To be fair, Hollywood loves method actors like Ben Foster who put a clamp on his foot in 30 Days of Night to act like he was in pain. Tarantino was just teaching her the method...

Had exactly the same problem, felt like it was using mental illness for comedy, especially with the happy ending. Not many films leave me angry and disgusted like that one did. It’s odd - I love Kick-Ass, but I guess that the comedy in that one is more shock and about naivety and misjudgement

I hated Super as it felt like too much of the comedy in it was about the mentally ill. The bit where he murders the queue jumper was just disturbing to me, and for the film to then reveal that the queue jumper was a real bad guy felt fake.

Soccer isn’t 2nd in Australia - it’s 5th in terms of spectators, but doesn’t make the top 10 in terms of participants. They have less World Cup success because they have a harder qualifying group with Japan and South Korea having been stronger teams for a long time. Pool size is not that important, it’s a minor factor…

That’s where I disagree, the US pool should be large enough as it stands - Australia has something like 1/10th the population of the US, and soccer is far from the dominant sport over there (sitting behind Aussie rules, two codes of Rugby, Cricket, Swimming, and possibly athletics too), yet are comparable in terms of…

It’s not about athletes. The problem is where the culture values athleticism over technique - can you show where the US is losing technically great players to other sports? It might be losing people who can run around a bit, but they’re easy to get. The harder part is getting the technique right, which is where the…

It’s not arrogance, it’s experience of watching football for decades! Iceland got to the European championships with a population of less than 0.5m. You don’t need that many athletes, you need technique. Thielen (and someone like Amendola) get by on route running etc, but they’re incredibly rare in the NFL. The thing…

You can believe that if you want... Evidence goes the other way - it’s why the Dutch have emphasised technique for years, and why people are slowly catching on. It’s a problem England had for years, generating players that were big, strong, could run for miles and couldn’t change a game if their lives depended on it!…

The NCAA is nowhere near good enough. It will never be. It can’t even match European youth tournament teams. Expecting players in a substandard system to suddenly develop at 23 is nonsense. Look at talented youths in European teams spending those years on the bench - they go nowhere and that’s significantly better…

The Scottish Premier League says “hi!”. Bundesliga say “We’re getting there...”

Soccer doesn’t depend on being the greatest athletes - players aren’t elite sprinteres or marathon runners for example. You need to be fit enough to play the game, but technique and awareness make a much bigger difference. Jordan Henderson is a much better pure athlete than many better players, or you could look at…

The NCAA doesn’t offer a good enough standard to help the kids develop. It might have the structure, but compared to kids like Chelsea’s Mason Mount going to play for Vitesse at 18/19, it just leads to the talent not being challenged enough, stagnating and being a mediocre talent. It’s a tough time finding good…

The Dutch and Belgian league isn’t a conscious decision on the part of their FAs, it’s a survival thing by the clubs - the don’t have the operating budgets of even the 2nd tier of England, so their best chance to compete in the pan-European contests (Champion’s League, Europa League) is to develop in house, and if…

You can’t have a half and half structure with Pro/rel - it’s all or nothing. The truth is, pro/rel is a product of the difference between the club being the business, and the league being the business with franchises operating within it, and you can’t have half the league operating under the rules to enforce…

For purely elective ones with no hereditary role? What were those titles again? Any sources where what your saying can be verified?

Were their children given titles?

I don’t know if it’s about being more standalone so much as having those kind of beats better integrated with the story. The Night Watch is definitely an example of that, where they are introduced and slowly revealed over time (and they way they make Zach complicit in getting someone taken away is clever, cruel and…

His title was from aristocratic heritage, not from his father being an elected king. That’s the distinction - because elective monarchies aren’t hereditary, the children shouldn’t get titles. The person retaining a title after leaving office is a separate thing

Currently rewatching Babylon 5 - the sleepwalk in to fascism in that was pretty well handled. It’s kind of a shame that the show didn’t come around now as you can really feel it straining at times against the way episodes were more standalone back then. The storybeats of that, mixed with the way episodes now feel…

Yes, but do the children retain the title prince/princess in those? The children of elected officials don’t have titles normally so it feels like a bit of bad retconning, trying to make the Star Wars universe more grounded, and less of a sci-fi skin on basic fantasy tropes. It’s one reason why I’ve never been that…