Star Wars: The Disney+ Empire Strikes Again and Again and...

blue food watch: space cereal with blue milk

the uptight police guy’s mom is a whole mood, i kind of love her and their vibe

also uptight police guy reminds me of the Jude Law android from AI, it might just be his hair

i thought the same thing

yes his mom is great. strangely for such a diverse and motley set of beings she’s one of the few real “characters” in this show

i was psyched for the heist but now i’m very much enjoying the slow burn. “clem” a bit jumpy, not just a strong dude for us to identify with but a dude with problems. “we all have our own rebellion” - loved that.

will our double agent’s moment of sentimentality - allowing the men to watch the cosmic happening - come back to bite them? i don’t know but i loved that we got to see that little grin

maybe didn't follow the plot but felt like that smile was showing that he played them, got them to think he was giving them what they wanted when really he cleared them out to not be paying attention during the heist or something?

I'm enjoying Ebon Moss Bachrach. I HATED him on Girls, where he played a truly odious character. Then when he showed up in the Bear I was like ugh this guy again, but then I was like well he's playing an asshole, do I hate the actor or just his characters? Then by the end of the Bear I was like, aw I like this guy, and now here he is again! And he's enjoyable. ANd I can erase his Girls character from my memory.

I've had almost the same opinions as you regarding that actor; they did too good a job making him an asshole on Girls and it's taken a few years to rectify. He was also in one season of Damages

same, his character was so convincingly awful in Girls i thought maybe i hated his face lol but i dig him so mich in Bear & Andor

So difficult to tell whether Dunham liked or loathed her characters, and I guess that had consequences for the performers too - were we watching a charming actor uncharmingly playing an asshole, or an uncharming performance of a character we were supposed to like? Hard to tell from week to week

dan otm

Ok. Wow. That was some Star War telly.
Tense.

lol they kinda delivered on the hype for The Eye thing damn

wow. episode delivered. only marred by young trotsky nerd’s hopelessly tendentious acting.

lol they kinda delivered on the hype for The Eye thing damn

ha yeah i was disappointed we hadn't gotten to the heist at the end of the last episode, but the wait was worth it!

Between this and The Bear, Ebon Moss-Bachrach has been in the two most stressful episodes of TV I've watched all year

ok if we get a three episode cadence, every third is action-heavy, and each builds on the last, that twelfth one better deliver

THE GREENIE GREEN ONES

THE GREENIE REVNOG

this show keeps impressing me tbh

so "shave and a haircut" exists in the star wars universe?

It does now!

Fantastic last couple of episodes here. And yes it's pretty clear we're on a three episode arc each time, which I have no problem with. (Appreciate the ISB office politics mania of course. Also didn't realize the dude there with the one speech about imposing measures etc is the latest iteration of this character, who might be the classic retcon.)

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Wullf_Yularen

looking forward to episode 9 being the star wars version of the great escape

nerdy sidebar - i love the room interiors for a lot of their homes & meeting rooms, like the architectural details in mon mothma’s mansion or the interesting brick interiors of andor’s home or that 70’s looking pad of his girlfriend/not-girlfriend, and uptight-guy’s mom’s modular pod-apartment

i can’t say why exactly but it gives me a bit of a “bladerunner” echo.

I'd reallt still like a series dedicated to Jawas especially a Jedi Jawa

veg, you're the third person to make the bladerunner connect here. I should be watching Andor I think.

for me it’s specifically the interiors somehow

anyway it’s great!

mandalorian still my fave but andor def a close second

and some of the music this latest episode - by the fantastic Nicholas Britell - used a lot of very Bladerunner-y synth textures. Such a wonderful series. The ground level Empire stuff (probe droids, TIES, stormtroopers) has rarely felt more ominous.

If you thought that the Mandalorian was essentially bad, is this good on a Mandalorian scale or on an objective scale?

the vacation planet theme song was pretty amusing

I like this much more than the Mandalorian, it is a very different show

it is much more focused on giving a glimpse into how normal people live in various parts of the galaxy, very subdued, much less action and heroics, although that stuff is in there for sure.

andor is way more grounded in a lot of ways than mandalorian, it feels more like a gritty, modern type of spy movie that happens to be set in star wars world rather than the kind of epic space western like mando was

but if you thought mando was essentially bad i can’t fully speak to whether you’d even enjoy andor

different vibe but like, it’s not NOT star wars

veg otm re the interiors. I also liked that wide shot of the Imperial cubicles, love this (and Rogue One’s) depiction of the Empire as essentially being run by a bunch of corporate stooges and horrible middle managers.

that ISB meeting scene was as gripping as any lightsaber duel lol

I think this may also be the first star wars show to follow multiple agents of the empire maybe not quite as sympathetic characters, but definitely as humans possessing inner lives.

It is Ronin but Stellan Skarsgård has more years and hair this go round

Absolutely delighted to discover that Chamberlin, Powell and Bon did some work on Coruscant before coming to London to design The Barbican.

Not so thrilled that everyone is carrying around tablet computers, I thought it was canon that SW never had that kind of tech.

i thought of the Barbican as well!

i must have missed the tablets. it’s a funny mix of tech, it mostly feels like Vietnam-war era is about where they’re at.

watched the new one last night and was thinking the same stuff about the production design and music. A lot of these star wars shows have felt kinda cheap...like expensive compared to a lot of tv shows, but budget compared to an actual movie, but the physical world building, the exteriors and interiors, vehicle design etc, on Andor has been really fantastic. I prefer this to the Mandalorian for sure. I skipped Boba and only watched one episode of Obi Wan.

I think a big reason it looks so much realer is that they used the green screen superdome a lot less for this show. Or at least, that gave them an excuse to have less scenes of people standing around in the desert.

Britell such a great choice for this series

I keep hearing good things about "Andor," but I haven't watched anything post-Mando S2. Just kind of Star War'd out, I guess. (Also totally off the LotR and GoT trains, too, though more power to you folks invested.) But maybe I'll give it a shot, since we're between Marvel things. The praise seems similar to S1 of "Mando" - just a good show set in the Star Wars universe rather than some portentous fan service playing up/with mythology.

Pretty much - it's a good show, a little elevated by the extra Star Wars mythology that it does touch and the action setpieces that finally happen

it ties in closer to the main Star Wars story than Mandolorian does because it's about the birth of the rebellion, but mostly avoids obvious fan service, most of the characters and settings are new, and there hasn't been any mention of jedi/sith stuff so far. It sidesteps the superhero aspects of Star Wars and focuses more on the human side of things.

I like the idea of the "rebel alliance" explicitly being a coalition of partisans and pro-republic politicians and aristocrats, as messy as that may be, playing out. The formal title of "Alliance to Restore the Republic" might be an interesting point in a future episode because it's been pretty strongly implied that some of the people involved hate the Empire but didn't necessarily have great faith in the Republic

I love Andor, and thought the Mandalorian post season 2, the Boba Fett thing, was dumb, as was Obi Wan. Dug the first two of Madalorian, but this is even better.

I have skipped LoTR and found HotDragon lame, so I have sorta desperate geek hopes here.

I have skipped LoTR and found HotDragon lame, so I have sorta desperate geek hopes here.

https://twitter.com/i/events/1584693275755044865

Try again:

A Secret Writers Room, a Rising Scribe and a Post-‘Skywalker’ Timeline: A Look Inside Damon Lindelof‘s ’Star Wars’ Movie (Exclusive) https://t.co/Qr3PvFqx3F

— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) October 24, 2022

no mas

I’ve read articles by like “industry watchers” who are LIVID that Disney has not been exploiting the star wars IP more in the cinema and I’m like….. thank fuck for that

The Force Reawakens
The Penultimate Jedi
Re-Rise of Nu-Skywalker

kinda crazy that Andy Greenwald (formerly of the Ringer) is on the writing team of Star Wars movie

Ha, I knew Andy from Spin.

We saw the first "Andor." I liked it, at times it sort of had "Blade Runner" vibes, but my daughter was very resistant and found the characters "boring" (which come to think of it is also very "Blade Runner"). That means I'm on my own for finishing it, which means it'll be another ... six months before I'm done.