In that sense I can understand why outside of the issues involved in monetization dating apps are stuck in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation with how they present matches. Even if the reality is that people in group A successfully match and go on dates with group B, if people in either group think they…

I don’t necessarily think the lack of “this character is safe” is usually the problem with prequels, but rather that there’s often very little room to play with the characters in other ways that fits with established chronology, and very little creativity on the part of show runners and writers in how to work around…

I will say that he seems right Kraven isn’t going to be like a typical superhero movie these days. Because it looks oddly terrible (the takeaway from “Kraven’s Last Hunt”, a story about a washed-up longtime nemesis of Spider-Man trying to best him one last time, is apparently... an origin story where Kraven becomes…

Yeah unfortunately I don’t see how reality TV stars could ever have the leverage to get union protection. They devalue the labor of other union members, so they wouldn’t ever stand for them, and by its very nature a reality show star can be more easily replaced by someone off the street, because that’s where they…

Yep. As much as it’s true that known IP reduces risk... I feel like Hollywood has constantly had a very different idea of what “known IP” means for average people. Witness: the early 90s proto-superhero movies based on stuff like a minor comic book (The Rocketeer), radio serials (The Shadow) or comic strips (The…

I personally don’t subscribe to the “everything is a remix” absolutism, but yeah, art is a function of personal and societal forces and rarely exists in a vacuum or spontaneously generates.

It’s amusing that this review treats a show retreading sitcom tropes to generate heartwarming comedy-drama as a plus, when the writer is currently slagging Ted Lasso for... retreating sitcom tropes to generate heartwarming comedy-drama (as written, the review sounds like it’s even more formulaic.)

It’s smart for the Writers Guild to jump on this. The machine models out there right now can’t even write a Wikipedia article that makes sense for more than a second, let alone a dramatic script that makes sense, but the tech is going to get better, and the developers of these tools are just going to chuck every…

Yeah, I’ve found that sometimes you have bosses who just can’t envision anything unless it’s done, which in a creative field, where you only have so much time and money and stuff has to be pitched with slide decks and storyboards, is absolute death to a project (and usually makes it much more expensive in the long…

Yeah I think some dissatisfaction with S2 and 3's arc was to be expected, but I agree they aren’t doing themselves any favors with how loathe they seem to be to edit things. S1's great strength on top of its heart and humor was that nothing felt wasted—stuff like the paparazzi subplot, or Rebecca’s confession to Ted,…

Most people don’t finish story-based games, and haven’t even when games were shorter and comparatively smaller-scale (even on TrueAchievements, a site for completionists, more than a third of tracked players haven’t finished Halo 3's story mode. When you look at the public stats for the achievement unlocks it drops…

I get that there’s no shortage of people who have whitewashed historical figures for much of history, but the current trend of declaring “so-and-so was actually black” when there’s absolutely no evidence to actually support it (and it applies modern racial labels to people generations or centuries apart from our…

The original film is enjoyable as a deeply weird blockbuster that simply wouldn’t exist in today’s studio environment. But yeah, while I think it reaches “so weirdly bad it wraps around to being fun again”, I can see why it doesn’t for lots of people. And if you do that with a favorite IP, it’s almost always going to…

Yeah on one hand I don’t like the implication that Michelle was screwing over Ted (or at least basically going into therapy not with the intention of improving things, but as an exit strategy), but it also feels kind of depressingly real (I’ve seen a ton of advice column letter writers who were in the same situation,…

Ted Lasso has been pretty good about either subverting the expected arc of a plot point or wrapping up what would be torturously turned into a Whole Thing in a much shorter spell (the Ted-Keely photo stuff from the first season being a prime example) so I wouldn’t be particularly worried.

While these films are not lacking in star power, the increasingly ridiculous premise of the film’s universe (you went from “okay, sure, there’s an underground assassin network” in the first film to “so is the major commercial activity in all the world’s major metropolises assassin-related? Everyone seems involved in…

Yeah, it was a good example of the “even if this film is good, it’s overstuffed” phenomenon. Some of the examples in the article he mentions I think do need that amount of room to work (I think what makes Titanic stand out, and why it did so well at the box office, is that it gives you a ton of time to focus on the…

Her work is very much of the time and viewpoint of a WASPy Brit. One story spends an inordinate amount of time pointing out than an abusive husband was a Greek, so what should she have expected? As for the removal of ethnicity altogether, it can be reasonably argued that since the author has to include details,…

Acting “believably” drunk is tough, and I imagine it’s even harder to dial in the tone with other drugs where people’s reactions are even more variable. So it’s not surprising people often play it super-broad and it falls flat.

Does anyone not? There’s a reason why “mouth breather” is an insult.