Thoughts on Oppenheimer

You know that old saying: you wait four years to go back to cinemas after a global pandemic, and then you go twice in the course of a month.

I caught Oppenheimer this afternoon with my dad and his lady. He'd expressed interest in seeing it, since it features scientists that he was (in some cases) vaguely acquainted with at Caltech, and since it's been the subject of cultural buzz for a while. Neither of them wanted to make it a double-feature with Barbie, so I'll have to save my Barbenheimer hot takes for another day. 

Though it's worth noting: what a point we're at in our culture, where the two biggest movies of the moment are a surprisingly grown-up take on a children's toy tie-in, opposite an impressively art-deco biopic of one of America's greatest scientists. It's hard to think of two concepts more diametrically opposed, but here we are: Barbenheimer's a thing.

Anyhoo:

The first thing to say is that I really liked it. Like a lot of Christopher Nolan films, it plays with the timeline, starting us off at the hearings where Oppenheimer's security clearance was stripped from him, and at the confirmation hearings for the man who, it turns out, engineered those other hearings. And then from there we see Oppenheimer himself, portrayed as a younger man at university. 

We jump among each of these timelines throughout the movie, and I suppose the jumps are meant to evoke the quantum strangeness of the fundamental physics that Oppenheimer studied. It's hard not to see that theme in the recurring shots of rain on puddles, which is sometimes a stand-in for nuclear detonations across tactical maps of the world. It doesn't play out like a formal experiment like the time jumps did in Dunkirk, but it's clear the two films share some DNA.

The casting is pretty great, as Nolan's tends to be. Cillian Murphy is not necessarily the person I'd have tapped to play Oppenheimer, but he's otherworldly enough to play to that sense of a man never quite at his ease in the world. I also appreciate the casting of Matt Damon as Leslie Groves of the Army Corps of Engineers, who oversaw the Manhattan Projects - despite the "Maaattt Daaamon" jokes of Team America, Damon's a pretty versatile actor who does a good line in that type of character. It reminded me a little of The Good Shepherd, which is not a great film and it's a different character, but it belies the sense of Damon as an interpreter only of youthful parts.

I'd also give a nod of recognition to Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer's wife Kitty, who has some great scenes and lines. I especially like the reference in her first appearance to the fact that Kitty's a biologist - acknowledging that women could aspire to be more than housewives.

Likewise, the cinematography is as good as always for a Nolan film. It may not be bombastic like the flipped-over semi in The Dark Knight, but the shot of the gantry at Los Alamos where the Manhattan Project is about to explode the first test device was still breathtaking. Just as breathtaking are the shots of the Earth being ravaged by nuclear explosions, or the interstitials of reactions that punctuate the scenes of high stress for Oppenheimer.

I also loved the score, which put me in mind of that for Interstellar (probably my favorite Nolan movie, and among my top favorites ever). It doesn't achieve the same soaring qualities that marked out that previous film, but has similar tonality and motifs. The sound design is good in general, as well, with Nolan not afraid to make you jump out of your seat by keeping the visual of the atomic explosion silent for a long time, then hitting you with the roar of the bomb like a wall of sound.

Thematically, there are two things I appreciate. First is how anarchic scientists are among themselves. They drink, they joke (at one point Enrico Fermi is taking odds on whether or not the test explosion will ignite the Earth's entire atmosphere), they womanize. We see Oppenheimer sleeping with Jean Tetlock (played by Florence Pugh), married to Kitty, and only toward the end of the film is it confirmed that he's also had an affair with someone else.

There's also the political side, with Oppenheimer's contacts with labor unions and out-and-out Communists, including both Jean and Kitty. This is the other theme that I appreciated, which was a little more nuanced in its treatment of Communism and the arms race than you typically get from American movies. Nolan's themes frequently feel more conservative, so it's interesting to see how the characters grapple with communism and leftism generally here.

Overall, I liked the movie, and like any number of Nolan's other films, I can see myself exploring it further, trying to tease out its complexities. Most importantly, I'm glad I saw it in the theater, because as much as I love watching movies on my dinky 32-inch screen at home, this has big enough visuals and sound that watching it at the cinema really lets you get lost in the story. I'm even tempted to go check it out in Imax at some point soon, to see how it hits in that format.

Strange New Worlds: Those Old Scientists is Pretty Great, Y'all

Like probably all fans of Star Trek: Lower Decks and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, I've been eagerly looking forward to the crossover episode that was teased after the first season of SNW came out. If you're eagerly awaiting it, but haven't watched it yet (I just finished it half an hour ago), be warned there will likely be spoilers after the jump.

But to whet your appetite, I hope it isn't hyperbole to suggest this one is up there with the classic Deep Space 9 episode Trials and Tribble-ations. Read on for my thoughts:

Just Desserts: Affirmative Action and the Doom Patrol

Just yesterday I picked up the collected edition of Rachel Pollack's run on Vertigo's Doom Patrol. I remember seeing listings for it back in the 90s, when she started writing it, and I was struck then by the announcements that she was a poet and novelist - which crystallized for me that the book was something different, if you followed up Grant Morrison with a poet, of all things.

Even back then I had some inkling of who Grant Morrison was, even if I hadn't actually read any of his comics. Though I guess that feeling of the "grown-upness" of Vertigo came from the descriptions of the other books being published in the line at that time: beyond Sandman and Hellblazer and Swamp Thing were Shade, the Changing Man; Enigma; Moonshadow; Chiaroscuro. All of these, going by the descriptions, dealt with more mature themes than the mainline DC books, so it made sense that the line would hire a "proper" writer.

I never picked up Doom Patrol at the time, though I did come across some early Grant Morrison issues in Italian compilations that I'd buy on vacation. I think I skipped past those pages, though, because I was just buying these books for the Justice League and Legion of Superheroes issues that they contained. So I didn't actually encounter the Grant Morrison Doom Patrol until a couple of years ago.

More recently, I heard of Rachel Pollack's passing, so I was reminded of her time on Doom Patrol, and learned that they had indeed collected her run. Those issues have probably been impossible to find for the last 30 years, because they weren't plagued with particularly stellar sales. I've spoken here before of the pleasure of finding old comics from that period that are rare but not valuable, so I appreciated the chance to get my hands on these issues.

Anyway, in the collected edition there's a foreword from series editor Tom Peyer, in which he talks about the prank he and Pollack played in the original issues' letter column (Pollack also mentioned it, and the snippets of the letters are pretty funny). They'd already hired her, but they ran letters from her in each issue, where she asked with increasing insistence to be made the new Doom Patrol writer, culminating in the announcement in Morrison's last issue that Pollack would indeed be the new writer.

The thing that set off a lightbulb in my head was Peyer's line about "the great American terror that someone, somewhere, is getting something they don't deserve". This terror is what's driven some of the worst behavior by the west in recent years (not just here in the US, but in Europe, and probably Canada too): Comicsgate and Gamergate are two examples, in which right-wing trolls threw a fit about women in the comics and video game industries.

(As a quick aside, those 90s solicitations for Pollack's Doom Patrol made no mention of the fact that she was a trans woman, a fact I didn't learn until the last decade. One imagines that DC might have made a bigger deal of it if they'd hired her now, which would have led to a predictable backlash from those Comicsgate idiots. But also, Pollack makes a nice counter-example to those who think gender transitions are something new)

But it's also what's driven the decades-long campaign against affirmative action, which seems to have culminated this week in the US Supreme Court's decision to limit the ways that Harvard and the University of North Carolina can apply race in their admissions process.

I don't want to debate the merits of the SCOTUS decision, or of the defense by Harvard or UNC. I'm not a lawyer or legal scholar, and I appreciate it's a thorny topic, given that Harvard seems to have been using some pretty gross racism against Asian students to prioritize Black and Hispanic students.

But that line by Tom Peyer is a perfect encapsulation of why affirmative action has been so controversial for so long. The opposition to it turns on the idea not that you're attempting to right historic wrongs, but that you're taking jobs or university places from deserving, qualified (read: white and/or male) people and giving them to undeserving (read: non-white and/or non-male) people.

That formulation speaks to a lot of people's sense of fairness, which is why it's been so successful in cutting back affirmative action, especially in higher education. Even the most fair-minded people want to see jobs go to the most qualified people; conversely, nobody wants to see critical jobs go to someone who has no idea how to do these jobs based only on their skin color or other circumstances.

However, support for affirmative action varies depending on how you ask the question. A lot of people who might support measures to reduce wealth inequality among different ethnic or racial groups will express opposition to these measures if they're painted as giving jobs to the "undeserving". The other way to look at this is that a lot of people who don't care about racial inequality can go around saying they want to do something for disadvantaged groups, but it has to be the "right" measure, whatever that may mean.

Unfortunately, affirmative action is another of those areas where the left has allowed reactionaries and the radical right to define the terms of the debate. Instead of being able to defend access to good jobs and education as the way to improve outcomes for historically disadvantaged groups (because the right also doesn't want these groups getting access to welfare, again the "undeserving" idea), progressives are left looking silly by defending a system that seems like it's just there to advance incompetent people. Not that anyone ever notices when a white guy is shown to be incompetent (ahem *Frank Lampard* ahem)

Progressives also end up unwittingly bolstering existing racial tensions, where people of certain disadvantaged groups feel they're competing with other such groups for the scraps left by the dominant group. Harvard's black-balling of Asians is a good example: there's a sense among some Asian parents, anecdotally in my experience, that their kids are working hard for places in college only to be denied by affirmative action for "less deserving" students.

Funnily enough, we got a clear picture of who the "less deserving" students were a few years ago, when the Varsity Blues scandal erupted. Here was a group of parents paying extraordinary amounts to fudge their kids' standardized test scores and extracurriculars, in order to get into elite schools (and USC) that they wouldn't have been able to get into otherwise. And, uh, most of those parents were white, which means, for example, Lori Loughlin's kid (who didn't even want to go to college) was taking a spot from a "more deserving" student.

There was talk about affirmative action then, too, and what this admissions scandal meant for students of color. What's depressing is that the question of how to properly address these racial gaps and provide opportunities fell by the wayside again until this week. Signs suggest that once the dust has settled from this latest decision, that question will get ignored again, and Americans will go back to worrying that someone who "shouldn't" be getting into Harvard, or being promoted to manager, or even writing a comic book, will be getting those things.

Across the Spider-Verse Was Enough to Get Me Back to the Movies

Despite the title of this post, this isn't a review, or at least not entirely. Though I will say that, if it's maybe only 90-98% as good as Into the Spider-Verse, that still makes Across the Spider-Verse a pretty great movie. It's emotionally resonant, filled with inventive visuals, and the voice acting is fabulous (there are also some nice live-action cameos, which made me squeee with pleasure).

It's more a musing on the act and fact of going to the movies, after being away for so long. There are a number of things I have yet to cross off my list from three years ago, but now I can say I've once again gone to see a movie in the theater. The last movie I saw in theaters, before the pandemic hit, was 1917, and in the interim, I've relied on simultaneous releases on Disney Plus or HBO Max, or just waited for the movies to show up on streamers. In one or two cases, I even rented them on my Apple TV.

The streaming factor is the other reason I haven't been back to the movies yet, not just the pandemic. I'm fully vaccinated, relatively healthy, and I wore my mask throughout the entire movie (as near as I could tell, the only person in the theater who did), so it didn't seem like too big a deal. But it struck me at one point that, despite missing the communal experience of movie-going, I've really gotten used to just watching films at home.

Maybe I'm getting old, forgetful and cheap, but $17, plus a $1.80 online purchase fee, seemed a lot for having to wear pants and shoes while watching a film. It also didn't help that the lady next to me decided to start texting on her phone toward the end. Luckily she wasn't talking to anyone, but the screen was bright enough for me to notice (and seethe about it).

On the other hand, we've been having a mini heatwave this weekend, so it was worth it to enjoy some air conditioning for a couple of hours. Heck, I even providentially brought my jacket, so I could bundle up a little against the AC. The movie didn't have the crowd jumping out of their seats, but it was nice being part of some of the laughs the movie got. Most of all, it was nice watching something immersive, on a much bigger screen and with a better sound system than what I have at home. I'm not one to spend a lot on a fancy, gigantic, top-of-the-line TV and surround sound system, so it's nice to catch a big, wild movie like Across the Spider-Verse on a decent AV setup.

I guess the price is what it is because of inflation and theater chains' need to recoup some losses after the enforced shutdowns in the pandemic. And not all of them survived: I still rue the loss of our beloved Palo Alto Square, which showed a different class of films than what does well at the multiplex that I went to yesterday (JoJo Rabbit, Honey Boy and Little Women were some of the more recent viewings I had there). As for the annoyances of getting dressed up and being around people, well, I was used to that kind of thing once, and I can get used to it again.

For the time being, I'm probably not going to watch a movie at the cinema every weekend, but it's good to have that option open again. And honestly, paying almost $20 to enjoy some relief from the heat is a better idea than my plan last September to stay at one of the hotels across the street from my house ($300 or so per night, to give you an idea). I'm also likely to continue watching most of my movies at home, on one of the many streaming services, but it'll be good to have another option for the really exciting films.

At the very least, when the third Spider-Verse movie comes out, I'll want to see that in theaters too.

Goodbye to Star Trek: Prodigy

I've talked here before about streaming shows getting eliminated, and this week we had another casualty. Paramount Plus announced that Star Trek: Prodigy, its animated kids' show set in the Trek universe's Delta Quadrant, would be cancelled and removed from the streaming service during the final week of June 2023. Apparently this isn't the first time an exclusive of theirs has disappeared, since they did the same thing with Jordan Peele's Twilight Zone reboot that had aired on CBS All-Access.

The last time I wrote about this, I suggested catching something you've been putting off, because who knew what would happen to it? I suppose I didn't expect it to happen so quickly, with another show that's relevant to my interests. The only problem is, when the news came down a couple of days ago, I knew that I wouldn't have time to watch all of Prodigy's 20 episodes before they disappeared.

It's disappointing because, again, you'd hope that streamers' original shows would be protected from this sort of thing, but it turns out that even hosting your own shows costs a lot of money. Presumably, the execs at Paramount saw that Prodigy (along with the other three shows that are getting axed) wasn't getting enough views, but I'm surprised at that, since I've heard a lot of good stuff about the show from other fans. I'd also watched the first few episodes on a plane last year, and had been looking forward to catching up with the rest of it when I could.

Once again, I have to bemoan the move away from DVD releases of shows in recent years. Apparently, Prodigy only got a DVD release of its first 10 episodes, and there don't seem to be imminent plans to release the others. I've also been watching Fargo on DVD from Netflix (RIP, come September), but as I finish the third season I won't be able to continue with it, since there was never a physical media release of Season 4. It seemed sensible a few years ago, when streaming got pretty good, to abandon physical formats, but now it just means shows and movies are disappearing completely.

One thought that occurs to me is whether this spate of cancellations is related to the ongoing writers' strike in Hollywood. Work has stopped on pretty much all scripted shows, apart from (presumably) the ones that were already written and filmed (since SAG-AFTRA is also joining in), so a lot of shows are probably on the edge of cancellation the longer the strike goes on.

This shouldn't be taken as a complaint about the strike, btw. I'm fully in favor of writers, actors, directors, and all creatives getting paid fairly for their work, and not being supplanted by AI (see the titles of Disney Plus's Secret Invasion, which were created with generative AI and kicked off a bit of a controversy this past week). I suspect that studios are cutting back more and more because the strike doesn't seem close to resolution, which means they'll be expecting worse revenues this year; while on the other hand, and kinda cynically, they've been seeing what happened when HBO/Discovery took the axe to a bunch of originals and since nothing too bad happened, in terms of subscribers, and so now the other streamers and studios are doing it too.

I don't know how Prodigy's production on Season 2 was affected by the strikes, since animation writers aren't covered by the WGA, though presumably its voice actors are all part of SAG-AFTRA. That said, the show didn't need to be doing so badly on its own to get canned, if cutting it meant Paramount could save money elsewhere, on some other executives' pet projects.

My only hope is that its second season does get picked up somewhere, so that, if nothing else, the creators get to finish their story and the fans get to watch it. For my own part, maybe it's time I invest in the DVD box sets of the various older Trek shows...

Champions League: City and Pep Get What They've Been Craving

In the end it didn't come easy for them. After the semifinals were decided and we knew that Manchester City would be facing Inter, the talk was all about, "What can Inter do to beat City?" The Guardian's Nicky Bandini acknowledged, when asked if Inter could win, that of course City's players were all, man for man, better than Inter's.

When the game arrived, Inter played without fear. They kept the possession relatively even - no 81% possession for City this time. But of course it wasn't enough. City's goal came on the 68th minute after over an hour of being frustrated. Inter didn't play the catenaccio that everyone probably expected (I was watching with an English friend, who teased me about that), taking the game to City whenever they could.

As I say, it wasn't enough. City's the champion, for the third time in a row, of Europe's most prominent league, while Inter came in third in a league that hasn't provided a Champions League finalist since 2017, and hasn't provided a Champions League winner since 2010... when Inter won it. When you have stats like that, you have to ignore talk of a hoodoo: City were always going to be too good for Inter, a team whose attack consists of a striker that City long ago deemed surplus to requirements and another striker who endured poor spells playing for City's biggest English rivals.

So City has its treble, becoming only the second English team to do that since one of those rivals, Manchester United, did it in 1999. They made heavy weather of it this season, given that they weren't even top of the Premier League for most of the season, despite Erling Haaland's record-breaking form. Yet they won that with a couple of games to spare, then saw off United in the FA Cup, and now have the one trophy that was missing from the cabinet.

The previous time City got to a Champions League final, they were beaten by Chelsea's street smarts (and by Antonio Rüdiger's shoulder breaking Kevin de Bruyne's orbital bone). The narrative around Pep Guardiola in the Champions League was that he was too given to tinkering, and that he'd created a mental block for himself, after those epochal teams that smashed United in 2009 and 2011. Back then he had Lionel Messi, at the top of his game, but of course Pep was never able to lure Messi to the blue side of Manchester.

Now he can say he didn't need him after all.

So what's next for City, and, y'know, for the rest of English football and European football more widely? The Abu Dhabi purchase in 2008 brought a few trophies, but it took the full reorientation of the club in Pep's image to bring the dominance that they craved. According to the Observer, City have won 17 major trophies since Abu Dhabi took over, but 12 of those have come in the years that Pep's been the coach.

Here's the list of those trophies:

• Five of the last six Premier League titles, including the record-breaking 100-point season of 2017-18
• Two FA cups
• Four consecutive EFL Cups
• And now one Champions League

It's clear that Pep's going nowhere, as long as City can keep paying for the players he wants. With his ability to construct teams consisting not only of the 11 men on the pitch but also the five substitutes, it seems unlikely that there will be serious challenges to City's dominance in the Premier League. It'll be a different story in Europe, as Real Madrid will probably still be able to treat the Champions League as its own fiefdom. At the very least, City and Real are probably the teams that'll dominate the honors for the next few years.

I'll leave it to someone else to talk about whether that's a good or bad thing for the sport more generally. I've been talking for years about their dominance and how it'd be nice to see them get challenged, but it's hard to see how the status quo at City changes for the moment. There's no bigger club that Pep can go to, and he doesn't seem the type to give himself a challenge by (say) going to manage a club with fewer resources. 

I guess the one achievement left to Pep and City is to win all four trophies in a single season, and with the form they're in, you can imagine them achieving that goal sooner rather than later.

UPDATE: Of course, the moment I commit to paper the words "Pep's going nowhere", he announces that he's leaving when his contract ends in 2025. The article says he'd previously thought of coaching in Italy, to complete his set of the top 4 leagues, but "his thinking has changed", and that one option is to coach a national team. I wonder.

A criticism of Guardiola that I've read is that he's never been firmly tested: every club he's gone to has been dominant or set up expressly for him (Man City, for example, brought in his entire recruitment team from Barcelona before they hired him). I can imagine that maybe the glory of dominating Serie A isn't as apparent now, given that the Italian league is a bit of a mess. But also, I wonder if he's really interested in coaching a national side - after all, he won't have an extremely rich club hierarchy there to green light whatever purchase he wants, and he'll be stuck selecting eligible players.

No, my guess (for what it's worth) is that he'll end up at another Gulf petrostate-funded team. If not PSG, which has been held up as the mirror image of Man City, since they have all this cash but still can't win the Champions League, then he'll probably join everybody else and pitch up at one of the top 4 Saudi sides, who've been making some waves by buying Karim Benzema, N'Golo Kante, and pretty much everyone else who's old and out of contract.

Maybe I'm being mean? It just doesn't seem like Pep's style to take on a challenge by starting at a lower-level team and turning them into champions. But as with everything, we'll find out in due time.

Thoughts on the New Max Streaming Service: Discovery's Gotten Harder

I've talked on here about how much I liked HBO Max, so now that it's switched to Max, to accommodate all the Discovery content that came with that merger, I thought I'd do a quick post on first impressions. I've been thinking about this since the switch occurred on 23 May, but I saw a review on CNET today and decided to add my own two cents.

The first thing I noticed was that the menu along the side was stripped down, compared to HBO Max. It currently has only Search, Home and My Stuff, where before you could use that to get to the various content hubs (HBO, DC, Studio Ghibli, Adult Swim, etc). You could also get to the Browse section, where you could select movies, TV shows, and look at all the things that have just been added, as well as everything that was leaving soon.

Although not "everything", because in the lead up to this merger, HBO got rid of a lot of shows without announcing it ahead of time (admittedly, it's because nobody was watching them, but it was annoying to see a couple of things disappear from my list without warning). Still, for the stuff that they did say was leaving, it was nice to be able to check that section and decide if there were any movies I wanted to watch before they went.

That "leaving soon" section has now been moved to New & Notable, for some reason. It's way far down, and it doesn't show the date when each of those movies leaves, so I don't know how long I have to watch them. I guess the issue is that there's so much on Max (as there was on HBO Max), that it's hard to decide on the actual thing I want to watch. When I knew something was leaving, it was easy to prioritize that, even if in most cases it came back a month or two later. Or to put it another way, discovery of new content is more difficult than before, which is ironic for a service part owned by the Discovery Channel. 

(In case you're wondering, I wrote this blog post just so I could use that line)

To illustrate how bad discovery is on Max, I didn't even know about the Last Chance section until I read this Tom's Guide review, midway through writing this post. It's not particularly intuitive to put "Leaving Soon" in the "New & Notable" section, is it? Especially if you put it way down the rows, so that someone who doesn't know it's there doesn't bother to scroll that far down.

Also, as a quick note on the name, it still feels odd that WarnerDiscovery took HBO out of the app's name. HBO is synonymous with good shows and movies, and has been for essentially my whole lifetime, so it seems like an own goal to deliberately weaken your app's branding. But then, part of what makes HBO, the brand, so impressive is that it's continued to have so much good content despite being hamstrung by a series of terrible owners, going back to the AOL-Time Warner days and right through the time when it was owned by AT&T, of all people.

But let's talk about some positives, because they do exist. The first one is that the massive amount of content I actually might want to watch is mostly still there. It still has all the HBO, DC and Adult Swim stuff I've been checking out, plus a few other shows and a lot of standup comedy. This is the thing that makes HBO Max/Max the best streamer overall for me: Disney Plus has a lot of good, Francis-approved content, and Paramount Plus is essentially a way for me to subscribe to Star Trek (plus Champions League), but HBO's diversity of content makes it the king, and the reason why most of the movies I've watched this year have been on there.

I'm not too bothered by the Discovery content, but one positive I've noticed is that now almost all of the CNN shows are back. Where before HBO Max only had season 1 of Parts Unknown, for example, it now has all 12 seasons, minus a couple of episodes that were pulled due to the circumstances surrounding Anthony Bourdain's death. They've also put on Stanley Tucci's Searching for Italy, which is good on the one hand, but sad because CNN cancelled it after season 2.

The other positive is that, compared with HBO Max, the new Max is significantly less buggy. The CNET review claims the user experience is still glitchy, but so far the only thing I've found is that one comedy special I've been watching bit by bit hasn't been added to my "Continue Watching" section. When I watched the second Shazam movie (and I've got thoughts, but I'll address those another time), that showed up in "Continue Watching", so this might be a one-off.

HBO Max, by contrast, had something go wrong literally every day. Whenever I'd start the app, its loading would cause a lag between pressing the action button on my remote and it actually starting the show. This lag meant either that it didn't register the button-push, or it did, but on the wrong show. The other infuriating thing was how I'd finish a movie, and be taken to its page, but when I'd press "back", it would start the movie again. I'm happy to report that these problems have disappeared from Max, as have random freakouts like the time I tried watching Superman II but the audio consisted of a high-pitched, constant beep.

To sum up, the new Max app is still probably the best streamer overall. It has the best selection of movies and TV shows of any streamer, and has been bolstered by all the Discovery shows, if that's your bag. Fingers crossed, it's sorted out the bugs that plagued HBO Max, so that things don't randomly autoplay when you've tried to quit out of them. Finding stuff to watch has gotten a little bit more confusing, but that seems to be more because of how they organize those sections, rather than completely eliminating sections like "Last Chance". Hopefully they'll make that navigation simpler and more in line with the old version, but at least it's all still there in some form.