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Bwahahaha! Alabama gets to feel, just for one night, what the entire 2023 and 2024 seasons have been like for both of the teams I care about.

This season had already beat me down to the point where I'm not checking in advance for weeknight games.

Can't say I'm sad to have missed this one. The Fire-Sonny train is picking up customers at every stop.

The first 15 minutes of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade are set 30 years before the rest of the movie, and teenage Indy has a single day where he is introduced to grave-robbing/"muscular archaeology" as a concept, uses a bullwhip for the first time, gets the small scar that Harrison Ford has on his chin, is traumatized by snakes, and receives his fedora. Solo nominally spreads things out more, but in the course of one movie he gets his name, the blaster, the dice, meets Chewie, meets Lando, wins the Falcon, does the Kessel Run, etc., etc. It's cute until it's not.

For "nighttime mud blasting," I was referring to the scenes when Han is in the Imperial Army on that planet where they're fighting WWI style battles, all of which are in the dead of night and everything is covered in mud, and you can't really see any sense of scale, I think mostly to save time and money during the Ron Howard re-work. It's pretty generic stuff, but it does show war as a not entirely heroic activity (a patriotic, gung-ho officer is immediately blown up, and Han implies they're the invaders), and therefore a certain segment of fans are obsessed with it as a more "sophisticated" take on Star Wars.

A given sport has to really hit a person at the right point in their lives for them to fall in love with it, and that usually at a fairly young age, but over the years I’ve very much come around to the notion that just because the charms and nuances are lost on me, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

PLUTO

DID IT CLEAR ITS ORBIT?!?

I say again, did… Pluto… CLEAR… ITS… ORBIT?

It’s not my thing, but competitive driving in circles at a consistent 180-200mph (290-320kph) with a certain tolerance for bumping. That’s a non-trivial motor sport.

The article lands on "not actually all that bad, especially from a business perspective, but could be much better," which is kind of unsatisfying, but I did like the opening analogy to the Falcon: "The garbage will do."

One thing they absolutely have to do is get better acting and production values that match the sequels, or at least Mando S1. The Volume should only be used when the scene makes sense for it, so either spaces that are themselves enclosed, or where the actors' blocking reasonably makes sense. Kenobi was particularly egregious with this, especially the airspeeders sequence. Everything is just so slow and small and anything that can't be done in VFX is crowded into a very tight space. When the Acolyte tried to build bigger sets... I dunno... something came off wrong, like they contracted the whole thing out to the Disney teams that make the public spaces in Galaxy's edge, which like all theme parks trade a certain amount authentic screen presence for durability. I doubt the sets are that durable, making it all the worse when they look how they do. BOBF's infamous scooter chase had some other issues, but what locked it in as a blunder was the cheap visuals that screamed, "We can't afford enough set to zoom through it at more than jogging speed!" Somebody needed to tell Robert Rodriguez that this isn't Spy Kids. Andor had a large but not unlimited budget, but the key is (barely greebled AK-47's aside) that they used it wisely and got bang for their bucks; they made choices that fit the story into the budget (they actually made two TIE fighters feel terrifying), and it ended up looking just right for the most part.

Then the acting. All 5 Disney movies did okay with this, and the sheer watchability of the performances an one area where I think they ALL outshone all three PT movies. Star Wars has never been known for "realistic" dialogue, but the OT sold it by having actors with movie star charisma, veteran chops, and a decade of "new Hollywood" naturalistic sensibilities. Then you had a collaborative process that took better takes and excised material that couldn't be made to work. The ST was less organic, but similarly collaborative and while almost cloyingly modern and quippy at times, you don't get the sense that the actors are struggling with the material. I don't want to lean in too hard on overly simplistic narratives here, but the amount of control that Lucas had in the prequels undoubtedly led to an under-emphasis on the parts of filmmaking he finds less interesting, and too much reliance on newfound abilities to "fix it in post." He somehow got awful performances from Natalie Portman and Samuel L. Jackson, and even fairly uneven ones from Ewan McGregor.

The shows, however, have mostly skewed to the worse side of things. Not quite so stilted as the PT, but there is a serious lack of charisma and humanity emanating from them, and it just makes things less fun, and when your dialogue mostly exists to deliver exposition, it leaves us more willing to nitpick details. Andor has a grimmer tone, but there is charisma there. The performances were compelling and I had to watch. You cannot and should not make all Star Wars like Andor, but you could make it all as well-conceived as Andor.

Solo was decent enough, but Christ it would have been better if they hadn't thought the fan-service in the prologue to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade should be stretched out into an entire god-damned movie. I was also only "whelmed" by the scenes on Mimban and I don't quite get the online begging for an entire movie of nighttime mud-blasting. Like, just watch a couple war movies, y'all.

I have no idea if this is a clever bypass around expensive commercial offerings, a clever waste of time that barely improves over doing it by hand, or somewhere in between, but it sure looks like a nice design and print.

This pales in comparison to cheesy blasters.

Looks shitty.

Fewer pouches, but still not zero pouches. This tracks.

I'm suspicious of those feet though. They look biologically plausible and therefore wrong for the character.