Great choice and write-up, Caroline!

Didn’t Columbus claim to have pulled that stunt? I know it more from Haggard, Twain, and err, Blyton.

In my notifications there’s a reply to my comment from Utopian Hermit Crab that’s pending approval. But it doesn’t actually show up in the thread when I click on it, so there’s no way for me to approve it, or even read it beyond the first sentence or so. Does anyone know a solution?

I mean, you say that like Indiana Jones isn’t also critiqued for being deeply racist.

The racism of Tintin is highly overstated. The vast majority of the adventures are entirely unproblematic, or are no more racist than, say, Indiana Jones. (So, for example, Prisoners of the Sun sees the heroes captured by a group of Incas who have survived in a remote valley, and making their escape by predicting an…

Not really. If she didn’t support him, why should he support her?

I’ve listened to the original audio, and in my opinion that is how it comes across in Swedish, perhaps more clearly than in the translation. Obviously I have no idea what actually happened, but it sounds as if what he’s apologizing for is (as he presents it) having had sex with her while not reciprocating her…

Fully endorse the point about laying off kids (this seems like one of those things we’ll look back on the way we now look back on how Britney was treated).

Paul has been a popular name for two thousand years. Why shouldn’t it be a popular name in the future as well?

You think Paul, Jessica and Duncan are funny names, but “Gurney Halleck” passes without comment?

Disqus was a pain because it couldn’t really handle comment threads that were thousands of comments long. Kinja solved that by driving away enough commenters that the problem never arises.

By that logic, saying an actor’s performance is theatrical or hammy are also meaningless complaints.

Yeah, same. May have been around the same time that it started mangling any comments containing links.

Also, the kids that Dowd calls “clean and upstanding” start the movie as literal drug dealers who revel in seeing their classmates get murdered on the news.

Yeah, I also thought it was very enjoyable. Sure, it was pretty tame and a bit too slick—in keeping with R.L. Stine’s books—but it worked, and it had enough weird quirks (like the lobster at the end) and unexplained mysteries (presumably hooks for the rest of the trilogy) to stay interesting.

Heinlein got there first, with “All You Zombies” (1959).

Without even considering flashback continuity, it took place more or less in present-day, right? And James Gandolfini was born in 1961.

the material just does not resonate for anyone except the small slice who really love it.

I felt that Jason Lee would have been a great choice to step into Chevy Chase’s shoes. He has much the same confident charm with less smarm.

I read the first one quite recently, and felt there was a lot of values dissonance standing in the way of my enjoyment, at least if Fletch is meant to be a charming antihero. (Which, given the ending, is not quite clear.)