I would even tie the “looking forward not back” thing to the “he broke Libya into pieces for no good reason, and now it’s mired in civil war, complete with literal slavery” thing.  If he had looked back at how the Bush administration wars had started out, he probably would have been less willing to start another one!

I agree with you about the Todd subplot, but that’s a funny thing to say given what actually happens there.  Which of course is part of the commentary on how shit the media is.

The 80s were a different time.  People weren’t woke enough yet to realize that 50 foot tall genocide-bots were wrong.

Before the series started, Regular Jane was accidentally hit by a misfiring shrink ray. So now she has the problem of having to fend off ants, being forced to wear thimbles as hats and postage stamps as dresses, and having to speak into an old-timey gramophone in order to amplify her voice to audible levels.

I…

Did the Dwarves do the Fall of Numenor?  I’m just asking questions.

I think the key here is, the show is deliberately introducing a lot of different substantive views about “what does it mean to be good” without choosing one. The lack of coherence is deliberate - it’s deliberately giving people a lot of options to grab onto, and suggesting that they’re all workable ways to be good.…

This is a very bad take. First, a character can be stereotypical in one area and non-stereotypical in another area. They don’t just cancel each other out. (If a Quik-E-Mart hot dog was made of the finest ingredients and cooked in a pristine microwave, but then it’s dropped on a filthy floor, you’re still not going to…

I also thought of Mass Effect - elcor Hamlet, or that Blasto movie you hear bits and pieces of in the second game. And “Mordin loves Gilbert and Sullivan” is a funny joke in the second game which gets paid off in a really great way in the third game.

At the risk of spoiling too much, it should be noted that Bad Boys For Life has a surprising amount in common with last year’s Gemini Man.

Shepard: How are you getting drunk?

Chidi’s eventual solution is to essentially treat our one earthly life as a run-up to the test that comes when you have to face the music. Only, the music isn’t the end, but itself a test, one whose difficulty is determined by how well you lived. And you get to take it innumerable times. (Eleanor, twigging to the…

I don’t know that this is necessarily true.  I didn’t watch this movie until, I dunno, the mid-00s, and I’ve never seen an actual Frankenstein (or other Universal horror film).  But Young Frankenstein is still incredibly funny, and for that matter I really enjoyed the aesthetic of the film even without getting any of…

Yeah, that was a weird phrasing. Even if we’re just limiting it to the 80s and 90s, were Murphy and Cosby more influential performers than Tupac or Prince?

A movie doesn’t need to be constantly flinging action/drama/comedy/romance at the screen to be good. Many very good movies take moments to relax and take a breath. At least, they used to. Now if there isn’t a cut every 1.5 seconds people start to think something is wrong.

Nevada and California (and maybe other states?) both recently passed laws banning NDAs in sexual harassment cases.

I don’t think Angela could do a good job of literally fighting white supremacists for the reason you say. But there’s a lot she could do aside from that. A lot of racism comes down to unequal access to material resources, which we know she could fix easily. Wave a hand, replace all the lead pipes in Flint with plastic…

This is a really well thought-out take. I read the theme of the show as being something like “you can’t cover up bad stuff, you have to air it out” - that’s true of America’s history of racism, and it’s also true about the masked vigilantes and their psychological trauma. And I think that fits with an alternate…

I think it works as a way of making the show’s reality more fleshed out and three dimensional. It’s like, if I’m watching Archer or 30 Rock or something, sometimes there are references to old pop culture or classic literature or whatever that I don’t get. So I go on Wikipedia and look up what Bartleby the Scrivener is…

Here is a write-up!

https://www.nathanrabin.com/happy-place/2019/6/3/birth-of-a-soul-sister-case-file-127my-year-of-flops-ii-24-loqueesha

That’s true, but the legal standard for “was it the paper’s fault” is extremely high (for very good policy reasons - if you let people sue papers willy nilly, you get... the current Kinja hellscape, I guess). But that’s not the only standard - from a more everyday, moral or practical standard, it might be reasonable…