All the big studios seem to think that hot-swapping behind-the-camera talent has no ill effects on a movie.

You might want to alternate issues of the main Star Wars title and Darth Vader b/c their plots are pretty closely related for the first six or so.

Is this a burn on latter-day Simpsons?

My biggest complaint upon leaving the theater was that the apparent brevity of every trip shrank the galaxy too much (it looks like you can hyperspace anywhere you want in 30 seconds), but upon further reflection I think that elided travel time is symptomatic, or maybe emblematic (since the filmmaking decisions that…

All aboard! Last stop: the Lego White House!

To a large extent, it was working with 1986 VFX. Abrams tried to do as much as possible the way it would have been done in the OT, to the extent that one technician described principle photography as being "like a historical reenactment of the filming of a Star Wars movie". Obviously there is a considerable amount of…

If anything the story was too lean and restrained, to the point where it bolted sleekly through the Galaxy without ever stopping to snag on people's workaday lives. Only Rey's existence on Jakku felt lived-in. Maz's Castle and the Rebel Base just ended up feeling like placeholder facades that evaporated when they were…

You should watch Little Shop of Horrors.

Hijacking the dream thread, I actually had a nice dream that I remembered recently. It was election night and the polls had returned to their post-DNC high. Georgia had just turned blue and it looked like Trump was on the path to a crushing electoral defeat. Then there was some sort of transition and I was in an…

Oh wow I didn't realize it was starting so soon. I remember the buzz out of SDCC being that this season would be a change-up in format, with multi-episode arcs, most of the ensemble in the background, a bigger focus on Ezra's struggles with the dark side and Sabine's with her Mandalorian heritage. If all that's true…

Next season: on Zoo

I respect that you didn't go for the "Alderaan places" pun.

Oh and he also used campaign funds to buy $55k worth of his own book… at MSRP.

Probably never. The media gets to pretend to be balanced when they cover the race as "the crazy one" vs. "the corrupt one". If they start covering it accurately as "the crazy, fraudulent, corrupt, racist, incompetent, policy-free, neo-fascist one" vs "the reticent one" they sacrifice their false equivalency which is…

Are you sure you're not the one writing all these in the first place?

"It was all a cream" is one of the cheapest conceits in all of victuals.

Is there any more apt and concise encapsulation of the chauvinistic impulse to use shame as a weapon? Probably, but not on this list.

Turns out our lights have been flickering for a month because of a single spring that didn't have any coil left to it in the fusebox. WE HAVE ANGERED COILY THE SPRING-SPRITE

I hope it's immediately preceded by a brief exchange clarifying just how many of them there were.

Well, it's good to know it's not something chronic. I hope she's recovered fully in time for the first debate (though from a strictly cynical perspective I suppose an illness could help with expectations-setting).