We never really learned who Palpatine was in the original movies. Hell, we don’t even learn his name; he’s just “The Emperor” until TPM.

It’s definitely both. A better actor could’ve overcome Lucas’s sub-par directing, and a better director could’ve gotten more out of Christensen’s limited range.

To quote RLM, TLJ is Star Wars for idiots.

I mean we all liked Ewan in Trainspotting and other stuff. Natalie Portman has proven herself with Black Swan and Jackie. Seems like Lucas as writer/director really is the common denominator.

The problem is that Snoke is important to properly understand Kylo, and by tossing him aside with so little development it leaves both him and the whole setup of the current status quo lacking depth and definition.

Counterpoint: Bullshit.

Dude’s fine, but I don’t consider him the most original antagonist, if I’m being totally honest. I think he’s maybe more interesting now, post-Last Jedi, because but, boiling him down to his story beats, he’s basically season one Zuko except whinier and presented as even less of a threat. He’s trying to find Luke…

Kylo Ren is everything Anakin Skywalker was supposed to be in the Revenge of the Sith. Conflicted, angry, capable of believably expressing human emotions.

“The Last Jedi just came to Netflix, which makes it a fine time to revisit the finer points of the best Star Wars movie of the past, oh, two decades.”

I do like Kylo Ren as the Big Bad, and I’m fairly happy they did away with Snoke so early on in this series. In the midst of all the not-entirely-unfounded claims that this new trilogy is just a rehash of the original, it’s nice to see that Ren and Snoke aren’t going to be just Vader and Palpatine analogs.

As prime numbers go? At least its numerological controversies don’t begin to approach the massive speculation revolving around 23.

They already are. Concussions, the absurd advertising, terrible scheduling, bad on-screen product, bad press from so many angles, all that had been driving down viewership long before the protests started. Trump and Co. like to point at the anthem protests and say “look, look, people are boycotting because of them!”…

The NFL deserves this. This is what you get for playing to the nationalistic base. This is what you get when you insist on players sticking to sports unless they’re out they’re waving the flag. This is what you get when you take payments from the DoD for “patriotism” celebrations. This is what you get when a…

Yeah, he would just be a shittier, incompetent Al Davis. He would be a horrible owner and the kids would start running the team while in jr high, but he would feel accepted by all the people who actually have money. After a while of that he would get bored and start a feud with Steinbrunner over a hot dog stand or…

A good “What if?” scenario I like to ponder over (occasionally, when I want to drive myself insane) is if Donald Trump actually bought a share* of the Buffalo Bills years ago, instead of running for President.

He used it as a parable to illustrate his anti-immigration stance, but yeah, he may as well have been speaking about himself and what he’d do to this country if we elected him President.

I’d actually never heard a “The Snake” version, I thought it was just The Scorpion and the Frog.

There is no reason to assume that Donald Trump even knows the words to the national anthem. He definitely does not know the words to “God Bless America.” Because these songs are not about him

This is the finest kind, Roth. Glad you write for this website I spent far too much time on.

Trump actually used the snake parable for campaign rallies? Holy fuck, he must have just been taunting at that point!