Wait a minute, wait a minute... You're telling me that the President of the United States does not, in fact, personally turn the dials in the Oval Office that control gas prices and employment figures and the flow of international trade? Well this changes things.

This is the only answer for me. Plenty of movies are briefly scary or unsettling. Eraserhead is the only one that burrows under my skin and fills me with dread for every moment of its runtime.

An anniversary card with a picture of a giant mallet:

I'll love you until we're both 72 and not a day longer.

It takes either enormous balls or an incredible lack of self-awareness to demonstrate no range as an actor and then disavow what is by far your best work. Oh well, at least he committed a hate crime in his youth and never really made amends for it.

I don't agree about "padding," but I do think that horror as a genre is especially well-suited to short films. For me, it's like legends told around a campfire. Often most effective when you're given just enough detail to let your imagination take over after the story's been told.

Thank you for reminding me of this. I heard mention of it several months ago and was intrigued, but I'd since forgotten about it.

I suspect that has a lot to do with them usually being better contained than this.

https://theweek.com/articles/480179/loveable-pet-hippo-that-mauled-owner-death

If not, they should give him money. Money him. Money now. He a money deserving a lot now.

OP didn't miss anything. They gave a correct synopsis of the movie in the interest of commenting on how other people have misinterpreted it. They weren't saying Peter's trauma is overlooked by the movie, but by viewers who openly take Annie's side. I don't understand why some commenters are acting like OP was endorsing that opinion when they were explicitly refuting it.

It's wild how society actively encourages the bystander effect. We shake our heads at stories of people standing around doing nothing while someone else is in distress, but when someone springs into action, it's just as likely that they'll be criticized for not twiddling their thumbs and waiting for the proper authorities to arrive.

I mean, it doesn't all have to be the product of manipulation. But I think the core idea of the story is, "What if there were already cracks in your family unit, and then some evil interlopers turned all of the stressors up to 11?"

I think OP means overlooked by some other viewers, and they're right. You can very easily find people who are fully in Annie's corner, blaming Peter for everything and calling him a shitty teenager standing there with that face on his face. Conversely, you can find people minimizing Annie's trauma and overlooking all the context for her abusive behavior in order to label her the one and only bad guy. Some people really want these stories to be simpler and more black-and-white than they are.

The way people have discussed Hereditary makes me feel very sad for the state of media literacy. A lot of viewers seem to have a pathological need to take sides and declare that Annie is "the bad guy" or that Peter is just a spoiled little shit who deserved everything that was coming to him. I think those viewers should take a long, hard look at themselves and consider what their one-dimensional interpretation says about how they would react to their own family breaking down in the wake of shared trauma, or in the presence of external manipulation. Because that is what the movie is about.

There's an actual demonic cult behind the scenes the whole time, manipulating these characters into situations that fracture their relationships beyond compare, and a whole bunch of people ignore that and say, "LOL, this character sucks; fuck 'em." I'm pretty sure you're supposed to both criticize and sympathize with everybody, because in reality no one's purely innocent or purely evil. Unless they've dedicated their lives to summoning an ancient, dark god to inhabit the body of a child. Then you can say fuck 'em.

ANOES 2 is one of those movies that frustrates me by almost being great but ultimately spoiling it's own potential. The possession narrative was a clever adjustment to Freddy's role, but the movie should have stuck to the concept of the protagonist's body being taken over, instead of just saying, "Whoops, he's physically Freddy now, knifey-hands and all."

I promise you that the 2022 Texas Chainsaw Massacre is several orders of magnitude worse than the 2003 version. I could monologue for hours about how poorly that film executes everything it is trying to accomplish, from the horror to the characterization to the social commentary and beyond. Just an awful, terrible, dreadful movie in every respect. So bad, in fact, that it's arguably worth watching just to recalibrate your sense of how badly a project can be fucked up in spite of having a respectable budget and decent actors.

My opinion of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake remains unchanged since 2003: it would have been better, maybe even great, if it had been a completely different movie focused on R. Lee Ermey's character.

It's considered rock solid by those who take the time to watch it, but in my experience it's chronically ignored. When people talk about the legacy of The Exorcist, they tend to just add a footnote about how it had a few follow-ups, without acknowledging that one of them is fucking great.

Admittedly, my memory is pretty spotty, but I remember being pretty impressed with the strangeness of Darling (2015).

Boo!! Infinity Pool was amazing.

But does she have a bleached asshole?

It's not a weird business model at all. There are countless podcasts that have short-run seasons with a hiatus between them. The ones that don't are generally the kinds of podcasts that are just a couple people in a room talking.

Those are often "very simple"; Radio Rental is not. They have to read through story submissions, coordinate with the submitter to record their audio, then edit that for time and content while adding music and sound effects. Also, all of the people involved in the show are surely working on a whole bunch of other projects.

It is entirely standard practice to produce a batch of episodes in a short period and then release them weekly before getting started on the next batch. Not just for workflow but also because a seasonal model gives people time to assess how the show is performing over time, make decisions about what to do the same/differently, and make deals with advertisers, partners, and talent.

There's a lot more going on than what you hear in a half-hour of listening.

The outro for episode 65 seemed unmistakably like a season finale. I'm not sure why they felt the need for a separate announcement, but maybe they just noticed that some people weren't picking up on the fact that they were done with the latest batch of episodes.

It's funny that the backlash is almost a form of meta- commentary unto itself. While criticism of a gender swapped cash grab is valid, a lot of dudes use that to mask the fact that they really just don't want to watch a female-led project. If that project is actually making the same criticism, it's pretty hard to hide whether you hate it because there weren't enough dongs on set.

Artemis has always been my favourite secondary character. You won't find me speaking a word against any episode that lets her shine.