2024-12-25 22:39:05
This article was originally published on Flaming Hydra on Dec. 4. If you like it, we encourage you to visit their site and subscribe.
For so long I avoided It’s a Wonderful Life—it was too bruising, its redemptions too meager for the guy I was in my 20s, with all those grand plans of his own. I always found myself wishing for more for poor George Bailey, I guess is what I’m saying. Trampled by bad luck, by his own virtue and his begrudging loyalties, stalled out at every moment of departure and always left to clean up someone else’s mess. And worst of all, tormented by the horrible Mister Potter, who creaks through Bedford Falls threatening foreclosures and buyouts in that blubbery old whine of his. I saw Potter as a special kind of real-world doom—a man so powerful you cannot fight against him, only beg him for mercy, as George’s father had done before him and as his children almost certainly will after. The Potters won’t live forever, but there is always another one on their way, with the cops and the bank examiner all working for them too. They weren’t going anywhere.
2024-12-25 22:00:00
Do you realize that this is the 12th year we've run this series? Time really flies when you don't have something lodged up your butt. But for those of you who do, read on to see if you made this year's list of the weirdest stuff that entered America's orifices. If not, there's always next year.
All reports are taken from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission's database of emergency room visits, all descriptions are verbatim, and all the entries below involved some very poor decisions.
2024-12-24 23:05:27
It’s easy to hate Blake Lively. She's beautiful. She's tall. Her hair is so lush. Her skin is so smooth. She's married to a damn Marvel actor, and they have beautiful children. Her best friend is Taylor Swift. In a world of demure, close-lipped smirks, Lively has a megawatt full-teeth smile. She was born in Los Angeles and raised by a talent scout and an actor. She was a cheerleader in high school. Relative to a celebrity like Jennifer Lawrence, Lively does not seem particularly approachable or down-to-earth; she seems much more like a goddess sent to give you body dysmorphia. She's the popular girl, and always has been. But those are all reasons based in envy.
Then, of course, there are the real reasons to hate her. Lively has been in the spotlight since Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants premiered in 2005, almost two decades ago. That's a lifetime in Hollywood, and plenty of time to make mistakes that everyone can see. And Lively's actual mistakes have been bad ones. In 2012, she married Ryan Reynolds on a plantation in South Carolina, a decision she apologized for eight years later in 2020. This was, somehow, not a one-off; in 2014, Lively launched a (very short-lived) online lifestyle magazine called Preserve, which included a spread titled “Allure of Antebellum.” As Kara Brown wrote for Jezebel at the time, “Anyone who romanticizes our nation's Antebellum period as some sort of marker of style and taste is definitely white and probably an asshole.”
2024-12-24 22:32:50
Happy holidays, everyone! Feel free to hang out here and exchange glad tidings with your fellow commenters while the site enters a bit of a slumber for the next few days.
Don't worry, there will still be some blogs under the tree.
2024-12-24 22:24:31
This is the time of year when the best, biggest, and most ambitious movies come out. Not Oscar season, but rather that stretch when the halls of streaming services are decked with the brightly lit, thinly disguised advertisements that are the year's new Christmas movies. There are more than 100 new Christmas films to watch this holiday season, and whether that number horrifies or excites you depends upon how much of a freak you are for the festive. Sabrina is proud to say they are a real Christmas freak, and this year they asked some of their colleagues to watch some of the most, uh, available new holiday movies. The final movie in our lineup is The Merry Gentlemen, Netflix's answer to the longstanding question: How will Chad Michael Murray withstand the ravages of time?
Sabrina: Well, well, well. It’s come to this: the finale of Defector Watches A Christmas Movie. Thank you both for experiencing this movie with me, and thank you Justin for shepherding this series. Let’s get right to it: This movie operates on the premise that a big-city girl must help save her parent’s local small-town nightclub. Did your hometowns have a local nightclub? Did you ever go there, and would you consider it worth saving?
2024-12-24 04:17:53
On Wednesday of last week, the richest person in the world seized control of the government of the United States. It's going to be helpful, over the next four years, to note down the events that happen, when they happen, before the next events come along.
