Star Wars Anthology shit talk (Rogue One, Young Solo, TBD)

Abrams is the very definition of a hack.

so sayeth the internet message board

Edwards might be a hack on day. He hasn't even really reached that level yet

Michael Bay is a hack. Abrams is a number of levels (maybe just 1) above Michael Bay.

"too arthouse" = fucking BORING like Monsters was

I really liked Monsters.

i liked the monsters & it was beautifully shot. but it was boring af

sorry, vg, but you are mad

they also said forest whittaker's performance was hot garbage and the studio was not happy with it

― carthago delenda est (mayor jingleberries), Tuesday, December 20, 2016 3:13 PM (six hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol 'performance' as reciting Joseph Campbell fortune cookies.

about the best you can hope for is sassy jokesmanship a la Ford in STAR WARS or O Isaac in EPIGRAM VII.

― Supercreditor (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, December 20, 2016 3:37 PM (six hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

forest really does create a new strain of bad star wars performance in this though

ARE. YOU. HERE...TO KILL...ME?

I reiterate my theory

oddly there is a preview of his upcoming appearance on the cartoon and the dialogue seems pretty normal

Abrams is the very definition of a hack.

― Josh in Chicago, Tuesday, December 20, 2016 1:22 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm. it's not even a value judgment really. a hack is a guy who makes both a star wars movie and a star trek movie and both times does the most professional job in years. michael bay unfortunately is a kind of auteur.

huh wow this was... something. very very expensive and well-made fanfic is right - it's great to look at and if force awakens hadn't already come out i would probably have just been delighted to be in the star wars universe looking at a well-shot, reasonably well-performed star wars movie, with star wars props and costumes and some new locales and slight extensions of the mythos, with a basically interesting plot about a desperate slim-to-no-hope mission for a ragtag squad. but since TFA does exist, that wonder-glow is diminished and what we have is a pretty fun but very pointless in-universe war movie with some SERIOUS shot-to-shot pacing issues, endless cheap narrative devices to gin up tension when the story's not doing it, a band of barely sketched-out characters whose fates are supposed to mean a lot to us (though they're all likeable and look super cool), at least three or four Mary Sues and a couple of baaaaad speeches. actually the script overall is terrible. there's one line where the former shuttle pilot guy (who i thought was going to be insane because of a brain slug?) is like, tripping over himself trying to explain that they need to connect something to something so they can get a manual signal out from somewhere and it is just a hilariously distracting line.

really though it's just so fuckin' jumpy for the first half! i swear that in the first ten minutes there are four different "meanwhile, on THIS planet..." shots. maybe five. i guess they got embarrassed about that because vader's evil barad-dur lava planet doesn't get one. for a long time nothing feels like it builds up, scenes have no sense of timing or rhythm, lines aren't allowed to breathe. some things work, to be clear, but other things don't. vader's first scene is wayyyy less tense than it should be and i think this is why. (also yeah jones's voice, but the dude is 85 so i'm cool with him still doing star wars movies.)

re: the missing material: forest whitaker's character in particular seems to have been gutted by this, though felicity jones isn't much better served. whitaker gets so built up and then has virtually no interactions with the main cast. it's a cool idea for a character though. i wonder what the heck an "extremist" in this rebellion looks like. does he stage terrorist attacks on imperial civilian populations or what? our heroes end up being a bunch of freedom-fighter saboteurs and assassins, right? is it just that he is willing to use the terrible octobrain in his interrogations? a step too far for mon mothma.

i slapped my forehead and rolled my eyes at many things, especially the callback-y bits (leia and pig-nose guy were REALLY not necessary - classic case of something that's not there to serve anything that this movie is trying to do, i suspect disney is really pushing for this stuff because it leverages brand equity or optimizes universe loyalty or something). jimmy smits showing up just made me laugh though.

CGI peter cushing was semi-okay in some shots but when he first showed up it was distractingly awful. getting close to polar express/spirits within level. whyyyy. like if there's ONE series that should have learned its lesson about the limitations of digitally created characters...

i did like the overall vibe in the last act though, it's your old star wars crosscutting climaxes thing but they're all tied together around one mission. i was also reminded very much of one of my favorite 90s superhero comics, the age of apocalypse version of generation x, which admittedly went a little doomier with the same kind of material but still. dirty dozen is probably the source though, yeah.

overall it's fine but kinda disappointing because it gets so close to being really great.

to put it more briefly, it's like what if the prequels had been well-cast and not all flat CG and featured enjoyable performances that were shot in a non-boring way with gripping action sequences... but were still basically pointless noodling around within the star wars playset, with no particular reason to exist. i dunno that makes it sound worse than it was.

really though it's just so fuckin' jumpy for the first half! i swear that in the first ten minutes there are four different "meanwhile, on THIS planet..." shots

This bothered me.

I thought this was closer to the ephemeral nature of Lucas' beloved Saturday afternoon zombie flicks or whatever: take a buncha boring archetypes played by second tier actors (except Diego Luna, who looks delicious) and cast them in a decent fan flick. I don't often flip for special effects, but the CGI stuff was some of the most thrilling (the Star Destroyers colliding) and beautiful (the Death Star coming out of hyperspace and seen peeking out of clouds) I've ever seen.

Vader's appearance in the final five minutes was surprisingly violent and quite satisfying -- dramatic and otherwise.

The weird ethnic casting bothered me a bit, i.e. "Let's cast actors who look like the citizens of countries from which we want to extract mega profits!"

Forest Whitaker is as terrible as Natalie Portman

http://jalopnik.com/lets-geek-out-over-all-the-fascinating-technology-used-1790293003

Surprised nobody gets the no-network design principle that explains most of the silliness

Instead of putting a password on the file they just rack the tape up in a hard-to-get-to room that you can fall a long way down in

Oh also, could NONE of the grizzled old saboteurs have been women? Or any of the main cast besides Jyn? The X-wing pilot was great to see but otherwise the gender balance in this movie is reeeeeally bad.

It's a good thing the Empire had land lines!

Reach out and DEATH someone

All the women we see that aren't combat pilots are bosses though

I didn't notice if many of the other people in Saw's cabal were human

The brain squid was probably a lady

finally, a breakthrough for the representation of lady brain squids in cinema

TOMBOT'S original post:

Felicity Jones
Mads Mikkelsen
Ben Mendelsohn
Alan Tudyk
Donnie Yen
Forest Whitaker
Diego Luna

these already look like Star Wars character names.

takes one to know one

General Soto to you, deck officer

The Irishman, Robert De Niro’s highly anticipated reunion with Martin Scorsese, will be receiving an added dash of nostalgia, according to producer Gaston Pavlovich. In an interview with Cinema Blend’s Gregory Wakeman, Pavlovich confirmed that Scorsese’s in-development project will employ the CGI technology recently used to recreate the late Peter Cushing's character Grand Moff Tarkin in Rogue One, in order to de-age De Niro for certain segments of the movie. The goal is to have him look as he did back in his “The Godfather 2 days.”

"You don’t use prosthetics, make-up, they have acting and the technology is able to have them go through different time ages without the prosthetics,” Pavlovich told Wakeman. “We were able to film Bob and just do a scene, and we saw it come down to when he was like 20, 40, 60, so we’re looking forward to that, from that point of view, for The Irishman.”

The movie, which also has Al Pacino (and, maybe, Joe Pesci) attached to star, is a crime drama centered on Frank Sheeran, the man who—on his deathbed—claimed to have murdered Jimmy Hoffa. The film is based on the Charles Brandt novel I Heard You Paint Houses, and—not unlike many other Scorsese projects—has been in the works for a while, with Deadline first reporting the casting of Pesci and Pacino way back in 2010. And it should be noted that it’s likely we’ll see those two actors made to look younger as well: A year ago, DeNiro revealed the technology was being tried out on “the other actors, too.”

http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2016/12/21/rogue-one-film-crit-hulk-the-slippery-sloping-story-of-rogue-one

How can I really care about a master switch that was introduced just two seconds prior? It's like trying to learn chemistry on the fly as you take the test. Again, none of it is "offensive" to a casual viewer; it's just so much less effective than it could be. If it had even an ounce of deeper dramatic understanding, the whole sequence could have been amazing. And in the end, this lack of clarity and stakes horrifically betrays the emotion/characterization of all the characters' sacrificing moments. To be clear, I liked the stylization of a lot of them, and even some of the mantras behind them, but because of the larger objective sequencing I can't help but feel like every single one of their sacrifices should have meant more, especially in terms of the dramatic integration of the actual heist...

Grand Moff De Niro

when did Film Crit Hulk drop the schtick?

After Election Day.

Really.

trump smash hulk

so was "this is a 'stand-alone' Star Wars movie" a cover story or a hilarious joke?

is someone talking

I feel bad for people who went to this movie expecting some kind of female-led space opera Ocean's Dirty Dozen - oh wait I mean hang on what did people think they were going to?

The weird ethnic casting bothered me a bit, i.e. "Let's cast actors who look like the citizens of countries from which we want to extract mega profits!"

harrumph, much better when this exact practice took the form of all white dudes all the time

ARE. YOU. HERE...TO KILL...ME?

the worst Forest perf i have seen is, of course, his Oscar-winning turn as Idi Amin

i wonder what the heck an "extremist" in this rebellion looks like. does he stage terrorist attacks on imperial civilian populations or what? our heroes end up being a bunch of freedom-fighter saboteurs and assassins, right? is it just that he is willing to use the terrible octobrain in his interrogations?

IIRC, Saw has been openly assaulting the Empire's military operations for years at this point - there's a line about his outfit hitting the Kyber crystal shipments, which is apparently way too overt for the rebellion at this particular stage. That's why the debate later revolves around "talk to the Senate (more)" vs "begin blowing shit up immediately"

overall it's fine but kinda disappointing because it gets so close to being really great.

sarcasm aside I do genuinely feel bad when people go to a movie and come away with this feeling. I was glad to have a couple of "meh" reviews under my belt to temper my excitement going in, I think it actually helped me have a lot more fun. I even liked the joke when they put the hood on the blind guy.

i haven't read many of the takes on this but i thought this was vv good. some very minor issues, but i loved its look and its variety of different worlds and settings. i didn't mind the callbacks or the CGI Cushing and Fisher. liked the nods to Red Leader and Gold Leader (but where are thou, porkins??), loved the FX, the use of crippled star destroyers to open the shield was some sweet space action, really enjoyed the cast overall. Whitaker was his usual oddball self but for a paranoid fringe lunatic character i thought it worked.

i guess the final (admittedly fantastic) space battle seemed to be a cover version of the final battle in Return of the Jedi. Multiple nods to it, which i noticed. it didn't diminish things for me. i always like seeing fish admirals fucking up the imperial fleet.

also, i suspect based on my memory of the conversation between Leia and Vader at the beginning of Ep IV that the events at the end of this film involving her don't quite line up logically w/her denials and Vader's line of questioning. I could be wrong. I had always imagined that there was a lot more subterfuge and secrecy as opposed to a huge Imperial-base destroying fight immediately preceding things. it's not a huge deal for me, it doesn't remove some of the mystery and enjoyment the way the events of eps 1-3 did.

You were on a diplomatic mission? Dude, you were blowing shit up around our tropical planet base just 5 minutes ago!

I explained that incongruency away in my head as the rebels basically rehashing their usual traffic stop talking points because they don't have anything better

"You just fled the scene of the first major Rebel-on-Empire space battle, and you stole the Death Star plans, and I saw you do it"
"I don't know what you're talking about officer this is a diplomatic vessel, we're all diplomats here"
"Also you just shot a bunch of my men when we came on board"
"Diplomatic cargo sir, diplomacy stuff, nobody here but us diplomats"

i can't believe how eye-rolley people are about cg leia. my favorite five seconds of the movie.

I disagree with their premise. I thought this one succeeded specifically *because* of all the connections to A New Hope. Whereas The Force Awakens felt redundant, because it *was* A New Hope.

yeah ... this does not bode well for non-prequels, imo. nor does the fact that my second-favorite scene was hallway vader. and i say this as someone who cringed often during TFA fan service.

not sure what rian has up his sleeve but it better be good, adam driver can't provide the new direction the series needs all on his own.

one complaint - the way things went down it wasn't clear that riz's sacrifice meant anything. maybe it didn't? you can't tell me him plugging that cable into the little cargo ship had shit to do with the giant satellite dish uploading the plans to dropbox.

Isn't that the action that allows them to talk to the fleet and say "open the shield now"?

Not that "open the shield" could be that far down the list of tactical goals.

was Saw even necessary to the plot? That section introduced the gang but not much else. Could have cut the film by 20 minutes.

one complaint - the way things went down it wasn't clear that riz's sacrifice meant anything. maybe it didn't? you can't tell me him plugging that cable into the little cargo ship had shit to do with the giant satellite dish uploading the plans to dropbox.

I thought the fate of his character was the first gotcha. He's back on the ship, transmission sent, home free, right? Then the shore trooper chucks one right into the open door.

Some weird tactical stuff going on in that beachhead cover shooter sequence. You pretty much just had dudes with rifles only blasting away at each other, right? Are grenades only allocated to whoever's playing the grenadier class on the imperial/rebel side? What's a standard trooper loadout?

That's one of the interesting bits I dig about having Wen Jiang there, as we haven't had an armored heavy weapons guy yet, correct? Chewbacca pretty much just had a semi-automatic bowcaster.

Wish they woulda spent 5 minute or something more just on characterization, as I don't even remember their names, much less identifying traits.

I remember all of them

*touches the face of rogue one memorial, drags finger across Blue Leader, Red Five, Chirrut Imwe, Baez Malbus, Bodhi Rook...*

Body Rock.

They had to go to Saw to get the video message, right? What is not clear, and I suppose there's a whole bunch of stuff that is not clear, is what Saw was planning to do with the information. Maybe he was just extremely ... lazy.

They went to Saw for help getting contact with her father. The message arriving there was just lucky timing, I think.