Vader to Piet, orbiting Hoth: “Deploy the fleet so that nothing gets off the system. Except the one guy I’m looking for — the one I named earlier: If he flies up from Hoth, leave him totally alone! I don’t even want him to see any Imperial ships around as he goes on his merry way.”

He can in “Star Tours”!

I always think about all those streams of flying cars out the Coruscant windows...all those dozens of people who just happened to be cruising past Palpatine’s office at that particular moment must have been like “Wait — Jesus Christ, did you guys SEE that?”

For Christ’s sake, it was really Mark Hamill, on set, on camera, and then de-aged like Samuel L. Jackson or Michael Douglas in the Marvel movies — it was not a totally synthetic creation like Tarkin or Leia in Rogue One. (Those actors are deceased.)

“You’re dead, Starling.”

But why on both sides?

Everything about the Kim Wexner story is solid gold. It’s making me realize how utterly tired I’ve become of the “wife” character whose entire role is to keep saying “Billy, no! You’re going to far—I don’t even recognize you any more!”

It had the exact feel of the episode where we first met him in Breaking Bad, and especially the one where we saw him for the last time.

Speaking of which: was that a clever little matte painting? The roof of the restaurant?

I was going to scornfully attack this...but, I suddenly realized that you’re in the position I’m always in on the Westworld boards, where everyone else is mysteriously enamored of what seems to me to be a shallow, pretentious, juvenile slog.

But, uh, another important character was allowed to choose a destination. I don’t want to spoil anything!)

That entire sequence was one of the best strips of film I’ve seen in the last twenty years.

Of course we all love Lynch, but what’s mildly annoying about this answer is that it reveals his guileless solipsism — he doesn’t care about Dune, the novel or the set of ideas, at all (and probably never did); the only meaning the topic of a new movie has, to him, is as a reminder of a frustrating artistic experience…

Blade Runner 2049 is a fucking miracle, and still makes me incredibly happy just to fleetingly think about. It was worth 2010 The Year We Make Contact, The Godfather Part III, and The Phantom Menace combined just to have one of the classics from that golden age — and, arguably, the most challenging to return to — get…

Brilliant!

Weed got me through the Prequels, but it’s been out of my life for a long time now.

I’m serious dammit

I adore The Rise of Skywalker more and more each time I watch it. I think it’s wonderful: beautifully done, exciting and operatic, and very moving, and — most important — planned out in a masterful way that manages to pull together all the crazy narrative strands and fake “prophecy” (and the other features of its…

“I think the point was the fact that you feel obligated to voice this take in a forum that is obviously populated by people who enjoy this show says more about you.”

Right — it reveals how unsophisticated and aggressively ignorant I am. I must be far stupider than I realize; ironically incapable of recognizing my own limitations. You’ve got my number. I’ll go back to the Transformers movies I evidently must prefer.