The people who are like "but Toy Story 3 was a perfect ending, therefore no more stories should ever be told by penalty of death" genuinely annoy me, and has actually made me retroactively think 3 is too pat and narrow in its circularity of resolution. 4 is way more interesting.

My hot take is that every Toy Story is better than the one before it. I am a loud and proud Toy Story 4 lover. Every time they come back they find deeper, richer veins. It's like Richard Linklater's BEFORE trilogy. Age and time just enriches the subject matter.

Especially with James Bond, the franchise that famously has the least immutable canon in the history of film! All you have to do is cast a new actor, and everyone will go 'oh ok, new James Bond. Cool.' They've been doing it for longer than most human beings have been alive. It's ok.

At least with the (very bad) engine they’ve been using in the Switch era, yes, this was the right call. I was reading TeraLeak details last night and it sounds like they are making a new engine for Gen 10, which does have a larger budget, so fingers crossed they actually get with the times now.

I do really love Lumiose City as a setting. A small, dense open world is a good way for Pokemon to refocus on its fundamentals, it gives everything a real sense of character and place, and the verticality of environments with all the roofs and scaffolding is just very fun. It’s a cool conceit.

Not sure if I’d want this exact battle system for *every* Pokemon going forward, but the overall suite of mechanics and how it all interacts here is as good and addictive as Pokemon has ever been, and it really encourages you to play and train and engage with things. It feels very good.

Really enjoyed my time with the game (40+ hours). Not perfect, but all around the best, most polished, most enjoyable mainline Pokémon since (appropriately enough) X & Y on the 3DS. It showcases and focuses much of what Pokémon has actually done right over the last decade.

I’m not sure there’s any Hollywood actor analogous to Nakadai alive today. You’ve got giants like De Niro or Pacino who worked with lots great directors, but not on the scale Nakadai did. He lived and worked through such a long, transformative period, was at the middle of *so much* cinema history.

And if you’ve never seen BELLADONNA OF SADNESS, Nakadai voices The Devil there, in one of the single best voice performances you will ever hear. We gushed at length about his work in the film when we reviewed it on Japanimation Station. youtu.be/7gJ9U11iblI?...

I think RAN might be the greatest movie ever made, so obviously I love Nakadai there, and other Kurosawas like YOJIMBO and SANJURO, where he plays two totally different villains. But there’s also the towering achievement of THE HUMAN CONDITION and all his other Kobayashi collabs, including HARAKIRI

Everybody to Senate Dems today: