The thing that I love the most about Empire is that Brackett (and presumably to some extent Kasdan), faced with the dubious task of writing a sequel to Star Wars — a movie that had papered over its tissue-thin characters and plot primarily on the strength of groundbreaking visual effects, Fisher and Ford’s…

Okay, this sounds like an awesome thing to queue up the next time I’ve got insomnia.

Meanwhile, based on the trailer for “The Plot Against America”, John Turturro was spending the same amount of time slowly turning into Ben Stein.

The second book always struck me as something that had almost certainly started as an unrelated project and was hastily re-tooled to be “A Takeshi Kovacs Novel” after Altered Carbon became a hit, so I won’t weep much if they skip it.

Iron Man 2 got mugged by the Writers Guild strike — they went into production without a finished script and no legal way of asking anyone competent to work on it. That the movie was even slightly watchable is something of a miracle.

Wow, thanks for the wall of text reply!

There are a lot of phrases I could use to describe someone who put his cards on the table early about his kink, and then spent five years being patient about it, letting her set her own pace of comfort and putting real effort into the other parts of the relationship (at least per his letter; obviously this is just one…

NO EVA GREEN

Absolutely nothing that Obi-Wan does in Star Wars makes a lick of sense if Lucas had the plot of Empire Strikes Back already written out in detail, doubly so if you posit that Return of the Jedi was already plotted, and if you stipulate that the prequels were prewritten at that point it reaches the level of insanity:…

I’m perfectly willing to believe that he’d written up a couple of notes about what the backstory might have been and what some possible sequels could be — he was clearly swinging for the fences with Star Wars, so why not really?

Also, it’s one of the scenes that if you think about it for a moment puts a lot of doubt on Lucas’ claims to have scripted out the entire nine-episode plot in advance:

Worse. As Umbriel alluded to above, the rat actually did breath PFC fluid for that scene, but even Cameron couldn’t convince anyone to let him try that out on Ed Harris...

The DVD release of The Abyss has an extended “making-of” featurette called “Under Pressure: the Making of the Abyss” and it is absolutely worth your time to seek out a copy because James Cameron is (a) a genius and (b) a deranged psychopath.

Watching the making-of documentary about The Abyss was an amazing experience: not only did it make it very clear why actors hate James Cameron, but it raised the question of how the fuck he managed to get an insurance company to sign off him making movies ever again since apparently the feeling is mutual: he hates…

Mostly this description just makes me sad that nobody is ever going to make a movie out of Peter Watts’ Rifters trilogy.

God, those are a lot of really good films, and also Bad Boys.  I feel like Hard Fucking Boiled should be higher up, but it’s hard to argue with Aliens at #1.

Mark Dacascos, an action star who you will regard with great reverence if you’ve watched enough early-’00s B-movies but who you might not recognize otherwise

“Rogue One”, weird built-from-edits-and-reshoots shambling mess that it was, remains by far the best Star War of the Disney era and it’s really not even close.

Honestly if you’re gonna have one bit of Accidental Gay, you could do a hell of a lot worse than peak-hotness Antonio Banderas.

Welp, this has to be some kind of all-time record for “locations I normally inhabit in real life showing up in a movie.”