Lucasfilm kind of never made anything good except for Star Wars and Indiana Jones even when Lucas was running things. They were never an IP factory with a deep bench akin to Pixar. Why would we expect them to make anything interesting without Lucas? Disney bought them to crank out the greatest hits over and over again.

Maybe the galaxy was so susceptible to Palpatine’s authoritarianism because there is no middle class anymore — droid labor and the outsourcing of manufacturing to Outer Rim worlds hollowed out the galactic middle class, and all the Coruscant elites care about is properly gendering the Hutts.

Yeah, great points there. The Mandalorian seems to have been conceived as “How do we make a Boba Fett show without making a Boba Fett show?” and then they executed it so well that by the time the actual Boba Fett showed up, secondary characters are mocking him as Mando’s sidekick (something that would have been…

In fairness to the showrunners, the difficulty in making a fun Boba Fett series is that there’s no character to work with. His suit of armor *was* the character in the original trilogy, and he captured imaginations because we learn almost nothing about him onscreen.

I think there’s a very good reason that Whedon is aging like Steve Bannon.

So JK Simmons is the same Commissioner Gordon from Justice League, but Michael Keaton is now his Batman? I guess Pat Hingle has been dead for quite a while, and they plan on shifting ‘89 Batman into the DCEU, but I can’t see how they’re getting through this movie without more than one joke about how Batman has gotten…

She may have been trying to time it so that she had maximum protection for her 100th birthday party. Certainly not what any doctor would advise, but it makes sense she might have been concerned the booster would wear off by January if she got it in September.

I find there’s a lack of self-awareness in Affleck’s redemptive tour, where he keeps expecting sympathy for his horrifying life situation where people were paying him millions of dollars to play Batman, and also he was forced to have sex with Jennifer Garner, and so obviously the only way out was drinking too much and…

Besides the raw number of albums, it’s easy to forget that much of Bowie’s most iconic work didn’t sell all that well initially. Let’s Dance is #1 by a *lot*, followed by Ziggy Stardust, followed mostly by his inferior 80s work after Let’s Dance’s mainstream breakthrough. Nothing from the Berlin era makes the top 10.

It’s hard to see how that EU explanation could work in a visual medium, with a disembodied voice talking to Boba from inside the Sarlaac Pit. I can see how that would be an interesting idea in book form, but it would just be silly on film.

Another take could be that Lilly was the true auteur behind the Matrix series, and without her involvement, you get Sense8 streaming-quality Matrix fan fiction.

The “global warming satire” angle was really funny for most of the series run — until it came time to pay that off and there was nothing “there” when it came to the ice zombies.

The Analyst says that out loud, but there’s always been a weird thing about the Mattix universe — life outside the Matrix seems far more miserable than life inside of it. In the real world, people have to live in dingy underground cities and eat gruel and dress only in unraveling knitwear. Things seem to have improved…

This is an important point about the stakes — in the original trilogy, the stakes are that the entire human race will be doomed to eternal slavery (or extinction) depending on whether Neo is able to assume his role as savior and make the right choices.

The problem with historical witch hunts was that witches aren’t real. But rapists are real.

So I guess this explains why Trevor was one of the last late night hosts to return to the studio and why he’s always sitting.

It could have used more pirates and candy-colored set design.

Given the very large sample size with Snyder (both in terms of his lengthy filmography, as well as the decades any cast or crew member has had to complain about him as a person), I think it’s clear he’s obsessed with fascist imagery on a very superficial level — he thinks Riefenstahl looks cool, he doesn’t understand…

I’ve always been a little annoyed by how much the Craig-Bond series borrowed from the Dark Knight trilogy, although one difference there is that Nolan used the conceit to give Bruce Wayne a proper retirement from the Batman persona, rather than killing off Batman. In the comics, Bruce Wayne can never have a happy…

This may be an unpopular take, but I absolutely hated the decision to kill off Craig’s Bond onscreen. It completely destroys the questionable continuity that had previously accompanied every prior recast — it was never completely clear whether Roger Moore was the same guy with the same memories as Sean Connery, but…