I’m still not entirely sold on the fact that the Star Wars universe has suburbs

On the other hand, I remain amused to no end that the Star Wars universe is such a rundown hellhole that their idealized paradise of eternal treasure and prosperity is… a mid-century modern house with a white picket fence at the end of a cul-de-sac, and a stable 9-5 accounting job with a decent dental plan.

I will accept nothing short of Willem Dafoe.

Did He-Man accidentally lapse into the public domain or something? I swear I’ve seen like five different “Masters of the Universe” reboots with five different subtitles in as many years and I gotta assume Mattel just left the film rights outside on the porch in a bowl that says “Take One” like it’s Halloween candy. Feels like there’s as many He-Men out there now as Spider-Men. Which is to say, I’m looking forward to seeing how they tie them all together in He-Man: Into the Masters of the Universe-verse.

Both are still showing up full price for me, if that helps.

…Think it’s too late to get a refund?

Weirdly, season 4 of both Fringe and Eureka have a portion of the main cast shunted into an altered timeline and having to reconcile their original memories with their “new” histories, to varying degrees of success.

Travelers kinda inverts the premise in its second season, where a bunch of time travellers sent back to fix the past start seeing their superior foreknowledge slowly rendered useless by the fact that their mission is actually succeeding in changing the future.

Obligatory addendum that as a creation of Victor Frankenstein, calling the monster “a Frankenstein” is no more inaccurate than calling Starry Night “a Van Gogh,” or a 2003 Aztek “a Pontiac.”

“It’s bullshit, man, it’s just bullshit.”

At least we can rest easy knowing that concept art was eventually repurposed for the Nightsisters, and there’s no way anyone could ever sexualize a tribe of leather-clad magical goth lesbian amazons with spiky chain whips.

this is the weirdest political compass I’ve ever seen

I still got my fingers crossed for a Young Indiana Jones Chronciles/How I Met Your Mother-style framing device where it’s Billy Dee Williams and horse girl cruising the galaxy in the Falcon, with the whole flashback to young Glover Lando as some old fisherman’s tale he’s telling that’s clearly being embellished in his favor

To be clear, this isn’t someone actually connected to the Cushing estate saying “hey man, that’s not cool,” because the estate did actually agree back when the film was being made eight years ago; this is some other studio claiming that, actually, it has the exclusive rights to puppeteer Peter Cushing’s digital ghost, because of some contract he signed back in the '90s or whatever.

'Cause, y’know, nothing quite says “justice at work” like watching the all-consuming media conglomerate duke it out with the copyright trolls over who gets to do the deepfakes.

surely, surely it must be possible to write a movie about a video game that does not include the words “mysterious portal to another world” anywhere in the synopsis. we’ve been doing this shit since the fucking hoskins mario movie, please, something’s gotta give

Yeah skimming it very briefly, it looks like your instance doesn’t even show bot indicators, so, no way you could’ve known really. But there should be a button to turn it off somewhere in your user settings, probably down near the bottom.

I mean I can certainly understand where the confusion may have come from.

Yeah, I mean, jeez, Elvis spends the entire middle of the 20th century taking beach vacations and playing cowboy on Paramount’s dime, raking in 3-4 million apiece (which was quite a lot back then) with half a script stapled to either end of an ad for his next record, and somehow that’s the golden era of Hollywood, but Hugh Jackman pretends to have an adamantium skeleton for the first time in seven years and suddenly culture’s being rotted from the inside-out by a new, omnipresent trend of performers wasting their talents goofing off for the frothing masses. Simple fact of the matter is cinema has been prioritizing screwing around with the audience over the illusion of artistic integrity since 1903 and anyone that says otherwise is probably selling something.

What is the alien truck fighting movie?

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, released a couple weeks before Oppenheimer.

Honestly I’d say probably 80% of the movies I listed as “less-than” are actually super rad and I was kinda just hoping nobody would notice. But it sure seems like this guy would take issue with the pop music toy movie and Frankenstein beating up a werewolf and Michael Winslow making funny noises with his mouth, so, sometimes we stretch the truth.

Well at the same time, I just think that’s more indicative of the progress of technology relative to the progress of the modern cinema. My TV is now very good, and films are released onto home media quite a bit faster than, say, the 40-year gap between the release of Gone with the Wind and the development of the consumer VCR. If I want to watch an expensive piece of audio-visual spectacle while it’s still part of the zeitgeist, that’s a pretty good reason to catch it early on a massive screen with Owlsey Stanley’s Wall of Sound blaring from all four directions. If I’m going to watch a three hour long character-driven, thought-provoking masterpiece that makes me re-evaluate the world and my place in it, I’d like to be able to do that in private on my couch with a bowl of soup and a thermostat volume knob I control, and not be wrenched suddenly from the pastoral vistas of St. Radegund by the stranger two rows down ordering a Taco Bell off his phone while I’m trying to process my complex emotions. And the pandemic sure didn’t help much either. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that for however much they’ve declined in recent years (and ignoring Guardians of the Galaxy III, which was far better than it had any right to be), the big-budget superhero blockbusters have been some of the few in recent memory to be able to consistently deliver on the visual spectacle to justify the day trip, the vice-grip on the public consciousness to demand seeing it right away, and, at least for a time, writing not so offensively dumb as to make it still possible to sit through. I think it’s less a sign of audiences becoming more concerned with spectacle than sincerity, and more a sign that people are being given more flexibility to engage with the medium at their own pace, and as a result the buzz around a given film doesn’t seem quite so pronounced as it isn’t all entirely done in unison. And while that does certainly hurt them at the box office, it’s not necessarily indicative that there isn’t a demand for them, just that people don’t have as much incentive to make a whole day trip out of one movie when they could just wait a few weeks and do it on their own terms. I don’t think it’s cinema that’s in a bad way, I think it’s just the cinema.

Of course, this fellow made much my same point quite a bit better and quite a bit sooner and I’d be remiss not to acknowledge it.

I dunno, man. I don’t think you can say “cinema was better in the fifites when there weren’t all these cheap action movies and creature features and cash-grab sequels” as though On the Waterfront didn’t come out within three weeks of a movie about giant radioactive ants and the fifth remake of Robinson Crusoe. And yeah, sure, last year people were double-fisting a sprawling biopic about the man that flung the world irreversibly into the atomic age and a movie about singing plastic dolls, and finishing it off with a talking alien truck fighting a robot monkey… just like how eighty years ago Casablanca came out the same year as The Invisible Man’s Revenge and House of Frankenstein, sixty years ago people were just coming out of 2001: A Space Odyssey and turning right back around to go watch Charlton Heston punch a guy in a gorilla suit, forty years ago we got Amadeus hot on the heels of Police Academy and The Search for Spock, and nine years ago Spotlight and The Revenant were running trailers at the same time as Minions and Adam Sandler’s Pixels. This is not a new phenomenon, the past only looks better because nobody talks about the mediocre movies from that era anymore. And I’m not even gonna touch the implication that mass-appeal entertainment is somehow devoid of merit with a twenty-foot pole, that’s a whole other can of worms.

And even barring that, I really don’t think you get to say “TV is doing cinema better than cinema these days” as though for every Chernobyl or Succession there aren’t eight NCIS spinoffs, three Big Bang Theory prequels, a Celebrity Golden Bachelor, Keeping Up with the Alien Ghosts of Skinwalker Ranch, and - guess what, bucko - a show with a bunch of superheroes running around punching each other in the dicks, or whatever. The ratio of “high art” to “party time” is damn near identical, the movies just have a bigger ad budget.

So in the end, it seems all you’ve got left here is a guy starting a conversation about a new, topical thing and using that to segue into talking about a thing he made last year and how it’s so much better than new popular thing, and you should watch that instead. Thanks, Brian, super glad we had this talk.