Also a fair point. No question in terms of his ability to synthesize different genres. Still, there’s something either over-the-top bombastic or cloyingly sentimental about even the best of his works. Compare, say, Williams’s Schindler’s List Theme with Morricone’s Gabriel’s Oboe (from The Mission), and you can hear…

that’s a very interesting point. Williams is the modern-day inheritor of Wagnerian leitmotif. Maybe the opera comparison was fair.

Derwood*

one of my all-time favourite games. the quasi-turn-based combat system alone is worth the price of admission. by most accounts the 1997 Japanese film is pretty bad (and only loosely connected to the game), but would love to see it properly done as a psychedelic horror by someone like Ben Wheatley.

the irony!

it’s genuinely surprising that True Grit didn’t win anything, given the career-best performance of a “late career” actor was prime Oscar bait. And deserved, frankly. Great film.

he has created iconic music (I am a mega John Williams fan) but is by no means worthy of comparison with the great classical composers. He writes great themes, but has never composed anything remotely as profound or complex as, say, a Beethoven symphony or Mozart opera. And I’ve listened to his non-Hollywood work too,…

a ton of contemporary vulgarities like “fuck” and “up your ass” which just seem really strikingly out of place. Not that the English or Japanese weren’t capable of era-specific profanities, but it’s absurd to have it peppered throughout the speech of, say, a daimyo or noble samurai.

The original 1980 miniseries isn’t nearly as Blackthorne/Eurocentric as contemporary critics (many of whom I’m guessing never saw it) seem to think. That said, this new Shōgun is simply fantastic; it’s both incredibly faithful to the source text while also elegantly expanding upon it in ways that add depth.

cocaine is a hell of a drug.

FFS, Saltburn was a pale imitation of Ripley written with TikTok memes in mind. Ripley should be insulted by this comparison. 

Yahoo home page material that infiltrated the zeitgeist.

right I meant Perkins who did those wonderful write-ups, including the “They said there would be no math...” political humour insights.

trust me, it’s always an ad. Old SNL would have used a fake name, MAD Magazine style, to make the same joke. Lorne’s dalliance with the devil of product placement really undercuts a lot of their jokes these days.

the previous SNL A.V. Club writer was way funnier and had a much firmer grasp on what makes for good live comedy. The current one is more like, “here is a show that happened this week. The host was okay.”

yeah the plot seemed to be, “this is an ad for Hooters. At Hooters you will see large-breasted women who will pretend to flirt with you.”

so fucking tired of all these commercials masquerading as sketches. Old SNL would never have lowered itself to plugging for AirBnB, Hooters, etc...

not to mention the legendary George Carling and Jane Rovers.

yeah, it felt like OFMD 2 reached that point that so many heterosexual love stories have in the past, where the creators give into the fan service (Moonlighting’s Cybill Shepherd/Bruce Willis, Frasier’s Niles/Daphne) and forget that the tension was what made it so fun.

visually arresting outer space drama a probing meditation on grief and marriage