Nonsense! Pirates in the 18th Century frequently wore short shorts with the words “Lucky You” printed on the backside.

I really liked Deterrence, and I think it’s weird that this article doesn’t explain that part of the reason Pollak’s facing this nuclear crisis is because he’s America’s first Jewish president, in addition to being a guy who was an appointed VP (like the Joan Allen character in The Contender) turned president after…

That’s one of the best line deliveries of the whole series. There’s just a little hitch when he says it, because he knows he’s blowing up his entire marriage, but he can’t lie about this.

So the big argument about why an obvious far right/libertarian dog whistle (which it was, definitely, at the time) isn’t supposed to actually be a dog whistle in this movie is because he didn’t make it the whole movie? Back to the grays you go.

No, that’s why it would be history, but nice try. And again, that’s my point: you don’t need to invoke illegals across the Mexican border in order to have Cuban fifth columns, precisely because of Mariel. Yet Milius doesn’t go for recent history and instead cooks up the nonsensical “Cuban illegals” (the Marielitos…

No, not really. The point is that parts of 2022 go back a long way. Before you had FOX News raising paranoia about the border and immigration, you had Pat Buchanan (and that’s an anti-immigrant tradition that goes back to 19th Century). Cubans coming from Florida would be history, not a dog whistle. However, a lot of…

You don’t think there’s any dog whistle there?

As others have stated, we don’t use them in court. However, the government has been known to use them in investigations and businesses sometimes do the same. The idea of getting fired based on something with such low reliability is disturbing enough. The one useful thing is that sometimes, the threat of facing the…

A surprising number of the shots in the trailer look like direct lifts from the 1984 movie.

Messing with the Second Amendment was a lot simpler in the Hyborian Age...

Yeah, the trailer isn’t great, but compared to the TV spot, it looks like something directed by James Cameron:

Again, this doesn’t ruin Conan for me, and I’m not saying it should for you. But I’ll just point out that that’s kind of the right wing/libertarian paradox—it’s all about rugged individualism (that’s not just Conan, but also how the kids in Red Dawn are presented)...until it isn’t. January 6 is the tale of a bunch…

Someone (maybe you?) brought this up when I mentioned Arnold not having prolonged speeches, particularly early in his career. Seeing it again, now, it’s fun to see how Milius managed it, even at a stage in Arnold’s career where he was frequently “moodilating” the English language. The whole thing’s done in ADR, and…

I say this as someone who loves the film, but that’s the idea of propaganda filmmaking, isn’t it? Conan’s okay to non-fascist audiences because it’s set in a “might makes right” ancient world, Conan is sympathetically drawn, and his enemies are monstrous. But it’s not for nothing that fascist regimes frequently invoke…

Part of it is an accident of timing. If he was as big today as he was in the ‘80s, he’d have the kind of contract JK Rowling and other big authors tend to get, with script and director approval. Back in the ‘80s Hollywood wasn’t at all concerned with faithful adaptations, and a lot of the time, they just wanted to be…

It’s kind of shocking in 2022 to see some pretty heavy advertising showing off what looks like sub-Syfy special effects and brutally bad kid acting, particularly since the trailer for the movie suggests a much higher level of quality.

It’d be even weirder to have a show about the children of Batman supervillains, and exclude Ra’s Al Ghul’s grandson Damian. I mean, it’s possible they conceived it that way and that DC refused to give rights for any comic book Robin. The entire thing where this is supposed to be unrelated to a video game with the same…

I’ll say this in support of Todd’s point: it’s a bit much to give him credit for Blunt’s (or Ferguson’s) career, but it is worth noting that even the best actresses often find themselves sidelined as just the love interest in big action movies, and that in the past few years Cruise has seemed intent not to sideline…

She was already a thing, but Edge of Tomorrow made her a completely different and far more lucrative thing.

Todd seems like a much more of a standard Hollywood movie reviewer—more of a junket/interview guy than a real critic—than the people who made this site successful. But this review seems to vibe with what I’m reading elsewhere, and unlike other recent AVC LA(tm) reviews, it doesn’t read like clickbait or provocation.