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

After a conversation this evening, I'm curious as to whether there's correlation between being put off by CGI Cushing vs knowing about it beforehand. I'd not heard of it, and thought it was fine (though in fairness there were a few shots where the verisimilitude flickered I thought "I've enjoyed video games with entirely CGI characters, this is good").

i hadn't heard anything about it and it was v noticeable/off-putting when it cropped up

also a determining facror: were one or both of yr parents killed by cgi

saw a third time tonight....regarding the stolen Imperial ship, I was trying to figure out when they acquired it, cos originally they were in their own Rebel ship that they crashed, they're all told to stay put, and after they disobey K-2SO actually says "where are they going? we're leaving if Cassian comes back before them", suggesting they're going to leave in the now damaged ship. and then at the end of the scene, they're picking Jyn and Cassian up in a stolen Imperial ship.

obv had to have happened off-screen, perhaps w/ Bodhi helping K-2SO find one, just was a lil weird.

Dude are we going to have to send you back a fourth time

The U-wing is toast on Eadu. They steal the Imperial cargo shuttle from Eadu to get to Yavin.

Jesus

lol I know that silly - I meant, K2SO is chilling in the damaged U-Wing waiting for everybody to come back after he gets ditched, the firefight ensues and he's radioing the Rebels, and suddenly 2 minutes later they have an Imperial shuttle.

it was bodhi's shuttle that he traveled on to bring Galen's message I thought? Idk

This was terrific. Not much to add except that so much of the rebel hair and mustaches were right out of the 70s.

You should see how hairy they are under their suits.

I was looking forward to seeing Riz Ahmed in this, but, like so many others in this film, his character was severely underdeveloped and lacking any spark. I was happy enough with the film I got, but Gareth Edwards' original cut - the movie that was promised in the early trailers and marketing, before the drastic amount of reshoots with another director - will always hang over the film for me.

yeah, I hope they release some version of the original cut at some point. So many underdeveloped characters and plot threads in the beginning of this movie, which I assume are the result of the reshoots.

given that disney like to squeeze as much profit from their home video releases as possible, i suspect they'll release a standard dvd/blu-ray first and then a few months down the line a 'collector's edition' with a bunch of deleted scenes and a heavily-sanitised bonus feature about how the film was 'reshaped to better fit the director's vision'

imo they should craft the leftovers into a "Rogue One Holiday Special"

http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/thank-god-rogue-one-made-darth-vader-a-proper-villain-1790293655

Now, scrap that stupid Boba Fett one-off and gimme Young Vader Murders A Lot Of People: A Star Wars Story.

a friend of mine who's old boss heard about the original cut said the studio was upset it was 'too art house' which is weird because why hire edwards to direct in the first place?

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

he analyzes every line in the script and invents an accent to best present that line
so it's a different accent and inflection every line

also idk that godzilla film wasn't really "art house"

i hope that's not some sort of codephrase for "good cinematography and lots of martial arts"

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.

Young Vader Murders A Lot Of People: A Star Wars Story.

Didn't we get this already?

http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130208034628/starwars/images/8/8b/ChildrenSlaughter.png

that picture doesn't look like anything

I am pretty sure it is Young Darth Vader about to murder a bunch of kids.

*stares at picture* I don't understand, what am I supposed to see?

Just now recalling that the prequels called Jedi kids "younglings".

yeah i'm just going to stick to my westworld robot routine here

i'm not programmed to accept the existence of anything other than three star wars movies from the 70s/80s, a couple new ones, and a cartoon

and the Richard Pryor sketch

Lucas clearly killed a few too many of these when writing the prequel scripts:

http://www.yuengling.com/userfiles/image/n_newlook_prem_lgt.jpeg

yousa in deep doodoo

Yeah seriously lol at the idea that Edwards was too arthouse. There are loads of cool shots that didn't end up in the movie (and I particularly mourn the Tie Fighter one) but the idea we would have gotten some sort of deconstruction of the futility of war is laughable. Guy's a hack with an occasional good eye

"too arthouse" = fucking BORING like Monsters was

anyone fetishizing his original cut is pretending not to remember how his other movies were basically fuckin mood studies that happened to have cool monsters in them. reshoots likely made this movie better vs worse imo

The last bad thing about Monsters and Godzilla is that they're "hacky." Both are slow and pretty and like them or hate them the opposite of hacky in the Hollywood sense.

yeah the "real gritty war movie" makes me think people are thinking of the director of the other famously reshot movie this year

Abrams = "hacky" before Edwards any day.

I never got Forest Whittaker. Not in "Bird", "Ghost Dog"... nope. Never got his schtick and why people ate it up. When a CGI Peter Cushing can act circles around you in the same film then you know it's curtains..

Abrams = "hacky" before Edwards any day.

well he's got a head start

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.