Does anyone know the reason why they’re not adapting Dan Simmon’s other adventurers-stalked-by-monster-in-frozen-wasteland book, The Abominable? I confess I haven’t read that one, but it seems like such a no-brainer after the second season faltered, I wonder why they’re not going to that well. Do they just not have…

Yeah, you’ve nailed it here. I spent the first few episodes saying to myself, “This is not very good. None of this mcguffiny-technobabbly plot makes any kind of sense, so why should I care about it?” The series really started focusing in on the thematic ideas it wanted to talk about in the back half, but I don’t think…

It’s mostly just some mild retconning, of course, but then Fury did jump start the MCU in the Iron Man stinger by literally acknowledging that Tony was not the first superhero in the universe. I think the justification is that Thor’s arrival in New Mexico was the first extraterrestrial threat that was widely…

Man, I’m so over the idea of this show. This is the prime example of an adaptation that has taken so long to get off the ground that it’s long past the point of being culturally relevant. Remember how Ralph Breaks the Internet felt like it was reflecting the internet of a decade ago, rather than current state of the…

Because she’s not as good an actress as either Ronan or Pugh. My god, I almost feel bad for Emma, having to do her best to act while standing right next to those two.

Well, Zemo wanted to completely destroy the Avengers by getting them to break up and turn on each other. At the very least, he’d be annoyed with the idea of Captain America’s legacy continuing with Sam Wilson. But it could have more to do with Bucky being mad at Zemo for the way he used and framed him for the UN…

I’ll add Megan Whalen Turner’s Thief series to the list here. Famously twisty - The first book is called The Thief, and even to tell you the titles of the other four books in the series would give away too much of what’s to come - it’s intrigue and politics and complex, flawed characters struggling with their own…

Yeah. And Jaime doesn’t mention or think of Brienne even once in this episode. They could have had a line in his conversation with Tyrion about how Jaime doesn’t think he’s worthy of Brienne’s faith in him, or maybe when Jaime finds Cersei he has some moment where he reckons with the difference between the two women…

I don’t think it strictly deserves a Best Picture nomination- Infinity War was definitely the better movie- but I would not at all be surprised to see such a nomination. Like others have said, I can definitely see the Academy hitting it for a twofer both because it’s the blockbuster needed to draw in the rubes for…

Well, I wouldn’t say the doors are completely closed. The MCU hasn’t been shy about doing an idea in easter egg/cameo/brief test run first, only to expand on it later. See: the Infinity Gauntlet easter egg in Asgard’s vault in Thor, or how the Agent Carter short was expanded (and softly retconned) into the full TV…

What happened is that they lost the source material. It’s not that the show couldn’t generate good dialogue on its own, since it never lifted a ton of dialogue wholesale from the books, but once they started having to weld plotlines together to streamline the plot, a LOT more of the dialogue had to be used simply to…

Sounds dumb on the surface, but I actually would use this feature. Even a quick 15-second rewind too. I often am knitting or doing something else while watching Netflix, and want to quickly rewind to catch a line or scene I didn’t quite see because I was looking elsewhere. It’s annoying to just click backwards on the…

For some very good consistent productions of this, see The Hollow Crown, BBC’s 2012 and 2015 English History/Shakespearean Cinematic Universe, covering everything from Richard II to Richard III, with all the Henries in between. They carried over most of the actors in the same roles from play to play (Rory Kinnear…

I’d go with Ant-Man over AoU too, not just because AoU seems to have retroactively caught the reputation for being one of the worst MCU films. But Ant-Man was the film where the narrative really turned from “Marvel’s gotta eventually make a bomb at some point, right?” to “Welp, I guess the MCU is Too Big To Fail.”…

You know, if we learned anything from The Lego Movie, it’s that there’s no reason that a brand-driven film can’t be a clever self-aware parody, a heartfelt homage to childhood, and an extremely profitable seller-of-toys. I can absolutely picture a Barbie movie that marries respectful nostaglia with a modern feminist…

It’s essentially textbook entitlement. To be fair, the 2000s era Teen Titans cartoon was cancelled untimely, and a big hit with critics and fans. But in today’s media landscape, 20 and 30-something year old fanboys are accustomed to having their childhood nostalgia pandered to and elevated to important blockbuster…

Not quite accurate on the Mormon posthumous polygamy. A living man can be sealed to more than one woman, as long as only one of his wives is alive. Ie: a widower can remarry, and considers himself to be eternally sealed to both women. So, for example, the current president of the LDS church, Russell Nelson, is a…

Alright, the only thing I want to know about this movie is whether or not it insists that Tonya was the first woman to land the triple axel. Because she wasn’t— Midori Ito was the first. Tonya was just the first American woman to land it. The trailer’s hilariously dramatic showcasing of a botched lutz take off made me…

The most generous interpretation is that it removes any bullshit victim-blaming argument that the son was flirting with Spacey or “wanted” it.

The problem with the ideology in Kingsmen was that it was muddled, and the subtext contradicted the text. Arthur and Valentine were depicted as evil 1%ers because they wanted to preserve the powerful and force the masses to kill each other off, and our working-class hero Eggsy gives a little speech about how ivory…