The fact that Truman not only doesn’t know they’re in a show, but reacts to finding this out with horror, rage, a descent into near-madness and eventually a willingness to risk death to escape from unwanted public scrutiny completely undermines every single point you’re making. Like, the film is literally the opposite…

I was once told by an industry semi-insider that his main attraction, rather boringly, is that he’s incredibly reliable: he’ll deliver his part of the job on time and in budget.

Given that the whole current Marvel thing is based on multiple versions of people in parallel universes, this does not seem like a particularly complicated problem to write one’s way out of.

He sort of discovered an optimal way to be funny in an entirely new medium, and has been consistently good at that for years. He’s like the Steve Wright (US) of Twitter, and nobody would begrudge that guy fame.

Where did I say anyone had to choose? I’m responding to a poster who said they weren’t aware of artists other than DM who had combined excellent pop songwriting, sparse synthpop production and a certain kind of cynical detachment, but also that they hadn’t overall listened to a lot of electronic music.

“No one else (that I was aware of, anyway) hit that sweet spot between sparse electronic production, cynical worldview, and impeccable pop songwriting.”

There are quite a lot of stops on the line between ‘retro kitsch bin’ and ‘essential’. They were, and remain, a well-liked band all over the world, and I don’t intend to claim that they should not be. Their tenacity and commitment is admirable, and I believe they are thoroughly nice chaps who have used their fame for…

I also listen to very little electronic music, admittedly. DM is something of an outlier for me (and probably a lot of other people) which may explain their lionization in the US.

He wasn’t a hindrance musically at all - he is, and remains, one of the most talented producers of his generation. Depeche Mode, however, wanted to be pop stars, and he wasn’t very interested in that. Which is fine on both sides, and they have succeeded admirably in their respective aims.

As I say, ‘popular’ is not the same thing as ‘essential’.

I don’t think there are all that many people in the UK that would call them essential, though, however they themselves might feel about the music. They were certainly very popular, but that’s slightly different.

It’s nice to know that if I ever need reminding of the vast cultural gulf between the UK and the US, I can find somewhere on the internet an article describing Depeche Mode as an ‘essential band of the 80s’ with a straight face.

I didn’t read it as saying that novelists have it easy - it was more about the fact that the struggle is between you and the work, rather than between you and the work and a large crowd of other people you somehow have to persuade to make the work the way you want it. It’s undeniably a different sort of challenge.

It’s fun and instructive watching the ‘respectable anti-woke’ Bari Weiss type media commentators trying to figure out how to walk this particular tightrope and saying a few of the quiet parts out loud by accident.

The irony of having a Brit direct a piece of television celebrating a cornerstone of American pop culture was not lost on Stewart.

Once again we have the AVClub claiming to be baffled that a film franchise whose first installment made vast quantities of money with millions going to see it the first time round, and whose second sequel installment appears to be doing the same, is actually popular with people, apparently on the bases that nobody in…

Except that badly trying to be one of those multi-generational, cultural phenomenon, merchandise-mania IPs is artificially baked into Avatar

always doomed to make buckets of cash, with nothing much to say afterward other than “that movie was fun, I’m ready for the next sequel.

This is an option worth revisiting: if Daniel Craig was supposed to be a Sean Connery-esque reboot, then replacing him with a handsome but not particularly charismatic Australian would be an absolutely on-the-nose move.

Wasn’t there a 90s biopic that at least suggested this as a possibility?