And while the West Wing view of how to do politics is very much a horse-trading, compromise-oriented perspective, the show is also low-key critical of the selling out of liberal ambitions. The arc of much of the show is the Bartlet administration rediscovering its principles, often finding (rather implausibly) that…

All the reasons you said are still the same resulting situation, people didn’t go to see the film and it’s flopped compared to its expectations.

Throaty? Raspy? Husky? Voice cracking?

It’s a remake nevertheless.

He’s in two shots: first rasping “Eh, kill them,” and then emerging from what looks like an oil bath. He’s bald like Rabban (and seemingly all the Harkonnnens).

I tend to think that if you’re making a movie adaptation of something that has been adapted before, you are in fact re-making it.

As a non-book reader, I’m curious—were the skies on Arrakis blue in the book?

I’m not terribly keen on the trailer, but the two specific things you criticize, the dragonfly ornithopters and “hologram” (visual effect of the Holtzman shield), are among the best bits.

the non-fantastical pseudo-19th-century-Germany setting

Judging by IMDB it actually started out as a short, and has been extended into a full feature.

I haven’t read it, but the title and cover design are just brilliant. (I think the cover won some kind of prize?)

It’s not fair to deny me, or the cross-eyed bear that you gave to me.

I don’t know that he “flipped.”

The church was paying for Mason’s defense for a while, at the insistence of Sister Alice. It seems unlikely that they would continue to do so after he fingered them for the murder and started digging around in their finances, though, and it’s very unclear who, if anyone, is paying the legal expenses towards the end of…

It’s not quite accurate to say that Aladdin is a “European addition” to 1001 Nights, even though it wasn’t part of the Middle Eastern canon.

Did any of the previous iterations make jokes about the character being called Ham Burger?

If a past Republican President ends up in Federal jail, will the GOP retaliate and will prosecuting former presidents become the norm, like erasing previous emperors in Rome?

Mads was so perfect for the role because you understood how he was able to fool so many people.

I wasn’t so keen on the childhood sexual molestation reveal, which is such a go-to device for giving female characters a tragic backstory. But Allison’s analysis of all the ways it informs Sister Alice and her beliefs is really great, and gives me more appreciation for what the show was going for there.

Slight parsing error there: he tells boss he’s sleeping with boss’s girlfriend in order to get boss to cut girlfriend’s brother loose.