This seems basically like ‘Ordinary People’ updated to the 2010's, but I may be misreading it.

I found Hemlock Grove to be quite enjoyable, but I tend to gravitate toward every supernatural series that comes out.

You can always get a pretty good idea about that from the commercials the chain produces. Who inhabits the world of the commercial? For Popeyes, other than the spokeswoman, the world is largely inhabited by white potential customers.

Well, we’ve reached the point where this discussion has become circular and pointless. I suspect you’re simply interested in winning the ‘argument’ we’re apparently having, but if you do have any interest in learning how art criticism is performed, there are hundreds of books on the subject that trace the thousands of…

Someone conducting an auteur analysis of a given artifact would chiefly look at the elements of the work that support the notion that it is an ‘Auteur’ work. They would point to elements that established the individual personality of the work, the elements of filmmaking that particular director commonly employs, the…

For the most part, an art critic, literary critic, or film critic will subscribe to one scholarly theory or another. All of the various media artifacts you mentioned can be measured using those theories as the basis and arguments can be made for or against whether the artifact under examination actually meets the…

Oh, sure. I largely agree with all of that. The primary difference between television and movies is experiential. You step outside of your normal life to watch a movie, (or at least did for the longest time). You go somewhere other than your normal surroundings and the movie itself is the primary focus of the time you…

That post was not a response to IrvingLee.  It was a response to Aslan, who said that the difference between the emotional manipulation done by Taxi Driver is that Taxi Driver, unlike the Marvel movies, was not attempting to make its audience reach a specific emotional end state, even though it was attempting to…

Do you believe that a movie that is obviously trying to get its audience to reach a specific emotional endpoint is weaker than one that is trying to draw some non-specific reaction?

Sure, that’s true, but most of the time, real critiques of art include some standard that can be measured and then whether or not whatever is being measured meets that standard, which gives the argument something beyond just, ‘this is my opinion and my opinion is right and you should agree with my opinion, simply…

Do you believe that an argument that depends on us all agreeing that IrvingLee’s subjective opinion of a given set of movies is the only valid opinion of those movies is a valid argument?

You do realize that the phenomenon you’re describing is entirely subjective, right? The emotions you might have felt were ‘genuinely earned’ in Taxi Driver, another viewer might have felt did not ‘ring true.’ And vice versa, all of the emotional beats in Infinity War that you felt did not ‘ring true,’ another viewer…

Do you think Taxi Driver is emotionally manipulative?

“It isn’t a tradition. It is an integral part of our democratic process. Our founders added this layer for purposes that are as valid today as they were then.”

That would actually explain how the character was both ‘born’ in 1984, but somehow also a relic of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the USA, which effectively ground to an end around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, when she would have been about 4-5.

She really was quite engaging in the series though. I’m not sure if she really does much beyond ‘be Jessica Henwick’ though, because the distance between her Sand Snake character and Colleen Wing was pretty small, but she does have the type of on-screen persona that makes you want to watch her.

It’s hard to prove a negative, but you can make a reasonable case that the first 4 new Star Wars movies were probably going to make billions regardless of who was in charge and that, given the diminishing returns of the last couple, she might have actually cost the company a couple billion.

Do they ever offer any sort of reasonable explanation for co-opting the name of the group responsible for one of the worst atrocities in the history of their world?

Will Smith probably could have had a franchise to fall back on if they hadn’t made Hancock be such a humorless bore.  I am never one to say ‘make a movie be about less,’ but Hancock was trying so hard to be ‘about’ something that they managed to strip all the charm away from Will Smith, Charlize Theron, and Will…

I think when you expend 80,000 calories a day like the team does, you can probably get away with it.  Felicity probably has to put in a lot of extra time on the treadmill though.