If you’re looking for kids’ movies and marketing-focused blockbusters to also be good movies, you might have a while to wait.

Those aren’t the reasons, those are more talented writers (for a goddamn cartoon, no less) trying to pick up the pieces while the prequels were shitting in five directions at once. 

I thought it was okay for most of its run, if just drama boilerplate shot in the ubiquitous hazy gray mess which passes for a color scheme most of these days, until the moment near the end where Tom Cruise’s teenage asshole kid is miraculously okay for no good reason, and it completely lost me there. Screw that film. 

It’s because we’re now at the point in our chronology when there’s a generation of young people who grew up with the prequels not as something new and tacked on to Star Wars (trademark pending), but as part of an already established - and important, and culturally relevant, and still decent overall (as they believe) -…

I like to think of it like this: We all like to think we’re Mark (because he’s legitimately smart and mostly competent, despite all his flaws that render him generally impotent), but secretly we fear we’re actually a Jeremy. 

Since we all suckle from the teat of pop culture, it does us unwise to ever bite that teat.

Even with the excellent performances from Douglas (in what is today a very retro “classic hero” mode) and Olivier, it’s telling that Ustinov steals the show in every scene he’s in and won a much-deserved Oscar for the role. That man was an amazing talent, and had been the only memorable aspect of Quo Vadis, a film…

When I was on a vacation in Germany and had watched the original film fairly recently before, I, for some reason, dug up a cover by Rammstein, which is indeed so poorly and quixotically done that it makes for great entertainment:

Man, if only the AV Club had some sort of feature wherein we could see artists of the present day reinterpret songs of the past generation-and-a-half for our auditory (and who knows, audiovisual?!) pleasure, so that we could actually see some of this fantasy be fulfilled. It could even be reloaded occasionally with…

I’m going to take the opposite tack and advise you (and everyone else) to stop your exploration of the X series at X3. Hell, maybe even X2, because X3, despite its creativity, is clearly only about 80% finished, and everything after X3 is the product of diminishing returns and creative choices that appear to have been…

So, are we supposed to be actually interested that two bands on the far downslope of their mainstream relevance did this side project, or are supposed to be self-satisfied in snarky superiority that these professional musicians are still around after their mainstream relevance, and that we believe them to be lame from…

Chuck Klosterman. Most of his work, good or bad, has a “I’m intentionally trying to piss you off by being provocative, and then deliberately vague” feel to it, and everything after Killing Yourself to Live wasn’t as buoyed by clever insights or thoughts and mostly just succeeded in pissing me off. Especially once he…

How about Desperate Living (1977)? It’s obviously campy melodrama, but you have the main lesbian couple not only live a live of (questionable, troubled, absurd) domestic bliss, but also ultimately reject the need for sex conversion surgery for a butch to satisfy her femme partner. Plus, they successfully lead a…

By all means, yes, point to the strong economy he inherited - while not acknowledging any of the multitudes of undignified and insipid ideas, policies, and nigh-unintelligible words he has created.

As long as you look at the world with those incredibly specific blinders on, it seems okay, doesn’t it?