Well, I guess this means that Scott Derrickson is now officially an auteur. He has enough of a point-of-view to be fired from a Disney movie. Let’s keep an eye out for his next $5 million Blumhouse movie.

I am pretty sure the re-shoots were because after the initial screening to the higher ups they, rightly I might add, asked the question. What if everyone dies? I believe the first cut was with the mains living because they were worried if they wen’t to disney with everyone dying they would have caused a ruckus.

The people who hate the last Jedi because of the so called feminist, sjw reasons should just be ignored. I hated the TLJ because it was just a bad movie and to top it all off it was boring.

This piece seems right, although a more scorching version of the argument turns up in the Vanity Fair piece by K. Austin Collins. The idea of “representation” at work in this franchise seems inherently condescending, with no real attention to lived experience, just moments to be catalogued as firsts for the franchise.

Now this is the kind of videogame coverage I didn’t know I needed, that doesn’t shy away from the personal experience of playing games but also gives the rest of us a way into that feeling. It makes me want to fire up the game to see what it makes me feel.

I felt the same way about The Last Jedi, but the consensus was that that made me a bad person. Why is it okay to not like Rise of Skywalker (which I did, actually, enjoy), and not okay to not like Last Jedi?

All these poor bastards watching Rise of the Skywalker when Uncut Gems and Little Women are right there. That said, I would totally watch an adaptation where Jo gets a lightsaber, but mostly because Amy would be super jealous.

The moral of Little Women is to vaccinate your children.

There’s been more cases of Disney yanking projects. Rogue One got taken away from Gareth Edwards and finished by Tony Gilroy. Supposedly the same deal was offered to Lord and Miller, quietly let someone else finish they’ll call it a collaboration, but they chose to walk. Josh Trank had a project pulled, Colin…

I agree that’s not what they’re really doing at all. There’s been three? instances where they cut ties with directors - Edgar Wright over Ant-Man, Lord and Miller over Solo, and Patty Jenkins over Thor 2. Not really very many when you consider the overall output.

Maybe audiobook isn’t the best format for this kind of thing, though. And the story in general definitely has a different pace than what we’re used to with our Netflix & Disney+ binges. Very little action until the last 10% of the book, and when it does happen it’s easy to miss what it is that did actually happen.

Fast food for the soul on one hand and and small-time artsy food on the other OR names we associate with known good stuff but made into another thing entirely (like The Man On The High Castle).

This was a great year for movies but a sparse year for personal filmmaking in science-fiction and fantasy. Apart from a few standouts, like High Life and Ad Astra, franchises dominated the field, and film writers steered me toward fewer pleasant surprises like Europa Report, Prospect, The Endless, Hard to be a God, The…

Superheros and Star Wars. Meeh.

Palpatine’s return seems like a transparent ploy to get around Snoke’s death in the previous film. And it returns us to a cipher-like big bad when the weird mixture of attraction and revulsion between Rey and Kylo Ren is the most compelling thing this new trilogy has going for it.

Tarantino has a very particular aesthetic and that aesthetic is very much not Star Trek.

“In a strange way, it seems like this movie, [Once Upon a Time In] Hollywood, would be my last. So, I’ve kind of taken the pressure off myself to make that last big voilà kind of statement.”

I mean, don’t we all have a beloved film/book/whatever for which we’re happy to pretend that some (or all) of its sequels/prequels/spinoffs don’t exist? (e.g. there’s only one Matrix, one Die Hard, three Bourne films, two Aliens, two Terminators, way less than twelve X-Men films, 2001: A Space Odyssey is a standalone,…

It certainly sounds like the creative team is hedging while the higher-ups negotiate to keep a successful show going. So again we have a tug-of-war between the intention of artists and the economics of franchise IP.

I would put in a word for Sobek, a one-shot from James Stokoe that turns the Egyptian crocodile god into a Godzilla-like protector who must save his followers from a greedy Anubis. The story here is simple, but Stokoe is at his best, with pages full of detail, movement, and sly humor.