I’m going to discuss the film at length in the next podcast, but here’s a point dependent on my memory: A gulf in tone lies between the reviews about The Force Awakens and those that greeted The Phantom Menace sixteen years ago. Then, the critics were numb and bored with the exercise of finding something to say… Read More How do you Know Star Wars is Back? Because You Can Critique it and Still Love it.
J.J. Abrams Executive produced this one, and, as the trailer indicates, it was directed by the guy who did Fast & Furious 8. So, there’s that. In the comments, they are NOT taking it well. And I definitely see why they wouldn’t. Star Trek was not supposed to be an action-movie franchise. It was supposed… Read More Star Trek Beyond Trailer Causes Trekkie Rage
In an otherwise blandly professorial discussion of “girl squads” for the Hollywood Reporter, Camille Paglia sent some shade at Taylor Swift: In our wide-open modern era of independent careers, girl squads can help women advance if they avoid presenting a silly, regressive public image — as in the tittering, tongues-out mugging of Swift’s bear-hugging posse.… Read More Why Can’t You Idiots Read? Camille Paglia and Taylor Swift
He keeps remembering things creatively: Lucas says Han shooting first in the Mos Eisley cantina — which is what happened in the original edit of 1977’s debut Star Wars film — ran against the character’s principles. “Han Solo was going to marry Leia, and you look back and say, ‘Should he be a cold-blooded killer?’”… Read More Unsatisfied With Being Wrong About Star Wars, George Lucas Decided to be Wrong About John Wayne
Knock it off, nerds. More than a month ago, I made some jokes about Star Wars on Red Eye, a satirical political comedy show that airs at 3 a.m., and it has resulted in me being verbally abused and told to die by a mob of enraged fans for the past four days now. The… Read More Anyone Who’s Offended by Anyone on Red Eye is Too Stupid to Watch Star Wars
So sayeth the Telegraph (h/t Vox Day). One recording purports to show a uniformed security guard speaking of getting “swastikas in my eyes”. “In two years, there will be a revolution here and there will be no more of all this s***. We’ll clean it all out,” the guard, who has not been named, appears… Read More So, Germans Are Making Nazi Sounds Again…
Being a fan of Star Wars is hard. You have to recognize that for all the fun it gave you, it’s also created a mass of boredom and Gungans. So very little of the Expanded Universe is done right. So much of it is a pastiche of the magic that made the first movie such… Read More Keeping Expectations Low for The Force Awakens
Last night, instead of going to sleep like a sensible person, I read Bret Easton Ellis’ “Thoughts on David Foster Wallace and ‘The End of the Tour‘”. In it, the American Psycho author holds forth on how the film “The End of the Tour” is a treacly one-note pile of horse flops that, with almost obligatory irony,… Read More When You Just Can’t Get into Authors You Want to Get Into
For a long time, we were lost in the darkness. Unable to tell what was problematic, or, if we dared push past our privelege to consider if it was problematic, to know just how problematic it was. Those. Days. Are. Over. For example, of course you knew that Wonder Woman’s costume was Problematic. That’s a… Read More Everything’s a Problem is the Tumblr You Didn’t Know You Needed
Killing the charactes we like, making us like the characters we hate. {Warning: Contains spoilers. Also Swearing.} At this point, we’ve been down this road so many times that some of us are starting to feel numb to it. This season has left a bad taste in many fans’ mouth, because the usual collection of horrible… Read More Game of Thrones Just Did That Thing It Does.
Content Blues 