I normally love rich-people-problems shows, because it’s sufficiently removed from my own reality that I find it very escapist and relaxing, not matter how interpersonally bleak it gets. For that reason I always thought Succession should be right up my alley, but I couldn’t quite get into it yet. I suspect it’s one of…

Making it look like a fentanyl overdose instead of killing Jessica in the basement does seem to save a lot of time when it comes to clean-up and corpse disposal. We’ve seen that Misty is more than up to getting rid of a corpse, but it does seem like a hassle.

Throwing the poisoned cigarettes away at first and having…

I get what you mean about Jeff loving Shauna more than she loves him - I found it quite moving when he defended her against Jackie’s parents for instance - but I think he’s barely as valiant as he needs to be to make up for blackmailing his wife and her friends exploiting their worst trauma. When he offers to go to…

No kidding about 1). Hoult spends the first season of The Great making the audience long for his swift demise at the hands of Catherine, and the second season making the audience root for his demented courtship of Catherine, while not actually changing anything about his portrayal of the character. First I could not se…

Matthew Rhys is, as the k-pop fans would say, my bias since The Americans, so your mileage may vary. But I found it very compelling.

Ha, I think trailers that show a lot of the actual movie are the worst! The fact that this trailer really doesn’t give away any plot whatsoever is what I like most about it. Clearly we have very different taste.... I also thought the 2001 parody was really inspired here, because it’s not just a parody for the sake of…

I love the trailer. The little girls listlessly playing with baby dolls awestruck by the emergence of giant Barbie in a 2001 parody suggests to me that Gerwig gets it. The little girl with the glasses who tosses her baby doll looks a bit like me at that age. The movie has Ryan Gosling as Ken. I might have to go see it…

I would be really disappointed if he takes the role, because it would prevent him from doing more interesting stuff in his peak-hotness years. Baffled, messy fail-knight in a plotless, lyrical nightmare is about perfect; I would hate for him to leave this sort of project behind.

This goes for most of the more…

Yeah, Daphne not trying to scam anyone and genuinely seeking connection made Harper’s betrayal rather heart-breaking.

I mean, you’re definitely right that all these people are a bit questionable and the lessons they learn often read as more than a little cynical. Negotiating a good bribe for the mediator role in his parents’ marriage definitely shows that oh-so-innocent Albie can actually be a rather smooth operator if need be.

My…

He’s embracing a certain mercurial nature, and that’s a bit dark, no argument here. Then again, it also might show he has finally stopped underestimating women and realized that he won’t have that much influence on his mom one way or the other; how much reason is there really to think that he would be the decisive…

I ended up liking Albie a lot more than I thought I would. Just like Cameron he’s redeemed a bit by his ultimate ability to take a punch. He gets dumped for the fun caveman, and handles it gracefully. Then he gets scammed by the broken bird, and doesn’t seem too bitter about it either.

I did predict that Albie and…

I feel like someone waking up after a night of debauchery - head still reeling, a little bit sick, a little bit embarrassed (I was so obsessed with trying to guess the ending and mostly completely wrong), but also kinda amazed. What a ride!

The ending really had everything one might hope for in a White Lotus ending -…

Oh, I’m all in on Daphne being the mastermind behind a potential demise of Cameron! And my death-pool money is also on Jack and (to a lesser degree) Mia, for very convoluted reasons. 

I was desperately avoiding work yesterday and got lost in Art-History/White-Lotus-conspiracy-theory TikTok. The paintings in the hotel…

Mike White said in an interview that the opening credits provide clues about the character’s trajectories. The actor playing Ethan is associated with the image of a man offering grain to a woman, who rejects the offering. The woman rejecting the offering is obviously Ceres/Demeter, goddess of agriculture, fertility…

Exactly, the thing about Harper is nothing about her personally, but the fact she’s Ethan’s girlfriend. So Cam’s not interested in Harper particularly, he’s interested in any woman who happens to be associated with Ethan. I still think the mimetic desire thing applies just as much if not even  more to Ethan himself…

I do think it matters that Valentina ultimately backs off, but point taken. 

I really think Cam is more after the money than after the wife. He needs to show Ethan his place, so that he can continue to bully him into serving his needs. It’s possible that he’s just after the ego-boost of once again besting Ethan, but I do think that a financial motive is mixed in. I don’t buy for a moment that…

I guess I just don’t think the scam I outlined is all that complicated (at least Cam’s part of it). Shared transgression to rope people into questionable behavior is frat-bro 101, that’s argueable the raison d’etre of frats in the first place - the future elite pulling stupid stunts together, to guarantee they can…

I always thought that Daphne and Cameron are in on it together, but only to a degree. Daphne’s stunt with the Palazzzo definitely seemed like a calculated move to seperate Ethan and Harper, so that each could be worked on seperately. I thought the goal was to get them both in compromising situations, to render them…