I saw it in IMAX, and I honestly don’t think it would have mattered to me if I’d seen it in a regular theater. It still feels like an event that would be missing something if I’d seen it at home first, but it was lacking any real visual spectacle. It’s a well-made film, but there were no blockbuster holy shit eyecandy moments.

That’s one of two major gripes I have with the movie.

My second gripe is entirely to do with a pretty egregious diversion from the source material, specifically with Athena. Zendaya is great, but Athena is supposed to wear a helmet. That’s her whole look. Having a helmetless Athena is like if they’d given the cyclops two eyes.

So your lack of knowledge about the source material won’t work against you, and seeing it on a small screen should be fine if that’s what you’re into.

My wife used to wake up tired some mornings and not know why, until I pointed out that the difference was whether her cat was nibbling on her shirt all night.

I don’t live in a climate that supports that. My cat can come and go as she pleases. My other cat won’t come in at night because it’s not his territory.

Still blaming the glass cliff scapegoat?

You could have left that take on reddit. You didn’t have to bring it with you.

He needs to be out here inventing cronuts and shit.

Agreed. Sometimes I’ll accidentally take a sip of Coke Zero and it takes me a second longer to tell it’s not my drink. So it’s way better than most, but still terrible.

Whose mad? My mad?

Well I’m glad the story has a happy ending at least.

Still downvoting beep no matter what.

Whenever I uncensor something, I like to add thematically appropriate emphasis to the curse word. A glowing “fuck” on a Fallout post, a Star Trek font “shit” in a Star Trek post, a big veiny “cock” for a post about cocks. I take pride in my work.

For a while there I was trying to emphatically uncensor any memes I found. I already did this one, because it’s an old meme.

How?

I couldn’t get through Tolkien. I tried reading the Hobbit but gave up when it started talking about blue beards and gold belts. It felt too arbitrary to hold my interest.

But the LotR movies are needlessly slow. It’s Peter Jackson’s directing style, which only works in that very specific context where a large portion of the audience is ready to fill in the blank spaces, and the rest of the audience forgives it because they expect it to be a rambling epic.

Every shot is one second too long. You could cut an hour from the runtime just by cutting out the lingering reaction shots. Every time Sam or Frodo says something, it’s followed by two seconds of them staring longingly into each other’s eyes. There are so many things to love about those movies, but they’re basically unwatchable to me.

As for Rowling, I think her success is mostly due to accessibility. They’re easy reads in a way that fantasy books almost never are. The reader doesn’t have to put in any work to get to the world building.

She follows a classical plot structure. She establishes motifs early and only subverts them when subverting them becomes the obvious choice. There are many blue beard/gold belt moments, but they’re propped up by easy-to-understand structures like the house system.

But yeah, then there’s no depth to it after that. I always thought it was overrated.

Meh. It’s a bit slow.

I’m on .world and on reddit, and reddit is much, much worse.

This is an old Steven Wright joke. It’s fine to steal it and use it on your young relatives, but stealing it and giving it to a bigot is kind of shitty.

Also it flows better without the “already”. It’s supposed to be punchy and absurd. Omit needless words.

Why can’t it be both? Too many people think that nuanced movies can’t be fun. It’s even dumber when they think a movie must not be nuanced just because it is fun. (Like anyone who talks about super hero movies like the entire genre is one bad movie.)

This is how I feel about almost every Coen brothers movie. Basic plot structure exists for a reason. That reason is because it’s good, and it’s satisfying, and it connects with something inside of us.

If you have a good artistic reason to depart from the expected structure, cool, great, I hope the risk pays off. But at some point these auteur filmmakers are just being lazy because they know they can get away with it.

Like in the Hateful Eight, when instead of revealing the twist in an organic way, within the confines of, you know, filmmaking, Tarantino just relies on blatant, unapologetic exposition. That’s not clever. It’s lazy.

A good filmmaker can say what they want to say while being entertaining and making sense.

And yeah, that’s also how I feel about the Godfather. Lots of great scenes, but I didn’t enjoy it as a film. A film should be more than just a loose collection of great scenes.

That’s still sitting up.

How do you play 600 hours sitting up in a chair? That’s not play. That’s work.

I can’t be certain, but the level of detail just feels off. He specifies the number of bolts, but glosses over setting up an alias?

Having read the version of this story that’s true, there’s also a lot more to it than just “buying a sign from the supplier”.

The way this is written is how I’d write it for a creative writing class. Possible I’m wrong, but I don’t think I am.