I used to live in a town where people were generally indifferent to pretty white girls but dear god they hated Sam Barsanti.  Had a Barsanti infestation in ’86 and now they cordon off the roads and search every truck bed to make sure one never gets in.  Fuck I miss that town.

‘barely worthy of my puns.’ That is so withering, self-deprecating, and goddamned accurate at the same time, I sprayed coffee out my nose. Well done.

This was *chef’s kiss* real writing.  Reading this, I’ve determined one thing:  You’re not Sam Barsanti.

I hope there’s a hell so Sam Barsanti can spend eternity reading his life as written by Sam Barsanti. The manner in which he uses his sneering, smug version of ‘wokeness’ as a cover for his witless writing is so, so loathsome.

Falcon and Winter Soldier was a complete mess, and the A-plot was incomprehensible rubbish. Which is a damned shame because Mackie and Stan (and Russell) were great and the stuff with Isaiah Bradley and the concept of Mackie’s impostor complex relegating the shield to an undeserving white man were really well handled…

I don’t think he was out of line. She agreed to go on a date with him, he was clear that his interests were romantic, and he had every right to consider her behavior rude and dishonest. She even dismissed their earlier conversation about his stutter, which was just mean.

Interesting that the transition happened around the time the site lost most of its best writers and replaced them with a bunch of witless virtue-signalling clickbaiters.

Assuming Crawford isn’t a garbage person, I’m really happy to hear he’s getting some more work now. His Teddy was the most surprisingly human part of ‘Rectify’. He’s a hell of an actor.

Is that you, Eliot Kalan?

Dave is great. Not only is he a charismatic and likable screen presence— he was also the first and loudest to stand up for James Gunn when the right-wing trolls engineered his ‘cancellation’ and firing from Disney.  The big guy gave zero fucks and did the right thing when everyone else was covering their asses.

One of them is the peeper perv and mare’s gonna choose wrong.

And what space-god WOULDN’T fall for goth Cate Blanchett in a body-stocking?

This is a seriously selective read that no one would come away with if they weren’t desperate to defend the show’s naked retconning. Sharon is unequivocally heroic in the final act of Winter Soldier when she saves the life of the SHIELD tech and takes on Rumlow. The movie even includes her in the coda montage…

‘It seems a lot of reviewers in these parts really wanted the show to be something different than it was.’

Oh, NO ONE misses the bloat of the Marvel Netflix shows.   But this show had the opposite problem-- it was frustratingly unfocused and dealt with sideplots that were completely unnecessary (Oh, you bet I’m looking at you, Madripoor).  It refused to dig too deeply into any one of its themes/plots and ended up…

I wasn’t smuggling anything!  I simply forgot Julia Louis-Dreyfus was in my bag.

100% agree. It felt like the show was a little embarrassed to deal too much with the deeper Isaiah Bradley/race-related stuff, so it tried to throw a lot of plot and heylookatZemowhatascamp! And blow-ups at the audience to apologize for it, and everything suffered.

I actually liked the fact that Sam—and the show—leaned into the idea that Captain America’s superpower is his moral compass, and ability to inspire the best in people. And of course, with Sam his moral compass is especially sensitive to the need of marginalized peoples.

Yeah Ock was made more sympathetic but I actually liked the way the movie gave him actual human reasons for wanting to replicate his disastrous experiment... while still allowing Molina to spout classic comic-booky dialogue like ‘This is the last time you interfere in my plans, Spider-Man!!’

Agreed. Snyder is an insufferable dudebro lacking even a piss-puddle’s depth, but he has the chops to deliver a decent genre movie if he’s got a fun script that doesn’t ask too much of him. Just give him stuff that conceals his glaring weaknesses as a storyteller and he can probably pull off a passable Joe Carnahan…