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I mean, yes, there a few jabs at Scientology and general new-age feel-good West Coast style unctuousness, but I’m saying this is a very specific dig at Burning Man, and is chock full of shibboleths to make that clear. It’s been a little while since I watched it so I don’t remember them all but there are a lot. One I…

Rebirth is a weird one. It’s essentially a feature-length critique of Burning Man, with lots of little hyper-specific cultural winks and nods to that particular festival, and the whole thing seems to be largely an allegory for a dude going to Burning Man and not liking it at all.

I guess “detailed” is about the best you can say about the characterization in the Foundation series...

To be frank, we could do with about 50 fewer Christmas songs than we currently have.

Thanks for the pop culture update!

I’ll stick up for The Sillmarillion, there are some awesome stories in there along with all the dull stuff - and specifically the Fall of Numenor, which this series seems to be going for, has some interesting beats and, refreshingly, is not composed entirely of elves being petulant with each other. That dull stuff…

The original Bill Mantlo run on ROM was pretty awesome. It was surprisingly horror-centric for a comic book made to sell dolls (not like cool comics, which are made to sell movies). ROM’s enemies are the Dire Wraiths, who in this incarnation are like Skulls but they use black magic, and one of their signature tactics…

I never thought any show could make devil-worship as dull as this one does.

What does RIYL mean?

One of the odd things about this aggressively mediocre movie is that only one of the three stories is actually based on a Clive Barker story, and that story is more of a frame story for the entire book series than a standalone short. Out of the other two, one has a few Barker-esque themes and the other is just a bunch…

For some reason this book never really clicked with me, even though I wanted to like it, but I thought his latest collection Wounds is really good. I definitely think of him in the same category as Laird Barron and John Langan and some others as a writer who is making horror fiction more interesting than it has been…

Definitely, though the show also has sort of a running “big-head guy” trope with Billy Quizboy.

Joan Cusack had a memorable role in season 2 of Homecoming, FWIW. Actually that season, and the show in general, is pretty similar to the British Utopia, with a big conspiracy and a dash of black humor, although it lacks the verve and energy of that show. (This could probably be explained by the original Homecoming…

Yeah, I don’t think he’s meant to be writing the story, but rather that the story is what’s going on in his head as he cleans up the high school one last time, contemplates suicide, and thinks about his parents and things he’s read about and a girl he almost talked to once and what she might be like and so forth.

In the movie, at least, he doesn’t demonstrate the level of misogyny that the label “incel” would imply. (In the book he’s maybe a serial killer, but still doesn’t seem to actively hate women.)

I didn’t get the impression from the book that her character was meant to be unintelligent (and in the book she’s just a kind of fragment of the janitor anyways, so the same level of intelligence). If anything the book was critical of the Jake character’s tendency to irritatingly mansplain things to her.

I liked this a lot. For those who read the book and were nonplussed by it, it’s worth noting that Kaufman has essentially thrown out the entire third act (from the high school on) and replaced it with something a good deal more cinematic and less like a horror novel, to the film’s benefit. He also ditches some other…

I take your point, but Picard was on the gritty side of the spectrum if you’re only counting Star Trek shows.

On the topic of movies whose existence you’re suddenly surprised by, I just discovered the bizarre 1987 two-hander The Caller, starring Michael McDowell. It is pretty much just straight mind games the whole way through and then it really swings for the fences with the ending. Recommended for people who like oddball…