I don’t know that I’d call it “lightly touched” when the villain is literally repeating Dick Cheney’s justifications for going into Iraq. Cripes, any less subtle and they’d have to put a neon sign across the bottom of the screen saying, “THE US GOVERNMENT IS REALLY FUCKING EVIL!!!!!”

...yeah, that movie about Captain America signing on to help eradicate terrorists, only to find out that the War on Terror is a smiling optimistic mask over an increasingly autocratic and authoritarian government who will stop at nothing to eliminate threats to its power was probably pretty message-free.

But again, he can’t just cut a huge check to an existing foundation to eradicate malaria. He needs to make sure it’s the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, run by his hand-selected people utilizing his ideas for what would be best for malaria eradication. He wants malaria eradicated, I’m sure, but first and foremost…

Oddly enough, shitting yourself doesn’t make you any more interesting.

Because people like Gates always want control. Always. He would be happy to give that money to a government he ran, but fundamentally he wants the power his money creates even when he’s spending it philanthropically. Just giving the money away and never seeing it again means that the people who have it aren’t beholden…

If he wanted to give away the bulk of his assets, he could do it. Charity Navigator is a thing. What he wants is to set up the bulk of his assets in such a way that his ideas for social change are promulgated eternally, with the money to force competing ideas out of the marketplace so that he and only he (and his…

No. He hasn’t. He’s been running charities, because billionaires have never found a problem that they don’t think they can solve by forcing people into a system that they have control over, but he’s been doing a lot of good for the public school system the same way Jeff Gilooly did a lot of good to Nancy Kerrigan’s…

Yes, dear. You’re absolutely right. It’s white men that are the real victims here.

The implication is that your cultural snobbery isn’t nearly as interesting as you think it is, and you can just stop talking now.

Oculus definitely spends a lot of time arranging Chekhov’s guns on the mantelpiece, but I’ll admit I kind of liked the way you knew that every single one of Kaylie’s precautions is going to be useless or self-destructive by the end of the night. (As I’ve pointed out in the past, there’s no reason to believe that…

I know Flanagan has done a ton of amazing stuff (and has a ton of amazing stuff yet ahead of him!) but I’m always going to love ‘Oculus’ the most of his work, I think. It’s got so much to say about the way that childhood abuse continues to traumatize long into adulthood, the way that siblings in abused families have…

There’s nothing magical about Jim Spanfeller.

He also keeps talking about how the Democrats are leaking incriminating evidence. Hey Donald, last I checked there are plenty of Republicans on that committee, and yet nobody on your side has leaked anything exculpatory. Wonder why that is?

I think that comparison is extremely unfair to Al Capone. Sure, he might have had a lot of guys killed, but he didn’t put kids in cages by the thousands.

MAGA chuds wouldn’t fall in line behind Pence, because he’s ultimately a gutless, charisma-free grey waste of a man who’s too timid to unleash his hateful id on camera the way Trump does. He’d go back to respecting protesters while disagreeing with them and cordially chatting with his esteemed political opponents and…

That means, much like this review, the film takes a good long while to set everything up. And, also like this review, it gets a tiny little tedious.

Let me put it this way. Is there anything, anything at all that would be different in the lyrics if she didn’t?

No. There are exactly zero people who dislike TLJ for “objective” reasons, just as there are exactly zero people who like TLJ for “objective” reasons. Objective means “not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts”, and it’s literally impossible to like or dislike something in a…

I have not talked listened to one person who liked TLJ

That one came up at the “So Bad It’s Good” panel this year at CONvergence in Minneapolis. Everyone agreed that it’s an absolute classic example. From the ‘dwarf’ who’s easily taller than some of the cast members to Jeremy Irons chewing the living fuck out of the scenery to the cavalcade of overqualified British…