Where do you get that I’m assuming they’re talking about books they haven’t read? I’m talking about whether it makes sense to describe Vivaldi or Tolstoy as pre-20th century “pop culture”; what makes them “pop” as opposed to “not pop”? What does that distinction signify in the 17th or 19th century and does it even…

But is a typical churchgoer in 1730 (or 1330) thinking “darn it if the only artistic messaging I get access to is reinforcing the power of the church?” or is he just thinking whatever he thinks about the art and music from inside the frame he occupies? I don’t disagree with you about the diversity of viewpoints, or…

I’d be hard-pressed to identify what particular worldview is being foisted on people by, say, the MCU.

And it usually wasn’t created in the spirit of “art for art’s sake”, it was essentially religious propaganda, commissioned and paid for by wealthy patrons seeking to maintain their worldview’s grasp over the minds of others.

That’s a good answer because some (not all!) of these responses treat “pop culture” as “creative work I have heard of,” which seems to miss the mark for me. The casual use of “pre-20th century pop culture” kind of begs the question. Of course there were more and less popular works of art in the past, but reflecting a…

Or maybe that most people’s real lives don’t make particularly interesting dramatic fodder even when the person in question was uncontroversially interesting or involved in interesting events suggests we should stop telling their stories in these formats, since we lose something either way.

Or not, because Bruce Lee probably wasn’t as good as Royce Gracie at choking people (to be understated about it). There’s a quote attributed to Lee where he said Ali would kill him, but I don’t know the source so I don’t know if it’s legit.

While calling him the “#2 heavyweight” is technically correct because that’s how it’s listed on the UFC website, it’s a counter intuitive-convention because Ngannou is third in his division; Daniel Cormier is the champ, he beat the previous champ Stipe Miocic (they’re having a rematch soon), and prior to that Miocic…

GoT was a huge massive chance on HBO’s part, and they also didn’t give it nearly the budget it had in later seasons to begin with for that obvious reason, and I have no idea what Weiss and Benioff were paid but it obviously wasn’t comparable to this deal.

I’m intentionally keeping quality out of it. The only complete season of a Ryan Murphy show I watched was the OJ American Crime story. I have a lot of negative shit to say about Weiss and Benioff, I just don’t think a rational Netflix executive would care about most of it. But if I were such a person I would be…

Or maybe Netflix canceled a bunch of shows to pay these guys.

The problems I had with Game of Thrones are, I understand, not really germane to Netflix. And GoT was a massive massive hit; of course they’re gonna be a hot property. And hey, I liked 25th Hour a lot!

People dunking on Douthat for somehow working his Harvardness into the story about his aborted hookup with chunky-and-DTF-Reese Witherspoon:

Well, a lot of people have written pieces about how the show surprised them because they always heard the comic was terrible but they liked the show! So no, not really.

The comics version of The Deep is like the most rational person in the situation of being in The Seven (even though it’s unclear what’s going on with his commitment to his schtick). He’s concerned about making sure that he doesn’t get screwed out of his fair share of the profits from being in The Seven, he doesn’t get…

Also the new movie in theaters has so much foot action that people are talking about how Tarantino must be aware that people are aware of his foot fetish and he’s just fucking with us, now. Like, there’s a lot of contextually appropriate barefootness in the movie where he could get his, uh, kicks in with some…

I think the plot adaptation founders - they had some really painful own-goals, like suddenly deciding to go to Dorne, needing to invent their own plot to have it make sense within the confines of the show, realizing it sucked, and bailing on it ASAP is only one - but I can see the virtue for a lot of folks in trimming…

At the time I joked that when the opening credits map added Dorne, you could tell the care and detail going into the presentation of the rich lore informing the show by the fact that the spot on the map was just called “Dorne” (as opposed to “Sunspear,” “The Water Gardens,” etc.). The detachment from the detail the…

I would argue that each season up until season 5 (the last I watched, though I did come back for the finale) was worse than the one before it, but there are reasonable arguments to the contrary, and mine is a very book-centric perspective; the logistical/plotting impact of early-season adaptive changes turn out to…

The character was born in New Jersey, and DeNiro’s just as Irish as he is Italian (maybe more so, since Wikipedia says there’s some on his mother’s side as well).