For better or worse, he will ALWAYS be Buggin’ Out to me.

“Hey, I thought we had a deal!”

Grogu is one of those names where the “r” migrates around and gets drops and multiplies whenever people try to remember it. “Gorgu? Grogru? Gogru? Shit, it definitely started with a ‘G’ that much I remember.”

I get the feeling he may be ok with the long goodbye of eventually parting with Grogu/the Child. He’s having second thoughts, even though those thoughts may be antithetical to his rearing as a Mandalorian of the “Way”.
I see this season of the show as him understanding for the first time that there are other options…

The Truman Show missed the mark. It assumed someone *wouldn’t* want an entire world custom-built for them, where they are the star 24/7, and the whole world watches them with rapt attention.

The thing I hate most about this movie is how it slams in the anti-commercialism angle, which I think is honestly an incredibly juvenile read of the holiday. And, as this article points out, is soooooo hypocritical.

It definitely contributed to Mike Myers’ career bottoming out. Between that, The Love Guru, and his reportedly being a nightmare to work with, his career is toast. Maybe he’ll have a comeback someday. I still love Wayne’s World and So I Married an Axe Murderer.

Tom, if you’re looking for a follow-up feature as you enter the home stretch with this one, may I suggest a year by year breakdown of the biggest film financial failures (i.e. greatest difference between budget and return). You can call it The Popcorn Chumps.

Agreed, the meditation moment is very resonant, almost startlingly so. It’s similar to the point in Obi-Wan’s fight with Vader in A New Hope when he allows himself to be struck down, but Qui-Gon’s meditation I think is better at conveying the depths of the Jedi way as a spiritual discipline. Even in a brief moment invo…

One of my favorite books is Patton Oswalt’s Silver Screen Fiend, where he talks about his film addiction in the late nineties and seeing up to four films a day at the New Beverly.

At the very end of the book, The Phantom Menace snaps him out of it. And it’s not just because the film is bad (though it is). It’s because…

I’m buried deep in the comments, but I did just want to say that I love this series of articles. Great work, Tom!

Honestly my favourite scene from the Phantom Menace is Quigon and Maul fighting on Tatooine. It’s quick, it’s dirty and in a real outdoor environment. It was like nothing we had ever seen before. It was probably the most visceral scene in TPM. 

Exactly. You could’ve spent a movie, either before Episode II or between Episodes II and III, establishing Obi Wan and Anakin as close friends who really care about each other, rather than making the Phantom Menace. That would give their squabbling in II and the end of their friendship in III some context and weight. Y…

I think you’ve gotten to the core problem with this film: none of it mattered even a tiny bit. Of all of the possible questions that someone might have had about the character of Anakin Skywalker after watching IV-VI, “what was he like when he was a second-grader” has to rank... it doesn’t rank at all. Nobody ever…

Led by people who were children without fully formed brains in 1999, there is a revisionist movement to posit that the prequels “were actually good.” That Space Jam was “actually good.” That Hocus Pocus was “actually good.” None of these things were actually good. Nothing is actually good. Nothing from your childhood…

I think TPM is probably the most solid of the prequels and least weighed down by Lucas’ weaknesses in writing and fetishization of special effects. That isn’t saying much or saying it’s “good”... I just think it’s the least bad (Attack of the Clones, for my money, being the worst). If the cast were as charismatic as…

Yeah, it’s an annoying caveat to any discussion of the prequels that we have to note TPM had this, the single best scene in any of them (and it’s not close, either).

My family has been watching the Star Wars films on Disney + starting with the Original Trilogy with my son (who is now at the age I was when I started watching Star Wars). He thought Episode IV started slow but liked it as it went on, loved The Empire Strikes Back and really liked Return of the Jedi. Then we put on…

The 30 seconds of Obi-Wan and Darth Maul fighting one-on-one after Qui-Gon’s death is maybe the most riveting 30 seconds of film I’ve ever seen. All my complaints just melt away watching those two have the lightsaber fight I’d been dreaming of since literally before I can remember.

Because of the internet and our increasingly interconnected world, the Matrix was the last movie that I saw in the theater completely cold with no idea what it was about. 1999 was a busy year for me-I graduated college, started law school, and got married over a few months, so I wasn’t paying much attention to movie…