Fair enough. I don’t really agree with the approach even on here, but at least it’s easy enough for people to call you on it, and nobody seems overly in awe of your credentials.

Hey, did you know the MCU movies are plagiarized from some old comic books? ... Give me a break!

The reduced power of the individual reviewer is more likely due to the glut of reviews available now. I’m not convinced it means people heed reviewers less on a viewer-by-viewer basis, and are less likely to be turned off from a film based on a review; it just means different people are listening to different…

That sounds an awful lot like what Vishnevetsky and Dowd do regularly around here. (Incidentally, Vishnevetsky was part of an attempt to revive At the Movies a few years ago.)

Even good writers/directors/actors sometimes make bad movies. Case in point...

I would give more weight to Vishnevetsky’s opinion because:

The whole star review idea has been on its way out for years, I’m not saying anything new or groundbreaking in this, (for some reason I’m being attacked because people think this is some grand idea I’ve had today lol).

The value of a letter grade (or star rating or whatever) is as consumer information. It forces the reviewer to boil down their reaction to one question: is this a film you recommend or not? Film criticism can be much more than that, but consumer information is its core function in most publications.

Back in the day when Netflix was a DVD rental company and you could give stars, my Netflix recommendations were excellent. These days they are shit. That’s partly because their library is much weaker now when it’s only what they can get the streaming rights to, but I also think their algorithm is at fault. Just…

It definitely stuck closer to the book, but between dodgy acting, poor production values and general ‘SyFy movie’ vibe, it’s hard to say it really brought it to life.

Paul drinking the Water of Life is like the second or third to last chapter in the book. If you split it, it makes most sense to do it either at the point where Paul and Jessica flee into the desert, or when they’re accepted by the Fremen. The trickiest part to adapt is the final third of the book, which is quite…

I’d say there are a number of things about the book that make it very challenging to adapt to screen:

It’s kind of sad, and extremely telling, that you completely failed to process it when I told you before that I am not a Christian. And in fact you’ve completely given up addressing any part of my actual argument in favor of just repetitively whacking whatever strawman you’ve constructed in your head.

Nonsense. Paul describes a Jesus born to human parents, with a human brother living in Jerusalem that he had met and spoken to.

Most scholars believe at least one of the references is an embellishment of an authentic mention, though. This appears to contradict Meatwad’s claim that we have earlier copies of the text without the mention.

Paul never claims to have met Jesus in life, but he claims to have met his brother James, and he mentions that Jesus was born to Jewish parents, that he was crucified after being betrayed by one of his followers (several of whom he also claims to have met), and that he ate a last supper just before that. He also…

Your reply seems unrelated to anything I wrote.

Uh-huh. What psychological needs drive you to try to troll people on the internet by mixing provocative misstatements, off-topic digressions and insults?

This guy:

That’s a good example, though I’m not sure to what extent the Luddites really believed in/insisted on Ned Ludd’s actual existence vs. were using him as a symbolic figurehead.