per capita normalizes for different populations.

The US has 300% more vehicle deaths per capita than Germany. How does Germany do that? Not with any of that BS you wrote about. They have strict licensing requirements and good transit infrastructure.

No, that came across quite well. It literally pulled me out of the film, as I was already considering how JJ and KK would react.

I didn’t really like his Star Wars film, mostly because I could see how disjointed it was from the previous and its inevitable conflict with the third while sitting in the theater. I thought the pacing was poor, the B-plot was asinine, the characterization non-existent, but I REALLY enjoyed Cranky Luke interacting…

2018 called; it wants its edgy use of an ANH quote in a tiresome forever war over the objective suckitude of TLJ back.

What a weird way to live your life 

“The Ninja Turtles’ best friend fucks in this movie.” is a pretty strong selling point. 

I loved both but Crash does have James Spader and Elias Koteas getting in on so it has the slight edge over Titane. 

You sure you know how to wear a tie? If you think the tie is constricting blood flow to your brain, it’s not. It’s your collar. Your collar is too small and doesn’t fit your neck. You need to get a shirt with a proper collar size. A properly fitting collar with a tie can still be quite comfortable.

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...

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.

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…