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.

Thank god, for a second there I thought they meant “cracking down on people dodging Windows 11 by intentionally disabling TPM,” like I’ve been doing. False alarm, carry on.

I know for a fact I’ve said I was going to “Xerox some copies” on a machine that was almost certainly not manufactured by the Xerox Holdings Corporation.

Someone, somewhere has evidently misinterpreted the fact that US presidential candidate Kamala Harris (pictured center) is of Indian ancestry - as in her family is from the country in south Asia - and instead photoshopped her into the stereotypical Native American “Indian” aesthetic. Why they have chosen to do this eludes me.

There have been several violent incidents in reaction to published depictions of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, which is strictly forbidden by some interpretations of the Sahih al-Bukhari, one of the major Sunni Islamic texts.

I’m assuming that’s what’s being alluded to here.

“Oh, this new post already has a comment, let’s check it out! … Dang it!”

That’s pretty much my gripe. One time I saw a post with maybe six, seven comments, opened it up, and they were all either the bot, or replies to the bot.

And even if you block the bot the post still shows up as having comments. So you’ll open up a post boasting the aforementioned six or seven comments expecting to find a lively debate, or at least a wisecrack about global affairs, and leave with a bunch of tumbleweeds and the lingering knowledge that somewhere, two or more people are arguing with a machine about whether or not it thinks the newspaper is any good.

There’s always old reliable, “that thing over there”

“Complicit in faking the moon landing/covering up the Flat Earth™” are the obvious ones. “Space cadet” always a classic. These, being the low-hanging fruit, I think will be the ones we’ll see the most going forward, but I’d still like to throw my hat in the ring:

“An astronaut? You mean those guys that get off on flying their little rockets out of the atmosphere so they can breathe bottled air for a week? Like some sort of oxygen cuck?”

(obviously this implies a repubican pundit using the word “atmosphere” in a complete sentence, so I think we’re safe)

I’ve had nightmares containing the phrase “Vice President Shapiro” and I’d like to avoid having that image in my head for even just the split-second it takes me to disambiguate the two.

Also the other guy’s been to space, so.

The thing about Arsenal is they always try to walk it in…

Hell I have yet to see him have worth.

“Now now, Batman, you should know that when a little pest like you dances with the Bug Zapper… He’d better be ready for a shock!”

“And as we can see from this computer model of continental drift in the late Triassic era… AS GOD AS MY WITNESS, THE SUPERCONTINENT OF PANGAEA IS BROKEN IN HALF!”

Doctor Ruth died in-between those two; we’re onto a new set of threes now.

“Security footage shows several ne’er-do-wells in domino masks fleeing the scene with a number of burlap sacks, clearly-marked with bright green dollar signs, no doubt containing the compromised data. AT&T security suggests the culprits must have ‘jimmied open’ their servers with a crowbar, or perhaps a bundle of dynamite detonated via plunger from a safe distance. One suspect is currently in police custody after attempting to escape through a tunnel painted on the side of a brick wall. More on this story as it develops.”

Season 4 episode 1, as well.

“Hey Tray, how’s connecting with the common man going?”

“It’s going super great, Dotcom. Meet my new friends, Nobody, and his wife, Susan Walters hyphen Nobody!”