I wouldn’t necessarily call it top-tier, but The Mandalorian knows what it wants to do, and it does it well, which is not something you can say about a lot of recent Star Wars movies.

Attack of the Clones has killer action scenes at the beginning and the end. And the stuff in the middle is truly terrible, but when I watched it recently, it became so bad it’s good. The “romance” between Anakin and Padme is Office levels of cringe comedy. And I find myself quoting that sand speech from time to time. 

Rise of Skywalker is absolutely worse than any of the prequel movies. At their absolute worse, the prequels gave us some top notch action scenes. Rise of Skywalker couldn’t even do that right. God, I hate that movie.

I’ve softened on these films over the years. Sure, all the same problems remain, but the larger context around them has made these movies more interesting.

I think the Ewoks are unfairly maligned. Yes, they are cute. But they are also dangerous carnivores who like to eat human meat -- they were going to eat our heroes until C3PO convinced them otherwise, and all the empty Stormtrooper armor around implies *something* happened to the people inside them.

As much as I enjoy The Force Awakens, it does sometimes feel like the Asylum version of Star Wars in that major elements of the latter (Tatooine, the Death Star, the Emipre, the Rebellion) have been copied but with names just different enough (Jakku, Starkiller Base, the First Order, the Resistance) as to technically a…

Kersh’s commentary on ESB is AMAZING!
“You see this is a family movie so we can’t show intercourse, but for these characters, this kiss IS intercourse! This is how we show these characters having intercourse!”

You forgot that they hid the last hope of the galaxy under the last name of his father that was born on the planet they were hiding him.... living with Anakin’s (step) family in the house where his mother’s buried.......on the planet that is suppossed to be farthest from the bright center of the universe which…

... living with Anakin's (step) family in the house where his mother's buried. 

You forgot that they hid the last hope of the galaxy under the last name of his father that was born on the planet they were hiding him.

My take has always been that the actors who actually had enough experience to still give a decent performance even without a good director (e.g. Neeson and McGregor) came off fine. It was the actors who weren’t experienced enough to “direct themselves” yet in the absence of a good director (e.g. Portman, Lloyd, and…

To be fair, that’s what I’d have done.

I don’t believe that Neeson’s career was ever in jeopardy because of this film (he does a pretty good job) and MacGregor outright thrived in its immediate aftermath, so I’m not sure it was the career poison Portman suggests (and if people were hesitant to hire her it was kind of for cause: her performance in this…

The person who benefitted most from the prequels was Ewan McGregor. I knew him already from his Danny Boyle movies, like Trainspotting and Shallow Grave, but this made him an international movie star. He also happens to give a pretty good performance in Episode 3.

On more than one occasion at SF Cons, I referred to The Phantom Menace as “The Most Impressive Cartoon of the Year”. (In my defense, I hadn’t yet seen Toy Story 2.)

In The Phantom Menace, I think we’re led to believe that Amidala is the queen’s name and Padme is the alias she uses when she goes incognito. But then in Episode II we learn her full name is Padme Amidala - so her idea of a disguise when she’s on the run from murderous factions is to just use her first name? And even…

You know, in the lead-up to the Phantom Menace, it looked like Lucas was staying in the same mode he had for ESB and RotJ. He was focused on revolutionizing the movie industry by shooting in digital, using virtual sets with CGI characters in them, and we just assumed that he’d have capable people in charge of actually…

The funny thing about the Phantom Menace is that it tricks you. Jar Jar is such a misguided concept, the storylines he anchors so bad, that he kind of convinces you that he (and poor Ahmed Best, who was just doing what George Lucas told him) ruined the movie. So when you came out of the theater, there was a bad taste…

The problem is that George Lucas is a fabulous producer/ideas man, but that’s about as close to the creative process as he should ever be allowed to get. His scripts are almost uniformly terrible, and his direction is average at best.

ESB is the best film in the series precisely because other, more talented people took…

A friend and I were the first people in Chicago to get in line for Phantom Menace tickets. We brought a tent and slept on the sidewalk from Saturday through Wednesday. We were on tv a few times, Roger Ebert came down to hang out for a bit (he famously didn’t care for superfandom of any type, but he was an invested and…