James Hibberd, writing for The Hollywood Reporter, examines Disney-fied Star Wars and finds it lacking.

Disney gave Star Wars fans what they wanted for decades — a lot more Star Wars, from different visionary filmmakers, and some of it has been terrific. A dormant franchise that once followed a single dynastic storyline has exploded into a more diverse galaxy of characters and stories. Even the oft-maligned sequel trilogy has sequences within each film that are inarguably stunning (for all its narrative flaws, The Rise of Skywalker‘s farewell scene between Han Solo and Kylo Ren is as moving as anything in the canon). And shows like The Mandalorian, Andor and Rebels clear even the highest bar a hard-core fan might reasonably set. A lot of the online uproar is a sign audiences are, at least, still very engaged and care about this franchise; a truer sign of failure would be apathy and disinterest.

But here’s another question: Could Disney be better at Star Wars? … Clearly, yes.

The company’s live-action movies and TV efforts, on average, could and should be better. In 2018, Disney CEO Bob Iger admitted the company made “a mistake” with Star Wars, making movies “a little too much, too fast.” After Iger temporarily left the company in 2020, Disney/Lucasfilm arguably made the same error again on the TV side. Lucas famously instructed his actors to be “faster and more intense,” but that doesn’t typically work as a franchise strategy (as Marvel has discovered, as well). It’s unclear if Star Wars requires more order or less — more Empire-like corporate oversight or more Rebellion-like creative chaos. But it’s long seemed like there’s somehow too much of both, which has resulted in a master plan that’s constantly being rewritten, and content that sometimes feels undercooked and clunky. It’s not the fault of fans that they increasingly have “a bad feeling about this.”

Any criticism from the sidelines, however, should be tempered with one final point: Making a successful Star Wars project is really hard. Marvel movies — with their iconic stable of heroes who can be portrayed by different actors — are arguably easier. Lucas created this thing and made six live-action Star Wars films over several decades, and only his first two were widely considered excellent by critics and fans alike (many younger fans adore his prequels, though they were never much loved by critics). This is also what makes making more content so tempting — the original Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back were profoundly amazing, and so captivated generations of fans, and have launched literally thousands of products and generated billions in direct and ancillary revenue.

Answering the question is pretty straightforward. Is Disney bad at Star Wars? Let’s say they’ve turned the Force into a farce. Sure, there are moments of brilliance, like Andor, but those feel like happy accidents in a sea of half-baked ideas and mediocre content. Even then, casual fans hated Andor precisely because of what made it great. My brother, not a huge Star Wars fan, disliked Andor quite a bit, mainly because it did not have the usual trappings of Star Wars like Jedi/Sith, lightsabers, space dogfights, and the Flash Gordon-like adventure.

The real issue? It all starts at the top, and it’s baffling that this is even up for debate. Disney desperately needs a cohesive vision—a Kevin Feige-type figure to whip this franchise into shape. Why this hasn’t been Dave Filoni’s destiny is beyond me.

Dan Pfeiffer, writing at his Substack The Message Box, said JD Vance didn’t win the debate.

JD Vance is a slick debater. He has the natural advantages of lacking a moral core and an ability to lie shamelessly. It’s how you go from calling Trump “America’s Hitler” to licking every boot in the MAGA media to possibly serve as Trump’s vice president.

Tim Walz started the debate a little nervous. He had some awkward moments. Most theater critics on Twitter and the political media scored the debate as a win for Vance. And if this were a high school debate competition, they would be right. Vance was poised. His answers were precise. Walz was overly elliptical at times and missed opportunities to call out Vance’s blatant lies, but political debates aren’t won by winning the approval of the pundits. They are won by making persuasive arguments to the voters tuning in.

I guess so, but Dan’s a little biased.

Vance did fine by mostly not coming across as “weird” as he has as of late. Of course, it makes no difference. It’s the guy at the top of the ticket that people really care about, and Trump is a fascist, adjudicated rapist, conman, and indicted criminal. I still don’t quite understand why the polls are so close.

Walz was fine. He was folksy and let Vance get away with delivering an insane amount of bullshit in a short amount of time. I mean, we got used car salesman-style slick lines/lies about solar panels and guns, January 6, illegal immigrants, saving Obamacare (ha!), a national abortion ban, and that Trump peacefully transferred power after losing the last election. I would have liked to see Walz call out these lies stronger. Generally, Vance was a more polished performer in a debate setting, but Walz was more effective on issues like school shootings, abortion, and health care.

The only thing anyone will remember about this debate is Vance refusing to acknowledge that Trump lost the 2020 election and his line, “Margaret, the rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact check,” after lying again about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. First, that wasn’t in the rules, and second, viewers realized he wasn’t upset because the debate moderators were wrong; he was upset because the debate moderators were telling the public the truth.

In the end, it will have no impact at all on the race. None. Zip. Zilch.

Dave Pell, writing in his newsletter Nextdraft, sums up my feelings toward this election cycle.

These days, the main thing I feel while watching debates and other political coverage is that I want it to end. The show. Our obsession with the race. The social media posts. The endless texts. This era. Trumpism. The media’s poor performance. The lies. I want to go back to life before Trump.

Me too.

Warren Ellis –

I finally saw The Milky Way, the other week. A bit of it. I’d never seen it before — never actually seen that many stars at one time before. The night after, I saw the Northern Lights for the first time. Well, a bit. It was white, and dilute. But clearly there. The others in my party had seen them the night before. I’d gone to sleep early and missed them. The photos the next day were luminous, electric green curtains. What I saw was more like smoke. It was still riveting.

The reaction to seeing something extraordinary is always to try and photograph it. Not least because a photograph will always last longer than memory, and will in fact trigger the deeper experiential record of memory. But, sometimes? I almost missed the moment of my daughter’s graduation because the phone camera’s focus weirded out at the last second.

Why bother trying to photograph the Milky Way when I can just lay on my back in a Norwegian forest at night and stare at it until it fills my eyes?

Sometimes, you don’t take the photo. You just live it.

Brendan Marks and CJ Moore, writing for The Athletic, do a deep dive into the state of Big Ten Basketball and provide some real insight into the teams and the league.

However, their rankings are sus. Still, who cares? It’s October. Let’s see how this shakes out in Q1 2025.

The only thing I know for sure is that Indiana won’t be that high.

Ray Ratto, writing for Defector, has the definitive take on the passing of Pete Rose.

He wasn’t complicated as a player, a manager, or in the end, as a self-parodic martyr. Rose had smaller measures of the skills that great ballplayers have but a greater capacity to employ them tirelessly, which is what his admirers always admired. He had one overarching gift, though, that covered by the play and the player—the determination and ability, through sheer persistence, to make you make a stand about him. His was the purest kind of narcissism, one so utterly naked that it never needed a second level. He knew that you were only interested in hearing him speak on the subject of him, and that became increasingly true as he grew from boyhood to late boyhood to middle-aged boyhood to octogenarian boyhood.

The only thing anyone ever thinks about with Pete Rose is his absence in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

And now, he is dead, at 83, and in his own magnificently me-centric way, he leaves behind him one final ghoulish debate about the thing that drove him most; his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame. For those who postulated that the powers of the game were just waiting for him to be unable to enjoy induction to extend the honor, the question everyone else long ago wearied of has been revived. Now that he’s no longer living and able to leave a final I-told-you-so to all those who didn’t see it his way—about whether his gambling disqualified him from the Hall, about the fine points of what he did or didn’t do—is it finally safe to put him in Cooperstown?

Nope. He will never be included in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Like Shoeless Joe Jackson, he is on the “permanently ineligible” list. Death doesn’t change a thing.

The irony is that every sporting event is now overgrown with commercials for sports betting. This post made me snort.

Major League Baseball is heartbroken to hear of the passing of Pete Rose.

Use code “PETEROSE” to get $1,000 first bet insurance for the 2024 MLB Postseason with BetMGM, proudly serving as an official gambling partner of Major League Baseball.

— Mike Beauvais (@MikeBeauvais) September 30, 2024

I won’t do any research to see if there’s any truth to it. I think it’s just satire, but it’s biting satire nonetheless.

Katie Woo, Writing for The Athletic, has the post-press-conference story regarding the future of the St. Louis Cardinals.

…a lengthy transition period is coming to St. Louis. The organization will completely rehaul what has become a lacking player development system. Mozeliak will oversee the beginning of this process, but will step down from his position after the 2025 season. Bloom will succeed Mozeliak as the Cardinals’ president of baseball operations starting in 2026. For the next 12 months, however, Bloom will be responsible for upgrading the organization’s minor-league system, including adding staffers to all levels and integrating modern technology.

If the Cardinals are going to change their ways immediately, shouldn’t Bloom make every major decision immediately? The front office seems utterly blind to what’s going to happen with fans because of this announcement. Keeping Mozeliak will mean more boos, more season ticket sales falling, and more fans just giving up.

I get keeping Marmol as manager, but hitting coach Turner Ward can’t be back, can he?

Everyone is tone-deaf. Mozeliak comes across as a smug asshole. Maybe he is. I have no idea. There are hundreds of decisions to be made regarding 2025 and I can’t see how these decisions should be made by the person who’s gone after next season.

It’s madness.

Remember Cardinals devil magick? Fans are going to be in Hell for a long while.

Happy 100th birthday, President Carter! Thank you for your friendship, your fundamental decency, and your incredible acts of service through the @CarterCenter. Michelle and I are grateful for all you’ve done for this country. pic.twitter.com/9TcYABwUO3

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) October 1, 2024

Kris Kristofferson—actor, songwriter, and outlaw country star—has died. Stephen Betts, writing for Rolling Stone, described him as a musical storyteller.

As the songwriter of legendary compositions like “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” and “Me and Bobby McGee,” Kris Kristofferson transformed lyrics into literature, elevating the craft to a legitimate American art form in a way few had done before. Part Romantic poet, part folk troubadour, part country-music storyteller, Kristofferson died Saturday at the age of 88.

I was not aware of his Renaissance man status.

Best known for playing the slippery John Black and his myriad personalities for nearly 40 years on Days of Our Lives, Drake Hogestyn has died. In an Instagram statement, the show confirmed Hogestyn died of pancreatic cancer. He was 70.

When I watched Days of Our Lives back in college, he was one of my favorite actors along with Steven Nichols.

Isaiah Colbert, writing in Gizmodo, has the story about Marvel and DC losing their joint trademark for “super hero.”

According to Reuters, the US Trademark Office canceled several of Marvel and DC Comics’ set of “Super Hero” trademarks in an order on September 26 at the request of Superbabies comic book artist R.J. Richold. The resulting trademark loss on Marvel and DC Comics’ part came after Disney and Warner Bros. representatives didn’t file a response to Richold. This makes matters all the sillier when you consider that DC Comics accused Richold of infringing on the Super Hero trademark with his series, which, as the name suggests, is about a bunch of super-powered babies, and threatened legal action. While DC and Marvel have yet to comment on the ruling, Richold’s attorney, Adam Adler, has. His reply? The verdict was “a victory for creativity and innovation” for everyone, not just his client.

The fact that Marvel and DC had the trademark on such a generic term was pretty ridiculous. I also think DC’s use of “metahuman” and Marvel’s use of “mutant” are the stronger marks anyway.

Brooks Barnes, writing for The New York Times, describes the failure of Megalopolis.

There is no kind way to put it: Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” died on arrival over the weekend.

Mr. Coppola, 85, spent decades on the avant-garde fable, ultimately selling part of his wine business to raise the necessary funds — about $120 million in production costs and another $20 million or so in marketing and distribution expenses. But moviegoers rejected the film: Ticket sales from Thursday night through Sunday will total roughly $4 million in North America, according to analysts, slightly below worst-case scenario prerelease projections.

I have no idea why Coppola thought this movie would have mass appeal.

In the 1980s, when Mr. Coppola first began to develop the film, “Megalopolis” may well have had a chance in theaters. It was a time in Hollywood when ambitious films for thinking people could be eased into a few theaters and allowed to build an audience over months, adding more screens week by week and sometimes playing for a year or more. Hollywood could afford to take it slow in part because moviegoing dominated leisure time: Not only was there no internet yet, cable TV and video games were still in their relative infancy.

Today, movies are typically booked into as many theaters as possible as quickly as possible, especially if reviews are weak. Studios use this distribution tactic to capitalize on expensive marketing campaigns, which are intended to open a narrow window of interest from consumers. If the masses do not immediately materialize, theater chains redirect screens toward other movies. (On Friday, the Warner Bros. sequel “Joker: Folie à Deux” will arrive in more than 4,000 theaters.)

“Megalopolis” almost didn’t make it into theaters. In the spring, when Mr. Coppola began shopping for a distributor, every big studio turned him down. Some executives from these studios admired the movie for its artistic risks. But none saw much hope for it in theaters. (Eventually, Lionsgate agreed to distribute the film for a fee.) More and more, original films are sent directly to streaming services — if they get made at all. Theaters are increasingly for remakes and sequels.

This might have made a bigger splash as an experimental film on Apple TV. Of course, Coppola could make another Godfather movie and earn millions. I mean, he won’t do that, but he could.

Sixteen years after their last album, five years after Robert Smith said “I feel intent on it being a 2019 release and would be extremely bitter if it isn’t,” and three years after long-time bassist Simon Gallup “appeared” to have quit the band because he “got fed up of betrayal,” The Cure is releasing Songs of a Lost World. And they seem to be having fun doing it.

They sent “cryptic postcards” to fans that didn’t quite announce the record. They put up a poster in the club where they played their first gig, followed by billboards and projections in cities around the world. They created an early 2000s-feeling promotional website where you can listen to short clips of two songs - if you can get in. They premiered the first song on the album on BBC Radio 6, and then launched a pre-order site, where you can order, among other things, a cassette of the new album. But the fun might end there. Robert Smith described it in 2022 as “relentless doom and gloom. It’s the doomiest thing that we’ve ever done.”

HT: Metafilter

Aptly named “Broken Man,” the Lincoln Project’s latest video mercilessly trolls Donald Trump for being what he fears most: an old, scared, worn-out has-been.

Say what you will about The Lincoln Project, they do create some sharp videos.

Dame Maggie Smith, latterly famed for the cantankerous matriarchs she played so well but long-recognized for a lifetime of acting excellence, is dead at 89. She was the dowager of Downton Abbey and Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter film series.

Nicholas Bate –

AI…

Wants you to stop reading so that it becomes smarter than you, more rapidly.

Don’t fall for the trap.

Build a book pile and start devouring the intelligence of the ages and the imagination of authors.

Stop scrolling; start reading.

As always, good advice.

I really love writing on my blog, having no comments, and having no idea how many people read it

— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) September 27, 2024

Me too.

Warren Ellis –

I sat outside for a bit around half past five. Watched sparrows bouncing around one of the holly trees, the one that’s berried in red jewels. Scrappy winds tumbling across the garden looking for a fight. Lilac bellies on the clouds heading east for the night.

Today was that kind of tiredness that feels like being empty. Sometimes there’s nothing left in you to put down on paper, so you have to watch the clouds go home and wait to fill up again.

Katie Woo, writing for The Athletic, has a story on what the St. Louis Cardinals off-season moves might potentially be.

The Cardinals have lost their way, according to people within the organization interviewed by The Athletic, all of whom were granted anonymity in exchange for their candor. All described an outdated player development department, one that has hurt players like Walker. Some lamented the organization’s emphasis on directing more money to the big-league payroll, even if it meant skimping on hiring the coaches, instructors and modern technology that are vital to refining players as they progress through the minors. Those decisions have left the organization to reckon with the harsh reality that they have fallen behind their rivals.

This has been years in the making.

The Cardinals missed the postseason for the second consecutive year and appear ready to revive the infrastructure that once served as a conveyor belt for polished homegrown players. Though they do not plan on tanking, people briefed on the Cardinals’ plans say the organization is preparing to shift its focus on upgrading the minor leagues and the player development department, even if it means going down a path seldom taken in baseball-mad St. Louis: accepting the possibility of not putting the major-league team in position to contend.

President of baseball operations John Mozeliak plans to publicly address the team’s future shortly after the regular season ends, though he and general manager Mike Girsch declined multiple requests for comment for this story. Representatives of the ownership group headed up by chief executive officer Bill DeWitt II did not respond to The Athletic’s interview requests.

It’s a great piece touching on nearly every aspect of the club. However, it doesn’t address the glaring hole of the missing Yadier Molina, who I think still wants to be part of the organization, but it’s unclear what role that might play.

Overall, it’s difficult to see the same people responsible for the collapse are also trusted to make the right changes and turn it around. I’m not so sure.

Nick Heer on the ever-increasing user-hostile demand for your attention from the biggest social platforms.

When I open any of the official clients for the most popular social media platforms — Instagram, Threads, X, or YouTube — I am thrust into an environment where I am no longer encouraged to have a good time on my own terms. From home feeds containing a blend of posts from accounts I follow and those I do not, to all manner of elements encouraging me to explore other stuff — the platform is never satisfied with my engagement. I have not even factored in ads; this is solely about my time commitment. These platforms expect more of it.”

More and more I’m removing myself from these apps.