The way the British vote is they gather around two microphones — one for Labour and one for Conservatives — and they try to harumph the loudest into them.

If Labour does poorly this election, they’re going to lose their ‘u’.

If the Conservatives win, they’re going to sell the NHS. The Democrats should jump on that; maybe they can get used national health care really cheap.

The Greta Thunberg thing is very stupid and you’re all quite silly to pretend it isn’t.

Everyone had given up trying to convince anyone and just wants to feed their id.

It feels so good to go a whole night without having to take your kid to the hospital.

The far left doesn’t care about anti-Semitism if they can’t blame it on people they already don’t like.
But maybe you can say that about any bad thing they sometimes rail against.

Daily reminder that proving Trump is terrible is not the same as proving he’s worse.

As for MCU vs DCEU, I think Batman Versus Superman, Suicide Squad, and Justice League are all worse than even the worse MCU film — as the worst MCU gets is forgettable but still somewhat enjoyable at the time.
Man of Steel (which at least was interesting) and Aquaman (really stupid, but fun) was maybe better than some of worst MCU — I might rather rewatch than Thor: Dark World.
Shazzam would be a top tier MCU film — it was really enjoyable. Wonder Woman is up there against the best of the MCU.
I haven’t seen Joker, but I don’t think it’s part of the DCEU and is kind of its own thing.

Kinda chuckling at the far left screaming at Buttigieg as Biden just walks away with it all.

I don’t think I want to watch Marriage Story as I’m not sure what to do while watching someone else’s marriage fall apart. I guess say, “Ha ha! Idiots!”

I probably won’t understand a thing about what this British election means until it’s an episode of The Crown.

through tear-filled eyes
“But don’t you hate capitalism and the Jews?”

If you can’t understand the good reasons people voted differently than your own politics, it’s good you lost.

This UK Election stuff is like hearing about a historic game that just happened in some sport you know nothing about.
“He did two knicker-dillies in a single set!”
“Wow. Epic. I guess.”

Judging by my feed, it was going to be a Labour landslide as all these people who never vote were voting Labour because it was just so so important and it was all I could do to keep my eyes from rolling back in my head.
Good rule of thumb: People only get really worked up and loud about dumb, unimportant things now.

Well, here’s my UK election explainer for people who don’t follow things there.
The UK is an island somewhere off France. It has water on all sides to keep out the Irish. It’s divided into several regions like Scotland, Wales, and the Shire.

The UK is a Constitutional Monarchy. That means they get to vote like normal people, but they still get to have royalty to use as a tourist attraction.
It was a very heated election this year, the main issue being the white wigs judges wear. Conservatives wanted to keep them the same length, but Labour wanted to make them an inch longer — something considered too radical by the working class.
Does this have any implication on American elections? No. Thanks to voter id, we should be able to stop any Brits from voting here.

Finished The Irishman. Wasn’t sure if at the end they were using old people makeup or just stopped using makeup.

One of the problems of the left is they think the way they’re super duper sure they’re right about everything and can’t imagine anyone disagreeing with them for any other reason than that person is evil is something that separates them from the Nazis.

The left are going to be an angry menace until they finally bother to understand why good people could disagree with them.

Since Brexit predicted Trump winning, I guess this UK vote is predicting a 1984 type landslide for Trump in 2020. California is in play!

Solid episode of The Mandalorian, but whenever Baby Yoda isn’t on screen, all the characters should be saying, “Where’s Baby Yoda?” Definitely my question for the first 20 minutes.

How can they impeach Trump when there’s no evidence he’s even president. Didn’t Hillary win the popular vote or something?

With how much people scream about how horrible things are, it makes you wonder how people would deal if any of us had actual problems and not just all the made up ones we screech and cry about.

Say what you will about Donald Trump, but he does treat fellow politicians with the respect they deserve.

The frozen nuggets I’m cooking in the oven for the kids has the recommended internal temperature for them when they’re done like I got some sort of chicken nugget thermometer on me. I hate when frozen food gets all uppity.
The worst is when the microwave instructions tell you to put it at 50% power like anyone has any idea how to do that. I mean really, Mr. Burrito, you’re just too good for the same microwave power that 99% of other frozen foods use?

Just for fun, here are my top 5 Simpsons episodes in no particular order. These are very open for debate.

Deep Space Homer
You Only Move Twice
Marge Versus the Monorail
A Star Is Burns
Homer at Bat

Maybe “Cape Feare” should have replaced one of those. 5 is hard.
Just a little bit of trivia: Matt Groening took his name off “A Star Is Burns” because I guess he saw it as crass publicity for The Critic, but it is a solid solid episode with many classic moments.
I think “You Only Move Twice” might be my all time favorite episode of The Simpsons. I love love that episode. Just the right amount of pure insanity in it.
Other episodes that maybe should have made my list:
Lisa the Iconoclast (a perfectly cromulent episode)
List the Vegetarian (“It’s still good! It’s still good!”)
Much Apu About Nothing (“Book him on one count of being a bear and him on one count of…accessory to being a bear.”)
And maybe another Sideshow Bob episode: Sideshow Bob Roberts. So odd now to think someone could do an episode about partisan politics that’s funny to everyone.
Oh man. I somehow forgot about the Stonecutters episode (“Homer the Great”). That has to be top 5.
And I forgot about the Australian episode (Bart vs. Australia), definitely one of my favorites. It makes fun of Australia so bad, and I never quite understood why (I think The Simpsons were really big in Australia).
Oh yeah, and special mention needs to go to Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie for predicting how eventually I’d stop watching The Simpsons (“Aw, classic Itchy & Scratchy… what else is on?”).
I thought The Simpsons had gotten really bad for a number of seasons, but got better about the time they went HD and almost felt like classic Simpsons… yet I faded away as a viewer soon after.

I tried to honor how Scorcese wanted us to view The Irishman — I watched it in four parts using VidAngel to take out all the swearing.

My review of The Irishman: It’s exactly what you’d expect if you were told you were getting a 3hr plus mob film by Martin Scorcese starring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci. You can decide if that’s a good thing. I liked it!

Watching 6 Underground (with VidAngel). It’s like the opening chase sequence is cut to induce nausea in as many people as possible. Not sure that’s a criticism.
I swear a magazine stand they hit just exploded in fire. It’s like Goldeneye for N64.
I rewatched. That happened.
Fast & Furious exposed to me why car chases tend to be boring (as opposed to car races where the objective is clear), but that one kept me pretty engaged by being so over the top insane.
So the backstory from one guy is he wanted to fire on a UN van but they wouldn’t let him. That’s similar to the general from that Robin Williams movie Toys.
They’ve featured both Red Bull and Monster prominently. Isn’t that like product placing both Coke and Pepsi?

Should I do a best movies of the decade list? Well, I really liked that last Spider-Man movie. Also, I’ve watched half of 6 Underground so far and I’m really enjoying it.
This is hard.

You don’t think Kristen Stewart should be named the best actress of the decade? Can you name a better actress?
Oh, you can name 23 off the top of your head. That’s a lot.

To help promote the new Star Wars movie, we only have to wait until Wednesday for the next episode of The Mandalorian.
I NOW LOVE THE NEW STAR WARS MOVIE!

If Disney needs someone better to run Star Wars for them, I can do it. If I saw The Mandalorian, I’d say, “This is good. Do more of this.” But when I’d see The Last Jedi, I’d say, “This is bad. You shall be cast into the outer darkness for making this.”
And here’s my innovation: When making a trilogy, I’d plan out a cohesive story line.
Think about it.

All the clothing options in Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption 2 seems to make this odd assumption that there’s a big overlap between people who want to run around shooting people and people who want to play dress up.

lives in the most prosperous time in human history with no real problems
“I have an idea for radical change!”

“I don’t know if I’m going to watch Rick & Morty anymore. It’s vulgar and nihilistic it doesn’t leave me with a good feeling.”
watches the heist episode
“You son of a bitch, I’m in!”

Ranking of the Star Wars movies:
1. The Empire Strikes Back
2. Star Wars
3. Return of the Jedi
The rest of the movies are on some list far away from these.

Revenge of the Sith was the least dumb of the prequels but it was still pretty dumb.

So in like 40 years, should they do another Return of the Jedi special edition since Hayden Christensen will be the same age as Sebastian Shaw was and can refilm all those scenes?
Of course, by then, we’ll have the technology to replace Hayden Christensen in the prequels with a young Sebastian Shaw.

I need to get in better shape. How do I get cast in a Marvel movie?

I think the fade in support of impeachment is people expected the impeachment hearings to lead to some more coherent charge than “He’s Trump!” and it hasn’t really happened.

My main criticism of Red Dead Redemption is that as I’m riding through the countryside, I’m just constantly hearing pigs squealing. I guess there are boars off in the woods or something (I’ve yet to encounter one), but why are there loudly squealing pigs everywhere?
I mean, I’m trying to have a lovely stroll through the countryside and it sounds like I’m touring an abattoir.

Wanting other people to pay more taxes is unAmerican.

I’m okay with the Red Letter Media guys having their fun with Star Wars fandom, but it kinda looked like they made fun of Baby Yoda.

Wow. William Shakespeare sure wrote a lot of memorable lines — not as many as John Swartzwelder, but a lot.

My reading of the mainly positive first reactions to Rise of the Skywalker is that the thing is a convoluted mess that couldn’t figure out what to do after Rian Johnson hacked apart everything from Force Awakens.
I figured worse case was that Episode IX would need to basically ignore Episode VIII and then be both VIII and IX in one movie, and it’s kinda sounding like that’s what happened.
Many are making the movie sound like it’s a direct rebuke to The Last Jedi, so maybe I’ll like it.

I hope all reviews for Rise of the Skywalker start with whether the reviewer liked The Last Jedi so I know whether to read any further.

The people who loved The Last Jedi seem to hate Rise of the Skywalker, which seems like a good sign. It would be nice to have a Star Wars everyone could love, but TLJ stans have gone too far to the dark side; there’s no saving them.

There hasn’t been a lot of analysis of The Last Jedi, so I thought I’d talk about why it fails specifically as the middle part of a trilogy. I thought the Force Awakens was a fine start and was excited to see more, but TLJ killed that enthusiasm. Let’s look at why.
First, Force Awakens posed a number of questions that intrigued me: Who is Snoke? Who is this Rey and why does she have such powerful force powers? What’s Luke been up to and how will he help? TLJ just dismissed most of those questions.
I was also intrigued by the character Finn as he didn’t seem to have any analog from the original trilogy (not really a Luke or a Han Solo) and was curious where his character ark would go. In TLJ, he just ran around in a circle and now I don’t care about him.
Not only did TLJ get rid of the questions that intrigued me, but it also defanged the main threat. Snoke was threatening because he was powerful and mysterious. Kylo and Hux are just two young goobers, though, and the Empire seems 100x less threatening now that it’s run by them.
I mean, I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be worried about at the end of TLJ. They had the resistance in tatters (after lots of poor decisions), but things just seemed less scary with Snoke gone. Are you really supposed to fear Hux?
And Luke just seemed wasted. His death could have been intriguing for the next entry if it seemed like only Luke was powerful enough to take on the main threat—but there was no main threat left. Instead, he annoyed Kylo and died.
There are other criticisms of TLJ (Holdo, Rose and “war is about love”), but those would have been just minor annoyances if TLJ had at least kept up the momentum of Force Awakens. It’s main crime is it was the middle part of the trilogy but left nothing to care about in the end.
In conclusion, the failure of TLJ as the middle part of a trilogy is so objectively obvious that anyone saying they thought TLJ was great is obviously a Russian troll and part of some plot to hurt Baby Yoda. Don’t engage them. Protect Baby Yoda from Putin.

So The Mandalorian had a strong first three episodes, but in the next three it kind of became this episodic, Xena: Warrior Princess-esqe show. I mean, I’ll keep watching because Baby Yoda, but I’m hoping it gets back to the greatness of the beginning.

I missed that Admiral Ackbar was killed in The Last Jedi the first time I saw it. You really had to pay attention to see he was in the room when it blew up and I was correcting my son from putting his feet on the seat in front of him so I missed the line saying he was killed.
That one really felt like a slight against the fans. “He’s insignificant and you’re dumb for having liked him so I’m killing him off screen!” Ackbar had to go to make way for Holdo so we could learn the important Star Wars value of never question your commanding officer.
How cheesy/awesome would it be if it was Admiral Ackbar who did that stupid Holdo maneuver, with one of the Imperials yelling “It’s a trap!” just before it happened?
BTW, they really needed a throwaway, hand-wave line to make it clear you can’t just do Holdo maneuver all day every day. “There is a bliby-blooble particle stream going through the command ship. That never happens, and it gives me an idea for something I normally could not do…”

Rise of the Skywalker is PG-13 which means it gets one f-word, which it used as the very first word of the open crawl followed by “Rian Johnson.” I thought this was an effective use, but I’m guessing others will see it as divisive.

That’s it. I’m done ranting about The Last Jedi.
At least until someone mentions Star Wars again.

To try and compete with Disney who keeps putting out all those live action remakes, Netflix has released a live action remake of Team America directed by Michael Bay.

“I think I’ve finally turned a corner on this sickness!”
spends all night shaking from the chills
“I think I’ve finally turned a corner on this sickness!”
spends all night throwing up
“I’m terminally ill and this is the best I’ll ever be!”