Nothing screams “a change in the perception, value and appreciation of music as a work of art” like an album slapped together from scraps recorded by artists who weren’t even aware they were working on an album together.

I saw True Lies late—whenever it originally came out on home video—and was pretty startled by how the movie treats Curtis’s character, compared to the fun reputation the movie had. The strip scene may scan as empowering and funny to some, but she’s manipulated into it by her own husband, and not just to “give her…

I’m probably an over-analytical viewer, but for me it hit AND felt slipshod. Like, the mood it’s creating is unsettling and well-sustained. The performances are good, the directing is good. I was absorbed almost all the way through, except for the aforementioned exposition dump, which was really literal and very long.…

Would tend to agree. I love the vast majority of those movies (and do see their DNA here), love Nic Cage, and I enjoyed Longlegs—for what it was. Which, as you say, is a bit of a pastiche. But I didn’t find it very well written and walked away from it unsure what, if anything, it had to say. It strikes me as the kind…

This tech seems like it could be really cool for a video game where an infinite number of fictional outcomes are possible. Ditch the pre-recorded, canned lines and have an AI announcer that really seems to react to the fake game.

Mostly no. The internet obsession with this is dumb and annoying. I kinda suspect it's just a meme phrase that is funny to say (like "failson"), which is why you hear it every fifteen minutes online.

I’m not sure about your pre-sales/seating take, that seems highly speculative. But the marketing bit is astute, and I am just about sure you’re right, because I am exactly the guy you’re talking about. I used to go to the theater constantly (my wife and I both had AMC memberships, which we got rid of when the AMC near…

Yeah, it seems like a real miscalculation to take a story that was apparently begging to be a full season on some streaming service and insist on chopping it up into movies for theatrical release instead. It’s rare for audiences to buy into a movieseries like that where the stories don’t at least somewhat stand on…

They definitely have not. Very frustrating to keep backing the party of unforced errors. At least the GOP can rightly claim that ever since they let him win a primary in 2016, Trump has hijacked their party and they simply can’t do anything without him anymore. The Democrats have better options, they just insist on…

There are several people I wish they had pushed harder. Feel strongly that we clung to Biden in the face of the threat of a Trump revenge tour, and basically didn’t think about a succession plan.

Nobody debates worse than Joe just did. Nobody campaigns much worse than he is right now, either (though to be fair, he’s completely wrong-footed now and will be for the foreseeable future; hard to campaign properly when you’re in crisis management mode).

I see this election as more of a second referendum on Trump than on whoever the Democrats are running. Harris wouldn’t need to motivate too many people to go vote—more like, she (or whoever) needs to not de-motivate them to the degree that they don’t vote at all. My concern with Biden isn’t that anybody will jump ship…

Right. And as long as the majority of non-Trump voters are voting *against Trump* more so than for their candidate of choice, I think our chief concern has to be any issues (real or imagined) that would depress turnout.

Kicking the “idealogues” out of the left would be about as effective at winning elections (especially this upcoming one) as the GOP kicking the MAGA morons out of the right. Both groups make up far too large a percentage of their base. Retooling either party would be like rebuilding an NBA team—a long-term project…

I thought that up until the debate. I no longer think it. Biden lacked a serious downside until his brain started deteriorating, which made him an ideal anti-Trump candidate in an ecosystem where very many people were desperate to vote against Trump, and for anyone else, so long as that anyone seemed capable and not…

If Biden runs I will absolutely vote for him, because look at the alternative.

Yes yes, everyone who disagrees with you is a fool, a sucker, or evil. Political discourse in the internet era, how I loathe thee.

Most liberals I know, and even many of the ones I see online, are admitting the obvious. Pity that Trump’s supporters can’t do likewise (the obvious in his case being that he’s also a very old man in serious cognitive decline, in addition to being a convicted felon and con man who surrounds himself with crooks and…

Highlander 2 is unrivaled in this arena, I believe. There was so little story left to tell that they just made up an entirely new one. And it was rightly hated by everyone.

My guy: undecideds still exist. They are few in number (fewer all the time in this era of intense polarization and wildly unlikeable candidates), but they do exist and they do matter, especially in elections decided by only tens of thousands of votes. What’s more, specifically *because* of extreme polarization, it has…