You see it in all the KKKhristers who publicly excoriate extramarital sex and homosexuality - then get caught having affairs with their parishioners/aides, or sneaking off for some gay sex....

As already noted, the Iranian Revolution was nothing like this.

We’re told that the stars and stripes flies only over Alaska and Hawaii in the show.

I never said it had to be. I and the other poster simply agreed that Gilead is not “nightmarishly plausible”. It’s certainly a reflection of people’s nightmares at the moment, but that’s different from being plausibly something that could happen.

The Iranian Revolution was nothing whatsoever like the bits we’ve seen of the creation of Gilead, which involved a small, militia-like organization that seems to have only a marginal footprint in the population somehow defeating the United States government.

The central feature of Gilead is a system of organized, religiously-mandated sex slavery of a sort that has never been a feature of evangelical Christianity (even during slavery in the US, that was something people pretended wasn’t happening, even though it was).

Yeah, the origin story of Gilead requires a pretty massive handwave. Not unusual in speculative fiction, of course, but I’d never mistake this for something that could happen the way the show indicates it did, no matter how rightfully unhappy people are with the Trump Administration.

Chastain had real comedy chops in The Help, but hasn’t done anything much along those lines since.

Chastain had real comedy chops in The Help, but hasn’t done anything much along those lines since.

I’ve been a fan of Boutella since Kingsman (a movie where, granted, she is mostly tasked with looking cool). I’m glad to see her getting roles with more opportunity to show range.

The “crew” are sentient, for all intents and purposes.

I don’t think that’s more effective, at least as far as what the creator was going for, as we transition from one man’s sad, warped idea of Star Trek to something more like the actual Star Trek.

The Alienist is phase one of Dakota’s plan to remind us all that she was more famous than Elle once upon a time.

I debated various parts of Stranger Things 2, but I ultimately went with the Snow Ball denouement. The centrepiece, of course, is the payoff of Mike and Eleven finally getting that dance (a textbook example of the efficacy of giving the fans exactly what they want), but it also makes room for Dustin’s parade of…

Michael C. Hall is a normally reliable actor, so I was jarred by how off his JFK is. There’s nothing wrong with highlighting JFK’s less attractive qualities, which were certainly there, but the main reason he got away with so much was because he was one charming SOB, and that’s completely absent in Hall’s portrayal.…

I thought the ending was akin to Young Adult in that it takes the protagonist right up to the precipice of getting the help she needs, only to have it undone (in this case, fittingly, by what might superficially be perceived as heartwarming).

A lot of these choices align with my own. Two films that I’m a big fan of that haven’t been cropping up on many top ten lists, that I’ve seen:

Lascelles’ most famous quote about Edward is the wish that “the best thing that could happen to him, and to the country, would be for him to break his neck.” And that was before any of the alleged Nazi sympathies. He was not a fan.

A Ghost Story is making many people’s Best of the Year list, but at the moment it’s my least favourite film of the year. Probably nothing in recent memory as bored me as much as that interminable pie scene, which completely took me out of the movie and almost made me leave the theatre, something I’ve never…

The Girl in the Tower by Katherine Arden is the second installment in what I guess is now to be called the “Winternight Trilogy”, after Arden’s debut novel The Bear and the Nightingale from earlier this year (and with the concluding installment due out next August; she clearly doesn’t waste time). Together they’re my…