Jesus, thank you for this, even though I’m a bit late getting to it. Yes, Campbell had totally taken over USC grad school, at least circa 2010. It was all-encompassing, and was also I felt an incredibly solipsistic approach to filmmaking. The irony is I attended USC solely because, a few years prior, they were known…

Hey fucktard in the greys, did it never occur to you to learn how to read? I was complaining about my experiences in film school, not about pitching projects in the real world, where I’ve had no problems. My point was exactly that: film school, even at the level of USC, is about losing your vision in preference for a…

Horseshit.

No, no, no. Everything has to be boilerplate Joseph Campbell bullshit created by man-children who have daddy complexes over George Lucas.

At least in terms of global OS usage, it’s never come close. Mac has never peaked beyond ~10% of the market. Mac OS has never even pulled that far ahead of Linux in terms of market share, surprisingly enough. Apple has never come anywhere near outselling PCs by orders of magnitude.

Now just wait a gosh damn minute. Clearly Justin Long’s high point is his scene in Idiocracy. One of my favorite things about my partner is that she still randomly quotes it to this day (“My first wife was ‘tarded. Now she’s a pilot!”).

Huh...? What kind of revisionist conjecture is this? The TOS movies were massive tentpole films. “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” had one of the biggest budgets for a movie ever when it was released. The pop culture hype and merchandising for the fourth, fifth, and six entries was endless and inescapable.

I have drunkenly insisted to people that “Class of Nuke ‘Em High” is in fact not a ‘bad’ movie, and is actually quite brilliant, because it is precisely what it set out to be.

I kinda get it. I imagine the appeal is that “Super Mario Bros.” is, in its own way, a special sort of thing. It’s a terrible movie, but uniquely so. It’s not just cheesy. It’s not merely inept. It’s... baffling. It’s seems to be a hard-drug-fueled ‘vision’ by weirdos who came up with the idea of crossing Super Mario…

All of this distracts from how awful the trailer was generally. I don’t really get it. Fixing Sonic’s design will mean Sonic will look better in a disastrous dumpster fire of a movie. So what?

Prepare to have your minds blown! I play fighting games on a mechanical keyboard. And I usually win. It is far easier to do movement inputs for me than on an arcade stick. Seems like these hit box things are the same idea, but with much bigger buttons. Might have to pick one up someday.

Vedder was always pretty up and up, no? Seemed like he genuinely hated rock stardom from the beginning, and unlike Cobain, knew how to avoid its fatalistic trappings. He was milquetoast to be sure, but dude wasn’t yer typical MTV whore even in his 20s.

Real talk: Mortal Kombat bothers me now, rather seriously. I’ve had a lot of tonal whiplash with these games. I used to think Tipper Gore and Joe Lieberman were absolutely *bonkers* for making such a big deal out of them in the ‘90s. I liked the first one, really liked the second one, and then fell out with the third…

Agreed. I was a hardcore Doom/Quake kid who never touched RPGs but would buy anything that was remotely a FPS. And Morrowind, to my teenaged eyes, was basically a FPS that, believe it or not, had remarkably good graphics at the time. That water reflection effect! So I picked it up without knowing anything about it.…

I am 100% convinced that this ‘conspiracy’ comes from hippie burnouts watching “The Capricorn One” when it first came out, then forgetting that they watched it, and then ‘dreaming’ it back into reality as if it really happened. Not the first person to have noticed this by any means, but it bears repeating.

Totally agreed. My only hope at this point is that corporate pop art becomes so untenable in this hyper-capitalist / algorithmic era — so obviously machined, so inescapably positivistic and inhuman — that more people just give up on it and it loses its power. It’s preposterous utopianism on my part, as always, but a…

Hear, hear! This might be the moment when he makes his “Heaven’s Gate,” and the whole cycle starts all over again. I’m all for it, either way. ‘Bout time video gamers felt my conflicted film-critic pain over the fact that it’s not *always* the studio’s fault.

Thanks. Thought of the same thing. Any day with an errant RotLD reference is a good day in my book. Send more cops!

Same. I remember a lot of rage over the color of Dante’s hair, in particular. It was all a bit baffling, considering that DmC itself seemed pretty awesome to me — fun skill-based gameplay, and a bonkers story that was *just* the right kind of camp bullshit, especially with all the “They Live” references. I absolutely…

I came to the party late, but I thought the first season of “The Newsroom” was fantastic. The second season was strained and a bit woolly, but sure, it had shit to say and I enjoyed it.