“Compelling” isn’t always positive, and that’s definitely the case here for me. Foodfight is a compelling movie, but it’s because the choices it makes are so utterly bizarre that it’s hard to look away.

A couple things:

Finished the season.

the people who are strictly making content quality complaints are largely doing so because of the identity details

Fred wasn’t even the rich one in the rest of the series, Daphne was. Fred worked a bunch of different jobs to make ends meet, Daphne had a butler named Jenkins.

Have you watched the show?

Scooby Doo has always been bad (with the exception of Mystery Incorporated).

I’ve seen all eight episodes available so far, mostly because I find its choices weirdly compelling, even if the actual content is mostly repulsive or just flat. While none of them are quite as awful as the first episode overall, Velma’s still an absolute self-obsessed nightmare to both Daphne and Norville, Norville…

This one’s also getting way more attention because it got an unusually large marketing push for a new Scooby Doo project and it’s the first one aimed explicitly at adults. Even without the racism, people who don’t normally care are reacting because people who don’t normally care are the ones this is aimed at.

The problem with Velma is that it sucks. It severely miscalculates the mean jokes to genuine emotion ratio, making everyone so intensely awful to each other than the moments of attempted sincerity feel empty and manipulative (Always Sunny has the good sense to not ask us to care about their plight). And the jokes are…

I wasn’t crazy about how the book handled that plot point (I don’t mind it conceptually but I didn’t care for its execution), so I’m honestly not too fussed about it being changed.

I mean, plenty of amazing art has come from that approach as well. It’s a question of vision and ability, and with Shyamalan that’s... definitely been up for debate if I’m being generous.

There’s a reason all kinds of insane bullshit happens in his version of Maine and the rest of the world neither hears nor cares about any of it. An ancient unpronounceable god could show a person the secrets of the universe in the woods, turning him into an insane flesh-beast forever doomed to slide along the forest…

Extreme weight loss does that.

It doesn’t read as a dig, it reads as an acknowledgement of her most successful and long-running comedic roles.

Black Panther was nominated for Best Picture in 2019 and Joker was nominated in 2020. The Academy hasn’t shunned superhero movies, but they also don’t have a designated slot set aside for one each year, and The Batman ain’t a particularly notable omission.

Not a single fart joke in the entire thing.

Puss is Boots is so, so much better than it needed to be or anyone expected it could be. Even with the positive reviews I still kinda went in expecting it to be Did You Know Fairy Tales Can Fart 6, and I left with it being one of my favorite movies of the year, easily the year’s best cartoon, and a new all-time great…

“King sucks at endings” is the popular opinion.

“Why doesn’t this author whose work is almost exclusively focused on the American Northeast pay more attention to the catacombs under Paris?”