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.

You don’t consume one bean at a time though. The existence of a lazy or boring post doesn’t ruin the good posts next to it. You can’t scroll through the beans from the crappy batch to only eat the good ones.

Besides, that’s still a solvable problem. I’m talking about a front-end solution, something that could be customized. Like a multi-reddit on reddit, but easily shareable like a starter pack on Bluesky. And if the multi-pack isn’t to your liking, you just edit it for yourself.

I attempted to post an original comic on Lemmy to what is basically the only comic strip sub. It was probably the only comic that had been posted that week that wasn’t on reddit first. It got removed for profanity. The profanity in question? “Balls”.

I posted it to reddit after that, and it hit the front page of r/all. Not to toot my own horn, but that’s some good fucking original content that the comic strip sub on Lemmy could have used.

While the fact that there might be 3+ communities on different instances all covering the same topic is a weak point,

I feel like there has to be a solution to that though. Some way to seamlessly consolidate subs for the front end.

what

Didn’t Biden pardon everyone who was arrested for marijuana possession?

I actually had a nice interaction with a mod on that subreddit just yesterday. A comment of mine was being auto-hidden. He explained why, then offered to help. Not the usual petty tyrant mod I expected.

The mods here can also be equally ridiculous. That’s just a problem with internet mods in general. It’s a role that attracts petty tyrants.

I scrolled all the way to the bottom of these comments, then breathed a sigh of relief.

Because the comments that I’d see on reddit, the ones all the way at the bottom that show up every time George Floyd is mentioned, weren’t there. I hadn’t even thought about those comments until I got to the end.

So what’s the damage here? I can’t find anything about the targets. Is this why my Xbox is having server issues?