Since these are relatively new films compared to the earlier Nolans, I wonder how spoilery this episode is.

A bit like the episode of 30 Rock where Weird Al takes the melody from a song Jenna made impossible to parody, and actually makes a sincere song out of it?

I think Tarantino was more into acting back then, so he would also appear in things he didn’t direct.

Tom Hooper became an Oscar winner thanks to the King’s Speech, and he’s been given the opportunity to turn his terrible ideas into bad movies ever since.

The historical inaccuracy of that bit in particular is one of the things that annoyed me. It’s Sorkin expressing his own hangups, in a film with little interest in the real Zuckerberg. And since the film ends with a callback to that, it’s hard to ignore.

There is actually contemporary evidence that the heritable component of political ideology might be expressed via media preferences.

What other ones are you thinking of?

Alright, I give in, Ebert was wrong! Starship Troopers isn’t satirical!

Yes, I was looking for a set of instructions in a high-level programming language that could be compiled into machine-readable instructions, and instead I got a feature film which behaves the same no matter what inputs you give it.

Very Socratic

Now I feel a little better about not having seen it.

After I heard about Librivox I started listening to more audiobooks, and that worked pretty well for horror stories from Ambrose Bierce or Lafcadio Hearn (or even Don Quixote, though it’s been quite some time since I made any progress on the second book). Eugene Onegin on the other hand was a very poor choice.

Economic crashes are a recurring thing. The film “Up in the Air” was taken as a commentary on the same recession, but it was based on a book inspired by an earlier one.

Nolan remaking Heat was still pretty good in my book. Unlike James Gray remaking Apocalypse Now without the Herzogian jungle madness.

The future, as depicted in Deus Ex: Invisible War.

He’s got nothing better to do. For a while he was touring doing live re-edits of Twixt.

I think The Beguiled was less about either of those.

Films made under financial duress often aren’t that good, but Coppola channeling his frustrations over having to make another Godfather rather than a passion project into that very film actually works here.

Likewise. I read Vulture’s article on it earlier when they called it a “flop”, linking to its Rotten Tomatoes page. But both the critical & audience score were both positive, even if not at the level of the prior films.

I found it rather dull as well. I was also annoyed that the film tried make him a representative of modern attitudes in a prior era when the real guy was not like that.