PICK OUR NEXT BONUS EPISODE!

I’m seeing so many comments about forcing Todd to watch anime again, which is ironic because this is the movie I recommend to my friends who don’t like anime (the dub is also incredibly good and well-localized), and Darren Aronofski remade this movie TWICE (while also stealing an entire scene, shot for shot, in Requiem for a Dream—a thing an industry friend argued was from an earlier movie, but isn’t, and said friend owes me an apology) without crediting Kon. I will never forgive Aronofski for this (also Nolan, because Paprika is a much more interesting/smarter version of Inception). Considering that Kon is a master filmmaker who will never make another movie since his death from pancreatic cancer, I think it’s a bit in poor taste. Though its release preceded the pop explosion of the late 90’s & 2000s, perhaps the more recent cross-over popularity of K-pop (and knowledge of the brutal industry machinery and culture behind those groups) will make the movie more accessible to a wider audience (a common complaint I heard in the aughts). Anyway, I’m glad this made the list and hope it wins out.

I have to comment on the last episode, simply because a 38-year-old man was talking about his only choices being Morgan Wallen and Olivia Rodrigo. I can assure all my fellow middle-agers that it’s perfectly possible to go through life without hearing either of them, then using the year-end best-of lists to discover Alvvays and The Beths, both of whom had breakup songs in 2022 that absolutely crush Miley and Olivia. And if you want to go back farther and find and absolutely devastating breakup song, pick from the Rachael Yamagata catalog. I’m a substitute teacher — today’s pop crap doesn’t have the impact on today’s youth that Prince, Springsteen and everything on MTV had on my generation. I felt like the depth of analysis for those two flimsy bits of overproduced phlegm was like obsessing over the brush strokes of a kindergartner’s morning art.

Beau Dure