R.CAllen

It seems obviously insufficient to merely say the following — especially when one considers the scale of what you’ve done — but, nevertheless, well, I feel I’d be remiss if I didn’t say anything at all so ...

Thank you for doing this! I have genuinely enjoyed reading your summaries and commentary. I think maybe my favourite bit out of so so so so many was way back when you were keeping track of all of Lando Calrissian’s derogatory nicknames for his droid sidekick Vuffi Raa? In any case, loved every entry I read! Couldn’t get enough of them! I thank you, sincerely, from the bottom of my heart!

I hope your other hobbies and interests are literally enjoyable and figuratively enriching. No, wait, if you end up making great stacks of cash at these other other hobbies and interests that’d just be a real plus? I don’t know. I hope things are great, things are good, what is it that Han Solo says, something about “May the Force be with you”, that, I hope that!

I was about to say that I found the last season to be kind of not quite up-to-snuff but then I remembered it’s got this episode in it so, uh, forgettabout it.

1 hour ago, Rogue 3 said:

final season

Oh no! I gotta hope there’ll be a spin-off to the spin-off. Something Kim-centric, maybe!? Well, in any case, I’m looking forward to what’s left of the show.

Yeah, GoodReads lets you set a Reading Challenge for the upcoming year. I think the last time I did it was ... 2018!? It’s got kind of an accountability feature baked in to the process because if you do the challenge and any of your friends do the challenge it shows that information on the page where the challenge is, the, uh, the webpage. That’s your accountability right there! It also keeps track of the books you’ve read for any given year.

If you want to play old wordles click here.

If you want to play the wordle game all you like, well, here’s a clone.

If you want to play an alternative version of the game where the choice of word cheats but in a fair way where you can eventually narrow down the answer then click here.

I saw it. Clancy Brown great! But of course Clancy Brown great even if reading the phone book or whatever. It’s not news at this point in time that Clancy Brown great. We all know Clancy Brown great!

Ending terrible! Not a good ending! Can’t figure out how to do a spoiler tag anymore but I suppose telling y’all what I thought was going to end up happening (but didn’t! it didn’t happen! and nothing equally or more satisfying — or even satisficing — happened! what DID happen suuuuuucked!) doesn’t really count as much of a spoiler. If it does, well, sorry. Stop reading these words, maybe!

I figured the season was headed towards Jennifer Carpenter peacing out the same way James Remar did what w/Dexter’s conscience becoming so disgusted w/his actions that this embodied memory of his loved one leaves him forever. (Wait!? Is that why James Remar’s ghost left Dexter’s mind? I don’t really remember the details anymore.) And a death for nu!Harrison (which would be what makes Jennifer Carpenter ditch him!) followed by him becoming Dexter’s new ghost pal. Same way as his dead father and his dead sister were up in his noggin now it’s his dead son in his head.

I also kind of figured the billionaire guy would end up being a bigger deal this season. Oh well! Maybe he’ll be back for Dexter: More New Blood (‘23) or whatever. Whenever.

On 12/23/2021 at 1:49 AM, Odine said:

How's everyone's noses?

My nose is doin’ just fine, thanks for asking! So fine, indeed, that I am deeply jealous of it! In fact, it’s already surpassed me by attaining the rank of State Councillor.

On 12/23/2021 at 1:49 AM, Odine said:

 Anyone else experiencing worse sinus colds than normal? 

Not me, nope!

Got my booster shot the day before yesterday. Call me Booster Terrik, call me Booster Gold, call me Booster’s Millions because I gotta say I am feeling pretty boosted. Fatigued, arm fairly ache-y (not as painful today as it was yesterday, though) but all in all, well, not too bad. Can’t complain. Not going to take any more Tylenol® Acetaminophen Extended Release Tablets to deal with it. Just going to let it sort itself out on its own. Certainly no worse than the last two shots of vaccine, that’s for sure.

I thought there was already a Christmas thread posted a few weeks ago but turns out that was ... last year. Time! It’s a terrible thing!

 

9 hours ago, Metropolis said:

One of my favorites is "Hey Santa" by the Wilson sisters. 

 

That’s a good one! Never heard it before today!

Saw it. Liked it a lot! Don’t really grasp the general critical skepticism towards it on behalf of a fair number of folks — I think it might be his best one yet! But, then again, I thought that about Baby Driver (2017) and also before that thought much the same about The World’s End (2013). I’m a mark, I’m a rube, I’m buying what he’s selling, on the Wright train for life, choo choo.

I laughed.

Saw it. Thought it was great!

 

Don't really understand the critical or commercial reaction to the film (well, that's not entirely true, of course — I do understand it, fans of anything and everything are always disappointed by the new stuff, that's the same old song, plus the show ended fourteen years ago so it makes a good deal of sense that "Hey, why don't you come on down to a movie theatre during a pandemic and watch our fifty million dollar webisode" wasn't an instant success) because it's a really beautiful piece of work.

 

Haunting, funny, in its own way better at being a movie than the show was at being a show. I'm obviously not saying that the movie is better than the show, the show is great, I watched/rewatched the show over the latter half of the summer, I really liked it, there's a shocker of an opinion for you, I think the great show is great. But my point is that the show has, like, lines being very noticeably ADR'd/foleyed in every which way in nearly every episode — only happens a couple times in the movie, maybe three times at most — and lots of very noticeable product placement — outside of the classic Coca-Cola® sign which shows up during the Newark riots that's entirely absent from the movie — and can sometimes get kinda clunky in its plotting. It's all, like, oh no, who will Tony have to deal with this week!? The movie has the benefit of being a movie, if that makes sense. It can be straightforward, it can kind of stand on its own, as much as that may be impossible when one considers that it's probably borderline incomprehensible unless one has just rewatched the series. I think that explains the negative reaction. Everyone's just gotta get on their stationary bikes and rewatch all six seasons of the show first. I guess that's why I think the movie is a masterpiece and ... people on reddit are literally theorizing that it's bad on purpose!? It's not bad on purpose! Get on your bikes, Reddit! Spend all of August on your bike watching the show!

 

* Everyone's great in it! The guy, the main guy, Alessandro Nivola, he has a nearly impossible task and he absolutely succeeds at it.

 

* The two kids they got to play Younger Tony and Young Tony — one of whom is Gandolfini's kid!!!! — do a great job. Corey Stoll does absolutely uncanny work in imitating Dominic Chianese ("He don't have the makings of a varsity athlete" "I hear he's slow with the talking"), both Vera Farmiga and Jon Bernthal are really good as Tony's parents. The girl they got playing Teen Carmela during that one scene delivers that one line ("Stop it!") absolutely beautifully.

 

* Kind of think Silvio would have made a better narrator (apparently there were cuts where it was Paulie!? Or Carmela!?) considering what he does at the end of the movie and the condition he's in at the end of the series. But, regardless, the narration's good! First inconsistently narrated movie I really really really liked, I think, usually it bugs me if it's not evenly distributed throughout the body of the movie but for this movie it didn't.

 

Just Some Bits I Really Really Liked

·         Tony being honest w/his Ma about the reason he couldn't go w/his father (because he'd pass gas while he was eating lunch) but eliding that particular detail when he later recounts that day to Dr. Melfi!

·         Dickie Moltisanti kicking in the TV; that and the TV sign-off before the start of the brutality in the car shop; excellent!

·         Vera Farmiga breaking out the "Poor you!"

·         the use of the song 'You' by The Aquatones in the scene where Dickie Moltisanti cries his eyes out

Saw them. Thought they were neat! Wish there was more episodes. Always enjoyable to shovel the Star Wars into my eyes and ears.

Had a visceral dislike for Toby the Astroboy and his stupid trashcan jetpack-backpack companion. Hated his dumb fleshy face, hated his hopes and dreams, really just could not stand his whole deal at all. I wish the Jedi hunter had killed him, sliced him right up, but seeing as he survived their battle I can but hope there's no hyperdrive on his T-16 Skyhopper so he's doomed to spend the rest of his existence drifting through the cold void of space.

Liked the little tape-cassette droid. Liked the yellow whirligig webcam-head droid. I'm undecided about the ancient tea drinking Scud The Disposable Assassin. Hated the floating lunchbox with the all-too-human looking eye, hated it almost as much as Toby, was glad to see it destroyed, hopefully that adopted furry kid can't manage to repair it.

Liked the stiletto lightsaber heel on the evil twin. Liked the family heirloom lightsaber that the adopted furry kid wielded. Really liked that ending fight move the older Jedi used where he ignited his saber only after first making contact with the body of the titular/eponymous Elder, that was choice.

[Edit : Even after a solid month I am still nerdmad about Toby. I want the Yuuzhan Vong to grab him up and tear him to pieces!!!1!]

Summer of '99 at first. Joined up again in Summer '05; I did so a couple more times in between, too.

Saw it! Loved it!

The movie super duper surprised me by avoiding doing something that I was sure it was heading towards — a hacky twist that's still latently present within the movie itself but I was glad that it avoids explicitly foregrounding. I'm fairly sure what I'm thinking of (it's kind of a spoiler, I suppose) is even now providing fodder for dumb dumb YouTube clickbait video essays about 'The True Hidden Secret Identity Of Gawain', actually, no, whatever, I shouldn't be so dismissive of the imagined and assumed opinions of unknown others, that's not my bag, go with God.

Yeah! Pretty odd when you consider that it all comes from a grand sum total of two (2) lines in ANH :

 

"You fought in the Clone Wars?"

and

"General Kenobi, years ago you served my father in the Clone Wars."

 

That's it. Nothing else in the movie and nothing else in the rest of the Original Trilogy.

I gave up on this about five minutes in. The animation style is stilted, weird, downright unheimlich. It reminds me of the brainwashing animatics from the Jonathan Demme Manchurian Candidate (which also co-starred Jeffrey Wright!) or those rotoscoped flicks like Waking Life and the Philip K. Dick one whose title escapes me at the moment, wait, it was A Scanner Darkly and it was ALSO directed by Richard Linklater!!!! And the voice acting in it registers to me as equally off-putting, everybody’s performance is just way too low key.

I think I’ll skip this show until and unless they adapt my favourite What Ifs — those’d be #6 (“What if the Fantastic Four had different superpowers?”), #11 (“What if the original Marvel Bullpen had become the Fantastic Four?”), #13 (“What if Conan the Barbarian walked the Earth today?), #14 (“What if Sgt. Fury had fought World War II in outer space?”, I particularly like the scaly hide of the Alphans, the evil aliens in this’n, don’t think they’ve ever showed up anywhere else), okay, well, we’ll be here all day if I keep at it and I’m tippy typing this on my tablet while pumping my dumb legs on a stationary recumbent bicycle so everything takes four times as long.

 

I like my What Ifs; just wish this show was drawn in a different style and had all the characters voiced by working animation professionals rather than the originators of the roles and/or regular live action actors.

I take stuff fairly often. My body! It hurts me! You've gotta be careful, obviously, because too much of it at once or too regular use of the stuff will ... I'm not actually super duper clear on what'll happen. Burn a hole through my belly? Mess up my internal organs? Imbalance my humours?

In any case, I haven't exhausted all the available remedies offered by the local apothecaries. There's still more kinds of pills to pop. I've been exercising fairly heavily (for me, that is, by my own personal standards) this summer and for a few weeks there that seemed to offer me some relief, the pain went away, but it's since returned.

I’ve had some fair-to-middling results w/the standard off the shelf stuff : ibuprofen, acetaminophen, naproxen. Some equally mixed results w/topical pain relievers : diclofenac diethylamine gel, Arnica flower fluid extract. Nothing’s really worked so far with the sort of 100% instantaneous relief and consistent track record that I suppose I’d ideally like; if I take anything I mostly just wake up the next day w/the pain substantially lessened and then a day or two after that if I’m lucky the pain is gone. Sometimes the pain doesn’t go away, sometimes the pain is only minimally lessened. I’d like to end this post w/something upbeat like, “Hope this helps!” or something jokingly (or seriously!?) disclamatory (not a word!??? my spellchecker says this word isn't real but the dictionary disagrees) like, “This is not medical advice — consult w/your physician” but instead I’ll just be frank and say I suffer so much from chronic pain that I’m not even going to bother putting this up on Nightly.Net now. Going to wait until tomorrow instead! Maybe my back’ll be better!!!!1!

I gave up about an hour and fifteen minutes into it. Wasn’t feeling it! None of the jokes really landed for me (because they were mostly my least favourite kind, Mr. Monopoly, just an unending sequence of Mr. Monopoly jokes over and over again) and there was maybe one (1) halfway good action sequence in the entire picture up to that point : when the three varieties of soldier action figure (the movie emphasizes how Peacemaker and Bloodsport are basically the same, yeah, but so is Rick Flag!) are being carted away in the back of a jeep to their deaths and they have to frantically best their captors, take control of the car, and deal w/the convoy around them and oncoming traffic. And I didn’t really get all the hemming and hawing from, like, Steve Agee over whether or not Amanda Waller would really put a juvenile offender in a dangerous prison which is the sort of awful thing that happens each and every day in the country he’s lived in all his life and all over the world besides, not to mention the fact that he’s already seen her kill a bunch of people (well, not people, not really. I mean, are celebrities people? Do we really think Pete Davidson counts as a person?) and nearly kill Rick Flag, too, just as a distraction.

Have probably half-a-dozen more complaints but is it fair to voice ‘em when I never bothered to finish the movie!? Nope! Mostly, I guess, over all, in the end, I have to say I just really missed the grotesque dark-yet-luminescent sheen of the metahuman transformed monsters from the first one. If they’d shown up again during the first hour and fifteen minutes of this particular reboot/sequel/failedcashgrab then I’d probably have been able to push aside all my little quibbles with the movie and get down to the grim business of not enjoying the rest of it in peace. (If you tell me, truthfully, that these particular monsters show up again in the remainder of the film I will seriously consider picking up where I left off.)

Saw this. While plugging away on the stationary bike, mind mostly vacant, but a few thoughts nonetheless:

 

1) You'd think it'd get kind of old to just watch these characters overcome obstacles (and themselves!) while a Top 40 hit plays on the soundtrack. It doesn't! Can't wait for more of it! Every time a rocket blasts off, fun. Every time they use their deepfake tech to alter existing footage, fun. Every time they'd kill off a 'real' person, fun.

 

2) Every single thing I looked up that seemed implausible at first blush ended up being absolutely real, or real enough for my purposes. Like, for example : the thing with the lunar regolith and the CME (1) (2) (3). By the end of it I was wondering if moonbases on the moon really would have Earth-like gravity. Of course, they wouldn't, but there's a limit to how far they'll go and ultimately a vague sense of verisimilitude is more important for these things than the sort of actual factual strict adherence to a mimetic representation of reality that'd be both prohibitively expensive and almost completely unparsable to 99% of the audience. But my point is that every time I thought they were dragging their feet, afraid to cross those limits, it ended up being that they'd actually stuck their toe across the line, what we were seeing on screen was close to what could’ve really happened.

 

3) I naturally expected that there’d be online discussion out there about what was real, what was fake, how the show’s alternate timeline could’ve unfolded, that sort of thing. Of course, right? But what I expected to find and DIDN’T, and this kind of leaves me flabbergasted, is constant and serious fevered speculation over whether or not Pam the bartender is a secret undercover KGB agent. I’m not saying she is, I’m not saying she isn’t, I’m saying that there should be chitter chatter online about this. Where’s all my Pam theories!? Pretty much from the second episode or so of the first season I was pretty sure there’d be talk on the Internet about her being an undercover Soviet asset. But if there is, if it’s out there, I can’t find it.

 

4) Joel Kinnaman is terrible in the first year and absolutely AMAZING in the second year. His performance is so wooden and hollow when he’s playing a young man (like everything else I’ve ever seen him in, really) and just incredibly engaging to watch when he’s playing an older guy, a guy who’s suffered, a guy who’s had to make hard choices. He’s a great actor! He just has to play somebody other than Robocop, or that guy in those final seasons of the Netflix adaptation of House of Cards, or Rick Flagg in Suicide Squad. Wait, ImdB is telling me he’s Swedish and … Jewish!?? (My other big opinion about the boys on this outer space show is that it's kind of sad how ten years ago Jeff Hephner was playing hot young white hope roles, like he was on Boss, and now he's already aged up into being the rich old man w/younger famous wife.)  (Oh, wait, I have a few more boys opinions : Saul Rubinek shows up for an episode as a Congressman, James Urbaniak is on the show as a FBI spook, Michael Harney is a TV newscaster. My opinion is that they're great, I love seeing 'em on screen, hope they get to go Mars in Season 3. Okay. That's it. That's enough. No more boys.)

 

5) WUBBO IS REAL!!!!????????????

I didn't watch the show when it was airing (well, that's not strictly true — I saw the one episode everyone always went on and on about, I didn't like it, figured the show wasn't for me) but a couple years ago I sort of half-watched half-eyed most of the show from about the middle up until the end. I liked what I sort of semi-absorbed, I didn't really give it my full attention, I could tell I was missing out on something special though; should probably go back to the beginning and watch it properly.

I think anyone really really excited about the movie, who really really expects it to be good, should watch Not Fade Away (2012) first, David Chase's movie he made after the show was over, and then maybe readjust their expectations. Watching that movie is the other thing that kept me from giving the show a proper try, watching that movie is the reason I felt confident I could just jump in on the show in the middle and just sort of eyeball it while idly playing Settlers of Catan online in the other half of my screen. I was wrong, in the end, sure, but that movie (dull! airless! practically plotless! the music did half the work and for an audience member w/no specific attachment to those particular choices much of the time the music was like the goggles, the music did nothing!) fooled me into thinking I made the right decision on both counts.

6 hours ago, zambingo said:

You know, some of us probably could say “I still post at Nightly.”

It me.

Going to put this in a quote because spoilers follow -

 

Quote

 

Kind of a C+ for me. Most of 'em are, really, didn't come into it expecting to be blown away. But, generally speaking, it feels less like a movie movie and more like a mishmash of v. recent Marvel movies : it's got the general late period Russo Bros. vibe, it's got the fat Thor jokes from Avengers: Endgame (2019), the movie ends w/an audio sting of the Avengers theme just like Captain Marvel (2019) and even features a needle drop of a Nirvana song just like that one, it's a James Bond riff much like Black Panther (2018). Most of the stuff that ISN'T from v. recent Marvel movies is from, you guessed it, slightly older Marvel movies. It felt like any time the brain trust behind the movie had to decide what Scarlet Johansson would do in any given scene they just dipped their hands into a hat with lots of little slips of paper in it, on those slips of paper are things she did in previous appearances, things like "DISGUISE SELF AS SOMEONE ELSE LIKE I DID IN CAPTAIN AMERICA II (2014)" or "SAY THE LINE I SAID IN MY INTRODUCTORY SCENE IN THE AVENGERS (2012)", that's kind of how the movie moved her character through a Connect The Dots style plot entirely about what this dead person got up to back when she was alive, where she was when doing what, just a deadeyed slog through pre-existing referents (there is a Geoff Johns style bit where we find out the deep meaning behind the vest she was wearing in Avengers: Infinity War (2018)!) while flaccid pseudo-jokes are dropped willy nilly out of actors' mouths.

 

So, on the one hand, I didn't like it too much because it felt like a cold and cynical calculated exercise in brand management by a supercorporation but on the other hand I kind of DID like it because it was also a ... hah ... somewhat faithful adaptation of a few issues of Marvel Fanfare from back in the '80s that I once flipped through when I fished 'em out of a back issue bin twenty years ago!? They made this movie for everyone, to please everybody, that's how they make these, but it still felt like they made the movie for me. I remember a discussion (not here, on some other forum, and not involving me, someone else said this) of the bone deep weirdness of being in a movie theatre to see Blade : Trinity (2004) and hearing Parker Posey scream out at the top of her lungs, "Hannibal Kiiiiing!" and marveling (no pun intended, surely) at that character's name being said in public, where real people would pay to hear it, for real money. Our dumb little hobbies took over the world!

 

They made the movie way too late for me to really care about it in precisely the same way I used to care about this stuff. I mean, shouldn't this have come out, no joke, ten years ago!? But they still made it anyway, better late than never I suppose, and I still kind of liked it.

 

More Of What I Can Remember Disliking About The Movie

• She watches Moonraker (’79) but NOT the bit w/the classic line: “James Bond, you arrive with the tedious inevitability of an unwanted season.”
• The goofy make’em’ups they scatter throughout the action in these things have always been a problem to me, the lines often feel like they'd belong in a Michael Bay movie more than anything else, but even for that low standard they really aren’t quite up to snuff this time around. Florence Pugh tells ScarJo basically the same thing twice during the Budapest chase sequence, once when they’re about to get away by motorcycle and once again when they’re about to get away by car. Then, later, during the prison break sequence she exhales a sharp “Hah!” to punctuate an action beat and then does it AGAIN.
• In general, action = bad. There's a fairly good opening action bit where they're fleeing America in the beginning, DavidHarbour has to save his family, they have to save him, they're fleeing from the cars in their plane, everything tracks. The movie never gets better than that, action-wise. All the remaining action sequences, the big set pieces, they all felt dull or incoherent or both.
• I’m not sure the movie can reveal Taskmaster as ScarJo’s Jungian shadow (and the audience’s!) in one moment and then set this damaged walking pile of her guilt’n’shame up for a bruising knockdown fight w/her own father figure in the v. next moment. I mean, it tried to. But I don't think it worked. In general, the movie did not do a good job tonally of switching back'n'forth between its two modes of (1) Fun Peppy Spy Adventure and (2) Dark Family Melodrama. I don't think anyone's managed to mesh the serious and the funny in these movies to best effect, maybe w/the exceptions of Joss Whedon and Joe Johnston (he made World War II seem like fun fun fun!), everyone else falls flat on their face for me.
• Why'd they only show the one hand of DavidHarbour's knuckle tats!? What's it say on the other hand, Disney Co.!?  Karl What, Disney Co.!? Disney Co., Disney Co., Disney Co., I'm disappointed in you. You'll make a movie w/the assistance of the Pentagon stating baldly outright that the post-WWII global consensus was undergirded by a Nazi death cult, you'll make a movie (presumably w/Pentagon assistance this time around too but I didn't bother to check in the end credits, but I did make sure to note the names of John Buscema, Paul Cornell, Adi Granov, Devin Grayson, Don Heck, J.G. Jones, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Ralph Macchio, David Michelinie, Richard K. Morgan, Jimmy Palmiotti, George Perez, Joe Quesada, Tom Raney, Don Rico, John Romita Sr., Chris Samnee, Bill Sienkiewicz, Roy Thomas, and Mark Waid) about how the modern world order since the fall of the Iron Curtain has been maintained by an uneasy confluence of child abuse and assassination and mind control, but you WON'T make a movie where Karl Marx's full name appears legibly on screen. It reminds me a little bit of that moment from Netflix's Bo Burnham's Inside (2021), the thing with the sock puppet, where Marx's name is also conspicuously absent. Capitalism will sell you the rope that'll hang itself, sure, but it will deliberately choose to forego telling you outright what the rope is and where it came from. That's a step too far, I suppose.
• At various points in the movie I lost track of where the vials were, what the vials where (I guess on a symbolic level they’re kind of just the beautiful fireflies in their Ohio home), the movie’s got a lot of heart but at the end of the day it’s mostly a movie about vials and I’m still not sure what the deal is w/the vials. The movie knows this, knows the audience is going to get a little lost w/the vials, lampshades that with its own little scene where Florence Pugh mockingly explains the vials, but I’m still on edge about it. Was the disc from the beginning the vials!? How did the first Widow who fashpritzed one of the vials on Florence Pugh find the vials? By the end of the movie vials are coming out of pockets all the time and I've got no clue how they got there or, if they were there all along then why they hadn't been used previously, I got a lot of vial questions.

 

Some Of What I Can Remember Liking About The Movie, I Saw It Over The Weekend But That Already Feels Like Forever Ago, Sorry!

• That’s definitely the kind of dinner set you’d get corn’on’the’cob served to you for dinner in if you were a ~10 year old kid in 1995. I know because I was one then and, yep, that’s what we ate ‘em out of!
• I said already about the movie having a lot of heart. That's what I liked about movie, that's what got me there. The movie ruined it every other second w/jokes that weren't funny and action that wasn't thrilling but I felt the feelings. I mean, it's pretty easy for a superhero movie to get me to feel the feelings, even a bad superhero movie, there's a moment in Green Lantern (2011) where Peter Sarsgaard, infected by an alien organism that's driving him mad, slurs out the words, "Remember when we were kids? Remember then?" to Blake Lively. I felt that!
• So, yes, a lot of heart but ALSO a lot of ... butt!? The movie's about hearts but the movie never forgets about the bodies those hearts come in AND it puts those bodies on display in a way I found pleasing to the eye. I'll watch Florence Pugh and Scarlet Johansson and Rachel Weisz do their little dances, say their little lines, I'm not picky. I liked looking at Florence Pugh, they didn't put her in a striking yellow number like in that John le Carré adaptation she did w/Park Chan-Wook but beggars can't be choosers. I liked hearing ScarJo talk, I liked the hair style Rachel Weisz had on her reclusive superspy St. Petersburg farm (who did it? did she ... did she train the pigs to do her hair like that!?), I'm into it, I want more of it, I'm down for Black Widow II (2024) or a Black Widow mini-series on Disney+, bring Natasha back from the dead, have it be Selina Meyer's doublecross Skrull plan or whatever, I don't care.
• The maybe obvious point about how at first it seems like David Harbour is lying about meeting up w/Cap but by the time of his conversation w/ScarJo I became convinced that he really did, he's not lying, because Avengers: Endgame (2019) ends w/Chris Evans going traipsing all over creation to put the Infinity Gems back where they belong (one can but assume some awkwardness w/the Red Skull once he finds him on that mountain planet, of course) so of course it's possible for it to have occurred back in the eighties. Red Guardian fought Captain America back in '83 or '84, that's canon, for real.
• David Harbour saying “he go toilet on my hands”, all time great moment.

 

I think I'm pretty much the same as I was when I was 18.

I don't think I'd get along well w/my 18 year old self, wait, how are we even interacting!??? Is this time travel rules or what!? Did he find a time machine!? Did I!? Who built this time machine!? Okay, ignoring that critical issue for the moment, I think the question of how the two of us (the one of us, actually!) would get along together is kind of silly when there's so much I can warn me about the world that's coming between '05 and now! I imagine we'd put aside our differences and learn to overcome our similarities and then just get straight to trying to ineffectively prevent or at LEAST mitigate world historical disasters — the Haiti earthquake, for example, or, wait, am I showing up on my eighteenth birthday!? If I'm showing up on my eighteenth birthday then I maybe have time to help save a few lives from the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami; I've been assuming that me now at the age I am today is back then in my eighteenth year at exactly the same period of time in my eighteenth year, I assume that I'm seven months and six days into it, I've been assuming that the me of July 6 2021 has time travelled back to July 6 2005 but that scenario isn't written in stone. And, like, is he showing up here or am I showing up then!? If he shows up here does he eventually go back to live out his life and become me!??? How!????

I feel like this is in some strange impossible (and obvious! I bet I'm not the first guy to make this joke!) way karmic retribution for Hannibal Buress being a landlord. If he'd only invested his money in, like, weed start-ups instead then Bill Cosby would still be locked up. His sin redounded through time and has freed the guilty!

(Obviously, seriously, I blame the prosecutor. No, wait, I blame society.)