“USians” is “sportsball” but for geopolitics

Thanks!

Mamdani is the human equivalent of buying grandma a Best of Sunday crossword puzzle book and having an actual conversation beyond disinterested smalltalk.

Yeah, saying something is suddenly classified is a notoriously sure way to make everyone immediately lose interest.

Call it Bluebeard's Law. Forbidding people from opening the locked room guarantees they're gonna be compelled to do exactly that.

Kinda worried the plan is some half-assed "distraction" that won't work but will cause serious harm and/or death to some totally innocent human beings somewhere. (Blowing up more boats, dropping something horrible on a village in Nigeria, having Bovino terrorize another building at 3AM...)

Dunno what the play is but if I lived in Venezuela or Nigeria I'd be keeping an eye on the horizon and meandering towards the nearest fallout shelter.

They're stalling for time while Bondi and Kash pump as many Epstein emails out of Grok as possible.

Please note that I didn't say the challenge was successful, necessarily, but

In Frankenstein some set pieces actually are practical but that weird sanitized digital look Netflix always insists on flattens everything to the point that it looks CGI. (Though at one point there's briefly an oil painting that's so flat it looks like it was printed at Kinkos.)

Right, and why go to the trouble of hiring Doug Jones and suiting him up just to bury him under augmentation?

The really noticeable augmentation in Crimson Peak is where the wheels came off. Rewatched it the other day with my expectations adjusted because I hated it ten years ago and upgraded it to "eh whatever" but yeah the ghost augmentation is definitely now ten year old CGI.

I'm being particularly hard on it because:

✅️Del Toro is capable of better than this and his CGI addiction is maddening
✅️I recently watched The Vourdalak which was shot on a budget of like 2 euros and features a life-size vampire puppet and it was absolutely charming, so what's the excuse here

His accent is its own character.

There's a great moment early on where between maybe an editing lapse creating an awkward pause & someone mis-marking which word in a sentence should be stressed he and Christoph Waltz just kind of awkwardly trail off in the middle of what is presumably an argument.

Tell me if you catch what might be crew smudge no one bothered to wipe off the mirror on the left side of Christoph Waltz's dining room when Oscar Isaac is petulantly chugging milk while I guess interacting with Mia Goth whose gown they only shoot from the waist up.

Frankenstein couldn't find an eyeball for the creature but he did manage a full set of Hollywood veneers.

"Wacky Marjorie" doesn't have the same punch as "Meatball Ron" or "Lyin' Ted." He's slipping into has-been territory.

And in their desperation they turned on a woman they didn't fully understand.

The ideal person for the job right now is someone who has no ability to move up beyond the role and doesn't do useful wildcard shit that would be hampered by the role. Given the veritable sin buffet waiting for them you probably want someone who's gonna retire soon anyway.

So...Chuck Schumer.