Many, many people are delighted by the prospect of another tongue-in-cheek Thor film. I am not one of them. Thor: Love and Thunder (Disney, 7.8) costars Chris Hemworth, Tessa Thompson (as the bisexual Valkyrie), Natalie Portman, Christian Bale, Chris Pratt, Dave Bautista, etc. Plus I am not a fan of director Taika Waititi. I probably never will be. Post-Jojo Rabbit (which Jeff Sneider had a great time with, chuckling and guffawing) my Waititi attitude became caveat emptor. I know mine is a minority opinion. I hope everyone has a great time with it.

Before last night I had watched David Fincher‘s Zodiac seven or eight times, give or take. Two press screenings of the shorter theatrical version (157 minutes), and the Bluray director’s cut (162 minutes) five or six times.

But last night’s viewing was different. For the first time I watched it with subtitles start to finish, and it seemed to make a profound difference. It felt more granular, more “police blotter” on some level. I know each and every scene of the 162-minute version backwards and forwards, and yet I found it spellbinding, especially the last 45 minutes or so.

The Zodiac Wiki page says “an early version of Zodiac ran three hours and eight minutes.” 26 minutes longer than the directors cut! It breaks my heart that the Director’s Cut Bluray didn’t present this version as an option.

HE to Fincher: Given that Zodiac‘s rep has grown exponentially since it opened 15 years ago, I would think that you might want to offer the 188-minute version (if in fact it exists) as a streamer. Have you ever considered this?

I’m still annoyed that research-screening audiences said they didn’t like (a) the two-minute news + music blackout montage that suggests the passage of four years, and (b) especially the scene in which three cops — Mark Ruffalo‘s Dave Toschi, Anthony Edwards‘ Bill Armstrong and Dermot Mulroney‘s Captain Marty Lee — report their findings about Arthur Leigh Allen (John Carroll Lynch) over a speaker phone in order to obtain a search warrant.

Another pleasant hang. We’re all accustomed to Piers Morgan being a tart, adversarial figure, but here he’s entirely personable and relaxed.

At the 31:30 mark, Maher blanks on Thomas Mitchell, the actor who played Scarlett O’Hara‘s father in Gone With The Wind. Mitchell’s two best performances — “Kid” Dabb in Only Angels Have Wings and Mayor Jonas Henderson in High Noon, who stabs Gary Cooper in the back.

Maher: “[Gone With The Wind], by the way…entertaining as fuck, and the people who need a disclaimer [about the 83-year-old racist content]…this is the problem, you fucking babies. Can’t you just see by the film stock that things were very different back then? History in general, we evolve. Just celebrate that we are not [as] racist any more. This generation [Millennials] needs a trigger warning and a Klonopin to get through an episode of [something or other].”

Around the 34-minute mark they talk about victim culture and “the end of the empire, what happens to successful civilizations, they get soft and mushy in the mind….weakness is celebrated and the stiff-upper-lip and resilience is now to be condemned.” And they get into pronouns around the 40-minute mark.