The Diplomat is what you get when Renny Harlin thinks he can do Le Carre.

Based on the two episodes I could stand to watch, I’ll defend Ortega’s performance given the constraints of the character and the godawful writing, but yeah, there are dozens of better performances in better shows that should have been nominated instead.

Fair enough, in the same way that he earned nickels :-)

Fair enough. I probably should have left it off the list...but in my defence, I would say that it belongs more in the ‘disappointment’ box alongside Dungeons & Dragons than the ‘go broke’ box with Shazam and The Flash.

I absolutely agree with all that.

Nobody has managed to shoot it in the head.

Millions? Zaslav made half a billion in the last 4 years alone.

I wasn’t trying to tell what you already know. You seemed to be arguing that the key problem is the studios having non-movie people in senior positions. I don’t disagree that it’s a problem. It might even be worse than ever. But I think the main driver here is the destruction of worker rights and the threat of…

Oh sure, they do that too. But I still remember their palpable glee that Black Panther was going to bomb because it had a Black lead (even though by this stage Will Smith had helmed multiple big hits). The fact that they blather when some flop has a Latinx caterer is another aspect of their refusal to face reality.

You’d think after chanting ‘go woke, go broke’ all through the successes of Black Panther, Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Puss In Boots, the Spiderverse movies, the Fast and the Furious franchise, Shi-Chang, Tenet, and so on and so on and so on, the mouthbreathers would learn to shut up.

At that stage of their career, Brian May would have been used to blowing people away as the regular Queen yardstick. He probably picked up on one flat note or a little buzz of extra feedback somewhere and thought the act was just OK. He obviously wasn’t judging by crowd response!

A slightly different take: most studio heads have been money-grubbers right from the beginning, and even those that loved movies would happily shaft their artists and crew for profit. This is still true today, and I’m sure even a shrivel-souled ghoul like Zaslav likes it when his studios put out a profitable movie…

But he’d make a great CFO.

Why? He’ll probaby get hit by a meteorite on the way to the store.

And *while President of SAG-AFTRA*, gleefully co-operated with HUAC.

For Alito, that seems pretty generous.

Doesn’t mean they don’t like Rosa Parks. Good chance they ticked ‘Don’t know’ on the questionnaire. Lotta ignorant folks out there (see also the moon landing and flat earth questions).

Chocolate bloc, surely.

Paddington is pretty good if you push through it, but if you struggled you can jump straight to Paddington 2 which is a fantastic film (Brendan Glesson has called it his favourite role!) and doesn’t rely on having seen the first film.

Don’t get me wrong, I did not like MoM at all. It had one half-decent idea, poorly implemented, that put it slightly above QM to me.