Not that this is the only example, but just watched "Lady Bird" where a major part of the plot is if the protagonist will go to NYU or UC Davis. As somebody who doesn't live in the United States and there aren't any "private universities" here just wondering if state schools are so bad? Why do they have such bad reputations or maybe just I'm just thinking too much of American-made entertainment?

This is a great question, because it allows me to talk about a topic that I find endlessly fascinating: how the cultural politics of class intersect with higher education.

With regards to Lady Bird, I think the first thing to understand is that it's a highly autobiographical film: Greta Gerwig also grew up in Sacramento, her parents had the same jobs as Lady Bird's parents, and Greta was also a theater kid who ended up going to a prestigious private university in New York City because she wanted to have a career in the performing arts. So what we're getting is not necessarily a universal experience, but how Greta Gerwig herself felt when she was a teenager.

Second, state schools are not bad but their reputations are ...complicated. The land grant universities are generally reasonably well-resourced, they have good reputations, and they provide an extremely solid middle class credential that provides a major pathway for social and economic mobility in the United States.

However, there is usually a hierarchy within the state school systems between the flagship campus(es) which are usually nationally ranked research universities - U.C Berkeley, UCLA, Ann Arbor (UMichigan), University of Wisconsin-Madison, UMass Amherst, etc. - and the other campuses in the same system, which tend to be less selective, less nationally well-known, and more focused on teaching.

This sometimes leads to state schools having a reputation among middle-class to affluent families with college educations as being less "aspirational" compared to selective private universities. (This doesn't apply to the flagship campuses, because they are more selective and thus more similar to elite private universities in terms of their reputations.) Kids from those families still apply to (and attend) state schools in large numbers, but the term that's often used for them is "safety schools" - they're the schools you apply to in case you don't get into the highly selective private schools who take 10% or less of their applicants.

Third, NYU versus UC Davis is actually a slightly odd fit for the "state school" versus "private university" comparison. NYU is not actually that selective: it takes in 13% of applicants, which makes it about the 40th most selective college in the U.S. That's surprisingly low down the totem pole, given that the annual cost of attending NYU would be around $84,000 for Lady Bird. (NYU actually has to be less selective than other private universities, because it has a fairly small endowment compared to the selective private universities, and is thus more reliant on tuition dollars for revenue.)

However, Lady Bird's conflict isn't so much about academics generally - it's more specific than that. Remember that Lady Bird/Greta Gerwig is a theater kid who wants a career in the performing arts. If you narrow your focus from which is the best university overall to which university has the best Film Studies program, NYU is the second-best film school in the country, and because it's right in NYC there's a direct pipeline to one of the main hubs of the film and tv industry.

At the same time, Lady Bird probably should have done a bit more research about California's public university system. Because of the legacy of the California Master Plan, there is a robust transfer system within California's public universities that allows students who are really on the grind to move their way up, so that you can potentially start at the least selective community colleges and end up graduating from the most selective flagship UC campuses. So Lady Bird could have easily gone straight from UC Davis to UCLA (because while UCLA takes in only ~11% of applicants, making it more selective than NYU, it takes in about 24% of transfers), which is also one of the best film schools in the country with a direct pipeline to Hollywood, and it doesn't cost $84,000 a year.

(Ironically, Greta Gerwig herself didn't actually end up going to film school - she ended up going to Barnard which isn't particularly known for film, ended up going into English Lit because she was intending to be a playwright, before becoming a breakout actor in the indie film world, and then zig-zagging from there into directing and back into writing.)

So there's been a couple of Spider-Man media showings of Doctor Octopus since the start of the century that portrays him sympathetically and/or his villainy is influenced by his robotic arms, and I'm wondering if there's grounding for this in the comics? I always thought Octavius was a bastard through and through, especially since he's one of Peter's arch-enemies

Doc Ock as a sympathetic figure is pretty much an invention of Raimi and Molina, as far as I know. In the comics, they've sometimes done fakeouts (the whole marriage business with Aunt May, for example), but Doc Ock is pretty consistently presented as an amoral, violent egomaniac with a pretty wide sadistic streak.

Even at his most heroic - the Superior Spider-Man phase - Otto was still primarily driven by ego, his eagerness to inflict serious injury and death on others was an immediate tell that this wasn't Peter, and he himself ultimately admitted that Peter was a better man than he.

So.... Are we really living in a world where a goddamn cook turned mercenary has putsched the real life version of emperor Palpatine? Wtf?

-SLAL

Of the New X-Men, who do you think would go to see Barbie, and which Oppenheimer?

Sooraya- Oppenheimer (Barbie idealizes western culture and Capitalism)

Laura- Oppenheimer (Constantly reciting unknown facts and data throughout the movie to everyone’s annoyance AND doing a security sweep of the theatre…)

Megan- Barbie

Cessily - Barbie

Julian - Barbie (says he’s going to it for Cessily’s sake…Probably has a bro crush on Gosling after “Drive”… also Hellion might be a Scorpio according to some anon?)

Sofia- Barbie

Laurie- Barbie

David- Oppenheimer (Also read multiple biographies on Oppenheimer!)

Noriko- Oppenheimer, solely for David’s sake though…

Victor- neither, the hype for both films annoys him and he’s too cool to get obsessed about a film….

Josh- BOTH, Oppenheimer for David’s sake but he whines the whole time…Barbie because he thinks Margot Robbie is hot

Santo- Neither, he’s just gonna binge watch “Fast & Furious” films or play video games all night…the only way Santo goes is if they all lie and tell him Margot Robbie has a nude scene in “Barbie”…

Jay- Barbie

Kevin- Barbie

P.I.C. Cuckoos- Both

Brian- Barbie…but he actually wanted to go to Oppenheimer…but was worried it would make him sound uncool…

Mark- Barbie

Dallas- Both

Alani- Both

Ruth- neither; the film she was most excited about this year was Wes Anderson’s “Astroid City”…which she went to see with Legion…she also already knows what films will win what Oscars

Ben- Neither; watching “Fast and Furious” with Santo

Nezhno- Doesn’t care…just happy to be invited…

Paras- Barbie (secretly super into Musicals and Bollywood)

Hisako- neither; says Oppenheimer ignores the POV of Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki….also thinks Barbie is too “girly” and vapid…watches “Seven Samurai” with Logan instead, all while Logan constantly brings up “In MY day…this was CONSIDERED a BLOCKBUSTER!”….

This is probably a bad question, but who is Kraven the Hunter, why is he getting a movie, and what did they get wrong about him?

Kraven the Hunter is a Spider-Man villain: his whole schtick is that he is a Russian big game hunter who is so good that he started hunting animals with his bare hands because it was the only way to make it hard enough to be interesting, who decides that the "most dangerous game" is Spider-Man and proceeds to hunt him like an animal, because somehow that's legal in J. Jonah Jameson's New York.

You might notice that, along with hunting and killing animals with his bare hands, Kraven's schtick is wearing their skins from head-to-mid-calf (capris pants and ballet shoes, what can you do?). Doesn't exactly mesh well with soulful emo with daddy issues who doesn't believe in hurting animals. (The daddy issues thing is particularly funny, because Kraven in the comics is relentlessly awful to his many children.)

As for why he's getting a movie, it's the same reason that Morbius got a movie - Sony has the rights to Spider-Man's rogues gallery, but under the deal they worked out with Marvel, they can't do their own Spider-Man solo films at the moment. So instead of having the villains be villains, Sony is turning them into anti-heroes, with decidedly mixed results.

Since Balon Greyjoy was almost certainly planning to attack the North long before he knew Theon was coming home, at least since Ned was imprisoned and more likely since Ned left the North, would it be fair to say the Ned and Robert’s main error was underestimating just how little Balon cared for the lives of his children, at least compared to the (imagined) glories of bringing back The Old Way?

Yes, although as I've said, Balon's behavior here is really deviant within the cultural context of Westeros, so Robert and Ned's assumptions werent unreasonable.

Why is Walt Disney refusing to recognize the animators union in 1941 a mistake on Disney's part?

Let's start with the moral angle: Walt was denying people their human rights to form a union free from intimidation by management, and he was denying them basic economic fairness and security at work due to his weird control freak tendencies. Moreover, it was pretty evil of him to retaliate against strike leaders by denouncing them as Communists in front of HUAC in 1947 in order to get them blacklisted.

Beyond that, Walt lost on both a financial and artistic level. After three months of picketing, Disney was forced to sign a contract with the Screen Cartoonist's Guild and give them pretty much everything they had struck for when it came to wages. On an artistic level, however, Walt Disney Productions lost almost half its workforce due to the strike - partly because animators had to pay the bills, but also because a lot of animators were so pissed off by Walt's conduct that they refused to come back even after winning the right to be rehired. (Those workers would go to work for Disney's competitors or found their own animations studios. Not good for Disney the company, but ultimately not necessarily a bad thing for the medium or the industry.)

This enormous loss of talent crippled the company at a critical moment - Pinocchio and Fantasia had not done well at the box office, and while Dumbo (a scab movie, btw) made a profit, Bambi failed to turn a profit. Disney stopped making full-length features for the next six years and had to survive on WWII propaganda contracts, some godawful shorts, and re-releases of DIsney's previous hits (essentially the "Disney" Vault started as a desperate attempt to maintain financial viability). There was a real possibility in that period that Disney Productions would go out of business.

While there would eventually be a recovery in the 1950s with Cinderella, Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, and Lady and the Tramp, those lost years in the 40s are something of a cultural tragedy - we'll never know what Disney Productions could have done for the medium if they'd kept the workers they lost and been able to keep making full-length animated movies.

So to sum up: all because he was an Andrew Ryanesque control freak, Walt nearly destroyed his company when he could have just recognized the union from the jump, saved himself an enormous amount of financial pain, and kept making the movies he loved.