Basically Michael Cera can only play so many young, nerdy white men, so somebody had to play the rest. Of course both of them have basically aged out of that demographic now.

Don’t forget “The Illusionist” (2006), the “twin film” (in the sense of Tombstone/Wyatt Earp, Deep Impact/Armageddon) of “The Prestige”.

Also this isn’t the first time Olivier has “acted” post-mortem. There was the very odd (but strangely endearing) indie film with all-virtual sets “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” (2004) that featured Olivier at the villain. At the time the whole thing just seemed like a weird bit of “outsider art”, but it was…

Amazon only fairly recently became profitable. For the first 25 years or so they were operating at a loss and only survived because investors believed that they would eventually make money.

But it doesn’t mean what you think. A life expectancy isn’t a measure of “how long will an elderly person likely person live to”, which is how many people incorrectly interpret it as. It’s a average of all people’s age at death in the sample. To the degree that life expectancies are going down, it’s not so much that…

Except The Road Warrior is a great movie and the original Mad Max kinda crap (although it was very low budget which didn’t help). I saw it years after I saw The Road Warrior and I think it was wise that the marketing for The Road Warrior in the US never mentioned that it was sequel to it.

Yeah, I kind of see it like something like English fox-hunting which everyone who wasn’t English (and even then, mostly just the upper-class people who participated in it) were horrified by it (why hunt a harmless cute creature you can’t even eat?) but the explanation was that it needed to be preserved because it was…

I love it where the kid is trying to convince Arnie’s character that they aren’t in the real world because everyone is thin and attractive and he responds with “This is California”.

The AV Club was not put on this Earth to “get it”.

I also liked Oblivion from the previous year. In both movies Cruise actually toned down some of his Cruise-ness and gave a good low-key performance in interesting movies.

Definitely Raptor Jesus. Raptors are Christians. We know this because of the documentary The VelociPastor.

It was a reasonable hope, just like the literal Tron:Legacy (which was a moderate box office success). It’s the same deal. Two SF movies from the early 1980s that were box-office failures in the theater but were embraced on home video and remained current in pop culture. So it was reasonable to believe there was an…

And I didn’t like the whole implication that there’s a whole Replicant resistance movement in BR2049. That’s just so trite like they are setting up a whole Replicant Rebel Alliance against the evil empire of Tyrell (or whatever Jared Leto’s successor company was). I liked how the original Blade Runner was small scale.…

His father created the James Dean Foundation Trust (already a bit iffy because Dean was actually mostly raised by his aunt and uncle not his biological parents). It’s unclear who controls it now (presumably relatives of his father).

Ethernet

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 transcedental philosophy essay?

I realize this is missing the point of the joke, but “The Lottery” was a short story only a few pages long. It always annoyed me to see this scene because it makes it look like it was a whole novel that would be an entire book.

In general, but there have been exceptions: The Godfather Part II was in many ways better than the original (obviously not the case for III), The Road Warrior (which in the US didn’t originally even say it was the sequel to Mad Max) was a far better film than the first. And people generally accept The Empire Strikes…

Oh, much longer than that. Here’s a Siskel & Ebert episode from 1985 where they tackle three terrible sequels (granted, from three franchises that weren’t particularly good even from the start).

Having seen them all, Onward is definitely the weakest of the four pandemic-era Pixar movies and feels more like a Dreamworks movie than a Pixar one.