Interesting. This may be unfair, but I always found myself thinking things like, “Huh, this is perhaps the worst acting I have seen from Oscar Isaac,” “They are wasting the John Boyega I saw in Attack the Block,” and, “Oh no, wait, they are REALLY wasting Lupita Nyong’o!!! And that is what you do with Gwendoline…

Yeah, I think you are absolutely correct that Star Wars (I know I should call it A New Hope, but I always like to think of it as I originally saw it) is just not as well made as Rogue One. I mean, not even close, really.

I believe Edwards actually said at some point he was trying to make a classic war movie. And I know some people had a problem with Felicity Jones’s rather serious, focused Jyn Erso, but to me she was doing a great job finding her inner Steve McQueen, Gregory Peck, or Lee Marvin (and were not The Dirty Dozen each a…

I really, really wanted to like Y: The Last Man, but in the end I found it pretty tedious. Not to pile on, given many others have said this, but Ben Schnetzer’s Yorick was SO boring, Olivia Thirlby’s Hero wasn’t much better, and Ashley Romans’s Agent 355 was quite flat as well.  And those three being so collectively la…

Anna Kendrick was awesome, but sort of made me remember that Tolkien did not exactly write an abundance of compelling female characters. Still, too bad they couldn’t get any of Tyler, Blanchett, or Otto (if Colbert didn’t at least ask, that would be pretty disappointing to me—it is not like Weaving played a main…

I noted in another post that Rogue One really reminds me of classic Hollywood WWII movies in terms of the basic structure, characters (and lack of character depth/development), and so on. Down to the relatively slow burn at the start before the action ramps up, and then in the end the members of the team we have…

I gather some people just dislike anything that they peg as “fan service”.

Low bar, right?

So as a kid I watched a lot of very similar movies set in WWII with a similar lack of character depth/development. Basically, the grim version of Ocean’s 11 in the sense there is a team of people with easily identifiable distinctions and then all the main drama is external. There are maybe some unexpected heroes and…

So I think you are basically right given the criteria you cited. But I would suggest its two main competitors are Empire and Star Wars.

Yeah, I’ll always have a lot of affection for the OT having seen them in theaters as a kid (many times). But I personally think Rogue One is objectively at least the third-best movie after Empire and Star Wars, and the latter ranks ahead solely because despite its flaws it was one of the most groundbreaking films in…

Somebody get them a show where Yelena just cooks for Kate!

I feel like Kingpin being the Big Bad in an Avenger-led TV series is de facto elevating him to a higher level in the Bad pantheon than mere city-level crime boss. The possible connection to Val, and for that matter Eleanor, seems to be pointing in the same direction.

So Kate goes to Eleanor’s home right after the multi-way rooftop fight at night and meets with Eleanor, then goes back to her own apartment where Yelena is waiting, and they have their conversation.

The deep philosophical problem is all those tragedies caused in the past by the Snap are not necessarily something you can disentangle from all the good that was caused in the past by the Snap. Presumably there were all sorts of romances, babies, and so on that came out of all that, so simply resetting history would…

I gathered from part of her conversation with Kate that Yelena has uncovered—or been fed—information about Barton’s past that independently makes him seem like a bad person and a liar. And given everything we know, it isn’t hard for me to understand how a selective interpretation of verifiable information—possibly…

Yeah, my assumption by the end of the episode was that Kingpin was the one who actually wanted Barton dead, for some reason related to Kingpin having used him for some dirty business back in Barton’s Ronin phase, possibly involving Maya being on the hunt (note Kazi, who I now assume is working for Kingpin, wants her…

I actually liked the first Sing movie. Not a great movie, but I found it reasonably pleasant for a “family” movie, with a mostly decent pace and at least some nice moments of humor and song. The critics’ consensus at Rotten Tomatoes says, by way of apparent praise, that is “undemanding”, and I agree with that being a…

Let’s see, how about:

Yeah, this would be extremely high on my list of classic hard sci-fi novels to adapt. And it never struck me as difficult to imagine a 2001/Arrival-type movie version in terms of plotting. It is just the visuals that seemed so hard to pull off convincingly—until recently, and Dune certainly persuaded me Villeneuve is…