I was once held up in a grocery store checkout line by a woman who refused to let a man bag her groceries.

Domestic box office rankings, post-Endgame:

2021 — #1 No Way Home, #2 Shang-Chi, #4 Black Widow, #6 Eternals
2022 — #2 Wakanda Forever, #3 Multiverse of Madness, #8 Love & Thunder
2023 — #3 Across the Spider-Verse, #4 GotG3, #8 Quantumania, #30 The Marvels

Yes, I understand that two of those are Sony projects (though…

Right, but Messiah was him writing without someone more powerful than him trying to talk him into/out of certain things, which Campbell was legendary/notorious for. The reason most of the super-famous Golden Age writers stopped writing for Astounding was because of ideas Campbell was not only enthused about, but kept…

That’s an awful lot of story, and you have to manage some pretty huge character swings. I think you’re fine sticking to Messiah if you just show the things that, in the book, are instead talked about in the past or future tense. Which is what Villeneuve would do anyway.

I sometimes wonder if it was really Herbert who failed (which I agree he did; it’s there, but it’s overwhelmed by the hero narrative). Unlike most of the work that followed, Dune was published in pieces under the watchful eye of the period’s most influential editor, John W. Campbell. And Campbell would’ve been very,…

Life of Duncans, more likely. It has potential: waking up in a tank that may or may not be a giant salamander, creepy dwarves singing at you, sex with Paul’s underage sister, getting crushed by a giant worm, getting crushed by a giant worm, getting crushed by a giant worm, getting crushed by a giant worm, getting…

The end of Messiah is a reasonable place to end Paul’s story. Chani’s as well, though Villeneuve has already completely upended how that works in the second book (and it’s about half the plot, so it’s not like it can be blithely ignored). I guess we’ll see how he deals with that, if he does indeed make the film.

I don’t either. You’d have to invent stuff to fill the empty space.

It’s the dilemma that anyone trying to adapt this story faces, because in the books all this is throughly explained by internal narrative. Lynch tried to preserve some of that and it didn’t really work. Villeneuve tried to put most of it in actual dialogue, but because he doesn’t enjoy dialogue there was a lot…

(spoilers for future books)

It’s interesting how much I hated most of the major characterization changes in LoTR (while generally loving the movies, overall), but I was fine with almost all of them in Dune. Chani walking...well, riding...away makes complete sense, given what preceded it. The movie didn’t need Alia, but it gave us a version of…

There’s still time for Poison Ivy 5: Heal the Bits.

23

This entire thread is full of people making a mountain out of a mohel.

The entire reason it’s set in Rio is so they could skate on more stringent sex laws about women her age, so yeah. But I agree: if you can put that out of your mind (good luck), it’s a delightful farce.

How did Michelle Johnson feel about his boundaries? I mean, she was fucking at least one of the producers at the time, but she and Demi have rarely had anything good to say about that particular film (which is unfortunate, because it was hilarious, and I wish I could rewatch it without wondering). Does she? She’d…

St-Denis, Ste-Geneviève, and St-Marcel. Plus for one specific portion of Paris, St-Germain.

I haven’t stopped seeing her live, so I’m well aware.

I saw Tori Amos perform perhaps thirty-ish times in the first few years of her career. Every single night she performed “Me and a Gun,” it was always exactly as harrowing as one would think and as she intended, and I always wondered what our difference in strength was; I was roughed up listening to it, yet she not…

I think the issue’s different. I think there were a handful of discrete plots in the movie. Some were very heavy but compelling. Some were pure comedy yet also compelling. Waititi failed to meld them into a narrative. The whole movie feels like a series of sketches, a la Monty Python, and there’s no Terry Gilliam to…