It’s clearly chocolate cake, pineapple, and carrot.

When my daughter was born, I was blown away to find that my company offered 16 weeks paternity leave. A couple of weeks before my wife was due, I was talking to a coworker and found that his wife was also pregnant, but he didn’t know about our company’s parental leave policy. He had only been planning to take a couple of weeks. After we talked I found out he took the whole thing.

That four months was one of the greatest times of my life, getting to know my newborn daughter.

Three years later I was in a different job when my son was born. They offered three days. Six months later I found a new job, and I took an extra month off during the transition, just so I could spend every day with my son.

I don’t regret any of that. I can’t even imagine what that would feel like. I love my children and love being a dad. This is life. This is all we get.

It is extremely clear to me that you’re the one who isn’t getting it. Nice discussing it with you though.

Yeah, no shit.

Let’s go back and look at who ran with this narrative so we can see who’s a gullible idiot. No one will be surprised.

shouldn’t

See I think Dark Knight might be his worst movie.

Even Shang-Chi?

That’s the worst climax ever.

A climax is supposed to be the turning point of the story, where the conflict is resolved.

You’re saying the actual story is this old man who’s barely in the movie realizing that life sucks. And this point in the story, where literally nothing happens on screen, is the resolution of the conflict of him not exactly realizing that life sucks.

Ugh. That’s not complex or deep. It’s oblique and pretentious.

The definition of a climax is “the most intense, exciting, or important point of something; a culmination or apex.”

That scene is obviously not intense or exciting. It’s only the most important part of this hidden plotline that’s even more off-screen than Llewelyn’s death since it only takes place in the mind of a character who’s barely in the movie, who has no agency and no part of the actual events shown on screen.

It’s insufferable. The things you’re saying (which I was already aware of, to be clear) make the movie worse, not better.

Even if I was super into this extremely boring theme, it doesn’t preclude the rest of the movie from containing a well-told story. And even if I went into the movie convinced that the Coens are geniuses and ready to forgive every other thing, voiceover exposition talking about symbolism-laden dreams is always going to be lazy writing.

I won’t watch it again. I’m not trying to reevaluate it. I didn’t miss anything. I just don’t think it’s any good.

Yeah! And DIONYS…jerk… or something.

Did you even watch the movie? They explain it right away!

Someone “blew it up” and the resulting explosion launched it into space.

If it follows a standard story structure, then what was the climax?

I think I’m very open-minded about movies. For example in the mid-aughts I dragged my girlfriend to like five different Coen Brothers movies before I decided that I really just don’t like them. For another example, I even like mainstream movies.

Isn’t it possible I do understand it, and I just don’t like it? I’ve put enough thought into it. I see the themes. I don’t think those things outweigh the poor plot structure.

You can say No Country has a coherent plot, but it doesn’t in the sense I’m talking about.

That’s probably a good point, but yeah, I don’t need to read a book to try to salvage a movie I didn’t like. There’s just no time for that.

Larson did the vocals in the movie version of the song. Sounds just like Emily Haines.

You really never rooted for Walt? You didn’t hope that he’d make the right decision? You didn’t find a little guilty pleasure in the satisfaction of a bad deed done well?

If not, then why did you even watch the show?

I’m fine with rooting for a bad guy. But no, I don’t enjoy stories that only have irredeemable characters that I can’t root for.

Besides, Javier Bardem won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, which doesn’t usually go to main characters.

But ok, even if Llewelyn wasn’t the main character, he’s the central character of the plot. His death resolves the main storyline in the movie, and it happens off screen. That’s not good storytelling.

Yeah, I’ve heard that before, about how Llewelyn isn’t the main character. Not trying to be rude to you, but that sounds like bullshit. He’s the character I’m rooting for. If the main character isn’t the character I’m rooting for, then that doesn’t sound like an enjoyable movie.

If you’re saying Chigurh is the main character: he doesn’t grow either.

If you’re saying Tommy Lee Jones is the main character (which I’ve heard before), then I’m going to strain my eyes from rolling them so hard. He doesn’t at any point interact with the plot. That’s not good writing.

I get the Coens are doing it differently. They’re not following the rules for how stories should be told. But different isn’t the same as good, and the way they told the story was needlessly confusing and pretentious.

I always find it useful to use food as a metaphor to describe how I feel about movies. If No Country For Old Men were a meal, it would be expertly seasoned and cooked, with one extra ingredient that doesn’t belong there and detracts from the whole thing, like if you made a perfect steak and drenched it in liquorice sauce.

And it would be served on a scrap of driftwood, or in a fishbowl, or on literally anything other than a plate. Everyone around me would be raving about the side dishes while I’m wondering why my meat tastes like shit.

You can include themes in a movie and still tell a coherent story. Try this: remove the theme. Is the movie any good? Is the plot entertaining, and does it make sense? No, it’d be really awful, and the inclusion of a theme doesn’t excuse that.

No Country For Old Men.

I was actually really enjoying the whole cat and mouse thing until the main fucking character died off-screen.

How does nobody ever talk about how shitty that “plot twist” is? It’s not clever. It’s not entertaining. It’s just bad storytelling. They don’t even show you a good shot of him to convey what actually happened. My girlfriend and I had to rewind it twice because it was so fucking stupid and made so little sense.

That’s actually how I feel about most of the Coen Brothers’ movies. The classical narrative structure exists for a reason. It’s a good framework for telling a story that makes sense.

Sometimes there’s a good artistic reason for diverting from that and telling the story in an unconventional way. Other times it’s just pretentious auteur garbage.

She is definitely not.

Artemis can be a boy’s name. Historically there have been masculine versions of the name with different spellings, but in modern times the feminine spelling can be used.

This was one of my first comics, which is why it looks a little rough. Based on a conversation I had with my mythology-obsessed daughter.

The elite controller has customizable back buttons, which are awesome.

PS5 had Spider-Man 2.

For Xbox Series X there’s Starfield.

For the generation as a whole, it was worth upgrading for Baldur’s Gate 3.