I think it depends on whether the grade is supposed to reflect the skill of the movie, or the movie-watching experience. I came away from the review with “it’s visually clever, but consists solely of horrible people doing horrible things and will make you feel morally and emotionally exhausted (and not in a good way).”…

There were some silly moments for sure, but my main problem with it wasn’t even really the movie’s fault. The idea of ‘updating’ the movie to reflect the pulp sci-fi of the 50s was actually pretty clever, I just drastically prefer the 30s-40s pulp-adventure aesthetic. It’d be like if the fourth movie in a…

I’ll agree that “dark” is an unhelpful term. At least for me, when I use ‘dark’ I’m talking as much about tone / outlook as I am about plot / cinematography - but I can see the value in using more specific language to describe the problem. So: Man of Steel wasn’t as violent and monochromatic as BvS, but it was rather…

I’m willing to be that person who starts the Supernatural reminisces...

I can generally agree that war movies focus on ‘good fighting men,’ and that “war is bad” is a different message than “war is wrong.” That said:

I’m not sure I’d call Dunkirk or 1917 military propaganda, since their message was essentially “war is horrific and traumatizing.” The movies were well done (and spoke well of soldiers), but I’m not sure anyone came out of those movies thinking ‘yeah, that’s what I want to do for the next 4 years / isn’t combat awesome…

(1) Have you never felt the least bit jealous when your best friend finds a new best friend?

(1) Have you never felt the least bit jealous when your best friend finds a new best friend?

I’d also be fine with any of those three approaches, and I agree they’d be more interesting than “he was secretly a villain the whole time.” 

I dunno, seems pretty natural there’d be some (mostly low-key) rivalry between Cap’s old best friend/sidekick and new best friend/sidekick. And there’s no particular reason they would be friends - after all, how much time have they actually spent getting to know each other? They were probably together a few…

The other problem with making Walker a racist idiot is that a whole ton of people would have been involved in choosing the next Cap. I find it hard to imagine that at least one of them wouldn’t have gone ‘you know, maybe we shouldn’t choose someone hateful to be the next Captain America.’

I suppose it’s possible it was intentional - that the plan was to have a regressed version of Thor in Endgame that doesn’t get his life back together until the next movie. But (1) leaving a character static through an entire movie is bad storytelling, and (2) they played it like him leaving was the right call, so I…

The “maintaining his faith in humanity rather than the other way around” idea is a good point. Reminds me of Doctor Who, and the recurring question of whether we live up to the Doctor’s expectations, and how he manages to keep finding a reason to fight for us when we don’t. (Or not - there was that moment in Torchwood…

I think what we’re maybe saying is that IW should have been more like Endgame (setting up pieces via interesting character studies), and Endgame should have been more like IW (one last go-round with familiar characters and familiar action beats)? 

Agreed - the dude is capable of being charming (see Man from UNCLE), but Snyder apparently intentionally created a Superman that is the opposite of charming. It takes an incredibly gifted actor to make ‘inhuman god’ interesting, particularly without any help from the script. I can’t really fault Cavill for not being…

I think I had the exact same issue with Infinity War that you did (undoing the previous movies), it just didn’t bother me until Endgame, when I realized we weren’t going to ‘fix’ any of it.

It’s not like white people are unfamiliar with the “only I get to call my brother an idiot” concept* - anyone who says they can’t understand why its ok within a minority group but not for outsiders is either (1) lying or (2) so racist that they truly don’t see how something that applies to their own in-group could…

Cool Runnings!  The quintessential High School Sports Team Bus Trip movie. 

I’ve never understood why not having emotions means not using contractions / generally talking like a poorly programmed robot. Not feeling things doesn’t undo 30 years of learned linguistic behavior! This sort of dialogue seems to happen every time a genre show has a character get a brain boost (I call it the ‘Data…

I think what Wanda did to Agatha was supposed to be a bit horrifying. Acting-wise it was definitely played as cold hard revenge, as intentionally vicious rather than angry lashing out. The show threw in enough moments to make us uncomfortable with Wanda, so that we can’t help but wonder if the Scarlet Witch is going…