Beyond The Mac Rainbow

I’m baffled by the seemingly widespread consensus on both Rotten Tomatoes and reddit that CADDO LAKE is confusing or fails to connect its dots. If you’ve read a bit of Emily St. John Mandel or watched a bit of Steven Moffat you should be able to follow it just fine.

It’s a pretty solid movie, but fair warning if you’re doing the Spooky Season thing, it’s a bit deceptive that HBO has it in the horror section.

CADDO LAKE is a great example of how much you can refresh standard tropes by transplanting them to an underused milieu. It’s basically “Blink on the bayou” but it gets a lot of mileage from the “on the bayou” part.

If I were in charge, every scene on television would begin exactly like this

There is a searing rage throughout the right wing that vulnerable people ever managed, by appealing to people’s consciences, to attain a brief bit of leverage in society.

Charge them with attempted murder.

Like if you found him wandering the streets with total amnesia you’d name him Frank Grillo as a placeholder while you tried to trace his family.

It’s amazing how much Frank Grillo looks like a guy named Frank Grillo.

911 is like the new RIVERDALE for me, in that I feel like it’s more fun to occasionally find out what happening on it now than to watch it.

9-1-1 poster with Angela Bassett in FUCKING SPACE!

Look, I appreciate this. TV needs more of this. Let’s have fun again. Seriously things are so bad in the industry and everywhere. Let’s all turn on stuff at night together and go “that was insane” and then surprise there are 20 more episodes and the characters don’t remember being in orbit.

Part of it is obviously that Trump wants vengeance on a long list of people, but another part is that this is how he tests people. He specifically wants a qualified federal prosecutor to pursue a case she knows is without merit because he told her to.

As someone pointed out in replies, as a well-funded media institution the New York Times could very simply deploy some reporters to the streets of Portland to determine if circumstances there rise to the level of domestic military intervention.

"Vent Fury" is such weird, awkward wording that it's hard to know why you'd use it unless you wanted the Oregon officials to look like rage-cases for <checks notes> objecting to something that's straightforwardly objectionable.

I will NEVER “keep it respectful

I know hypocrisy-owns don't do anything, but for me it's more about the future: any time Republicans talk about liberty or states' rights going forward, Democrats and journalists need to immediately jump down their throats: "We know you don't believe that, we know you're lying right now."

Hell, if they tried this in the US there'd be civil war.

God, imagine the torrent of spiteful opinion columns that would greet this if they tried this in Britain.

The new Supreme Court term starts today, meaning that -- in a novel twist -- the justices will hear oral arguments in some cases before they issue rulings that actually explain what they are doing.

We must now start calling this what it is: Trump’s Invasion. It started with federal agents, it will soon include deploying federalized members of the Illinois National Guard against our wishes, and it will now involve sending in another state’s military troops.

I would really like to know what journalistic virtue would be betrayed by the NYT or NBC announcing tomorrow morning - or shit, why not now - that the Trump Administration is attempting an authoritarian takeover of the United States.

Again, I put the question to media institutions: what is “objective” about looking at the accumulated facts available and then *not* reporting what they add up to?

Goonies sometimes say die

My buddy @justinmuschong.bsky.social had the perfect summation of how you feel after you finish that movie: “I never *needed* a beer more or *wanted* a beer less.”

The internet used to be where you uploaded a photo and it put a piece of bacon on it and now it’s the end of the world

The ALTERED STATES missing-link-run-amok sequence is a real classic of the “this is waaaaaay pre-CGI, a dude actually did all that shit” genre.

Two characters from the Star Wars show Andor talking about how the enemy isn't even putting in an effort to lie anymore because they no longer need to.

Logo for The Harbingers

God, it just really hit me

It’s less than 10 days until the release of my new podcast 😱

Qualley’s the best reason to see this. After a run of good performances this feels like her coming-out party as a movie star: poised, interesting to watch, anchors the movie effortlessly.

Taylor Swift

HONEY DON’T - it is amazing how neatly Single Coen movies feel like what they are. You can absolutely tell that *a* Coen is involved, but just as clearly that the full brain trust isn’t. If I watched this cold with no context I would be all “did like *one* Coen Brother make this?”