Sometimes you just have to stop watching

Ross Douthat's review of Solo is titled "Meager Competence." It begins:

Sometimes you just have to stop watching. I figured that out after the first Hobbit movie. Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy was a peak moviegoing experience—a childhood classic brought to life more beautifully than anyone could reasonably expect. But after Part One it was clear that the Hobbit movies were going to be bloated and disastrous; why give them the power to retrospectively taint Jackson's prior achievement? I didn't; I just stopped watching, without a trace of regret.

But I haven't ever managed that kind of self-discipline with Star Wars. The George Lucas prequels were terrible, a crime against the originals, but I still watched them all. Then came the Disney expansion, which promised to replace the ambitious dreadfulness of Lucas's prequels with something slick and mediocre. And exactly that has come to pass....

I haven't watched a Star Wars film since the original three and the only one I have re-watched recently was the first. Unlike Douthat I did make the mistake of watching all three Hobbit films. "Sometimes you just have to stop watching."