My assumption was the main work was being done mechanically, but for appearance/tradition’s sake they still include some live bearers. Indeed, it has already been well-established in the show that the litters play an important ceremonial role, communicating the social superiority of the Hutt being carried, and…

Rising to the top of criminal enterprises in an era where there are advanced weapons is usually not about pure physical fighting skill. It is more about a combination of cunning, ruthlessness, ambition, paranoia, ego, and last but not least, the natural ability to lead, which usually involves some sort of personal…

Yeah, I remember it being discussed very early on. I also remember the dominant (not exclusive) view at the time was that it was surely accidental, meaning surely she did not actually intend people to think of Jews when they read about or saw her goblins.

So I think seen from the distant perspective of the Nolan films, let alone the Snyder films, it is fairly easy to see all the 80s/90s live action movies as more similar than different in overall vibe.

I can’t really argue with wanting more time with Keaton’s Wayne, particularly in retrospect.

There is definitely room for more than one take on Batman, including both campy and noir.

What an amazing physical performance. His body language transformation to go along with his internal transformation was fantastic, including high degree of difficulty moments like his later version of the character pretending to be the earlier version.

My biggest complaint about this season was how they made me REALLY want to see Tori win, and both Sam and Daniel lose . . . and then they actually gave me what I wanted! . . . and then they immediately took it all back with Tori learning Silver had paid off the ref, and Daniel (who doesn’t even know about that!)…

Yeah, I actually think effectively satirizing other media content is one of the harder degree of difficulty comedy tasks. You can more easily do a broad parody/spoof like Airplane!, but I think a really good satire requires care in execution, such that it actually gets close enough to the real world thing to serve as…

I really HATE musicals, and therefore loved this post-credit scene making fun of musicals. How long it went on, from my perspective, wasn’t detracting from the joke, it was PART of the joke, because that is a big part of musicals (and why I hate them). And I did not get nearly the same feeling from the scene during…

Not really, but it is sorta fantasy-adjacent in that the karate is almost magical as presented in the show. Or you could also consider it superheroic. I also find the show reminds me of magical realism, where the karate as a quasi-magical element in an otherwise mundane setting is being used for the purpose of social…

Yeah, having just gone through a HS soccer season, it is sadly quite believable that adults would get this wrapped up in trying to live through the athletic competitions of youths.

Probably a bad sign that I as an adult really liked The Mysterious Benedict Society (watching it with our daughter). Hale was brilliant in his dual role, and the whole thing had a really stylish/quirky/subversive vibe to it. But I gather not enough kids found it relatable enough to be a mass hit.

I think these last episodes might be longer, and in general they have like a movie’s worth of screen time left.

They were probably concerned a show like that wouldn’t hold a big enough audience. And that does seem to be a big part of modern streaming economics—you want people to really want to see how the unanswered questions in the episode/season they just watched get resolved in the next episode/season, and it is hard to do…

I didn’t mind the way The Wild Hunt was introduced—they are clearly the next Big Bad, and introducing them with a lot of unanswered questions at the end of this season is pretty much standard for streaming series.

It seems to me the norm these days is for movie or TV “adaptations” of genre IP to be relatively loose, as loose say as the Marvel adaptations of their comic book IP. In legal terms, these are still derivative works/film adaptations, in the sense you would be violating the original copyrights if you marketed them…

OK, you personally do not like streaming mini-series structured like movies.

It could be simple, but there is potentially still a long path between him first gaining the respect of the Tuskens (as seen here) to rescuing Shand and getting his armor back (as seen in The Mandalorian), and then finally killing Fortuna and sitting on the throne (as seen in the mid-credits). As I recall, that is…

So as many have pointed out over time, a modern streaming series is often more like a mini-series from the broadcast era than an episodic series. And in terms of structure, they are in turn more like movies than episodic series, or for that matter more like novels—and in fact, these episodes are being called…