Wouldn’t be a present wrapping party without some Rankin/Bass. 🎁🎄

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I like the penguins. They’re basically just modern Looney Tunes. This has a rough ending but overall really hits the mark.

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Jamie Lee Curtis and Dewey from Malcolm in the Middle are pretty much the only good things about this movie.

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Was talking with a friend about The Grand Budapest Hotel and came up with what I call the WATI (Wes Anderson Tolerance Index).

Weights your ratings of his films/shorts/ads based on runtime and averages the scores out. I have a relatively high WATI of 0.83.

Feel free to make a copy the Google Sheet and track your own WATI here.

The best writing of any game I’ve played, hands down. The world is so fascinating and original, textured and many-faceted. It takes a long time to get through (esp. with the voice acting - I can’t allow myself to cut people off) but I actually enjoyed taking it slow. Taking the scenic route, poking around in unlikely places for more information. There are a lot of subtle twists that happen through this - moments where my eyes were wide, waiting for the next turn in a tense conversation. Small, seemingly insignificant pieces of information can cause a ripple effect to dramatically shift the way you once perceived the story thus far, your character, and even the world you inhabit.

iOS pull-down search is weird… sometimes if I type in “Photos” the only recommendation is to download the Google Photos app. But if I type in “Pho” I get the Photos app as a top hit.

At this point, the obsession over IP’s has been digging so deep that studios are pulling obscure IP’s out from decades ago that no one has ever heard of, which completely negates the original point of doing reboots and remakes of old IP’s in the first place. It’s just cringey and desperate feeling and I’m embarrassed on their behalf when I see it.

What’s even crazier is the amount of execs I’ve met that don’t want to do this (all of them). I’m constantly told by execs that lament about how they wish they could make original stuff and not IP’s, but that their hands are tied. None of us got into this business so that we could remake old stuff. We didn’t watch some movie as an 8-year-old and say “When I grow up, I want to make this same exact movie but for a modern, four-quadrant audience, and as the jumping off point for an extended universe of films.” No one wants to do this, but for some reason, everyone in charge feels forced to.

I mean aren’t we all starting to laugh at and get bored by “universes”? It’s alienating at this point, and a turn off, when you know that a movie or show you’re watching is just there to set up some other movie or season you’re supposed to watch later. You can really feel it in what you’re watching and it just feels gross. Let’s just make things we wanna watch now with an actual ending, then we won’t feel gross when we watch stuff and can just sit and enjoy it!

I think it’s a huge, joyless loss that an entire generation of artists are having their original, unique, and timely voices shifted almost entirely into the IP mines. A loss that I feel won’t be seen or understood fully for at least a decade, but when it happens, will feel like we’re missing an entire part of our collective souls.

Original post here.