Aw man, a Gunn Superman movie could have been great. Could have been silly, campy, and given us our dorky Superman we’ve needed on screen for ages.

Oh more than three got snubbed my friends.

Oh, it won’t go away for a while. There’ll be followup articles about Snyder stans throwing hissy fits about the negative critical reaction; articles about how many people ostensibly watched the Snyder Cut on HBO MAX; articles dissecting weird moments and easter eggs; at least one For Your Consideration article…

It’s the cinematic equivalent of Proust except, you know, not good.  

I’ll just save you 4 hours and just sum up the movie with this:

This movie is going to be so fucking terrible.

Cline himself doesn’t seem to be all that interested in introspection. It would be fine to write a novel about shallow characters (think Great Gatsby), but there is no hint that Cline is at all interested in understanding his own characters or in building an interesting world.

Funny you mention Gibson, as I think reading Neuromancer would have taught him that you don’t have to stop and explain every little bit of tech to a reader; they can figure it out from context. (The fact that the character ends up sleeping in a ‘coffin’ just like at the Cheap hotel, but doesn’t mention ‘just like the…

“Hmm, I haven’t contributed much to my 401k recently”

does it seem like he likes any of this stuff beyond it’s awesome or something?

I try to not be as immediately negative and cynical towards other people’s tastes as I have been in the past, but RP1 is something that worms itself under my skin and gets my bile up. I’ll be blunt: my opinion of anybody is immediately lessened it they admit that they like this book. Is that fair? No, probably not,…

My friend’s review at the time was “it’s the first two thirds of the best book you’ve ever read”.

And let’s not forget that Snowcrash wasn’t exactly a paragon of literary genius. While it’s certainly one of Stephenson’s more compelling and accessible books, his insatiable need to stop the story for pages and pages at a time while he holds forth on whatever topic he’s heavily researched is pretty maddening and just…

For me, the book’s main problem is a lack of any larger context. Nobody ever asks what the point of memorizing all of this 80s pop culture is. You’d think that Wade would at some point confront the possibility that he won’t win the contest, and that he just watched/read/played/listened to all this stuff for nothing. I…

Why? Why can’t he serve this one particular audience by giving them what they like? Is any other demographic group off-limits to pandering?

Stephanie Meyer has the exact same problem and yet the two of them made a bazillion dollars.

Damn... I could hate read the shit out of that.

I’m 18% in and nothing has happened but some lame world-building. There has been zero dialogue except between Wade and his robots. It’s terribly boring and Cline clearly just wants to recap how much he knows about pop culture. Luckily, even if you don’t get the reference, he explains it in the next phrase.

With slightly less underage sex

I don’t think the complaint of the first book was that it was about Cline’s interests, but that he didn’t synthesize something new out of those interests and fell back on pure reference of them. It was like reading “Family Guy: The Novel”

Or, to put it better: