Kel Varnsen

That part never really bothered me. I mean sure when babies are awake they require a lot of attention, but they also sleep a lot. So if a sitcom is basically covers 20 minutes out of a whole week, not seeing a baby in every episode isn't that surprising.

My read was that he is the king and since they are doing the ritual combat challenge thing I don't think it is temporary. Although she is still the Black Panther so she probably won't be taking too much me-time.

I am not sure. I mean logically all the price increases and the competition have probably pissed a bunch of people off and it would be stupid to try and do more stuff like that. At the same time though it is not hard for me to picture them making an announcement around when Stranger Things season 4 comes out that says that current subscribers are fine, but anyone who signs up after a certain date after that will have to start paying a fee to sign up. Basically daring people to cancel after they watch Stranger Things knowing that if they unsubscribe and want to come back it will cost even more.

Depending on how successful the password sharing crackdown was, it wouldn't surprise me if Netflix next implemented an activation charge. Something to discourage people from just signing up for a few months each year to watch a few shows then cancelling. I think they would probably need to have a run of really successful shows all in the same year if they wanted to try that.

Finished the last one today and thought it was pretty good although I thought it could have easily been one or two more episodes. Like they could have easily spent more time on that messed up contract Jill signed. Because even with my basic understanding of contract law it doesn't make sense. Because I thought for a contract to be enforceable each side had to get something. If she agreed to do work without getting anything in return how is that a binding contract? Not to mention if she signed it before she was married how would it cover her unborn kids. Like could she say that she will appear on the show but TLC is not allowed to film her kids? Because that would end the show pretty fast. Of course if IBLP people were allowed to watch TV she may have seen 30 Rock and know that the easy way to get around a reality show contract is to say everything on camera as a song to the tune of Uptown Girl, so they can't use it. Or wear a NY Rangers goalie mask while the cameras are around. They also could have dug more into the shitty education the home school people got, and how it contributes to the abuse. One thing that stood out from Behind the Bastards is that if girls aren't getting any kind of sex ed do they really understand if they are being abused? Also speaking of education I really want to know how that Joshua Generation got a Harvard Law degree and worked for a supreme court judge. When they spent all that time showing how terrible the fundamentalist home school education is. Lastly I am really curious if Jim Bob ran for state Senate to hopefully funnel donations into his son/family's legal defense. Since I have heard stories of other politicians who have had legal trouble (who I won't name) doing the exact same thing.

I had a few different explanations for how Michael had any money. One was that the jobs on the show weren't all the ones he took. Or that when a job involved infiltrating criminal groups he just stole from them, either directly or using his hacker buddy. Or he was also a spy for many years and Jack Bristow on Alias had a giant storage unit full of money, guns and other spy stuff. Surely he stole or kept that from various spy operations, so I figured that Michael had a similar stash of cash saved up from his spy days.

Two episodes into the season and it is pretty good. Although even by this shows standards a character player by John Mulaney dealing with a serious addiction that is harming him and then having an intervention is kind of uncomfortable.

I am two episodes in and so far it is pretty interesting. I knew most of the actual horrors from listening to the Behind the Bastards podcast on the Duggars and IBLP but getting actual first hand accounts from people is still pretty shocking. What I find interesting is that it is whitewashing for the general public and for people in their church. Because TV makes Jim Bob look like a big success (nice house, nice clothes) which in turn makes it look like having double digit number kids not so bad. Which is a good way to promote that lifestyle among people who would follow them. Even though in reality kids are expensive, and most people don't have a reality show paying them. I remember from the podcast I mentioned that there are a lot of IBLP followers that are literally dirt poor. At the very least it is the same brand of hypocrisy. Because if the goal was for families to have a bunch of kids, the wedding night sex manual wouldn't just be one position with a how to for handjobs. It would describe something that both partners would be into so that both would want to do it more often.

I like the part about how Star Wars is just continuing and retelling the same stories over and over again. The sad thing is it seems that the lesson Disney execs took from the success of Mandalorian season 1 was just the basic one that people want Star Wars TV shows not the more challenging one that people want new stories with original characters.

To be fair, it might not just be because they were animated, but for Rebels at least it originally came out on the Disney XD channel. And even Disney's own marketing says that is a channel for 6-11 year olds.

For me I don't care so much about the cohesion, if they want to make stand alone movies for awhile, that is cool. I just think at least for the movie side the majority of them were ok to good, it is just some pretty bad ones dropped the quality average lower than what people were used to. Looking at the schedule since 2021 I feel like if they just hadn't bothered with Eternals (both because it was kind of boring and 4 movies in one year was too much even after a year of nothing), and then made Ant Man and Black Panther a lot better then people would be talking a lot differently. Yes for BP a big part of it was Chadwick Boseman's death but even if it were the same Namor plot with him in it, I am not sure it would have been that great (so maybe they should have recast T'challa I am not sure). And Quantumania was just a dumb story with bad effects that didn't use any of the main actors well and didn't really make sense. Fix those two and the overall average goes up and people I think would accept what they had a lot more, because No Way Home and GOTG3 were great. And the rest were somewhere between ok and pretty good.

If you read that on the AV that may have been me. I wonder how much they will go into what an awful person he was. I didn't really know much about the family until I listened to the Behind the Bastards podcast episodes about Vince McMahon. The first one talks about the Von Erich's and how horrible Fritz was, and how he had a hand in a lot of the tragedy. Chris never should have been a wrestler and Mike should never gotten back in the ring after he had brain damage. And the tribute show after David's death seems like his dad trying to cash in on his sons passing. But then I watched the Beyond the Mat episode about the family, and they seemed to gloss over Fritz and how much control he had over the family. I have to wonder if part of that was because there were a lot of interviews with Kevin and that was part of the deal for him being involved (since he calls his dad a great man). Hopefully the movie isn't afraid to go in that direction.

I really thought there was going to be a twist at the end that blowing up the moon is what caused the apocalypse. I did like the joke about how Birds of Prey was a name that made no sense.

Hopefully they can fix things because there is definitely some good stuff in most of the shows. But there is also definitely a decline. You would think going from Ms. Marvel which had an unnecessary villain fight at the end, to She-Hulk which broke the 4th wall to call out unnecessary finale villain fights and then to Secret Invasion which had the most unnecessary finale villain fight of them all would have clued someone in. Especially with Ms. Marvel I went from being someone who was completely uninterested before it came out to wishing it didn't have a villain at all and was just about Kamala, figuring out her powers and her family history and dealing with family and friends.

I mentioned last week how stupid this plotline is and it continues to get dumber. I feel like even if Bradley didn't take the video and had no idea her brother was at the Capitol on Jan 6 until he came forward and could some how prove it, she still would probably lose her job if this was real. Absolutely if there was even a possibility that she knew before hand and covered it up. I wasn't super paying attention to the interview but from what I gathered he was a venture capital guy who bought their company and it actually took off and made a bunch of money. And when he bought it he paid a reasonable price for it. So what is the issue? If Stella could have developed it on her own she would have; isn't that the whole point of VC people. And don't they usually lose money on a bunch of projects just hoping one hits it big?

When I was 7 my cousin who was a teen was going to take me to see Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Weirdly it was only rated PG-13 but for some reason the ticket person thought that PG-13 meant kids under 13 couldn't see it without a parent (although PG-13 was only around for a year at that point for years I thought it was R). So she wouldn't sell us tickets and we went to see Pee Wee's Big Adventure at a different theatre. Weirdly I have never seen Beyond Thunderdome to this day, but Big Adventure is my favourite movie.

So this is probably the best place to ask about this, but I remember when I saw R rated movies in theatres as a kid, like T2 there was always these little like maybe 30 second cartoons at the start reminding people that the movie was R rated and kids weren't allowed without an adult. Does anyone else remember this? Was it only a Canadian thing? I tried googling but you only get results about actual R rated animated movies.

That is sort of the other problem I have had with all these sort of Mandalorian spin off shows. They have sort of fallen into that Marvel trap where they all have to lead to the next thing. And since we already know these shows are going to lead to a movie they can't really finish off much here. It is all about getting the pieces in place so that when Grogu and Mando and Boba Fett and No Katan and Ahsoka fight Thrawn they are all where they need to be. By comparison we already know how Cassian Andor's story ends, so his show can pretty much do whatever it wants to fill in the blanks and tell stories about what happened before Rogue One. And it was awesome.

I feel like they were kind of going there with The Last Jedi, what with the title and the whole scene with Luke and Yoda and burning down the little temple. If they had kept that plot it would have been a massively satisfying conclusion to the 9 movie series (Luke realizing the Jedi order is stupid and Rey going to find her own path). But then in the next movie she is back doing Jedi training. For the D+ shows I feel like they could have possibly dug into that theme, with Grogu walking away from Luke and here Ahsoka finding a different way to teach Sabine. But I get a sense from watching the behind the scenes stuff on the D+ shows that Filoni is a freaking George Lucas super fan who loves him and everything that he has done. So he probably won't be doing anything that goes against Lucas's vision for the series.

I watched the movie Maggie Moore(s) on Netflix on the weekend and it really made me wonder what is up with Jon Hamm. The movie was ok for a pretty basic crime solving cop movie. And I don't think it was very successful since I didn't even realize it wasn't a direct to Netflix thing until after I watched it. But I am really wondering why he isn't doing better more successful stuff. I know he was also in that Fletch movie which I don't think was very successful either and he had a small part in Top Gun: Maverick. But Mad Men basically made him a household name and he is a talented good looking actor. Did he make a bunch of money off Mad Men and now just does stuff for fun? I saw that Maggie Moore(s) was directed by John Slattery who was also in Mad Men so maybe he does just do stuff like that. And maybe he doesn't want to be in a super hero or Fast & Furious movie so there aren't a lot of options. And if that is the case why not go back to tv?

I saw Die Hard 2 in theatres with my parents in 1990 so I guess I would have been 12. Not sure I can remember seeing anything R in theatre before then (although I did see Terminator 2 the next year). As for home I can remember my birthday a year or two earlier having some friends over and renting a bunch of action movies like RoboCop and I think Commando. So I would have been 10 or 11.

Well there is one Mando with very strong force powers too. He is pretty popular too. Maybe he can meet Sabine if she ever makes it back to the main galaxy. That was definitely one big thing the prequels screwed up, especially Yoda. The whole hermit martial arts master who lives in some hard to reach place is a classic movie trope that is kind of awesome. But then the prequels changed it to Yoda being the leader of a huge, centralized organization who is in hiding mainly because of the huge mistakes he made.

Is Thrawn close to winning? Like he has one Star Destroyer and a bunch of busted up Storm Troopers. Instead of flying all the way to the fleet is there a reason Ezra couldn't have called Hera, said Thrawn and his one Star Destroyer are here, you should bring the fleet over and blow his ass up.

I wish some kind of main Star Wars project (like a movie or live action D+ show) would explore how much the Jedi order sucked. Because from their point of view you if you were skilled in the force you had to train as Jedi and have no close personal connections, because otherwise you would fall for the temptation of the dark side and turn evil. But their super rigid ways led to the downfall of the galaxy. But then in the original movies Yoda wants to train Luke as a Jedi and in the new movies he opens his own Jedi academy. And even here Ahsoka is training Sabine using the Jedi manual and calling her a Padawan and all of that. My dream is for Mandalorian season 4 if Din just says to Grogu that he is going to teach him what he knows and help him figure out his powers, and they go from there and Grogu gets stronger without turning evil. Because otherwise the idea that only Jedi can be good force people is really stupid.

And an Emmy winner, since Garrett reminds me a lot of Ted Lasso. I mean he sounds a lot like him and he has a moustache (he even said I appreciate you to the cab driver). Plus he works with a guy with a beard who doesn't seem to talk as much.