The only legendary actor brave enough to let his final role involve serious bowel trauma.

Phantom Thread: didn’t love it. I’m sorry! Lots of people did, and that’s cool. It was certainly pretty.

Generally I’d rather not try to review a movie that didn’t do it for me. But okay, just a little.

Maybe because in a love story where the love feels unmotivated, it undercuts my investment in the whole story –like The Shape of Water, but from a darker perspective.

Maybe because the movie seemed to both celebrate and have contempt for its main character, portraying him as a foolish blowhard but also lovingly praising his brilliance, which left me confused and even a bit angry — much like Wolf of Wall Street. (Man, I do not like that movie.)

In fact, that made me think that in particular, I’m pretty well over movies about terrible men that we are supposed to be entertained by, and that the films seem to glamorize for the majority of their stories, but that, *wink*, all us smart viewers know in our hearts are awful, so it’s ok to spend hours laughing at their misdeeds. I’m not really buying that argument.

So instead of talking about the deep themes of a movie I didn’t like, a simpler question:

Who’s more over-rated, Martin Scorsese or Paul Thomas Anderson?

You can answer this even if you love both! I personally like several of the movies by both of them. But… definitely not all, nor would I call either “The Best Living…” anything, based on my tastes.

Controversial!

Also, they could have made the fish guy way hotter.

Here’s the thing about this beautiful, fanciful, fairy tale about seeing beyond the surface of a person, misfits banding together against conformity and fascism, and accepting your weirdness as something that can be loved.

I totally wasn’t into it.

I realize on paper that it has those messages, all of which I’m for. Aesthetically, it did all sorts of things I tend to love. But The Shape of Water left me totally tepid.* And now it’s getting all this award season buzz up against movies that I absolutely understand why everyone loves.

*my best guess for why: the creature never intentionally does anything to make Elisa fall in love with him; it just happens because of what he is. so there’s no wooing, no courtship, no earning it, no “falling” in love, just a woman in love with an idea, which makes for an unsatisfying romance.

Some of my favorite critics loved this movie. I just don’t feel it. I almost feel guilty about not feeling it. It’s the kind of thing that makes me question how my own brain works.

What’s something lots of people love, that you just don’t get? What is it about that thing that keeps you from loving it?

What does not loving that thing say about you — or about why everyone else is wrong and you’re not?

The depth of despair: sites that force you to watch ads before trailers — which are already ads, for movies — which have now become content. WE ARE PRODUCT.

Plenty have complained “they give too much away”; and yet people click, watch, and share new movie trailers like crazy. At The Ringer, they’ve had enough.

Stop watching trailers. I don’t mean: If it makes you mad, you should avoid it! I mean: Stop watching trailers. You’re buying a broken product. Trailers are free? No, you’re paying to see a movie, and when you watch a trailer, you are decreasing the value of your ticket. You’re cheapening the experience. Everything costs something. Trailers are ruining good movies, and they are making average movies unwatchable. They are bad and they need to be sent back to the factory.

Framing it as a consumer value proposition feels like a new angle to discuss this from, so I had to offer it up for comment.

If the thing you enjoy and pay for is the movie, why diminish that with trailers?

What would be a better way to find out about and get you excited for a movie that diminishes that joy less?

Definitely unfair: judging images based on beauty per square inch.

Over the weekend, I played through a video game called Inside, which I am comfortable calling a masterpiece. Its moody visuals drew me in. Its haunting environments kept me constantly on edge. Its unsettling themes left a mark I won’t soon forget. Games of this high caliber give me hope for the artistic potential of the medium. It’s that good.

It’s especially easy to recommend because I played through the game in two sittings of a few hours each, making it convenient to absorb in its entirety.

This in contrast to another recent game I also loved, The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt, a giant role-playing adventure that I spent roughly 80 hours to complete. As I joked on Twitter: “In the time it’s taking me to finish #Witcher3, I could have listened to the entire audiobooks of both Infinite Jest and A Game of Thrones. This is not an exaggeration. I checked.”

Which is not to say that a game becomes immediately less worthy by being longer, deeper, or more epic in scope. Merely that very very long works in any medium, whether a three-and-a-half hour film or a thousand page novel, come with certain baggage. And in the case of Inside, or the original The Office, or the short story collections of George Saunders, there is a sense that every minute, moment, or page were agonized over to distill a work down to their very essence.

The obvious counterargument is that different works have different aims, and a George RR Martin book or Godfather film would not be what they are or achieve what they set out to by slimming down. But if you were to invent a metric that measures Quality Per Minute of artistic works, those shorter works would rate extremely highly, where the longer ones by their very nature would rate lower.

With Inside, that rating would be off the charts. Every minute brings some new surprise, some newly disturbing tableau, some beautiful choice of artistic direction or thought-provoking inversion of expectations. By this measure, this may be one of the best games I’ve ever played.

The question is:

Should quality-per-minute factor in to judging any work of art?

Is that metric an unfair way to consider more ambitious works that aim for a bigger, deeper explorations of ideas?

Or, are those works being unfair to their audiences when a shorter work could achieve a similar resonance without requiring so much time?

**Do not be a coward and dismiss the question. Care enough about the limited time you have on this earth to value every minute and demand more of art.

He weeps as he defiantly asks the universe, “What happens when I catch them all?”

As of the week of this writing, you cannot go on Twitter or Facebook or any news site without seeing something about the unstoppable popularity of Pokemon Go. It is everywhere. People are walking around the real world (outside!) trying to catch imaginary creatures, and having a ball sharing screen grabs of cartoons in funny places like on the toilet or next to celebrities. It’s a lot of good clean fun.

But as a more, let’s say, discerning fan of video games, my question with this game, and most free-to-play mobile games where you tend a farm or build a fortress or any other task of accumulation, is why?

Once you get the Pokemon, you have them. You can make them better, by training them. You can fight other Pokemon with your Pokemon, but all this finding, collecting and powering-up of pretend pets is in service of… having lots of Pokemon? Why is that compelling?

I wonder if the real draw isn’t the novelty of AR; the wildfire spread of this game seems in part attributable to the social currency of funny animals superimposed on otherwise mundane places, the appeal of which is obvious (and articulated well here).

But I’m more interested in what comes next. Once people have realized the appeal of an augmented reality game, when do we get one with a real story, a real point of view, as a work of creative art? Getting me out of the house is fine, giving the world another funny little trifle to feed small talk is fine, but how do we make it mean something more?

What kind of game would be a more interesting use of the AR that Pokemon is popularizing?

Is there a different property that would make a better AR game, like Star Wars or Mission Impossible or the Kardashians?

Is there a more tangible good for society an AR game could drive people to participate in, like voting or pothole reporting or recycling?