The thing about the late 90's / early 00's was that it did feel like a lot of those kinds of social problems either had been solved or were close to being, so it felt more OK to ironically joke about them (I’m obviously talking from the perspective of someone who wasn’t in a group who was on the receiving end of that…

Maaaaaaybe. I’m not saying that aspect isn’t in there (and that it isn’t gross) but making the big bad a French guy works against the theory that it’s all about immigrants. It’s a film about how angry middle-aged white guys are right about everything (it’s hilarious to me how the exact thing he said would happen,…

Nah, Taken is a divorced middle-aged dad power fantasy. I’m not saying it’s *not* xenophobic but that’s kind of a byproduct.

People are offended by predictable, tortured, bad faith takes, that try to drag every single thing into their dumbass fake culture war, that’s actually just a projection of their audience’s insecurities.

I shall go to my grave firm in the belief that “woke” won out as the new “political correctness gone mad” because it’s from black twitter and sounds just grammatically threatening enough to certain ears.

This kind of marketing only works if people engage with it, though. People are enjoying it or else it wouldn’t be happening on this scale. There’s a pretty funny joke at its centre as well (pitting Barbie against Robert Oppenheimer is appealingly ludicrous).

Ooh I know. It’s because everyone has an idea of what Star Wars should be, in their head and TLJ is exactly what 30% of the audience wants and the literal opposite of what the remainder wants. And everyone’s right.

My point with Hux is that if they hadn’t totally defanged him, it would’ve added more narrative possibilities with Kylo. I mean it’s Star Wars; _someone’s_ on a redemption arc(!) and someone needs to be the villain. And I don’t think the text of TLJ sets Kylo up to go full bad, even if that’s what a theoretical other…

Would it have been better though? I agree that the redemption arc was hacky but “he’s just the bad guy and they beat him” sounds alarmingly conventional. Again, there were infinitely better ways they could’ve handled it than Rise did but it’d have been easier to do something interesting if TLJ hadn’t left them with…

Don’t get me wrong, a better sequel than Rise could definitely have been made from TLJ, I just think Johnson was concerned with making “his Star Wars movie”, way more than the middle part of a tale. The closing shot is emblematic of that; it’s a beautiful visual homage to every 80’s kid who ever pretended a broom was…

Now come on. Suggesting he only didn’t like the Rose plot because of Kelly-Marie’s race is as reductive and basic as when those guys say The Little Mermaid ‘23 is bad because of Ariel’s race. We can do better than this.

That game where each person writes one sentence of a story, then folds the page over so the next person can write the next sentence without seeing theirs, and then at the end someone reads it all out as one thing; that’s the Star Wars sequels.

TLJ is a brilliant movie, it’s just not a great Star Wars movie, and it’s not even kind of interested in functioning as the second part of a trilogy.

Okaaaaaay. Now prove that was because of the skin colour of the mermaid.

It’ll only make you unhappy if you believe it’ll make you happy.

Nah that’s not how their trick works. They need to say “go woke, go broke” about everything, so that when box office disappointments inevitably happen (as they always have and will), they can pretend they were right. Box office successes are hand-waved away.

“The cretins browsing & tweeting…”

He’s not in the same league, and that’s the main issue with Dial of Destiny.

Nah. All the other live action Disney remakes are varying degrees of terrible and their RT audience scores are through the roof. People are review-bombing Little Mermaid because of the casting.

Look at this stuff