Real darkness has love for a face.

Jokes aside, what a gorgeous, wonderfully crafted movie.

Actual conversation that happened in a discord call earlier

The Mothman Prophecies (2002). Its Wikipedia page has brought me such joy:

Randomly, an old video by Jenny Nicholson popped up in my homepage recommendations.

I was cooking, and wanted background noise so I stuck my headphones on and put this on as a casual listen.

Towards the end, the point I've timestamped, she brings up Syndrome. And she describes his motivations as:

"It's not fair that some people are born with superpowers, and I'm gonna make technology so that everyone can be equal"

Except... that's not his plan. Syndrome has been systematically killing off superheroes so that he can be the "best" superhero. And he only plans to share his technology when he's old and bored of being the only one with that power.

"And when I'm old, and I've had my fun. I'll SELL my inventions, so that everyone can be super"

Not only is he planning to hoard the technology, he's going to make it a product, not philanthropy.

Nicholson says at one point:

"What is it with these movies hating everybody that's not born a superhero?"

But here's the thing. Syndrome isn't getting rid of the unfair "lottery" style of having powers or not. He's just making it so that people who won a different lottery have access to them. Now it becomes something that wealth gets you. It's just a different form of inequality.

They also don't "punch him in the face" for wanting to make superhero tech. They save people from the robot he unleashed to fake a superhero debut. And then they go after him because he tries to kidnap their baby.

I think there's some merit to a Randian reading of Incredibles 2 and Tomorrowland, but her attempts to apply it to Incredibles 1 and... Ratatouille?? It feels like she's working backwards from her conclusion.

-and her brother Winston, who is an innocent in all this [sic] jumps off the plane and runs below decks. He smashes the screen which breaks everybody out of their trance-

She says she thinks this is meant to be the scene of a "non-superpowered character making a difference", and that it doesn't work because of the backstory scene of Winston and Evelyn's father dying because he was too reliant on superheroes.

Her takeaway is that the movie has Winston learn nothing from what happened. But I don't think that's a fair read. The point is that Evelyn learned the wrong lesson, to never rely on others for help. She thinks superheroes are inherently bad because people like her father will over-rely on them. But its like trying to abolish the fire department because your father ran into a burning building to call 911 on his landline.

Cole Sprouse gave one of his all time best performances in Lisa Frankenstein, he committed 100% to the hammer horror vibes despite not talking for almost all of it.