🐰 I'm-a the Freakin' Pope... The Crime: Red Rabbit The Guilty Party: Tom Clancy Overview: A spy thriller is short on thrills but long on didacticism. Why I Hate It... The arc of Tom Clancy's career is interesting. His debut novel, The Hunt for Red October , is a legitimate classic that blew up the technothriller genre. It stars Jack Ryan, an all-American Mary Sue who's also an aerophobic CIA analyst, who gets in way over his head helping a Russian submarine commander defect from the Soviet Union. The novel spun off a series in which Ryan's exploits get more heroic as the the stakes get ever higher and the novels get ever longer. By the 90s his books were being turned into blockbuster films and video games, at which point Clancy was firmly a genre unto himself. And then it sort of dropped off around the time Jack Ryan becomes the president of the United States (due to a succession of large-scale terrorist attacks that he failed to stop). The books were overlong by
🙀 Yeah, Everybody Wants To Pass As Cats... The Crime: Cats The Guilty Party: Tom Hooper Overview: Nothing short of an unmitigated disaster Why I Hate It... Cards on the table here: I was never going to like this movie. I'm lukewarm on musicals to begin with, and I've seen Cats , the stage show, and I didn't like it at all. Hell, I'm not overly fond of cats, the animal. But just because I'm not in the target audience, that doesn't mean a target audience doesn't exist, or that I can't appreciate a thing for what it is instead of what I want it to be. And yet this movie failed, on just about every level, to connect with anyone but the most blasted-out-of-their-minds-on-hallucinogens movie-goers. Now I'm not going to go into a laundry list of everything bad about this movie. I would instead point you to Lindsay Ellis's delightful video post mortem . Rather, I am fascinated by how this movie ever came to be in the first place, because it was destin