Maybe they’ll bring back his buddy Cannonball from the (rather atrocious) final season of the original run? He can remind Sunspot in between explaining how he’s high-invulnerable while he’s blasting.

I have to wonder if Swift’s win for Album of the Year was more of an acknowledgement of her pervasive pop-culture dominance more than any particular musical merit (and I’m not trying to be a hater - I think Midnights is a pretty uneven product as a whole, but I think some of the songs are very good).

And if that’s the…

I’m surprised that Lady Eboshi is mentioned as the anti-villain of Princess Mononoke, when she’s arguably an anti-hero, much like Sen: she’s protecting lepers and sex workers who have been abused and abandoned by the rest of society, providing them with a place to stay, work and live with dignity, and arming them to…

When discussing the whole phenomenon, one of my friends said something like “nobody ends up dating an NFL star by accident.”

Oh, I don’t think I’m impartial! I’ve got lots of opinions about Swift - fully include myself in that litmus test comment. I don’t know if my opinions are all that abnormal, or particularly unique or insightful. But then, I guess their normalcy isn’t my call to make.

I think people’s opinions on Swift are a fascinating litmus test of people’s pop culture opinions. Their reactions are far more interesting, to me, than her as a cultural phenomenon herself. (And I don’t say that to hate. I think she has a lot of good music, and a lot more that simply isn’t for me.)

I might buy that Black Panther was a “fan favorite” for some comic book readers, especially since the 2000s (or whenever it was Marvel tried pushing him harder by linking him to Storm romantically), but he was far from a guaranteed success for any live-action adaptation. He never had any kind of widespread name…

Having finally watched “Across the Spider-Verse,” you kinda have to admire Sony’s persistence with a single idea:

“What if there were, like, a bunch of Spider-People?”

Whether or not the original Star Wars movies were “good” will of course come down to personal taste, but I do feel like there are excellent examples of some “how to make a movie” fundamentals in them, and that a lot of modern blockbusters don’t even bother attempting.

And yeah, not to overstate the obvious, but like ... a lot of their Phase 4 stuff just wasn’t any good.

There’s another common thread with the MCU’s best films that is now missing: the Russo Brothers.

Yeah, this movie was obviously already in production when they decided to make the Infinity Stones a plot point.

If you watch the scene where Odin talks about the Aether (and also makes oblique references to the Infinity Stones), it’s pretty clear that it was all added in ADR, because there’s surely no footage of…

Is it the worst MCU movie? Arguable, but I’d say probably not. I don’t love it, but for my money it’s way more watchable than Quantumania.

Having Avi Arad and the Maze Runner guy attached does not inspire confidence. The most interesting thing in this announcement is that Sony is so deeply involved in producing a Nintendo IP for the big screen.

I think a black and white morality is baked in to Star Wars’ DNA, which isn’t a bad thing for this genre of story. But I agree that it doesn’t have to be boring, and multiple Force-using factions/faiths can be interesting.

I’ve been saying for a while that, post-prequels, Star Wars only makes sense if there’s no reliable way to disseminate information across the galaxy - i.e. no major news media and no unified record of history accessible to the public.

I tend to find Filoni’s vision of Star Wars as an intriguing but disappointing hodgepodge. For every glimmer of clarifying unity, there’s a moment of blatant fanservice; for each new creative idea, there’s a stale rehash of the familiar. For every Mandalorian season one, there’s a Book of Boba Fett.

The WEG ethos making its way into a lot of following Star Wars projects is pretty cool, if you ask me. I found some notes from their design bible that someone shared online once, and it was very thorough - can’t remember details, but it was all about the “used future” aesthetic, the banality of evil that the Empire…

He still puts the subject of his sentences at the end (“Judge me by my size, do you?” “Luminous being are we.”) but it’s less about being a wacky pest and more about speaking in a heightened, Shakespearean-like way.

And yes, his other appearances outside of the original trilogy are pretty grating.

This was true in the ‘60s sitcom as well. Gomez and Morticia had relatively lustful attitudes towards each other - still pretty tame, considering the era, but they definitely seemed hornier than Lucy and Ricky or Jeannie and Major Nelson.