I was genuinely confused, when I was a kid, about why Ariel had a name. There’s a flounder called Flounder, so I didn’t understand why they were calling her Ariel when by the naming standards elsewhere, “Little Mermaid” should have been her name.

This is hilarious. Nobody at Disney went, “Hey maybe the reason the photorealistic Lion King seemed like a good idea* is because lions are beautiful to look at” and now they’re in the position of having to reckon with the fact that most things under the sea look disgusting and weird.

Made for a good South Park gag though didn't it

I saw him earlier in the year on Steve-O’s podcast and for anyone who knows what I’m talking about, he gave the impression of not being ready for recovery.

I didn’t say they were interchangeable, but those aesthetic (which I’m taking to mean formal, correct me if I’m wrong) choices all rely on the audience already being literate in what those formal choices do: that’s how you build a relationship with your audience, by establishing expectations.

I remain unconvinced by Ari Aster. I feel like his films rely, like Tarantino and the like, on overt references to other films. I get the impression that for a lot of people, the extent to which they’re effective comes down to the extent to which they feel he is able to stitch those elements of other films together.

Bu…

I actually noticed that but couldn't bring myself to point it out, the broader spirit of the observation very much stands 

And, god, I’d love to see Anthony Wong play that part, particularly in the part of his career that gave us Running Out of Time, when the youthful smirk of his Hardboiled villain was turning into something more world-weary and wry. I can see him shake his head, ever so slightly, with a look that says don’t you see I…

I watched the new film last night and, like a lot of the reprobates here, I’m a long-time fan of the original film, and the original two sequels (for different reasons).

I gotta tell you, this new film is the best bit of new Evil Dead content since then.

I didn’t like the remake, and I think the new film suffers one of…

This is far from a hot take, but the line between horror and comedy is so paper-thin anyway, and the artistic intent that informs the use of both modes in any story is so intertwined, that the question of “is a horror movie funny?” actually always struck me as kind of pointless.

The whole thing is: you were…

This is a marvelous comment. And yes, Chinese Ghost Story seems to be the only one in which there is an overt link. The others are more like an incidental overlap.

It can be argued that 1981’s The Evil Dead, made on a shoestring budget when director Sam Raimi was barely 21, kicked off the 1980s boom in horror comedy, which would include Ghostbusters, Return Of The Living Dead, Re-Animator, The Stuff, Beetlejuice, Gremlins, and (in the early ’90s) Peter Jackson’s wonderful…

I would argue that you’re simplifying in that you’re conflating things which don’t really warrant conflation.

Does it blow anyone else's fucking mind that Mario has a "canon"?

Plus he already socially distanced from his co-hosts.  God, that really felt like one of those "you'll never see the likes of that again" shows, didn't it 

It feels like way longer than 8 years.  Imagine if we'd had that show during lockdown.

Kula World adaptation or bust.

I dunno, I think that there’s more in common between those two.  There's a Venn diagram between Dick Wolf and David Simon that has Tom Fontana in the middle, and even though all their shows have a different look and feel, they're cut from the same cloth.

I do think that the mysticism is the USP of this show yeah.  It hints at a world beneath ours, without ever veering in fantasy.  It’s the kind of thing I love, and I think the reason I’ve always been so frustrated by this show’s inability to resonate with me in full, is because that particular aspect is so appealing…

My only remaining memory of season 2 is that weird mid-season pivot to a generic “assembling a ragtag team of rejects” structure. For whatever reason at the time, it felt to me like they had been watching The Wire specifically, and it baffled me because if there’s two HBO cop shows that are mathematical opposites,…