Everything about this adaptation seems lazy. All I keep thinking of is how interesting this remake could have been with, say, a first generation immigrant’s kid who spends his time as a model student balancing the push and pull of his parents’ native cultural expectations and his own American expectations…

This article didn’t even show up in the RSS feed, the main one that supposedly has “everything.”

I had the same thought yesterday after seeing the aftermath of the Kinjapocalypse. I felt like our squad lost the dance competition, and thus the funds necessary to save our somehow-not-run-down-and-overrun-with-used-condoms-and-needles and the evil greedy developer and his stupid prep school son had just watched the…

This. Why is half the fukcing page filled with whitespace?!

This whole site redesign feels like what happens when the plucky dance troupe isn’t able to raise enough money to save the rec center from the evil wealthy real estate developer who wants to tear it down.

Mister, if you think for one moment that the AV Club is going to ignore user input, then you... might actually have a point.

The American version of Light being a Ferris Bueller type, a popular, laid-back, Really Cool Guy who’s easily tempted into murder, would be a great translation of that. Alternatively, you could make him a popular athlete to get a similar vibe, but then you’d have to avoid the “jerk jock” stereotype found in teen…

Yeah, he’s supposed to be a preppy rich kid which contributes to his messiah complex, not the poor loner kid who is disenfranchised or alienated.

Sounds like they really screwed up Light’s characterization (the character in the manga and anime is an arrogant preppy rich kid, not the poor loner of this movie), but at least it sounds like they are trying to capture L’s mannerisms.

Early on, the manga was fantastic about setting up stakes in a believable manner. It was a cat-and-mouse game that created tension from seeing this high school kid keep up appearances while still being a murderous asshole on the inside. You see him get corrupted further and further by his desire to enact his own brand…

I’ve been saying for the better part of two years now why the hell didn’t they just make this a Gaiden/Side Story. Other Death Notes have fallen to Earth in canon, then the Director and Writer wouldn’t be sand bagged by the expectations placed on being an adaption of one of the best manga ever written.

I thought Light was more specifically an inversion of the protagonist of a standard Shonen Jump manga (the magazine Death Note originally ran in) — which would be a character who’s not particularly bright or handsome who achieves success through effort and the power of friendship.

One of the biggest tensions in the original works is that the kid who is a model of Japanese societal success turns into a mass-murderer almost instantaneously after being given the power to kill anonymously. That’s why the potato-chip scene works so well. We’re literally watching an ostensibly good person internalize…

It takes less than 10 minutes for Light to transform from a term-paper-selling loser who lives so close to the train tracks that his dishes rumble off the dinner table into a remorseless Angel-Of-Death-in-training.

It’s nice to know that I can deliberately not watch this on Netflix. At some point the whitewashing has to stop.

Never understood any of the people who called her accent “ridiculous” or “unintentionally comical” when the film came out. Anyone who’s ever seen video of her speaking would automatically know how scarily accurate it was.

Heh, sure. These days on Christmas Eve my wife and I go out to our favorite restaurant, Keen’s Chophouse in NYC.

This movie looks about as nauseatingly bland as this new Kinja format.

Between this and Arrival, is it finally cool to be a linguistics nerd? (To be clear, am linguistics nerd, want to be cool)

You can’t get sued for defamation for reporting what Tig Notaro said.