Just as you’re not “politically black” if you vote differently than you should, if you have the wrong opinions on movies you become “critically white”. That almost happened to Ray Fisher due to his support of Zack Snyder, but since he was complaining about Joss Whedon, who got cancelled more recently, it cancelled out.

I didn’t see Rise of Skywalker, but I appreciated rather than ignored your commentary. And I regard Rogue One as the best Star Wars film since Empire Strikes Back.

The problem with her arc compared to Luke’s was that it was all compressed into one movie even though they knew it would be a trilogy. Finn similarly had his arc completed within the first act, which left him nowhere to go.

His best work was on the Jackie Daytona episode of What We Do In the Shadows :)

Real life fascism doesn’t have to be race based. It was invented in Italy, and the Fascist party there was clear that their nationalism was a matter of Italian culture rather than race, so when their German allies tried to force them to adopt anti-Semitic policies they neutered them. Hence the ironic note that…

Eh, if it’s an empire that spans the galaxy, it wouldn’t be that odd for there to be a wide variety of people in the military. The Romans recruited plenty of barbarians. The Nazis even came up with justifications to recruit Slavs (which they normally regarded as untermenschen) into the Waffen SS, and of course they…

Finn had already committed himself to the Resistance, first by helping Poe escape and then by falsely claiming to be a member of it. If he’s sticking to Rey, and she’s committed to the Resistance, then he is as well.

Poe’s dangerous arrogance rose to mutiny, meriting a court martial and execution. The introduction of Rose had some promise, but her ending scene was so bad and flew in the face of Holdo’s last act.

I didn’t notice Finn staying out of the conflict in Force Awakens. It’s actually bizarre how quickly he goes from being shocked by the death of a fellow stormtrooper to gleefully helping Poe gun down a whole bunch of them.

What character arc did Finn have in The Last Jedi? It seemed to me he went through his entire arc in the first act of Force Awakens.

More like Disney knew fuck all about how to handle characters period. I didn’t notice any “nuance”. Admittedly I still haven’t seen Rise of Skywalker, but by all accounts I’ve heard it didn’t serve any characters well.

I had been under the impression it was more serious/idealistic rather than fun.

As far as I’m concerned Johnson has had a monotonic progression in quality, finally resulting in an honest-to-God good movie in “Knives Out”. However, he’s merely executive producing here which is a vague title that could mean little.

I found it odd that they adapted the entire book as a perfectly good miniseries... then decided to make another season entirely unrelated to that book and with a different showrunner. The Leftovers did a great job after their first season exhausted the source material, but they also had author Tom Perrotta on board to…

I take it you’ve never seen actually pure racism. The point that there’s a selection filter at military bases compared to other places is not one that any social scientist would disagree with, although the magnitude of its importance could be argued. The selection filter exists regardless of race, but the point was…

I’ve seen many critics of schools cite that stylized fact, and I’ve done it myself, but since it’s always worth highlighting cogent critiques of your own ideas, I will link to this argument that if you disaggregate educational outcomes you see there actually was improvement over time disguised by Simpson’s paradox…

Your comment reminds me that Lynch’s fellow painter-turned-director Peter Greenaway might also qualify. I haven’t seen any of his post-dating Prospero’s Books though, so it’s possible he dumbed things down over the decades.

I never read the actual front page anymore, instead just avclub.com/latest

Different people having different preferred voices sounds like a market opportunity, although I don’t know how common that is in the audiobook industry. There was some talk about who will narrate the new A Song of Ice and Fire books (if they’re ever published) now that Roy Dotrice is dead, and some people noted that…

I didn’t see any mention of that in the wikipedia article on sexual cannibalism, but doing some searching I see this blog post  says it occurs “about 30 percent of the time” (helpfully providing a cite that could be used for that aforementioned wiki page), while also noting how males anticipate and try to avoid this…