In all the rush we never got a chance to talk about my balls

Re-watching Rogue One, it's hard to know how much of it is an actual mess and how much I am reading as a mess because I know that a lot of behind-the-scenes shenanigans went on as the producers inexplicably panicked at the last minute that they would not make a cubic fuckton of money from a film with the words "Star Wars" in the title even when it has Darth F Vader in it.
But Rogue One is certainly episodic - in a manner reminiscent of that wave of cheap space operas churned out across the world in the wake of the first Star Wars trilogy that concentrated on the escapades of a group of adventurers in various sci-fi locales before they regrouped for the final battle against the movie's central protagonist, a formulae seen in the likes of Space Raiders, Star Crash and Ice Pirates, and a bit more carefree than the typical 3-act structure usually seen in sci-fi and action movies of the time.  The Force Awakens attempted to channel that same kind of narrative structure, best seen in the hentai monster sequence that doesn't actually serve much storytelling purpose beyond distracting you from the lazy coincidences used to weld Han Solo and Chewbacca into a story in which they don't really have any place, but Rogue One excels at recreating this kind of cheap-ass, anything-goes adventure - it's just really hard to see it because the film is so damned well-made and everything is filtered through the post-millenial grimdark lens of uber-seriousness to the point that not even the clumsy slapstick and catty wisecracks of a comedy robot breaks through - seriously, it is a film that has a wisecracking comedy robot front and center and yet the big takeaway from it is likely how grim and portentous it all is.
After the The Force Awakens' cherry-picking of elements limited to the original trilogy of movies and - given the anti-Prequel /anti-Lucas slant of some marketing and subsequent de-canonising of decades' worth of spin-off media - calculated effort to convince a generation that this film and this alone continued the adventures of their heroes, the Star Wars universe (by design) felt a lot smaller and more empty than it ever had, but Rogue One reverses that.  It adds Easter egg after Easter egg, from cameos of Original Trilogy stalwarts and backing characters to the cast of tv's Rebels without discriminating against the non-movie sections of the canon - this universe feels lived-in again for the first time in a long while, and I am thankful to Rogue One for that, even if I suspect I'll never rewatch it half as many times as I have other Star Warses.
...and so to The Last Jedi trailer, which dropped today.

I am genuinely struggling with how underwhelmed I am, although that could just be my general disappointment with The Force Awakens coupled with an inescapable feeling that much as I thought these new characters were okay in one movie, they've already had their chance to tell their story and now it's done.  I mean, Rey's character arc so focused on "the Call To Adventure" - the first step of the Hero's Journey (AKA "Screenwriting For Dummies: Chapter 1") - to the point that it became the entirety of her arc and when she accepted that call she completed her journey as a character.  I'd prefer to move on from Rey, but obviously Star Wars producers - as we learned with Rogue One - are cautious when it comes to spending 300 million dollars, so I guess we're getting a "white people learn them some mystic arts" movie now, which I guess is as good a mid-80s genre to plunder as the sci-fi romp is.  Even so, I think my hopes are more pinned on the next Star Wars Anthology movie than the latest entry in the increasingly tired Skywalker Dynasty.

I used to work at a book store and I read a sentence from every single one of those books

Watching Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, and I have scattered and unfocused opinions and impressions taken from it, so bear with me for a blog post that probably reads like a Twitter feed more than it does a coherent overview of a - FACK ME - 10 year-old film.
During the great opening half hour action sequence, I love how General Grievous announces "Fire ze emergency poofter engines!" - I'm not sure what Poofter Engines are, but they sound fabulous - and then uses something called "Race Shields" to trap the Caucasian characters.  There is some odd stuff going on in these movies.
I do like that it's just a bunch of mad fights, but they also highlight that the weakest part of the film is Anakin's Face/Heel turn in the slower moments - Hayden Christiansen gets a lot of flak for this, but that's unfair, as the dialogue is pretty weak and doesn't tie the disparate strands of his character arc  together.  There's some nice touches like Anakin's humility and magnanimity possibly being his reflecting those emotions from those around him, suggesting a functioning sociopath who's simply faking it and using the Jedi's teachings to help him do so, but I suppose if Anakin is a sociopath, it makes his eventual redemption in Return of the Jedi impossible, and the whole point of Return of the Jedi is arguably that Anakin the Jedi... erm... "Returns" when given a similar moral choice to the one he makes here.
Another nice touch is that his fall comes not from the Sith but from the Jedi - through Mace Windu (shortly before before Mace goes through a windu) - failing to live up to the standards of the Jedi order and the justice system of the Republic, implying that Vader was never inevitable, simply a long game of Sidious' that the Jedi could have thwarted if they'd stayed the distance and held true to their code.  There's probably a great What If? story waiting to be told, stemming from Mace Windu not losing faith in the way of the Jedi and thus never prompting Anakin's impulsive decision that leads to his turn to the Dark Side, but I suspect it would still be told against a background of an empire in decay, as one thing Lucas does well is use colour and scale to show that we're seeing the large-scale widescreen final days of a once-proud and great power in decline - an honest-to-God culture, corrupted from within and seized by an antagonist who's an opportunist as much as a schemer, and I don't help but notice it's a capitalist system that's going tits-up, and that the igniting incident of the war was corporate greed.  Usually in these space operas - Star Wars imitators, admittedly - they center on dynastic skulduggery usually involving a Bad Old Dude making a power grab from his poorly-lit  throne room set, and what we see of "the galaxy" is some corridors and maybe an outdoor shoot near an old fort or something, but here we see an actual sprawling civilisation at stake.
The Prequels are about the fall of an empire, not the rise of one, and in retrospect, Lucas made the right decision to tell this story rather than the more obvious and lucrative one, because when people bitch and whine about how the Prequels don't feel like Star Wars, what those people actually mean is that they aren't 8 years old anymore, and they're likely more angry that they will never be young again than they are angry that some guy didn't make the movie they wanted.
"It's just a toy advertisement" - I never really understood this argument, as so was the original Star Wars, because obviously toy companies - having just bought the toy rights - made toys out of anything they could.  It seems to me that what people are complaining about in the context of the Prequels is not potential toys but the act of world-building Lucas undertakes.

What a prick C3P0 is - he walks in on padme watching the Jedi temple in flames and announces that Anakin just went there "but I'm sure he'll be alright" and then he fucks off and Padme breaks down in tears.  Dick move.

I like when Palpatine says the Empire will make the galaxy "safe and secure" and everyone believes him and claps like the morons they are.  HAHA GEORGE LUCAS' DIALOGUE IS SO UNREALISTIC.
"Into exile I must go.  Failed I have."  Erm... what?
Padme dies of a broken heart.  I unironically love the romanticism of this notion.

I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would.  I think its main flaw is that it's too ambitious and set out to do too much, to the point that no matter how neatly it ties up the threads it weaves, the best case scenario was always to be that it leaves the story just as it's getting started.  Unlike, say, The Force Awakens, Revenge of the Sith at least tries, and if I had to identify its single biggest problem, it wouldn't be the acting - not even that Jedi kid that approaches Anakin in the temple - it would be that for a movie so full of inventive fight scenes and madcap chases, it's a real bummer to watch because of where it all goes in the end, so you can't take as much joy from it as you otherwise would.  Also the pacing is really odd, with multiple scenes playing out alongside each other and slowing things down in those scenes - although I really liked that Padme dies just as Anakin becomes Vader, even if it doesn't actually make that much sense because he's already Vader, and doesn't actually become the proper for-real evil Vader until after the Frankenstein's Monster riff near the end - but still, full marks for soppiness, with the callback to the charm Anakin carved for Padme in The Phantom Menace being an especially good example of same, and as much as Jar-Jar was a terrible idea, seeing him sad at Padme's funeral is heartbreaking.

I liked the little callbacks to the original trilogy, like Anakin's choice between helping Mace Windu or Chancellor Palpitine being the exact same choice he would be presented with in Return of the Jedi (with the Emperor and Luke), Obi Wan picking up Anakin's lightsaber before leaving him to die, and the way Owen (Luke's uncle) is standing looking out at the suns of Tatooine in exactly the same way Luke would.

I wanted to get you a bazooka but apparantly there are laws

A bit of seasonal cheer from myself and Lee Robson in the shape of a strip we ran up what you can read, like...

It's aptly a space-y thing because Christmas for me is defined by memories of one of the Star Warses being repeated for the umpteenth time, which I mention as a seamless intro into reviewing the latest Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens, as it is a law that internet reviews of TFA start with an anecdote about the franchise's personal connection with the reviewer.
I did not think The Force Awakens was very good.
I couldn't get the feel that this was actually Star Wars, it just felt like someone doing a homage to the Star Wars I remember but not quite getting it right because they aren't really emulating the old stuff, they're just using the trappings like the ship designs, the laser noises, and the names of characters - fanfiction, basically, and if you've ever seen one of the half-decent Star Wars fanfics available, you'll know what I mean when I say it's nice to look at, but the tiny things here and there undermine the proposition that you're watching something official.
I fully appreciate that this is a minority opinion, all the same, as the vast majority of people seem to be over the moon about The Force Awakens, or at the very least they're over the moon that it isn't the prequels, as every review seems to be born of some variation of the same basic conceit that this one wasn't made by George Lucas so it is automatically good, and never mind the slapdash art design, the rehashing of the Death Star plot yet again, a McGuffin that makes literally no sense whatsoever, massive coincidences stringing together the various scenes rather than actual plot connective tissue, and a villain whose entire deal is that he will never be as good as Darth Vader from the original trilogy, which is awful to behold onscreen and yet at the same time a brass-balls level of self-awareness of a kind the rest of the script might have benefited from experiencing.  Ironically, The Force Awakens' biggest problems are the exact same problems that plagued the prequels (such as the impression that it is a remarkably small galaxy in terms of characters crossing each others' paths), and yet this time audiences and reviewers are happy to hand-wave away such concerns, where before they were baying for the blood of George Lucas.
Mind you, the prequels grew on me over time, so perhaps The Force Awakens will do the same, as it seems to rely entirely on nostalgia as its one selling-point, and that takes time and distance to develop.

I can't understand what the devil he's saying, but you know, there's a lot of movement and it's bright and colorful, it keeps my attention

Yes, it is so snowy here in Cookstown that I thought I'd take a photo and use the snowfall and local mountains as backdrop and texture layers on a sketch of something snow-themed and it almost works, as though there are many things wrong with the picture, offhand I'd say the greatest of its problems is that it is not a picture of Shako. Clearly the shin-deep snow has addled my mind to the point I can no longer get my priorities straight.

Watching: Hawaii Five-0 - man I love trashy tv, I am such a fucking snob that I think James 'Spike From Buffy' Marsters' Irish accent is pure entertainment. Luckily I am absolutely right, and hearing actual human beings say lines like "Get mie ma money or yorr man gohs bum!" is why I have a television that does more than play videogames that train me to be a better sociopath.
Lost Girl - also trash, but that's no reason not to be entertained. It does suffer from the slight flaw of the main character - supposedly a sexually-irresistible succubus - not being as hot as her comedy sidekick, but otherwise watching it is like being maced, except your mouth's open and instead of mace it's beer or something. Complete fluff that barely holds together from one moment to the next, but y'know, the alternative is staring at the wall, and the wall doesn't move, my mind wanders - I prefer Lost Girl.
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency - which follows the recent spate of live-action adaptations of Terry Pratchett works in feeding a newly-emergent genre of humourous novels adapted into television shows that don't actually have any jokes. Added to which Gently himself has changed from the pudgy, bespectacled subcontinental Asian in the novels to something teenage girls and Daily Mail readers(1) will find more palatable. Believe it or not, the BBC actually broadcast this:

which is actually more Freudian than it is funny.

(1) I imagine the overlap here is much larger than I suspect it to be.