ha! I trust your memory more than mine, lol. I’m sure I’ve said it here before, but I tend to remember my experience of a book or movie more than any details about the plot, etc.
I’m usually the sort of person who likes to like things when it comes to popular media, but I’m also a bit of a curmudgeon, so my approach to the MCU movies has been to enhance my suspension of disbelief with a bit of day drinking, and then walk to my neighborhood theater and indulge in the spectacle. I usually have a good time and enjoy the movies, but the details are admittedly sometimes a bit fuzzy.
Jon Favreau is one of two regulars on the Chef Show.
Maybe Paltrow was asked " We need you to appear as Pepper Potts for a short scene." Spiderman Homecoming’s shooting schedule (according to IMDB) didn’t overlap with Avengers 3 and 4, though. If it had, the confusion would be understandable.
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Even second-hand this teacher’s attitude is one of the dumbest takes in history:
(Again, this is about the teacher not the Twitter poster).
I hate to break it to that guy, but there never was a fussy little Belgian man who liked to use his little grey cells or a morbidly obese Montenegrin immigrant living in a brownstone in New York with his personal chef, personal assistant and a room full of orchids. There aren’t many historical records of little old ladies being better than the police at solving crimes.
Yet, I have a feeling all those would be more acceptable as stories about people than a graphic novel full of talking mice and cats and pigs. Since there were no dinosaurs in the US civil war, there’s absolutely nothing a child could learn about such human things as racism or see someone who looks like them in a leading role by reading such a thing.
Genre/format snobs should never be allowed to shape children’s reading experiences.
And yet (speaking as a former English teacher) there are a lot of English teachers like this.
It gets weirder: there is a lot of overlap between these English teachers and English teachers who basically don’t read anything except what’s on their school board’s curriculum. They haven’t read a new-to-them book in years, much less read anything for fun.
I got snark from colleagues both for reading “intellectually” (translation: reading lit fix for the fun of it) and “pulp” (translation: reading SF).
It gets worse: there are plenty of department heads and principals who think teachers should only read YA so they can “relate to the kids” – which means they’re not prepared to relate to that kid who shows up to class with manga… or a copy of War & Peace.
Tell me about it. I can’t read graphic novels. It’s some sort of weird dyslexia. Anyway, my oldest did not ‘get’ reading for the longest time, despite being read to daily and all that good stuff. Then she discovered manga and I think the fact that I CAN’T read it made it special and secret; next thing we know, she’s reading both those and conventional text-only books too. Different isn’t bad…sometimes it’s even better.
I once took a short story class (as opposed to the sf classes I’d taken) at a local writing center. The teacher was an English professor from a nearby college, who was proud to have had stories published in university literary magazines. I mentioned I was writing sf, and later he referred to that “space ship” stuff.
One of my stepdaughters was really good at math but had never been a reader. She didn’t like it, would quit if there were words she didn’t understand or long, complex sentences. She thought books were always as bad as the required reading in school. She might have gone through life that way and raised her kids that way too.
But then Twilight came out and she started devouring books. When her son was born, books to read to him were some of the first things she got. As a toddler, he started reading things pretty young.
It doesn’t really matter whether Twilight or Harry Potter are ‘good’ by literary standards if they’re effective.
Probably more than any other format (including classic literature), SF is all about isolating and examining specific aspects of humanity. Wouldn’t expect someone who’s never read much to know that though.