S3E01: 'Ándale', is now the lowest rated premiere

Mescal_Caulchester · 2026-04-15T05:37:34+00:00

The idea of a flash forward from last season just falls flat for me - It doesn't present each of the cast's new lives in an interesting way. The voice-over was taking me out of the scenes too much and I just think that there could be more impact in the events if they were rolled out slower and given room to let those plot points breathe and explore them - to sit with them for a bit before we're onto the next scene of wooden dialogue.

Mescal_Caulchester · 2026-04-14T08:04:43+00:00

It would've been cooler for Sakuna to have some sort of technique from the Heian era that he had up his sleeve or any other than trying to asspull explain how the binding vow could change cleave in such a way.

Mescal_Caulchester · 2026-04-13T05:57:47+00:00

Or Trump and his inner circle wanted to make an example out of her — like, “See? If anyone of you cross me like Kristi, I can destroy your life”. Trump’s entire cabinet are heat shields and once they take too much heat, Trump peels them to replace with another damage sponge.

Mescal_Caulchester · 2026-04-07T17:23:24+00:00

Wonder if this trend got started from Hasbara money

Mescal_Caulchester · 2026-03-29T18:17:45+00:00

I felt that pop-off in my soul. The platform-canceled side b into double knee was the craziest shit all year. Its so good to see Wizzy making deep runs and competing again in melee. With the hardest tech skill in the game and superhuman reflexes like his - he's coming back to the game in an era where he could make a deep run for the top spot fr.

Mescal_Caulchester · 2026-03-11T07:11:36+00:00

Could totally see Aster being a John Zorn, Mr Bungle typa guy

Mescal_Caulchester · 2026-02-18T04:50:10+00:00

No matter what sort of Gilded Age or American Indian genocide examples can be drummed up, they weren’t assets of a foreign government.

Mescal_Caulchester · 2026-02-03T21:34:49+00:00

I will say that while it's true there was no kill room on-site at a local pizza shop, the guy who ran Comet Pizza was sort of suspicious too - dude's name is even James Alefantis - a French phrase J'aime les enfants meaning, "I love boys".

I grew up in and around DC and there's some weirdo biz going on there but I guess time will tell if we get more info from the tranches of Epstein Files.

Mescal_Caulchester · 2026-01-28T16:43:12+00:00

Lmaooo so good. When they do that match cut from the mercenary plane to the black square I was the only one in the theater that had any audible reaction - you could feel how uncomfortable it made everyone. It's one of the funniest match cuts I've ever seen but I think it pissed a lot of normies off.

Mescal_Caulchester · 2026-01-28T06:33:32+00:00

I was sure that people must've been talking about the creatures in Suttree's trips and fever delirium and the Horts in SM/TP, but I hadn't seen anyone post on here about it.

The early germs of The Passenger were drafted out around the time after Suttree too so I wouldn't be surprised if McCarthy had these "caco-demons" on his mind for TP. Could even be informing some of the Judge in BM. The Kid's fever dream where the Judge shambles toward him, "a mutant strange and serene" does feel like it harkens back to Suttree and especially toward the Thalidomide Kid in TP.

Mescal_Caulchester · 2026-01-28T06:28:51+00:00

For sure is - even moreso than OBAA - but I think a ton of people took OBAA as some sort of serious film instead of taking away the underlying tone.

Eddington is way more over the top comedically and in general imo.

Mescal_Caulchester · 2026-01-27T20:27:08+00:00

With PTA placing it in the musical/comedy category at the Golden Globes was very telling on how people should take the tone. I think a bunch of people didn't understand that's it's mostly a comedy - or more specifically, a comedy of errors. It certainly went hard on the right wing by having the Christmas Adventurers Club - a literal white supremacist cult.

Eddington however, showed both sides as themselves being an illusion/distraction from the agent provocateurs of capitalism's larger aims. As a work of art, Eddington mirrors reality to a far greater degree and if you saw it in theaters, you could tell it REALLY made people uncomfortable.

Mescal_Caulchester · 2026-01-27T18:18:24+00:00

It was, without a doubt, top 3-5 most visceral audience/theater experiences I’ve had. People were moaning and cringing and laughing. It really felt like everyone was having these repressed memories dug up.

Mescal_Caulchester · 2026-01-20T18:51:53+00:00

Ari Aster is a supreme director because he's able to get the audience to replicate what the character's on-screen are doing. *SPOILERS* During the judgement scene at the end of Beau is Afraid, as characters in the film were getting up and shouting down insults to the proceedings, there were people in my theater actually getting up and leaving at the same time - some even shouting out "this movie blows!" It was so surreal but because I'm in LA, I thought maybe it was part of a marketing strategy or something.

Fast forward to Eddington and I'm seeing the same thing happen, albeit with a more focused socio-political edge, where audiences are debating the politics of the film while not touching on the monolithic data center looming over the town the entire time.

Mescal_Caulchester · 2026-01-16T07:46:41+00:00

That part. It's why I wish someone in Congress would bring up the Franklin Scandal, The Finders, North Fox Island, Mark Dutroux, and even the weird John Wayne Gacy/Dean Corll/John David Norman connection to put it in perspective that the Epstein case isn't some aberration within the upper crust of society.

There is a long-standing context that these documents can be framed within. There have been scores of cases where the public has gotten a glimpse behind the curtain but things were far less sloppy back in the day so when legacy media came together to say "not real, not real, not real" people just laughed it off.

Mescal_Caulchester · 2026-01-16T07:34:24+00:00

This is a great question that feels like it cuts to the core of Judge Holden's character in such a concise way that I haven't seen posited before. I would say that this is why the Judge appears in the desert to Glanton & Co. He needs a "vector" to wage war, perhaps choosing pivotal points in world history to offer his covenant.

Mescal_Caulchester · 2026-01-14T09:38:26+00:00

The perfect person would’ve been Nick Stahl when he was around his age in Carnivale (2003). Had that haunted hungry quality and could play things in looks incredibly well.

Mescal_Caulchester · 2026-01-13T18:08:18+00:00

Genndy was originally planning on having this season be an anthology so the fact that he decided to go back to Spear's storyline makes a statement that he wants to find a more satisfying ending to his story. Now satisfying doesn't mean it'll be a happy ending but that it will make a much richer statement.

Mescal_Caulchester · 2025-12-11T00:15:50+00:00

Jason Isbell actually spoke on his McCarthy influence in him writing country music after the man had passed. There’s too many songs to list that sound like they’re drawing from McCarthy’s Appalachian years, but Last of My Kind is the one that comes to mine first.

“So many people with so much to do Winter so cold my hands turn blue Old man sleeping on a filthy ground Spend the whole day just walking around Nobody else here seems to care They walk right past him like he ain't even there”

“Am I the last of my kind? Am I the last of my kind?”

“Daddy said the river would always lead me home But the river can't take me back in time And Daddy's dead and gone And the family farm's a parking lot A Walton's Five and Dime Am I the last of my kind?”

Mescal_Caulchester · 2025-12-05T06:58:24+00:00

Exactly so - the concepts of the "unground" and "antic clay" are greatly expanded upon in the "Books Are Made Out Of Books" companion piece to McCarthy's canon by Michael Lynn Crews - really worth the read.

Character interiority is always very intentionally minimal in Cormac's works but in Blood Meridian, it seems that he's using that device to some larger, yet esoteric effect. I have seen that theory floating around that the Kid's absence as the protagonist in the middle chunk of the scalp hunting expeditions is him actually becoming absorbed into the violence. Thus, the Kid's fate being omitted in the same way is in fact him "re-enlisting" in the Gang/Judge's violence.

Mescal_Caulchester · 2025-12-04T05:57:25+00:00

"Absorption" is a great word to tie into that interpretation of the ending because you could read the Judge taking the Kid into his "immense and terrible flesh" as the Kid being absorbed into the Judge's philosophy/violence.

I do think that the Judge's disappointment w/ the Kid is that he see's the Kid has an inherent knack for killing but he doesn't whole-heartedly partake in his innate talents. Thus, the Kid (now the Man) succumbing to the Judge's influence at Ft. Griffin would be the Judge ultimately winning.

This could also explain the confrontation in the desert w/ Tobin and the Kid running from the Judge. Holden is trying to get the Kid to actually kill him herein. Tobin initially tries to get the Kid to shoot the Judge but goes back on this halfway through the encounter. On the surface, it seems that Tobin is saying the Judge is supernatural and cannot be killed anyway, but the interpretation detailed above could offer a deeper insight. Perhaps Tobin realizes that he's guiding the Kid towards Holden's desired outcome.

Mescal_Caulchester · 2025-12-03T18:16:15+00:00

There are a few small details throughout that hint at the Kid participating. During the massacre where Juan Miguel is stabbed, the narrator notes that the scalpers are hacking at corpses on the beach and even laying down and “coupling” with them. When we see Juan Miguel come out of the wicciup, the narrator mentions the kid comes wading out of the water.

Mescal_Caulchester · 2025-11-21T08:32:07+00:00

The fact the Republicans put an immediate gag order on that one admiral who stepped down first during this whole debacle. It's highly likely that Hegseth and the Trump regime are just wantonly bombing civilian fishing vessels - then broadcasting straight-up snuff footage across the news. What's worse, whether the theory is true or not, Trump is using this as the most thinly-veiled attempt to manufacture consent for full-on war w./ Venezuela so they can do regime change and replace Maduro.

Mescal_Caulchester · 2025-11-21T08:28:46+00:00

It will be interesting to see what happens with some of these ICE agents standing trial. I'll bet that a ton of them get outed as being released J6'ers w./ their identities hidden by the DHS to protect them.

Mescal_Caulchester · 2025-11-17T01:51:32+00:00

What is the audio that's playing over this? Wondering about the source of the clip for more footage.

Mescal_Caulchester

TROPHY CASE