I envy you reading Demons and Ulysses for the first time! A quick warning about Demons: it's a bit of a bait-and-switch, so stick with it. The first section is very much a stuffy boudoir melodrama about love and money, and it's occasionally a little dull. From there it becomes his most violent, hilarious, and…

My alma mater offered a course on Proust, and in the description it "strongly advised students to read or re-read In Search of Lost Time before the semester begins", which made me wonder how many college-age students had read, much less re-read, the entire thing.

Yep.

From what I could tell of the other writers I could find, they all seem to be serious LGBT allies outside of the show. I hope this means they're using the superficial stuff to hook people, but they intend on deepening the picture as they go. I'm not sure I want to sit through half a season of gay panic jokes to get…

Have you seen Weekend (the Andrew Haigh movie). He's the series creator for Looking and early reports are that it's very similar in tone. Which is a good thing.

Yeah, I started going through the list. Ryan Shiraki is gay, 'tho only credited with one episode. That's the only one I saw, but in fairness, half the writers' names are so generic as to be unsearchable. Searching "Tom Brady gay" was fun, but did not give me relevant results.

I was hoping the pedigree would promise better, despite the …er, less than promising previews. I'll still give it a chance.

I think Brandon's point is that the very-thin surface is the only thing that's sorta-unique about the character, but once the show gets started, it's really just the usual stereotypes in a slightly unusual package.

If so, I'd cast Philip Seymour Hoffman as a resurrected Darth Vader/Anakin.

Perfect.

Scene one: Lutz-1 is feeding Lutz-2 marshmallows….

[Lutz] simply can’t act, and spends much of the movie looking like a
confused Labrador retriever, his head slightly cocked, eyes
communicating a willingness to please the audience combined with an
inability to understand what he’s being asked to do.

All I can think about is that scene in Boogie Nights where Burt Reynolds nods grimly and says "You know… this is the Newswire I want them to remember me by."

We're not totally disagreeing: what you're describing as a "practical effect" is what I'm saying as "the gun going off isn't a literal rule, and that's the point people seem to miss." (If you don't believe me, google "Chekhov's gun" and just cringe at the results).

Keep in mind that Chekhov was making a bit of a rhetorical argument, too: in his plays, the guns never go off as planned: they fail to fire, or are used off-stage, or (in The Cherry Orchard) are pointedly never used at all. Point being, writers who take Chekhov's comments too literally often miss the subtlety of what…

I'm a closet sentimentalist under a cynical shell, so I'd have to go with: "I love you and I like you", which melted my damned heart.

And yeah, I squirmed like hell through that amazing party scene. Thanks for convincing me to give it a chance.

@Scrawler: Totally O/T, but who cares in a post on Armond White heckling people: so I finally got around to Frances Ha, and your assessment was totally right. Gerwig softens Baumbach's misantrophy, and Baumbach brings Gerwig's preciousness down to earth. I really, really enjoyed it. I've never said that about a…

I don't think he was arguing that violence and history are exclusive: I think he was arguing that McQueen's filmography shows an aesthetic fetishizing of violence without a grasp of what violence is and its place in the history you're recording. It's not a bad argument, depending on how you viewed Hunger and/or Shame.

Hamartia in the Greek sense wasn't distinct from the problem of Fate, though: in fact, that's the point of it. There may be a difference if you consider the determinism an internal (character) or external (the universe) phenomenon, but it may be an arbitrary distinction if it gets you to the same place either way. …