavell maintained an interest in and respect for the Japanese after that experience. My father’s uncle also was a POW in a Japanese camp and retained a grudge against…

Rom-com game? You mean like those weird Japanese video games that are “dating simulators”?

The actual Three Body Problem is a pretty famous problem in physics (basically it is easy to compute how two bodies, say the Earth and the Moon, move in relation to each other, but once you add a third body, say the Sun, it is far harder because that third body is influencing both of the others and you have to resort…

That’s like saying Einstein was a terrible dancer, so it’s a bit hard to trust his views on physics. I don’t see how having weak characterization (if it is really so and not just a cultural difference between China and the West) has any bearing whatsoever on the Dark Forest theory, which is simply asking what would be…

It was a star-studded intervention! There were minimums of fame required!

In practice yes, but the reason the term was initially used for closeted gays was that an unmarried male could more easily explain himself as being just too into women in general to pick just one as opposed to not being into them at all.

Well, Bewitched was beloved in the day despite the sexism. Small Wonder was just creepy even at the time.

And Central (and parts of South) America are so poor that quite a lot of immigrants from there just go to Mexico (not as a waypoint to go on to the US). As poor as Mexico is compared to the US, it is well off compared to lots of other places.

In the 1930s and 1940s they basically had episodic shows called “serials” that you watched in movie theaters when new episodes came out.

Yes — the 2002 version of Ripley’s Game. I assume his presence in the new one is a bit of an Easter egg. Pity they couldn’t have gotten Pepper or Damon to be a part to get other former Ripleys. Maybe even Delon, who is still alive, but maybe not acting these days as he is nearly 90.

Or the space trucker working for Weyland-Yutani who had that weird story about alien eggs?

It sounds like this is just an adaptation of the first book again. Highsmith wrote a whole series. The first book has been filmed twice (1960 as “Purple Noon” with Alain Delon as Ripley and in 1999 with Matt Damon), the second book once (in 2005 with Barry Pepper), the third book twice (in 1977 as “The American…