My first thought upon seeing the headline was that Deadspin was already covering the league that the Ball brothers are going to be playing in.

According to the linked reports, he’s just being charged with felony forgery for passing the $100 bill. Seems to me that the fake name is just evidence that he had a criminal intent- he can’t claim he didn’t know the bill was fake if he’s using a fake name and address when he pays with it.

I’m pretty amazed that the story focuses on Subban at all. He’s just sending it into the zone and the goalie puts in for him. If the goalie decided to take a nap at this moment instead of trying to make a save then the puck goes wide and this is a meaningless moment. It would be like writing about how great a pass…

Exactly. Someone else on here pointed out that one of JJ’s major faults as a director is that he doesn’t care about coherence or creating an lasting impression- it’s all about “the moments”. All JJ saw in that scene was a way to create a funny moment- Rey gets a chance to show her overexuberance (see how excited she…

“Could there have been a better, more memorable, more impactful story? Sure. Could the characters and ideas that so many cherish in extreme fanatical ways have been better serviced? Probably. Would that version have made as much money? Probably not, or at least the studio didn’t think so. If they thought another story…

I don’t know- if he’s not force sensitive in some fashion then he’s basically just a magical plot device. He’s blind, yet still defeats all those storm troopers using only a staff. He’s able to walk across the beach repeating his mantra without the force being involved at all...? It seems more like he’s sensitive to…

“There’s a hopeful wow, I/we really made it back to a ship moment, then boom Vader enters and the scene plays out pretty much the same way.”

“I’m tired of defending TFA to the joyless curmudgeonly masses who obstinately refuse to see what a goddam miracle it is that it even exists and is as good as it is.”

I hope the test for sexual harassment isn’t that the person made the woman “think of sex now”. I’d imagine that when most women interact with him, sex is the last thing on their mind.

I thought Kinja’s Grinch Week was over already?

I think that all makes sense, but that just gets us back to the original basis for this particular comment thread- that the heroic accomplishments of the OT have been dramatically diminished, if not completely undermined. In your analogy, Luke and the other OT heroes were the allies that won WWI. They then set up the…

I think we’re pretty much on the same page here (sure, the OT still “matters”, but it was diminished by TFA), so I’ll just throw in a thought about what could have been presented that wouldn’t have undercut the OT so much, and I’ll stick with the WWII metaphor. Simply introduce a new, rising power. Communism was able…

I agree that of course it matters, but only to an extent. By bringing back essentially the exact same enemy to be defeated again, JJ dramatically undercut what had been achieved in the OT. I can’t recall the opening crawl, so I’ll take your word that there was a sustained and long peace (which then raises questions of…

Any poorly written movie, sure. A halfway decent story has actions that are actually caused by prior scenes. R2 doesn’t wake up because anything happened- he wakes up because it was the time in the story where the writers needed him to be awake. That’s it. Why does Kylo Ren kill Han? Because it was the time in the…

It helps, but raises huge questions. So you’re saying that “Trump” (Snoke) ordered the total annihilation of the “USA” (the Republic)? How does that make sense?

Except that it’s not like it took 75 years for a new Empire to arise. Using your analogy, it would be more like the Allied forces invaded during D-Day, suffered huge losses after years of war, pushed all the way to Berlin, seemingly defeated the Nazis, only to realize that the Nazis had just moved to South America and…

Why are they “the resistance”? It still makes no sense to me. At the end of Episode 6 we’re shown the defeat of the Empire. In the middle of Episode 7 we’re shown the First Order crushing the republic, which (I guess?) has been back in control since the defeat of the Empire 30 some years ago. So “the resistance” is…

Ugh, in my excitement over seeing E8 I’d forgotten that they’d given the reins to E9 back to JJ. Rian is a great, interesting, creative young director. I have high expectations for E8. But JJ is a pure hack in the worst sense of the word. He can’t make an original or interesting movie to save his life- it’s all…

Agreed. It was (like much of the movie) just so forced and obvious. The whole film felt like the movie was written backwards- “okay, so we’re agreed- there will be a major character death somewhere, just like Obi Wan. But who will it be? Eh, Harrison Ford has said he wants his character to die...Perfect, Han will die.…

This deserves so many more stars.