Patrick R

I was skeptical of my memory. Surely Toy Story 2, a film I last saw in 3D in 2009, wasn't as good as I thought. Surely it wasn't as funny, wasn't as smart, wasn't as moving, wasn't as- Yes. It's so good. So so good. I cry so damn hard at the "When Somebody Loved Me" sequence. And this time around it's actually about something (acceptance of death!) as opposed to Buzz's "But toys are cool too, I guess." arc in part 1. The introduction of the second Buzz is the smartest part of the movie. So funny.

I liked this episode a lot, even though I didn't get a chance to read the book. I hope you two continue to disagree on things.

Closest I ever got was bidding for an NES and a copy of Super Mario Bros. 3 at the same time on eBay. I didn't win either.

Election year. I had to subscribe to the New York Times on an election year. I am an IDIOT.

It was really well received upon release. It was directed by Mark Romanek, who's best known for his music video work (including the video for NIN's Closer), so I imagine it at least looks beautiful.

I just bought a copy of the film adaptation. A copy of Fates and Furies never freed up at my library (77 holds in front of me!) but maybe I'll have better luck grabbing a copy of this. It'll be interesting to compare the film to the book, since I've never experienced either.

A Bug' Life is just one in a long series of movies with a plot that's based on Seven Samurai. It's actually closer to Three Amigos, because in Seven Samurai the protectors of the village are (mostly) actual samurai, where in Three Amigos they are actors pretending to be great warriors. Beyond the basic plot, there are no meaningful references to the Kurosawa film. At least, none that I could pick up. And, to speak to your broader point, I think it is less that a reference makes something automatically "good" and more that people who have seen a lot of a certain kind of film grow a taste for it. It's not so different from certain genres of video games, where some mechanics might feel completely backwards and esoteric to people who haven't played a lot of them. In the same way, if you haven't developed a taste for spaghetti westerns, there are aspects of them that could put you off them. Also there are plenty of people who just like references. Let's call them the "hey, it's Calvin and Hobbes drawn as Han and Chewie on a t-shirt, awesome!" contingent.

Can you explain what you mean by Lebowski's meta-narrative?

I just wrote a super long post and accidentally hit page back. I am sorry, I wanted to do a good response to this but I can't rewrite it. To really simplify it, genre is what grounds and organizes all of the Coen's digressive writing and without it they have a tendency to get lost in the weeds and make films that are unorganized and unsure of what they're even about. There's more to it, but that's the gist. I was counting to four starting at A Serious Man, Burn After Reading is the best.

a) I think this is very reductive and doesn't really get to the heart of what the Coens do. sunglasses) I don't agree they're playing stuff more straight these days, especially with A Serious Man and Hail, Caesar! I think the last time they really just played it straight was True Grit. And before that, Intolerable Cruelty? Possibly No Country For Old Men, if you count a faithful adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel playing it straight, when that novel wasn't playing it straight in the first place.

It's been four films in a row now the Coens lack an organizing principle to sort all their ideas into a coherent whole. I think maybe they're done making truly great films. Though obviously I'm in the minority on this forum, where ILD and ASM are widely regarded as two of their best. Hail, Caesar! has plenty of surface-level pleasures, but it's a real mess. It tries to say something about the deification of Hollywood mediocrity (and only three weeks before the Academy Awards, hmmmm) but I think it stumbles pretty hard.

Oh, well I guess I have read The Signalman, as short horror fiction is the one realm of literature I'm pretty well-versed in. Forgot that was Dickens. I might try A Christmas Carol, but I'm a bit worried it'd be so familiar as to feel tedious? Is there more to the story than the thousands of stage and screen adaptations let on?

I'M SUCH A FOOL. Fixed. I thought Toy Story 2 started next Monday. I'll watch it soon.

If someone was going to attempt to read Dickens for the first time, where would one best start?

I can't stomach multiplexes anymore. There's a single one in Chicago that's worth a damn (AMC River East) and every other one (mostly Regal cinemas) constantly has shitty seating (some theaters at the Regal have a total of 40 seats, and half of those are 10 or less feet from the screen!) and shitty projection.

Firewatch is 15 dollars cheaper than I thought it'd be! Firewatch requires a better graphics card than I have. Oh well. I wasn't planning on being able to play it right away anyway.

My partner writes a film blog about depictions of fat characters. It's good! They are a much better writer than I am. They recently wrote an article about fat characters in Pixar movies, basically creating a scale of depictions that range from indefensible (Heimlich in A Bug's Life) to questionable (Sadness in Inside Out) to admirable (Russell in Up). I think it's really good. (Wall-E, they will have to grapple with on it's own at a later date.)

The best question to ask in any Pixar movie is "Do the characters...fuuuuuuck?" You know those Cars? Do they, like, fuuuuuuuuuck? Do Wall-E and Eva...well, y'know...fuuuuuuuuuck? Do the feelings in Inside Out...well, um...do they fuuuuuuuuck? When Bo-Peep is talking about getting someone else to watch the sheep tonight...do she and Woody, well I mean, I guess what I'm getting at is, not to put too fine a point on it, but, like, do they........fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck?

I was surprised to hear that Jake didn't have a PC capable of running The Witness, since my three year old off-the-shelf laptop more than meets the minimum system requirements. Is it that you actually can't play The Witness or that you want to play that game with all the graphics set to max?

Mulder got saved by that magic little Navajo man. #blessed #XFilesSoWhite #vodka,lotsandlotsofvodka

Only bean recipe I know is vegetarian chili.

I have not. I'm not really a fan of Richard Stanley, but I'll keep it on my radar. Also it doesn't really sound like the sort of thing I'm talking about.

I wrote a brief 500 word thing about April Fools Day and why I like slasher movies.

I guess we'll find out if I can back up this nonsense with any evidence in the coming months.