Of course the trees were walking. Their wives left them, and they were sick of touching their own wood.

truly tolkien is the patron saint of modern urbanists, he hated cars and wrote entire books about people walking.

I don't think they were supposed to learn anything, except possibly Nick's recognition that your past is always dragging at you. I think it was more to show a snapshot of the nouveau riche/high society and the valley of ashes that sustains them. The character interaction just gives a way into those worlds.

omg

Humans love drama

That's literally right. The "soap" in Soap Opera was about the ads for household cleaning products to hit target demos in the early TV decades.

It's that soap operas are period dramas adapted to a new period.

I'm guessing he didn't like Damon hanging out in ancient China either

What pulls me out is modern Californian-accented actors in period pieces. Leonardo DiCaprio is a bad choice for Jay Gatsby. Can’t say “old sport” convincingly. Give me Daniel day Lewis.

I defy anyone to watch Jeanne d'Arc and not be profoundly moved and astonished https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passion_of_Joan_of_Arc

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

The subversion about women's rights and self determination aren't really why people like the book today though. Nor is it because of the subtle social clues oh high society that we just don't pick up, like the timing of their breakfast.

It's because the characters are so real, and their growth is them turning from a real person into an also real person, while being likeable (well except maybe for Darcy at first) all the way. They're also quite smart and funny along the way, even if most of the jokes are rather nuanced and hard to spot by modern eyes.

But honestly, I found the book extremely boring as well. They're excellent characters who do absolutely nothing interesting.

That's what I didn't like about Wharton's Age of Innocence, because I'm sure it was subversive in the 1920s, but reading it almost 100 years later it was just like "Oh, a woman flouts the rules of her rigid social class. Big fucking deal." I don't know what my HS English teacher was thinking assigning it and not really addressing it as a period piece, because the themes were really boring on their face.

I did enjoy Austen's Northanger Abbey in college though. I think we read it as an examination of the Gothic genre though, so it wasn't just reading it in a vacuum.

If you've ever been in that severely-jet-lagged-in-a-foreign-place state, this movie nails that feeling perfectly.

B-but there's ennui

(I get what the movie is going for but it didn't grip me either)

Lip my stocking, then.

I watched that. And that's literally all I remember of it

Star trek characters can go anywhere as long as it's something that can be built in a soundstage in Burbank, California, or an alien planet that looks suspiciously like a color graded place in Burbank, California.

that's not true, sometimes things explode for no good reason

Still one of the best standup bits ever.