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

I'm entirely in favour of detailed complaint videos. This is what the internet is for.

Why are STAR WARS films set off by themselves in this way though? It seems like a weird boundary to draw around something. Why not compare them to other action-adventure movies generally? One thing RLM did that I liked was bringing in things like Star Trek (2009) or the sword fight in Die Another Day to say, look, there are more interesting and exciting ways of shooting things like crises in space or lightsaber duels. I feel like when people go to see things like Fast and the Furious they are comfortable saying they liked the action better in Mission Impossible (or whatever).

Plus until last year all the STAR WARS films since Jedi were terrible, something acknowledged by a great number of STAR WARS fans, so insisting that they be accepted as a standard seems like a really really low bar, idk.

yeah that's a ridiculous argument. I won't be watching the video, but it's perfectly reasonable to judge Rogue One by standards other than its quality relative to other Star Wars movies. Might as well just give up and go home otherwise. Although...

I think I was saying, she seems to be coming on as a big STAR WARS fan, but she doesn't like the best recent SW film, so maybe she should rethink her starting point.

Maybe I have misunderstood and she doesn't actually like SW much, and the droid in the background etc is just a one-off joke for this video.

I think it's OK for people who don't like SW to criticize SW, and compare it unfavourably to other films, if they want.

Is she RLM? I don't know her name, haven't seen her before.

maybe she likes star wars in a different way than you like star wars

Maybe she likes Force Awakens more. I like Force Awakens more.

I think I was saying, she seems to be coming on as a big STAR WARS fan, but she doesn't like the best recent SW film, so maybe she should rethink her starting point.

like the pop-culture-opinions-as-objective-truth thing here is metacritic user comments level

PF: "RLM" is Red Letter Media, some podcast / youtube guys who watch these movies a lot and then rant about them, as one does

...spliced in with weird torture skits

Woody Harrelson (!) joins cast of Young Han Solo film.

http://www.starwars.com/news/woody-harrelson-signs-on-for-young-han-solo-film

I don't think I want to see his face popping up in Star Wars.

Eh, they'll give him some pointed ears and a unibrow or whatever they do to those Star War characters and you won't even know it's him.

I hope he plays the exact same character he played in The Hunger Games. Not the same type; I want Haymitch Abernathy to show up.

xxp: I'm sure he'll do a great job acting, and I'm sure they'll do a great job with him. It's just that his face really leaps out at me as "oh hey, that's Woody Harrelson from the zillion other things I've seen him in" moreso than many other actors.

Yeah I was going to say "maybe they'll mo-cap him".

he'll play a wise-cracking stoner robot.

I must admit I had the exact same thought as DJP

He'll be an out of work dealer who used to sell weed to young students at the Jedi Temple. "Yeah it was a sweet ride but the Empire shut the place down, man."

Dogged detective (also half dog)

I think Woody Harrelson should put a rider into all of his contracts that mandates whatever project he works on has to do rewrites in order to include the reveal that his character has secretly been Haymitch this whole time.

imo Haymitch, before he became a Hunger Games participant, was a folksy bartender but the games... changed him

I see you see where I was eventually going with all of this

i wonder if they made frazier today, they'd CG cap kelsey grammar to be his own brother instead of hiring david hyde pierce.
would be nice to see uncanny valley coach.

Not happy about Woody news. Think this might be where I get off the ship. Then again I had the same reaction about Forest Whitaker.

and he turned out to be great!

if woody is anything other than a grizzled mentor-type smuggler to young han solo who dies at the end of the first act, his ship incinerated by Boba Fett in a bounty beef, i'd be shocked.

"Naw, Greedo. Ah am your father."

Confirmed: Woody playing Jabba the Hutt.

No CGI or anything. Just Harrelson in tighty whities chilling on a dais and eating frogs.

that's so woody

(the frogs are animated in post-production due to his veganism)

they could just make them out of seitan

that's what they did in zombieland iirc for the twinkies

Woody's a solid actor, he'll be fine

No, I think he's mostly liquid like the rest of us.

It could be a fun movie, but I'm not sure a conventional moral arc will work. Han learns to overcome self-interest in A New Hope. That's already basically an origin story. This movie is going to have end with him not being a hero.

no they will cover that plot hole in the next movie, Young Han Solo: The Death Star

woody's going to be the grizzled space-gambler from whom han wins the millennium falcon

i'd be down with woody as space-haymitch but i'd rather he reprised his role from kingpin as a space-bowler

The three Brian Daley Han Solo paperbacks from the late seventies could serve as a basic model -- Han getting into scrapes etc. but with a moral code that surfaces as it does.

I'm hardly the first to observe it but the entire idea of doing a Young Han Solo movie is moronic for exactly the reason jmm points out - Han's story is that he's a rogue who becomes a hero. We already saw that and there's really nothing to see before that story starts. The only reason to make a prequel is as a cash-grab serving fannish "BUT I WANNA KNOW WHAT HAPPENED BEFORE" impulses. The only way to write it, I expect, will be to gin up some wheels-spinning crap that doesn't matter at all. Most likely they reveal that Han was once an idealistic guy who in the course of the movie fights for good, but at the climax when he beats the bad guys he also loses in some way (ten bucks says his love interest is killed, or maybe the family farm he was saving up for gets burned down in retaliation with cheap echoes of the Lars farm in the original film) and he buries his heart and soul and so on. Heavy borrowings from Casino Royale, plus some space chase hijincks with college buddy Lando in his souped-up spaceship (Lando: "I'm thinking of calling it 'The Falcon'" Han: "Shyeah, that'd be a cool name... IN THE LAST MILLENNIUM"), and a pointless cameo from, idk, IG-88 and you've got yourself an $800 million box office. Hooray.

Like I'm potentially open to spinoff movies in what once seemed like this vast and exciting universe with new stories to be told around every corner, but if all they can come up with is "more prequels, but this time they won't look like shit and the scripts/acting will be baseline competent" it's a pretty sad indictment of the entire enterprise.

yeah, I'd certainly prefer it if they chose to explore this vast and exciting universe with new characters in new situations - rogue one was a half-step in the right direction, although still ultimately married to the original trilogy, but a solo-Solo movie is like two steps back again

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C1y9DvrXgAATEA9.jpg:large

OK, which one of you started asking the Star Wars canon guru my questions?
https://twitter.com/pablohidalgo/status/818884677125607426

although i'd be lying if i said i wasn't excited about the forthcoming droids trilogy starring r2d2 and c3po

sorry, first link was supposed to be a link to the image in this tweet
https://twitter.com/pablohidalgo/status/818737112459530240

(Han Solo film spoilers!!)

fwiw I think I owned this magazine

pablo hidalgo dodges the vader-dick question, further fuelling fan speculation that Rey will be revealed to be cloned from vader's severed dick during ep viii

I kind of want to invite the woman postulating about "Ani's nut juice" on twitter to ilx

i did enjoy this from the replies:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C11HV1_VIAAH6dy.jpg

The Woody mentor character will die as a direct consequence of not having shot first.