I am 100% ready for blue suede interiors please.

It is classic Hero’s Journey shit and wonderfully straightforward. The stakes get sufficiently raised throughout. There’s a ton of character development. The thematic resonance is there but stays subtextual. Even the more expository dialogue is so artfully written...

Polygraphs are not admissible in court.  Yes, they get used in investigations, but given how unreliable they are, they’re never actually entered as evidence.

…or c) these movies are filmed on a green screen and it’s entirely common for people to appear in scenes together without ever having met.

Indeed.  Modern writers forget that its way better to give you a slice of a world rather than explain every corner of it.

I agree with all of this. Milius definitely created a culture that felt pre-modern in a way that a lot of other ‘80s and subsequent sword and sorcery films really didn’t, just by leaving out all the quippy dialogue and letting Conan and his friends express themselves with their physicality.

There’s a lot of tossed-off bits that work the way they did in Star Wars (‘77), hinting at a larger, full-of-weird-shit world without making you have to stop and parse it out to orient yourself. Like “just another snake cult”, I love that.

Again, this doesn’t ruin Conan for me, and I’m not saying it should for you. But I’ll just point out that that’s kind of the right wing/libertarian paradox—it’s all about rugged individualism (that’s not just Conan, but also how the kids in Red Dawn are presented)...until it isn’t. January 6 is the tale of a bunch…

I guess it just strikes me as a regular-way hero story. Fascism to me comes with a sizeable demand for conformity by the masses. Conan was a loner who picked up a couple of sidekicks, both outlaws. His enemies needed to be bad so we’d root for him. I just don’t see propaganda in this film despite the director.

There’s an austerity to Conan the Barbarian that I wish more filmmakers had employed when sword & sorcery flicks were having their brief moment back in the early-to-mid eighties. And one which I hope is utilized in the likely inevitable revival of the genre.

It’s true that a fasces is a bundle of rods (and an axe), but fascists took it as their emblem because its been a symbol of law and order for two millennia and not because of a strength-in-unity allegory. In Roman times the fasces was carried by lictors, who were bodyguard-enforcer-executioners employed by local…

Yeah, Road Warrior is a good comp. Conan isn’t looking for trouble, but trouble keeps coming his way. There are a hundred classic Westerns with the same basic premise. And I would add that the crypto-fascism interpretation doesn’t really work for a character whose preferred mode is solitude - group identity and…

Yeah my agreement as well. The world is soo shitty and brutal. Everyone is just struggling to survive when everything wants to kill you. I really never thought about it being a fascist play.

I’m not sure the movie is espousing a might-makes-right philosophy. It’s just a lawless world where might equals survival and possibly power. And Conan’s the baddest motherfucker in it. It’s more Road Warrior than Triumph of the Will.

Aw, no mention of Basil Poledouris’s legendary score for the film? It practically makes the movie. Conan’s prayer to Crom intercut with Thulsa Doom and his riders closing in as the sweeping music plays always gets to me.

Man, it is crazy to suddenly be reminded of both how old Conan the Barbarian is and also how much I absolutely love it as a movie. Don’t get me wrong, it has several flaws, but where I disagree with the review here with about is that what makes the movie so iconic and enduring is that it succeeds in being ultimately…

I do believe it’s the best daily driver money can buy (though I would be fine with someone arguing for the Model Y instead since the hatchback is more practical and with some more interior and storage volume).

yep, at some point a grocery store chain will require new locations to have a charger at every spot in the parking lot and it will be the tipping point of “oh yeah this costs us next to nothing to operate and allows us passive income” at which point suddenly everyone will be requiring their stores to do the same…

That would make sense if this wasn’t the case for any EV out there.

I saw an EQS for the first time in the wild the other day. Pretty sharp-looking car, and definitely a little better than how it looks in the pictures.