star wars 9 grim resignation thread

I recently re-watched TLJ for the first time since it came out, and genuinely laughed at the scene where Poe pretends to have connection issues in his video chat w/Hux ("...General Hugs?"). Say what you will, that s#$% is funny

I haven't seen Caravan of Courage since elementary school and I remember that thing better than The Last Jedi tbrr.

Cool i get to explain to my colleagues why I'm reading about fingering droids on company time good work all

they're fingering recorders!

boy are they ever

hanblaster.gif (NSFW)

way to waste your time and money nerds

BTW: any aspect of the BBC that even knows that there were novels and comics in the '90s (or are novels and audios and comics* now), probably knows that there are a few hundred ppl who read the '90s novels at the time, and are still watching the show. The 7 million ppl who watch a new TV episode on BBC platforms in the week of transmission and never think much about it again can safely be regarded as "the other 100% of the audience."

Rian Johnson healthily seems to take this attitude even to rabid Star Wars fans, insisting that the hundreds of misspelled Last Jedi abuse replies on every tweet he makes about baseball games are a tiny proportion of the actual feedback he gets overall.


* extry extry for OL: the regular DW comic has been running unbroken since November 1964, with two caveats: a five-month break in 1978-79 (about 1/3 of the current gap between TV seasons) while it moved from TV Comic to Doctor Who Weekly; and sometimes in the Fourth Doctor era they would just draw Tom Baker's face over a Jon Pertwee face on older stories.

http://alteredvistas.co.uk/assets/images/Third181.gif http://alteredvistas.co.uk/assets/images/Fourth210.jpg

(The first and second Doctors, rather than being spacemen with companions from 18th century Scotland and 25th century orbital research facilities, were Earth inventors who travelled with their two prepubescent 1950s-born English grandchildren. CANON!)

I hate the sequels, and would really like to say the prequels are better. And they are more... 'interesting'. But I've tried to rewatch them, and they are unwatchable crap.

*ponders firing up the pvmic thread*

xxpost Yeah, I know Who is much less precious about this stuff, what with all the 'timey-wimey (middle finger drifts in from the bottom of the frame)' and whatnot.

And I'm not really under any pretense that most of the people stewarding these franchises care about fan reaction that doesn't come in the form of $$$.

(I mean, the BBC ppl stewarding it aren't, bcz they don't get any of the $$$)

Attack of the Clones is up there with Woody Allen's 'Whatever Works' for me in the extremely small club of films that I'll always remember as "non-student films that were so badly made i couldnt believe i was actually seeing them in a real movie theater".

haha "Whatever Works" is so shockingly bad

Before I leave bg to c+p, the best illustration of Dr Who's attention to canon is that they destroyed Atlantis three different ways in five years. And two of them were in season finales, in successive years, written by the same two-person team. One of whom was the producer in charge of the show. But anonymously, bcz BBC policy didn't allow you to write for the show as well as working on it.

sic otm above

I think it's fair to say that the sequels and the prequels are both disappointing, but the prequels are just disappointing in a much more fascinating way. And I don't even hate the sequels, they're just...OK. TLJ has flashes of brilliance.

if this was 1985 we could be complaining about how ESB was too much of a thematic departure and ROTJ sucked

No

people did that!

I would rank AOTC above ROTJ (that's my "challop," I guess?)

due to when I came of age, my subjective stance is entirely tainted by having seen the original trilogy on VHS overly too many times. we'd have it running on a tv while playing board games until the wee hours of the morning when I was in high school at a friend's place

completely ruined my ability to judge anything star wars-related through any lens other than that of inflated cultural importance and locked the aesthetic into a particular set of characters and stylistic choices

my stylist had Star Wars playing (on VHS) during my last haircut, I wasn't there very long but I was taking note that the whole middle part of the movie, between the somewhat emotional beginning and the action-packed end, is just a lot of hijinks and one-liners.

TLJ has flashes of brilliance.

In my TLJ rewatch, I noted how some of the movie is truly bad -- just bad dialogue, clumsy plotting, etc. -- but it also has these scattered moments of creativity and excitement where you get a jolt: This really works.

I guess that's how I responded in the theater, too... I remember being kind of bored for the initial stretch; but then when Leia did her Mary Poppins thing, I sat straight up -- like, "Oh, this is gonna be that kind of movie...."

lol Fred that is *literally exactly what happened*

http://www.acriticalhit.com/fans-react-empire-strikes-back-1980/

make sure you click through and read the piece David Gerrold wrote for STARLOG. Its criticism after criticism.

My hot take is that I watched the original again a few years back with my kid and my reaction was, it's nicely nostalgic to see this stuff again but this movie kind of sucks, and I'll bet if I ever watched Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi again, I'd feel the same way, which is why I won't.

Very similar to when I last saw the original trilogy with my kids, their one and only time (they're just not that into Star Wars). I thought, yeah that was okay, but I'm out.

If Leia had only worn her Force Awakens costume no-one would've made the Mary Poppins connection.

Having been raised on the cultural afterbirth of two preceding films that I was barely old enough to remember as films, the release of ROTJ was an epochal depth charge at the most perfect point in my youth. A handful of years out, though, after the trilogy had become more accessible via cable and home video, I was able to recognize it as fairly flimsy in comparison to what came before but still an undeniable feast for the senses. It makes for a great reel of visual and sound design, and also there's some people talking and doing things.

The Luke/Vader/Emperor scenes are great, I'll give it that.

tbh i think for me (38yo) the lasting impression of the original sw movies wasn't the memory of how *good* they were, it's the world they opened up for daydreaming and make-believe and such.

I do think the first two are truly good movies, fwiw

gbx otm

for kids of a certain age all the toys, comics, trading cards, merchandizing ephemera, etc. made the first two films just feel like a window onto a much larger universe that you had been invited to wander around in with your imagination. It didn't have much to do with the actual quality of the films.

needless to say any joy/interest in this "universe" was subsequently crushed/sucked out of me via over-exposure long ago. My son wanted to watch Empire over the Thanksgiving holiday, I didn't even bother to watch it with him, I went off to do something else.

I watched the de-specialized versions of the first trilogy a few christmases back, and they are most of the time legitimately beautiful.

There will always be idiots who criticize something, some people think Hong Sang-soo isn't the filmmaker of the decade. So sure, there were some people who thought Empire Strikes Back sucked back then, and it might seem the same as thinking The Last Jedi sucks now. But no. Right now, wrong then.

a lot of those 1980 comments are pretty funny, especially david gerrold's objection to "fast-paced cross-cutting" between characters in different places:

Crosscutting also implies simultaneity — a concept which most modern physicists say is impossible, especially on an astronomical scale. Sorry.

Last Jedi and Empire Strikes Back are the only two better-than-okay Star Wars films

applying star trek nitpicker "THAT COULDN'T REALLY HAPPEN" logic to star wars is a recipe for endless comedy

just reverse the polarity etc

the ships in star wars are actually boats

like the spaceships are boats and the planets are islands, that's all that's going on

god I need to do some work but I may have used up all my rope today

the only two better-than-okay Star Wars films

creature design and models and sound design in the first three are all fantastic obv

Honestly I find some of the production photography more evocative than what showed up on film. Like some of the photographs they used on the action figure cards? Them shits is badass.

I used to be mildly obsessed with the Ree-Yees card photo. Dude freaked my shit out a little.

just a guy with three penis eyes coming out of his forehead

James Carville?

I had a C3P0 toy as a kid before I ever saw any of the movies -- I think it was some deal where you mailed in cereal box tops and got the toy. It had removable arms and legs and a plastic netting to mimic the way Chewbacca carries him around when he's blasted apart in ESB

I was only vaguely aware of Star Wars but it was so cool. What's up with this robot guy? Why would someone be carrying him around, and what happened?