I really don’t understand the nominations for Dern and Pesci. I mean, they did good jobs, but they were smallish roles that didn’t seem to call for much. 

I didn’t care for the film, but in all fairness the only reason Joker is a supervillain film and, say, You Were Never Really Here isn’t is that one has a connection to an existing property and has the protagonist wear a weirder outfit. 

I didn’t even like Joker, but my god am I sick of everyone just collectively shitting on it. I don’t see the point.

If it affects this many people nationally it’s probably proportionally as big an issue there. 

Almost 700,000 people were arrested in 2018 on charges connected to cannabis. WaPo says 55 million Americans use it, although who knows how accurate that figure is. It’s an important issue, and it’s strange that the  Democrats don’t run on it. 

That’s a legitimate question, though. From a tax perspective, from a criminal justice perspective, from a perspective of “this is something the voters are passionate about and overwhelmingly agree with us on”. How many stoners do you think would be motivated to vote if this was on the ballot? 

Makes perfect sense. Pelosi embodies the “status quo with a few tweaks” approach of the corporate wing of the party, while Andrew Yang is like a libertarian with a generous dollop of left-wing policy on one specific front, both would be at home there. 

As bad as he is, I don’t think framing deescalation as going out like a bitch is helping anyone. This whole link between machismo and militarism is half of how we got here to begin with, “you’re a wimp for not bombing Iran but that’s good for now” isn’t setting great precedent. 

I don’t love the scene, and I think the scene is generally considered to be the most disliked part of the movie, but “angry and uncomfortable” was definitely a conscious choice. 

What happened to Pacino’s career in the past few years? Did people just suddenly remember “oh right, Pacino’s alive and desperate to be in something good”?

Blowing up Richard Spencer isn’t going to change anything, and he can’t do anything meaningful to stop Nazis from going online. What’s he going to do, make some servers explode? He’s not some super-hacker, and even if you did take down Stormfront they’d just go somewhere new. 

Doctor Manhattan already did a lot of stuff like that, though. That’s why the world ran on electric cars, because he synthesized so much lithium. That’s why Watchmen’s science is in a lot of ways better than ours, he pushed it forwards. 

Manhattan exists at all points within his own life, but not within the lives of others. And just because changes in thought processes can lead to physical changes doesn’t mean he can figure out how to safely alter things.

A), the number of people who are openly white supremacist is still fairly small, even if there are some Tuckers Carlson out there. B), it’s not like Tucker Carlson exploding would straightforwardly decrease the level of racism in America, these things would have ripple effects. C), any sufficiently angry person could…

How exactly is Angela supposed to fight white supremacy? She’s not psychic. She can’t wave her hand and change people’s minds. As long as the white supremacists don’t put on masks and say “hey, look at us, we’re a cabal of open racists” there’s not much Manhattan’s powers can really do in that context. The problem of…

They’re not 1:1 identical, but in terms of “a specific term for a niche subset of the medium that few people really get into or care about” it works well enough. 

Seeing The AV Club complaining about “the discourse” seems like a fascinating lack of self-awareness. 

Yes, no jock has ever used their position to release pent-up rage, as long as you ignore the military, the police, the Klan, militias, and the million other times they did exactly that. 

I think saying “they’re not cinema” is some pretty blatant disparagement. If your friend said “Disneyworld isn’t even a theme park” he’d sound like an asshole. 

It’s a vastly better analogy for obvious reasons.