Get ready to be nostalgic for the Roger Moore era.

Marvel is getting a narrative pass from me for a little while as they had to make a massive corse correction after Jonathan Majors, who they were planning on hanging the next 5-7 years of movies on as their big-bad, turned out to be a dude that beats up women. The entire planned arc needed to be bent to accommodate Dr Doom instead, including reshoots on this and the rest of what’s coming out this year.

I think next year’s Marvel movie-products will be the ones that will benefit from not needing after-the-fact fixing.

Old. :)

Strawberry Mansion is one of my top 5 film from the last decade. I’m so ready!

The Intercept has a more recent article about him, including an interview:

https://theintercept.com/2025/02/10/super-bowl-kendrick-lamar-gaza-sudan-protester/

tl;dr: He’s fine, and been released without charges (so far).

Reading this made my knees hurt.

I’ve been deeply frustrated by the progressive stance on trans people in professional sports.

Anyone who began medical transitioning after puberty will have reasonably notable physical differences from cisgender people in their appropriately gendered sport. It’s similar to doping, but something their body was doing naturally with incorrect hormones that didn’t reflect their gender.

I certainly don’t feel good about it, but I do think there is a very viable argument to disqualify those kinds of trans people (who medically transitioned after puberty) from competition. The debate becomes much more nuanced as you consider different sports where physical differences between gender matter less. Rugby, weightlifting; trans folks are out. Target shooting, chess, darts; no problem. It’s a debate to be had sport by sport, league by league. The whole issue should have been messaged that way from the beginning.

Queer advocacy groups taking a broad “all or nothing” civil rights stance on this was a HUGE mistake. It’s an argument they were destined to lose, only affected a minuscule number of athletes, and wasted so much time and effort that could have been spent on other battles for trans rights. US Democrats take their cues on queer issues from those queer advocacy groups, so they rolled with it and got trampled.

I really want to have a conversation with queer strategists and Democrat policy leaders to understand why this was the hill they decided to make trans rights die on.

Vote with your wallets, people.

Also, it’s a huge step backwards in terms of trans representation. A trans filmmaker breaks it all down here: The Racist Cisgender Nonsense of Emilia Perez

This is especially egregious as one of the best films about the trans experience in decades also came out this year, and was completely snubbed by the Academy.

Yum yum.

🎯

One more for the thread:

Alien on Stage (2020, dir Danielle Kummer and Lucy Harvey)

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwUHTKOsZwk

This is a story about a unique crew of Dorset bus drivers whose amateur dramatics group decide to ditch doing another pantomime and try something different. They spent a year creating a serious adaptation of the sci-fi horror film Alien, finding ingenious solutions to pay homemade homage to the original film. The show is a crushing flop but fate gives them a second chance to find their audience. Whilst still adjusting to the idea that their serious show is actually a comedy, the group find out they’re suddenly being whisked from their village hall to a London West End theatre to perform this accidental masterpiece for one night only. With wobbly sets, awkward acting and special effects requiring ‘more luck than judgement,’ will their West End debut be alright on the night? This bus driving crew are our space heroes. Their bus station is our space station. Dorset is outer-space and where is the Alien? It’s behind you!

I think there is some deeply cynical logic, or a horrifying game of chicken, being played by Democratic leaders here.

Let’s say Jack Smith is given the go-ahead to investigate and prosecute Trump as fast as he possibly could (while building a bullet-proof case for conviction). With all the legal resources (not to mention Republican-friendly judges) available for Trump to leverage, it’s safe to say that Smith certainly would not have been able to complete a full trial and secure a conviction before the 2024 election. But perhaps one could have been under-way.

A Trump trial for election interference in the middle of 2024 would have been a galvanizing force for his base, and likely cause his popularity among like-minded folks to surge and likely help his polling numbers. After all, conservatives love their persecution complexes and already live in a hazy fantasy world where their guy can do no wrong. So this doesn’t help Democrats.

If Trump were to be acquitted, this would obviously be credibility kryptonite for Democrats, so that’s a bad outcome. And if Trump were to be convicted, I believe there is genuine concern among top Democrats that all the armed crazies (including those in the police, government positions and military) might do a real insurrection this time as opposed to the world’s shittiest flash mob.

So what’s a cynical Democratic operator to do? Have Smith slow-walk the investigation and take his time to make it immaculate. Have the election without using litigation to get in Trump’s way and hope that people don’t make a shitty choice. If they do, they’ll get what they paid for: another four years of ridiculous chaos. These would represent setbacks and lost ground for Democratic causes, but their patrons will figure out how to make it profitable in the meantime and be there to fund a comeback when the American people become exhausted by the bullshit. Let him burn himself out in the spotlight, further expose himself as a corrupt fool, letting his support curdle naturally rather than fighting him and his supporters at their strongest.

This scenario presumes several deeply horrifying and risky ideas:

1. No one who matters will get hurt in the next four years. Are you rich? Are you a middle-class cis-het-white person? Do you not live in Palestine, Ukraine or Taiwan? You’ll ride this out. The poor and the queers have nowhere else to turn, so they’ll eat shit and be right back on the Democrat’s side next time around (unless they have money, of course).

2. Trump and his cronies will be too inept to dismantle American democracy before the next election.

I’m no card player, but this all seems like a terrible gamble to me.