The studio wants a female-centric action film, they own one of the more prominent IPs that fits that description, they commissioned a new take on it. It all makes sense to me.

The basic premise of Charlie’s Angels is just that there’s an elite team of three female private investigators who work for a mysterious guy we never see.  There’s no reason you can’t make a perfectly respectable action movie out of that.

There’s no way that Nyong’o’s non-involvement is because they didn’t want her, particularly since the replacement is a complete nobody as far as star power goes.  I expect she ultimately passed on the project.

One of the lesser-mentioned influences this movie had on the franchise was foregrounding the idea of the X-Mansion as a school in a way that was never the case before. The Xavier School/Institute had always been part of the X-Men franchise, but until this point it was a “school” that never had more than a dozen people…

I wouldn’t say “flat-footed”, but they were being cautious about their production slate at the time, which is understandable since the whole thing was a huge risk (something that nobody remembers anymore since it paid off so spectacularly).

Lee’s dialogue seems incredibly hackneyed now, but at the time it was widely acknowledged as cutting edge stuff.

It gets a 0.2 or 0.3 rating thus far.  Bad, but who knows what cable networks think of ratings anymore?

Well, at least Hale was killed.

That story can still be told without Snoke on screen.

Mr. Incredible stopped him after he had already jumped off the building. What he did was literally the only way to help him.

I don’t think affection for the films needs to be rationalized. They’re great, and remain great.

He was groping people’s crotches, reportedly.

Of all the people felled by revelations of impropriety, Lasseter is a strong candidate for the one I found the must upsetting, since his work was a huge part of my childhood (and, really, my whole cinephile life, since it’s not like I ever stopped watching and loving his movies).

The thing that really gets me about Mickey Rooney’s character is that even if he wasn’t a grotesque racial caricature, the sort of loud, obnoxious comic relief he’s intended to be is totally out of step with the vibe of the rest of the movie.

You also have, for instance, the intended parallelism between the two scenes where Poe leads an assault, which are meant to show character growth, but the contexts of those two sequences are so different that the intended character growth falls apart, and the film doesn’t realize this.

Thing is, TLJ ultimately comes down against there being shades of grey (and, on that point, writers have been trying to wriggle out of the Manichean morality scheme that Lucas created for the series pretty much for as long as writers other than Lucas have been involved in the property and/or fan fic has been written,…

I never argued that you couldn’t have Kylo usurp Snoke, but, as with many of its ideas, The Last Jedi didn’t execute it properly.

This is the most engaged I’ve found Hopkins in a role in a long time. 

The original movies didn’t give Vader’s arc nearly as much screentime or attempt the sort of character work the newer films do (it’s notable that when Lucas did the prequels he realized there needed to be more there; he just sucked at executing it).

Yeah, he is, because he’s the reason Kylo turned to the Dark Side, but we know basically nothing about how or why this happened.