Nothing could be more offensive than the recent-ish reboot I half-watched while my kids were watching it (can’t remember if it was a movie or a show but I think the former).  It had Daphne in hopeless unrequited love with Fred and Velma in hopeless unrequited love with Shaggy.  Idiotic.

It’s been done! There was a Brokeback parody movie-within-a-movie (monks, not pirates or cowboys) in Tropic Thunder.

Yeah, there was a real tone—I guess you could call it subtle snark—to the article. If you look at the actual facts it lays out, Strong’s a guy from a modest background who’s been impassioned about acting forever, managed to endear himself to famous actors, kept working and trying until he finally made it, and even as…

Spot on. And even some of us old fogeys got very tired of the whole “ultra-dark superhero” thing. It’s telling that Marvel has done better than DC in the past decade or so, not that Marvel doesn’t dabble in the dark tropes too.

I dunno, I find contrasting creative approaches interesting. But I agree the results are great.

Agreed. It kind of sounds like Strong forces some of the Oedipal stuff to play out offscreen in order to fully inhabit the part, so it’s understandable Cox would have something to say about it. (But also, I found Strong appealing in the New Yorker profile. He doesn’t come from a fancy background and I found his level…

Leonard Cohen had just died, so it was sort of about two bad things that happened, but yeah, commenting simultaneously on two bad things ≠ comedy.

That struck me too. But they’re not hobbits, they’re “Harfoots”?? 

I feel that way about movies with bears.

Unfortunately I bet those aren’t mutually exclusive. 

I loved the books as a lonely adolescent, and the movies came out when I was in my twenties. I enjoyed them a lot and thought overall the casting was great (although in a perfect world Donald Sutherland would have played Denethor). It didn’t hurt that Peter Jackson answered a question I posed in a Q&A on Ain’t It Cool…

It’s the role I associate him with the most. I’ve seen that version of A Christmas Carol dozens of times (starting when it originally aired on PBS). He’s just wonderful in it.

LOL I was 10 that year. A lot of things have gotten worse since (polar ice caps, etc.), but the culture has gotten a little less idiotic in some ways. I remember a lot of talking heads on the news being like “George Orwell published a book called 1984. Are things like he said they would be? More at 11.”

The Summer I Turned Pretty (book, haven’t seen the adaptation, obviously) is absolute garbage.  Will doubtless be one of those rare cases where the adaptation transcends the source material. 

Young Dumbledore in Space

Fantastic answers, especially to the last question.

Stop trying to control me, Fellowes.

I’ll give you that one.

I enjoyed saying “legacyquel” out loud to myself.  I would allow it just for how it trips off the tongue.  

Over time it has become clear that Tom Cruise has exceptionally high standards for the movies he’s in. I may not be in the mood for a Cruise film 95% of the time, but I get the sense he puts in significantly more effort (which means a lot to the quality of the overall movie) than most of his peers in the industry.