It honestly seems much more believable than someone somewhere genuinely thinking that it was somehow a good idea to produce a low-budget live action reboot of a cartoon that owes its success to a highly stylized, artsy design that’s impossible to translate into a non-animated medium.

The numbers only matter if the right doesn’t intimidate us out of uniting against them. The trick of fascism isn’t convincing everyone that it’s a great political philosophy, it’s convincing people that aren’t fascists that they have too much to lose if they oppose it. It’s convincing enough of the majority to cower…

I wish there was anything “uniquely odd” about it. She’s just someone who thinks she has the right to tell a person of color what to do. That’s neither a rare attitude among white people nor a mental health condition. For more than a decade, far right media has hyped people up, convincing a good portion of them that…

Because there are levels of “weird” that white people feel comfortable subjecting their neighbors of color to which they don’t feel comfortable subjecting their white neighbors to, and which they’d call the cops or pull a gun if their neighbors of color tried subjecting them to. Being a person of color means that some …

I’ve seen comments cite the RT denying the score being gamed, but I’ve been unable to find any evidence of an investigation actually being done or reported. Meanwhile, the RT audience score seems to have gone down about 35% since release, and multiple alt-right groups have bragged about tanking the score.

Of course, the MRA reading of the movie conveniently turns a blind eye on Rey being wrong, too, in thinking she can surrender herself to the First Order and turn Kylo the way Luke turned Vader. That’s one where the male characters—Kylo and Luke—both turned out to be right.

At least TLJ gets one part of it right—you’re not going to have the leisure time to do a medal ceremony at your secret rebel base after blowing a Death Star. You’re going to be far too busy running for your life now that the Imperial Fleet knows where your secret base is located.

It would’ve been exciting for her to take that turn, but TLJ had to work with what it was given (that is, TFA), and I don’t see the tools available to pull off that plot. Also, I think it would have been a hard look to finally have a female Jedi main character in the movies, and have her get turned to the dark side by…

Well, you could’ve spelled one of them Luuke to distinguish them... oh, someone tried that already?

I’ll admit, the movie bucked me at that point, and it never got me all the way back, even with the lady from Fleabag playing a droid revolutionary who’s apparently had sex with Lando. But they couldn’t stop with just the name! They had to answer other questions no one was asking, like “where’d he get that vest?” and…

It is pivotal to bring up Rian Johnson’s supporters Devin Faraci and Tim League, too.

Exactly. Of all the Star Wars movies of the Disney Era, TLJ is the only one with a smooth production history (as far as we know). TFA was delayed and rewritten, TROS was taken from Trevorrow and given to Abrams, Rogue One was largely reshot under a different writer-director. For all the whining from the True Fans…

At the risk of sounding obvious, Rogue One was a better movie than Solo. Both of them had troubled productions, but R1 told a focused story and has a great final act, while Solo told a story derived from a checklist of every single thing we learn about Han Solo’s past in the OT. The only thing that isn’t in movie is…

Supposedly, the scale is more hundreds of thousands to maybe a million Imperials that die on Death Star I. But I think that’s part of what this movie interrogates: the Jedi are supposed to be people who use the force “only for defense,” yet their first response to adversity is murdering people, sometimes on a massive…

I’m fairly certain that RT score is gamed by the trolls. That high Episode IX score is kinda belied by the box office, which was not in any way TFA-like. The thing that puts me off TLJ criticism most (and I agree, there’s a fair bit to criticize there) is that so much of the “A TOTAL FAILURE!” stuff looks and smells…

I always imagine a Force Ghost Jimmy Smits sidling up to Obi Wan and saying “Why not Bail Solo? Ben wasn’t even your real name!”

He’s not a pacifist throughout the movie, but the big thing is that he not only won’t kill his father, he throws away his lightsaber, essentially saying that he won’t kill the emperor, either. If he wants the Emperor dead, throwing away his primary means of offense and defense is a poor way to show it, no matter how…

That blue milk is a harsh mistress.

I think that Fraser’s character being a bit of a cypher is by design, and that’s part of the point this column’s making. The adventure romance model places the woman at the center of the story, and her male co-star is a romantic interest. And like the female romantic interest in male-centric adventure stories, them…

It’s male-centric, but Hanks is in the role traditionally occupied by the women in these movies—the person with a mission, but without the means to complete it, who then gets paired up with a person who has the means (a boat, or guide skills, or both), but whose life is a mess because they don’t have a mission. One…