Part of me really dislikes the melodramatic, larger than life style of these stories. I mean, Uber is a car service that paired GPS with an app and ate the lunch of complacent cab companies who sucked. It was a smart idea, but this whole “WE’RE GOING TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD!!!” bombast is dumb.

I used to make that for my break meal when I worked at McDonald’s a million years ago. (To give you an idea of when this was, think “McDonald’s Pizza”).

Well, the “latinx” term was invented by a Latin American professor in Puerto Rico, so it’s not just super-woke white people using it.

As opposed to the dozens of previous live-action “Mario Bros” adaptations that shamefully cast white actors. 

For a moment, I thought that BJ was the son that Uncle Baby Brother left in the mall. 

McBride knows his comic voice and sticks to it. His whole thing is showcasing  childish and self-absorbed obsessive masculinity. It makes sense that he sticks to that wheelhouse. 

Eli was painted as perhaps the most righteous of them all: gentle, kind, longing for his late wife, and prone mostly to fatherly aggravation

For the life of me it sounds like he’s fucking around. Sure, there’s a bit of real irritation there, but it’s mostly in fun. 

It’s indicative of the pharmaceutical obsession with convincing us that EVERY tiny discomfort can be solved with a pill (as long as there isn’t an applicable generic option).

Sure, but it wasn’t a SYNDROME until there was a magical pill to supposedly cure it. Until then it was just being kinda restless and twitchy when you’re trying to relax.

“Poochie died on the way back to his home planet.” 

Yeah, it’s very much a, “you can be two things.” I mean, we should ALL be on the “don’t trust big pharma” train when it comes to bullshit price inflation and inventing new chronic ailments for which they just so happen to have the perfect pill (remember when Restless Leg Syndrome was suddenly a thing?) and maybe don’t…

That’s my guess, as well. I had access to the manual 2-door Golf GTI VR6 in the early 2Ks (I worked at a VW dealership) and, my God, that thing was amazing and a little frightening. All that raw power in such a small vehicle was kind of insane, it felt like someone stuck a jet engine on a go-cart.

I liked FTWS overall, but I think FWTS had various problems, including being cut short due to COVID

It’s a perfect ending to that story. It looks like they’re dodging the usual sequel pitfalls, here. Raylan’s not going back to Kentucky, they’re not “undoing” anything, and even at the end of the show he and Winona were happily separated and co-parents, which looks to be where we’re picking up. Sure, that means that…

Yeah, Freaky Deaky was one where the director seemed to be screaming, “ISN’T THIS ALL SOOOO HILARIOUS!?!” every moment of the movie. It leans hard into the “wacky farce” end of the Elmore Leonard adaptation spectrum.

Any Elmore Leonard adaptation should be easy: get a decent cast and keep a shit-ton of the book’s dialog.

I’d say the Boyd of the pilot was very much a neo-Nazi. It’s just that subsequently Walton Goggins took control of the character, subtly retconned his motivations, and turned him into something much more compelling.

The king poo-bah of bad theme songs is still the goddamn Middle School mixer crooning of Enterprise. 

Screenwriting 101, if you want your audience to sympathize with a character who is a legitimately awful person, give them a parent that is just so, so much worse.