Glad to see Session 9 there! That one feels underappreciated to me. I wonder about all the ways that people go to find movies—classes and what else? Everything’s on the internet, except for the stuff that isn’t or don’t know what to look for. Lately I’ve been missing Kim’s Video, which has been closed for years now,…

The last one I attended was years ago—and I still have a free pass to the next one since that visit was cut short by a tornado warning and they gave vouchers as a conciliation gift—but outside and all, I did get spooked by hearing that the first weekend was a possible superspreader event here.

Well, the big New York Renaissance Faire that met the first weekend of this month got specifically cited by the local county health commissioner as a possible superspreader event and that everyone who attended should get tested...

That sounds fascinating—even without a modern politics read, I think the cultural lessons from the warring states periods (either China’s or Japan’s) can play out interestingly in fiction. It doesn’t always have to be another WWII.

Money is how we trade time/labor—it’s not how we measure time and labor, since that’s all over the place. But when I spend it, I know what I had to do to get it and I try to remember it’s more than what I can see in front of me if it’s a thing I’m getting.

I don’t think this is a book that will lose “pop” by revealing now—if anything, it’s the kind of thing that could easily get lost so a drip feed of a selection of the bios might be in the offing and that there will be more pieces before it’s release. That’d be my guess, since the pub month of the book is more of a…

People love Spec ops: The Line, but I found it’s storytelling very heavy-handed specifically because of a moment of poorly integrated dissonance that made be stop playing the game. There’s a lynchpin battle moment where dying is a failure state of the game, you can’t give up, and the only way to proceed results in a…

The critique is of their business model—which who knows if it works—that it needs people to sign up to think it’ll make them money even if it won’t. In that sense, I don’t know if there’s really any curatorial/platform shine to anyone having a substack and if it’s “promotion” at all. The effect seems to be rather the…

It’s strange what passes the censors and what doesn’t—though I know there’s been a clampdown in more recent times. I think Shadow was pretty underrated, better and subtler than Hero and more beautiful with it’s blacks and grays playing on classic Chinese paintings, and also undertalked about for what’s a critique of…

It’s been an age since I played regularily, and my era was AD&D 2, WoD stuff/Ars Magica, and Shadowrun—what this means is that while I’ve looked at games since then all my references are going to be 20 years old. (Anyone remember Castle Falkenstein? Or Nobilis?) In every attempt to start playing again one element has…

I want to pipe in to amplify your last paragraph—big Hollywood releases is pretty rarefied air, and many big cgi movie money has limits, but the funding for the MCU movie got that Scorcese or Villeneuve—who continue to make expensive movies—wasn’t the stuff that was directed to the part of cinema that at least for me…

My favorites of his are Sicario and Arrival, and I wanted to like but don’t think Blade Runner 2049 was particularly compelling (Dave Batista was the best part). At least for me, he’ll make something beautiful, he’s good with a serviceable script and better with a good one, but a lot rides on his casting.

I don’t know that Return of the King and Avengers: Endgame should be on the list—the rest of the movies typically work without having watched anything else but those two are very embedded in a continuity experience. They’re long, and they’re good, but plunk someone down who hasn’t watched the series and I don’t know…

This had to be approved by SO many people to get this far!

I think Nova dunked on Civil War in regular continuity as well. He’s briefly on Earth and Tony starts telling him to register or something and Nova’s all “I told you the galaxy was at war, what were you doing?”

I watched this via a streaming festival—Japan Cuts—and for me it never quite shook a feeling of being a TV drama. A generally ambitious and successful one, but still constrained—though I kind of wonder if I’d get more out of it if I saw it on the big screen. It’s definitely noteworthy that the film deals with…

The Marvel fans are getting their bloated fare and you are getting what you want too—you just watched it. It sounds like what you want is for it not be criticized—certain the Marvel stuff gets it too.

I started it and it’s fine for what I want it to be (an action scene delivery device) though having established that Kate speaks Japanese—why doesn’t she speak Japanese and why do many of the Japanese reflexively use English?

Looks fun! And also the kind of story that can be delivered safely in 6 episodes.

I wouldn’t limit it to the AV Club commenters—the whole “dirt bag” theme is Jezebel’s to own up to.