The more news comes out about this, the more I am realizing I picked the wrong time to read Raising Hell.
On the one hand, there’s The Devils, a genuinely fascinating (if not to everyone’s taste) labor of love from Ken Russell that WB has kept the completed cut under lock and key for decades, occasionally letting it…

Fitting in a way. I keep associating his fandom with the Superboy scene in Infinite Crisis when he looks at the world and becomes so furious with how ‘wrong’ everything is, that he punches reality till it fractures.

More and more it feels like he had some general ideas for this movie that were struck down before they really planned anything out, he didn’t want to disappoint his fans, so he talked up the line about it all being all ready to roll and is now throwing noodles at the wall to try and get this thing to live up to what…

I mean, this is still slightly better than the quote where he defended the behavior by going “Look at all this money they raised for charity! How can they be toxic?”

Which is such a stark moral binary that I almost want to ask him how he processes the existence of a guy like Jimmy Savile.

I’m starting to feel like this may be his George Lucas moment.

He’ll dabble in other things, but every time he’ll keep coming back to having to make the Justice League he always wanted to make (even when it’s increasingly clear that isn’t the case and he’s just rewriting his own backstory).

In time, he will either…

As a good friend of mine put it best - the scene in Shazam! where Billy finally meets his biological mother and has to process that she didn’t lose him, but gave him up because she felt he’d be better off with someone else as a parent hits harder and with more genuine emotion than anything Snyder has brought to that…

Addendum to this - given how often it’s felt like the modern MCU has whiffed on its antagonists (a problem it has only recently started to overcome) Goddamn, Alfred Molina’s Octavius still shines. Between the writing and the performance, there’s a good balance struck between the over the top comic book villainy and a…

“It’s still a PG-13?
Goddammit...um...call the CG department. See if they can work in someone getting burned alive or something.
No, I will NOT just put in another ‘Fuck!’ That’s the lazy man’s way to do it! This is ART, Goddammit!”

You know, it doesn’t have to be a competition, right?

They can BOTH be terrible for different reasons.
I know the internet likes to make this shit a zero sum game, but it’s okay to just say ‘fuck ‘em both’ and leave it at that.

See - the honestly kind of creepy way the Watchmen movie presents the Comedian’s attempt on Sally.

You know, I never thought about it before, but damn, there was a missed opportunity re: Rose’s view of Finn.
Paired alongside Rey’s reconciling Luke the man with Luke the legend, there was some genuine potential to really dig into the idea of, maybe not ‘don’t meet your heroes’ as much as ‘recognize that, under all the…

I don’t blame Rian Johnson for that, he had to play the hand he was dealt and he did what he could. But they couldn’t do the classic “skip ahead to the next big adventure months or years down the line” because The Force Awakens didn’t finish its story, which also hamstrung the trilogy as a whole because it felt…

‘Was every detail planned no.’

Kind of an understatement. For as big a part of the story as we now see him as, during the time Empire was being written, Lucas had given serious thought to just killing Darth Vader and even described him as a ‘throwaway’ villain at points.

Any planning there was the broadest of broad…

I mean, wouldn’t the end of Empire suggest that at least the last two movies were planned out?

I read this article partly to see if they would acknowledge that in their Simpsons Guy discussion and was surprised to see it didn’t even merit a name drop.

The credit for the Groovy Gang ep (Viva los Muertos!) also partly goes to The Tick creator Ben Edlund, who was the writer on that one (one of the only eps Publick and Hammer didn’t write.)

This. The idea being the message they send to the person they’re threatening is “I have enough money to outlast you in court. Just try me!”

Of course, now that we’re seeing all sorts of reports about how Trump may not be as well off as he likes to present, his own power there has lost much of its menace.

This and Jacob Wohl walking away empty handed after spending the past four years being Trump’s public dancing monkey are the silver linings I take away from this.

(Seriously, I had fun with Tiger King too, but even just on the strength of what we see in that documentary, Joe Exotic’s a fucking creep and sexual…

Any noble intention behind the practice died screaming the day Gerald Ford used it to pardon Nixon.

Thus giving a country with an already pronounced problem of sweeping its bad things under the carpet to fester rather than deal with them a previously untapped level of ‘just pretend it never happened!’

Armond White is a guy who’s basically built his career as a critic on performative contrarianism.
Dude will go out of his way to champion films that are generally getting panned and even more out of his way to find hot takes on why generally liked films are actually awful. He’s known for this to such an extent that,…