I highly recommend it! If you have the chance to read the novel beforehand, do that, too! They’re both great, but sufficiently different that I think that knowing one enriches the experience of the other. 

Overall a pretty good list. I’ve seen many of these and can endorse The Rain (first two seasons are very good, the third is shaky), Station Eleven (outstanding), and The Last Man on Earth as my faves on the list. Chernobyl is probably my favorite limited series of all time, but it’s not speculative fiction so I’m not…

Obligatory:

Yep. So many top execs have said the quiet part out loud on earnings calls recently because they’re not scared of the consumer. Procter & Gamble has raised prices 20% across the last two quarters, and it led to their first quarter of declining sales since 2017. Their CFO basically admitted that they’d reached the…

Dear lord if it’s down to Spielberg or McDonagh, please make it McDonagh. He’s so much more interesting as a filmmaker to me, and Banshees took more risks and those risks paid off.

Yeah, I don’t think NOPE was a failure, by any means. It just wasn’t remarkable. No filmmaker is going to hit a homerun every time. That’s not a big deal. 

Eh, maybe I misremember a bit. It’s been about 10 years since I read it. But I think my larger points still hold: I would say that Melanie is a kind of immune, or at least viewed as the key to humanity’s survival in a way that is similar to Ellie. In that regard, both characters serve similar functions in the…

I thought it was a lovely time. Like you said, not as shimmering as Knives Out, which is just so perfect. But completely enjoyable and the type of movie we need more of. It told an interesting story and had good twists and it was smarter than your average bear. There is an audience for that, for sure. 

I honestly just make a note of the reviewers who do no analysis and I skim their recaps just to get down to the comments, where there is usually some pretty cogent critical analysis going on. 

I can’t say anything definitive because I read the book without even knowing The Last of Us existed. (I liked the book a lot, for what it’s worth, and a pretty decent film adaptation was made a few years later starring Gemma Arterton, Paddy Considine and Glenn Close.) I’m not a gamer and I didn’t know it was a thing…

Don’t Worry Darling and NOPE are not snubs. Neither was particularly Oscar-worthy. Don’t Worry Darling squandered the divine Florence Pugh, and it was so badly written that none of the actors really had a chance to shine. The movie was bad. Not just mediocre. Outright bad. I honestly cannot think of a category in…

God, I would love to know how that happened. I see so much thinly-veiled MRA stuff in the classes I teach. Most students know enough not to be very open about it, but it seeps into their writing and I just fear for the future of masculinity if this is where they’re taking their cues from. 

I’ve never felt bad for cockroaches and lice and bedbugs before. Yet here I am...

That’s a good way to put it: Thanks for bringing people back to theaters. That’s not what the Oscars are about. Honestly, Cruise’s early career is pretty remarkable and leans toward him becoming a celebrated actor with solid dramatic bona fides: Rain Man, Born on the Fourth of July, Jerry Maguire, A Few Good Men, etc.…

Agree to disagree. To me, it was an SNL sketch with Cruise in a fatsuit. 

I was trying to keep an open mind (but largely calling bullshit) as I read, until I got to the last paragraph where the author touted herself as an experienced facilitator who was qualified to run these tests. Girl, you’ve got degrees in communications and HR management. You are not a psychologist. You would need to…

Pictured below: A personality assessment just as accurate and useful as the Myers-Briggs:

I was supposed to take the Myers-Briggs test as a freshman in college as part of our orientation. But I missed it because it conflicted with preseason volleyball training. I didn’t think anything of it because I’d had to take it twice in high school and I knew that it was crap. Then four years later I applied for…

“Many of these assessments are grounded in good behavioral science.”

I cannot roll my eyes any harder at the “Tom Cruise deserves a nomination” campaign. C’mon. Did we watch the same movie? The idea that Cruise deserved a nomination for Top Gun: Maverick is laugable. Tom Cruise has been playing Action Star Tom Cruise for the last 20 years, and while he’s probably the best stunt actor…