I doubt he is truly a nephew; if your uncle was a globetrotter why would you only have gotten to Europe as a grown man? I think that’s a near certainty. 

This is a literal Veep plot point. 

“I don’t care if they raise the price of Disney+ a couple bucks or whatever, but when i pay several thousand dollars to go and stay at Disneyworld, then get nickle and dimed to death inside and have to pay a bunch of extraneous surcharges, that really drains most of the “magic” from the trip.”

This is all about streaming. The theme parks actually serve fewer customers now compared to pre-pandemic life — yet they make way more from each customer, rendering that business highly profitable. (And the declining quality of experiences so far hasn’t hurt the business — in a way making it something like the airline…

YES, Jack! Got that mixed up. In any case, I went back to the transcript and it’s very open-ended (and I’m certainly sensitive to portraying gay people as predatory). Jack says that Palermo is “all right, if you don’t mind a bunch of gays grabbing your arse and copping a feel.” Portia asks if he minds and he says, “No,…

Like 3 views of the same life. 

I forgot to shout out Bert’s cogent assessment last episode about the ways in which the old are no longer respected but instead reviled as ugly reminders of less enlightened pasts. (Admittedly, Bert is clearly cut from the sexual harassments cloth, but he’s also astute.) I think Bert’s lament that he may never again…

Valentina has already violated HR guidelines. Like Armond, she’s a sympathetic character, but also a bit of a predator.

Do we trust Quentin? He seems to have gravitated to Tanya rather deliberately. I can imagine he traveled to such opulent settings to grift. Or do I just have a cold, dead heart? 

Results is still one of my favorite of his films (along with Support the Girls). Even his misses are hits on some level. He continues to make work that could only be films. 

The original film worked so well because it was built around the idea of who owns history, who gets to tell it and how it can be misused. There are a lot of ways to go from there, but space is definitively not one of those places. I can think of a lot of villains in the 1960s who very much wanted to distort history.…

Just like Trump, you can never lose if you never acknowledge failures. 

I just want the Disney team’s internal email chain on this matter, pls.

How is the title of this story not “Back and to the ... Middle?”

This sounds like a film Paolo Sorrentino could have made with perhaps more finesse. Sorrentino has the a similar rich visual vocabulary as Iñárritu, but is better at handling absurdity and making louche-ness feel fresh. (See Loro and The Great Beauty.) Still, the fact that Iñárritu is still able to make over the…

BURYING THE LEDE: “It’s just not usual to do so in flight...” 

Random excuse to post this insane video of Jay goofing off while clinging to the NOSE OF A FLYING PLANE. https://www.tmz.com/2021/08/11/jay-leno-hangs-on-front-of-airplane-in-wild-video/

That is the alternative — just wiping the slate clean. And, given this storyline, I’d be just fine with it. Honestly, I wish Belinda had been the carryover cast member. She had more story to tell, plus it would make sense that employees might transfer among various of the chain’s locations.

Didn’t need to know what Tony Soprano saw when he looked up from the jukebox and definitely don’t need to know if Darius saw thick Judge Judy. A+ finale. Most laugh-out-loud episode of this season. What a pleasure. 

Also, Greg speaks to the restaurant host.