SeanC

Aemond has officially used the dragon that Rhaena wanted to claim to kill both her fiance and her grandmother. I appreciate that the writers of this show aren't scared of cool dream sequences, unlike the writers of Game of Thrones.

Really nice to see Milly Alcock again, albeit only briefly.

She wasn’t altering things in the first movie.

Her objections in this weren't to Riley experiencing other emotions, she disagreed with Anxiety specifically over decision-making (and moral questions) and then got kicked out of headquarters when the latter unilaterally decided to take over. She wasn't selectively curating memories in the first one, she was trying to keep Riley from being sad all the time.

That wasn’t what Joy decided. She learned to stop trying to curate which memories affected Riley’s sense of self; she didn’t have a problem working with the other emotions.

There's been a lot of discussion about Pixar's push to produce more sequels -- in this case, at least, the premise of Inside Out is such that new scenarios are plentiful and wholly natural extensions of the initial concept. The original was, for my money, the best thing the studio has made since WALL-E. A tough act to follow, in other words. The mostly new creative team (original co-writer Meg LeFauve is back to again co-author the screenplay; Pete Docter has ceded the director's chair to Kelsey Mann, though since he now runs Pixar it's not like he wasn't heavily involved) delivers a very good followup entry that never manages the raw emotional power of the original, but is well worth your time. The whole voice cast is good, but Maya Hawke is the MVP here. I also thought that Liza Lapira replaced Mindy Kaling quite seamlessly.

If he left the police department (which one imagines he did), that's not terribly implausible. But even if they did hear about it eventually, after a certain point, what would they even be able to find?

After its rapturous reception on the festival circuit, Richard Linklater's Hit Man being sold to Netflix produced a mini-crisis among online cinephiles, mourning what this says about distributors' current perceptions of the theatrical marketplace for films like this. One wonders if things would have been different if it had been put up for sale after the success of Glen Powell's Anyone But You last Christmas. Very loosely inspired by the career of educator and undercover cop Gary Johnson (Powell, the model of a modern romantic lead, who also earns a co-writer credit with Linklater here), we follow Johnson as he becomes a skillful fake assassin, used to lure people stupid enough to think that contract killers for hire are actually a thing. Then prospective client Madison (Adria Arjona), a woman looking for a way out of a bad marriage, causes him to balk. Complications ensue. Hit Man is an interesting film to classify in terms of genre. It opens with elements of a comedy procedural, shifts into romantic comedy territory, and then at least dips its toes in film noir. What it is perhaps more than anything is an advertisement for the movie star charisma of Powell. Linklater's mostly-forgotten-about 2006 film Fast Food Nation was one of Powell's earliest roles, leading to a larger part in the director's Everybody Wants Some!! in 2016; along with his most widely-seen supporting part in Top Gun: Maverick, he has become a romantic staple in recent years both on Netflix (Set It Up) and in theatres (Anyone But You), and Hit Man is his best vehicle yet. Arjona is terrific opposite him, and one hopes and imagines this will lead to more prominent parts for her as well.

https://variety.com/2024/film/news/x-men-movie-screenwriter-michael-lesslie-1236012406/ Trying to judge non-auteur screenwriters based on their track record is notoriously dodgy, since you never know for sure how many uncredited rewrites may have been done, what sort of directorial/studio mandates they were dealing with, etc. Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes was a solid adaptation of the source material, for what it's worth. But by the same token, based on Marvel Studios' past track record, he may well just be the first of many writers to take a pass at this in the development phase.

He just said it happened eventually, so I don't imagine it was immediate.

I mean, Sheldon in TBBT is a gigantic asshole and there's a million jokes of him relating events that happened earlier in an episode in a completely warped manner. That isn't to say that Young Sheldon didn't wholesale retcon pretty much everything relating to his family, as it clearly did, but I have a hard time seeing it as some big betrayal of the earlier show's character.

Carpenter changes the lyrics in the final verse of "Nonsense" all the time in live performances, in keeping with the theme of the song of her saying random stuff. Here's one list of them from the Eras tour.

Writing-wise they had a bit of a challenge here because the endpoint of this show really only makes sense as an ending for Sheldon (and George Sr., obviously). The writers more or less decided to embrace this -- for Missy, in particular -- which is naturalistic, but also to some extent unsatisfying for some people, I'm going to guess. I'll be interested to see how the planned spinoff with Georgie and Mandy handles the rest of the family.

I saw some debate casting Zendaya as a 30+ mother, but she's 27 and I tend to doubt she'll look much different than she does now in her early 30s. Pretty good film overall, I thought, with a legitimately great ending. It's fairly rare to see a movie end in such a sharp manner these days; that sort of conclusion is something I more associate with pre-1990s studio films. The use of "Hot in Herre" as a marker of the mid-2000s was great.

I liked it. It never really feels like it's threatening to become a great summer movie, which is what I was hoping for based on the pedigrees of many of the people involved (though Leitch has never quite lived up to his solo directorial debut, Atomic Blonde), but it's solidly constructed. Gosling and Blunt are given a lot of space to work, rather than things feeling overly cluttered, and their relationship has enough weight to make you care. Structurally I kind of wish there was a way to get more of the dynamic between Seavers and Ryder in the early going/setup phase, because that would make him a more impactful figure. As is he's just kind of there.

Why would he know that the Bene Gesserit wanted him on the throne? It's Baron Harkonnen who he knows is scheming to achieve that. Paul already indicated in the film that Chani will come to understand the situation. The Atreides gave up Caladan for Arrakis. The bunker is on Arrakis because the nuclear weapons are of no use to House Atreides anywhere else.

They couldn't really have it play out like it did in the comics even if they wanted to, since the original show already did the Phoenix Saga and Jean's death and return.

Illyana appeared in one episode of the original animated series as Colossus' sister, but she didn't have powers, etc.

The 2018 rules changes cut time from the men's and pairs free programs so that they're the same length as women and dance, and as a result each lost an element; for men in was the eighth jumping pass (they now do seven, like the women) and for pairs it was the side-by-side spins.

A 1989-set neo noir about a discontented gym employee (Kristen Stewart), an aspirant bodybuilder (Katy O'Brian), and a heap of trouble that they become entangled in. This is, first and foremost, a visceral film, both in its sensuality and its bouts of explosive violence (one particular postmortem depiction drew audible gasps from the audience at the screening I attended). All of this is accompanied by a solid streak of black comedy, and (even moreso than your average crime movie) a willingness on the part of the script not to insist on its characters always being likable and morally upright. Stewart and O'Brian play off each other very well, aided by solid supporting performances from the likes of Ed Harris and Anna Baryshnikov. Marvel Studios could have saved a lot of VFX money on its She-Hulk series if they had just cast O'Brian in the title role, painted her green, and digitally enlarged her somewhat. She's a striking screen presence who we will hopefully see more of in the future.

It might change an aspect of Children of Dune, but Villeneuve isn't planning to make that one anyway.

Alia isn't born, so by implication it's been less than nine months since the initial Harkonnen assault.

The main reservation some had with respect to the first film was that it was very much the first half of a story rather than a truly independent film in its own right. The release of Dune: Part Two secures the place for Villeneuve's duology as one of the great genre achievements of our time (whenever he gets around to making his planned Dune Messiah adaptation, one imagines it will become one of the great film trilogies). The first film heavily advertised the presence of Zendaya, whose actual screentime did not nearly live up to that billing. But that is certainly not the case here, and it becomes very apparent that Villeneuve's single most significant alteration to Herbert's Dune is the revised role of Chani. While not unimportant to the narrative, Chani was never one of Herbert's more nuanced characters, but that would not suffice either for a director like Villeneuve or a star like Zendaya. Chani, it turns out, is thematically crucial to the story of Dune: Part Two, in ways that in equal parts builds on the bones of Herbert's story and slightly (or significantly) revises details. The script bestows flesh and blood onto the bones of the narrative that did not really have that previously. It augurs for further and more interesting revisions to Dune Messiah as well. As with the earlier Dune, Villeneuve's touch with visual effects is noticeably distinct from what we see from many other contemporary cinematic franchises. Both shooting locations and even pure CGI creations have a sense tactility and weight bestowed up him by the director's camera and lighting, and you can tell that like James Cameron, all the time has been taken necessary to make things feel real, despite the fantastical nature of so much of what is onscreen. Bonus points also for the deployment of Anya Taylor-Joy, another of my favourite actresses, in a role so obviously suited for her that it might as well have been a fancasting assembled based on Tumblr gifs.

Already a thread: https://forums.primetimer.com/topic/139899-priscilla-2023/#comment-8202028

This is a relatively minor detail, but all the characters keep referring to "Sir Winston Churchill". He was not a knight in 1943; that wouldn't happen until ten years later, as part of the leadup to the Queen's Coronation.