I'm really curious what the deal with the Falcon is in the new movie. Han and Chewie sound like they haven't seen it in a long time. Maybe it was abandoned after the Jakku battle? Rey was just scavenging and one day she tumbled down one of those wrecked Star Destroyers and it was just sitting there?

The other thing is that there's no dramatic heft to the post-JEDI story in the EU. It's just a bunch of heroes who are bestest buddies spending their lives defending the galaxy from impotent threats. The new movies seem to be at least suggesting that SOME interesting shit happened after the OT.

What's bizarre is that the Empire and Rebellion/New Republic/Whatever-the-fuck-it-was-called-after-that never really evolve in the EU. The Empire becomes less evil and the Rebels basically recreate the Old Republic. That's it. The direction THE FORCE AWAKENS is taking, where new institutions that are separate but…

OK, there was exactly one EU character I liked: Darth Bane. I liked him so much that I was almost willing to swallow the idiotic Rule of Two nonsense.

Hell, that one shot of Finn in the desert from the first teaser is better than basically any of the EU stuff I ever read.

My first thought was EPISODE VII was announced was "So they're either moving the plot thousands of years into the future, or they're throwing out all the old EU shit."

My favorite thing to bring up to exemplify the awfulness of the EU was LEGACY OF THE FORCE, a book series that included such delightfully folksy moments as Han's grandson having a force-flashback to Anakin killing the younglings, dressing and acting like Darth Vader with zero sense of self-awareness despite living in…

Well, technically those Padawans were all murdered by Hayden Christensen using the McGuffin Lightsaber.

What's weird is that the Starkiller Base sounds like an amalgamation of the Death Star and the Sun Crusher.

It's probably because Campbell is a good journeyman director who was handed an excellent script for CASINO ROYALE, and a garbage one for GREEN LANTERN. He should come back for the next one. I'd be interested to see if they'd go for a DARK KNIGHT RETURNS style closer, to keep with the continuity-laden Craig series.

Kurylenko is good, but Camille's agenda feels completely extraneous to everything else going on. It's literally her only character trait and it feels like a vestigial piece of fluff flimsily scotch-taped onto the movie.

Belatedly, I finally got to the end of my Bondathon (except for SPECTRE).

I'd personally go Connery, Craig, Dalton = Brosnan, Lazenby, Moore.

I thought GOLDENEYE gave him actual development that was mostly undone by the subsequent movies. The weirdest bit was him being tortured for over a year in DAD and shaking it off like a bad bout of the flu.

All of the Brosnan Bonds do stuff like that. They try to fit in current events stuff (maybe because they don't have any of the novels left to strip-mine?), but because Bond is ultimately a figure of fantasy, it doesn't really affect the overall movie one way or the other.

I agree with the charge that THUNDERBALL is a bit slow, and that GOLDFINGER is at least a little overrated (in that it's not the best Bond ever by any means). Your assessment of OCTOPUSSY is absolutely spot-on.

I also finished reading the first of the DARK TOWER series, THE GUNSLINGER. I'm going to read the shit of this series.

I continued my James Bond run with the Pierce Brosnan era. I originally only planned to watch the first two, but upon learning that I would be unable to watch the next two next week for work reasons, I decided to cram them all into one and save the Daniel Craig movies for when I return. It made for… an interesting…

DAREDEVIL was easily the best, in that I watched for the entire season and mostly enjoyed it.

I quit GOTHAM about 18 minutes in, THE FLASH after one episode, and ARROW after four. I made it to the end of the SUPERGIRL pilot, but I doubt I will continue. Benoist was perfect, but the rest of the show was kind of a huge groan. Calista Flockhart was particularly excruciating.