empire

10 Sep

How Ted Lasso Sneakily Crafted its Empire Strikes Back Season

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This article contains Ted Lasso spoilers through season 2 episode 8. Perhaps you’ve heard, but Apple TV+ series Ted Lasso was the subject of some dreaded Discourse recently.  Since the Internet is infinite and we privileged few in the media have nothing but time, a handful of features came out weeks ago essentially questioning what Ted Lasso season 2 was even all about. Many of these features were well-written, well-argued, and fair, but when filtered through Twitter’s anti-nuance machine (i.e. Twitter itself), every feature boiled down to the same reductive take: Ted Lasso season 2 doesn’t have a conflict.  In…

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10 Sep

Empire of the Vampire Makes Vampires Scary Again

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This article is sponsored by As a species, humans have more or less always been obsessed with vampires. (The earliest references to blood-drinking creatures date back to ancient Mesopotamia, believe it or not.) But the way we relate to these creatures has shifted throughout the centuries, as legends, folklore, and popular culture have adapted to the needs and fears specific to respective societies.  Published in 1897, Bram Stoker’s Dracula may have sparked a particular vein of horror story that continues to this day (looking at you, American Horror Story: Double Feature), but Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, published in…

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02 Jun

Star Wars: Major Solo Character Returns to Save Han from Boba Fett After Empire Strikes Back

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This Star Wars article contains spoilers for War of the Bounty Hunters. Star Wars: War of the Bounty Hunters kicked off last month with the untold story of Boba Fett’s journey back to Jabba’s Palace after the events of The Empire Strikes Back. Han Solo is still frozen in carbonite on the Slave I, but when the carbonite matrix becomes unstable (which could turn our beloved smuggler into “goo”), Fett is forced to make an emergency stop to Nar Shaddaa, the infamous “Smuggler’s Moon” located smack in the middle of Hutt space. As you can imagine, things only get more…

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21 May

Star Wars: Leigh Brackett and The Empire Strikes Back You Never Saw

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The Empire Strikes Back is a masterpiece of blockbuster cinema and the standard by which we measure all other big-screen space adventures. But before it became the magnum opus of the original Star Wars trilogy, the spark that would become The Empire Strikes Back floated in the nothingness of space, waiting for its big bang.  When Star Wars premiered in May 1977, the saga’s sequel could have gone either the low-budget or blockbuster route. Although we got the latter, there was already a plan in case the film wasn’t a huge hit. George Lucas hired Alan Dean Foster, who ghost-wrote…

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15 May

What Star Wars: The Bad Batch Reveals About the Rise of the Empire

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Sometimes it seems like every inch of territory in the Star Wars galaxy has been explored. From the fate of the Jedi after Order 66 to every minute detail of the Galactic Civil War, the franchise has always been interested in tracing and expanding its own history. That tradition continues with the new Disney+ animated series The Bad Batch, which explores the lives of clone troopers in the aftermath of the Clone Wars. This dark period of transition from Republic to Empire was previously chronicled in the now non-canon Legends continuity, but now we have a canon interpretation of it…

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21 Apr

Rare Star Wars Script Protects Empire’s Darth Vader Secret

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This article contains spoilers for Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: Far From Home. These days, you’d lose a metaphorical hand to a studio’s red lightsaber if you dished details on any major upcoming plot twists. Media training for interviews, fake scripts, and so much green screen that the actors couldn’t even really tell you what was happening on set if they tried are all extremely commonplace behind the scenes of the big franchises, so that invested audiences get to experience that collective shock when Cap wields Mjolnir, or J. Jonah Jameson live-streams the doxxing of…

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09 Nov

Star Wars From a Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back Review

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From a Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back is a fun anthology of Star Wars tales. Like its predecessor, it offers a variety of stories rather than simply evoking the dark second act of the original movie trilogy in particular. Here are slapstick comedies and lamentations, space battles and alien conclaves. Although some of the stories lack structure or feel unfinished, there are enough good ones here to please just about any Star Wars fan. One sure crowd-pleaser is “Rendezvous Point,” a Rogue Squadron tale by Jason Fry. This is a fun jaunt back into the spirit of…

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28 May

The Fall of the American Empire

Max SchindlerMovie reviewsamerican, empire

Pierre-Paul Daoust, 36, an intellectual with a PhD in philosophy is forced to work as a deliveryman to afford a decent living. One day, while delivering a parcel, he gets caught in a hold up gone terribly wrong: two dead and millions in money bags laying on the ground. Pierre-Paul is confronted with a dilemma: leave empty handed, or take the money and run?Rated: RRelease Date: May 31, 2019

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