Right?? Maybe it’s just me, but the tone of the comments is generally making me feel optimistic today (which is a rarity for me). 

If you took the 80's “Dark Knight” graphic novel version of the Joker and superimposed him on 2019, I could imagine a story line where the Joker mass contaminated vapes in such a way that the people who smoked them died with grotesque smiles on their faces.

It’s some Tipper Gore shit.  I can’t believe I’m writing that in 2019.  How ridiculous.  Like, you’re afraid of MOVIES?! That’s what you’re gonna say the problem is?! Movies.  Oooooooookeee.

Agreed.  It is incredibly fucking lame. 

Hell at least when trump blamed video games it was in reaction to violence that actually already occurred not some hypothetical violence that might occur.

I decided to look Todd Phillips up at Open Secrets:

And the first reviews I saw coming out of TIFF was the movie was great. Sounds like he is victim of the woke.

I think by “the realities of the world we live in” he’s referring to “the discourse” created by people like himself. You can’t just tell clickbait writers they’re off-base!

I don’t recall Philips ever declaring himself to be a conservative, and I’m confused about how anything he’s done constitutes “wrapping himself in the flag”.

yeah, it sounds to me like he’s not comparing the goals the extremes of both sides are trying to acheive, but the actions they take to meet those goals.

“Phillips can be frustrated that people are preemptively blaming his movie for a hypothetical situation that would not even be his movie’s fault (violent media doesn’t make you violent!), but the points he’s making here seem like someone being willfully ignorant of the realities of the world we live in today.”

What?…

Every piece of discourse on this movie has been dumb as fuck. Nobody that wasn’t at TIFF or isn’t a professional film critic has seen the movie. We don’t even know how violent it will be! The trailers don’t actually make it look all that violent! If it’s as inspired by King of Comedy as people say... it probably won’t…

It’s so heartening to see that most of the comments about this article are critical of the article itself (and in sympathy with the director). That opening sentence is really something: “Todd Phillips has proudly joined the ranks of famous people who would’ve been better off saying nothing...”  

I’m old enough to remember a week ago when the right tried to blame gun violence on video games and the left pushed back. 

...unless you’re doing a meta thing about how much the left can be as prone to interpreting statements in a way that fits their narrative as the right, this quote does not necessarily imply the above.

A person can believe the discourse around this specific movie mimics moral hazard/”the wrong people will get the…

When it comes to pearl clutching moral panic, the desire for censorship of anything they can read the wrong message into and equating art as some sort of dangerous mind control device, the left has very much turned into the right. This is exactly what the right did when I was a kid and the left railed against it. If…

“John Wick is about one guy with a specific goal to kill the specific people who have wronged him.”

I initially put in a joke because i don’t know what to say regarding this anymore. This really is an odd situation for me. Here we have a movie - that hasn’t been released yet - that’s had more written about it than probably all of the movies released this year.

“Todd Phillips has proudly joined the ranks of famous people who would’ve been better off saying nothing...”

Exactly, these people don’t bitch about torture porn movies and torture happens every day somewhere in the world.