Heh. I’ve never actually tasted it. Is it actually good?
I think it just tasted more like Pepsi? But its been a loooong time!
I still love this movie, and nothing anyone can say will change that. Very much looking forward to IX.
Okay… and that has what to do with what?
Oh man, that takes me back. I was living in a frat house in Boston with a Coke machine (bottles, which were retro even then) and the guy came to fill it and gave us some free samples of New Coke. It was way too sweet, and I never had it again. Definitely not the good mixer that the original was (and Pepsi never was). It was pretty fun to watch people hoarding the last of the “good” Coke until they re-released it as Coke Classic. Makes me wonder what a case would have gone for on eBay, if that had been a thing back in '85.
Back on topic, who’s up for some Star Wars Classic? All the flavor you remember.
Well, I did buy the the DVD special edition of the original Star Wars movies that contained “bonus” discs of good ol’ unenhanced Star Wars the way I saw it as a kid. I think those were really just rips of the laserdisc versions, and not very nice looking, but sometimes you take what you can get.
I have those too. When I want to watch a Star Wars movie, that’s the version I watch. #yugyug4ever
“Because I was under the mistaken idea that this trilogy was going to be the farewell song to my heroes, the passing of the torch, I didn’t realize the torch had been dropped and this trilogy was about the new generation picking it up from where the previous one had fumbled it. :D”
The old generation didn’t just drop the torch, they laid the firewood, poured gas on it and then threw the burning torch on it to help create the current crisis. Which is fine if you want to remake the franchise to attract a new audience and don’t mind alienating a fair section of the older audience. But if you are remaking the franchise, why try backstories featuring Han Solo, whose life as we now know is pretty sucky and unhappy and ends up in failure?
Will be interesting to see future of the franchise as my kids aren’t really interested in Star Wars and given my view on the current story line, I have zippo interest in taking them to see any future movies.
His 16,000 words have a particular audience who maybe need that much argumentation. You implied that for anyone to enjoy the movie they would need to read his piece, but that’s not the case with me and a lot of folks. That’s all!
It’s a Film Crit Hulk piece. 2000 words is short for him, and it touches on a whole lot of things. He doesn’t even touch on The Last Jedi until section 4, some 3000 words in.
But if you actually read it instead of going for a snide dismissal you’d know that.
Presumably the thought that I dismissed it precisely because I read it would melt your brain.
For its entire novella length it felt like the author attempting to erect a skyscraper-sized mental scaffolding to justify to himself why he liked this movie. In that respect it somewhat reminded me of the articles that still pop up occasionally arguing that Starship Troopers was actually brilliant satire.
Snipes from a TIE fighter – how apropos!
I assumed you didn’t precisely because of the 16000 words comment, because he doesn’t talk about The Last Jedi for a large portion of the piece. Instead it’s about what we want from entertainment in general and Star Wars in particular, and why he likes it is pefectly in keeping with the ethos Film Crit Hulk’s been expressing for ages. So if it’s scaffolding, it’s not stuff he’s been erecting for this movie.
Because there is literally no point to approach the “bad logic” of a given story choice like you think you are fixing flaws of a film. Instead, you are literally erasing conflict from the movie. The obvious problem there is that the entire damn point of a movie is to create conflict.
The author has no problem with what my old film professor called an “idiot plot” – for your story to advance, your characters must behave like idiots. As an audience member, I hate that and find it alienating (unless of course the movie has established that the character is indeed an idiot). I can’t get on board with the author’s idea that all ‘conflict’ is fungible and should therefore be untroubling to a film audience no matter what form it takes.
It’s not really untrue. I mean almost every movie, especially in sci-fi/fantasy, I can think of key moments where if they did something sensible, the 2+hour movie would drop to maybe 10-20 minutes and be done. Like, you know, every Alien movie. Keep the door closed, one death, done.
Yeah, but that basically illustrates the point. Alien would end early if Ash would obey protocol. That would be the smart play, if you share the same goals, if you know what the movie is about. (If you know you’re in a horror movie.) But that’s not what the movie is about. It’s not what Ash is about. On some level, he knows what he’s doing will bring ruin on the crew. And it doesn’t matter, because his goals are different.
And Fine, Poe and Holdo’s goal are the same, so it might feel like they’re carrying an idiot ball, but It’s about character POV, and whether their choices make sense for them.
Everyone understands why Poe does what he does, because we’ve seen that movie tons of times. But when it comes to why Holdo is not forthcoming about her plan, why she’s not trusting it to some hotshot flyboy who has demonstrated himself to have no judgement it’s some big fucking mystery.
Yeah Holdo doesn’t have the audience’s POV and Poe really screwed up not that long ago with the bombers. She had no reason to tell him or anyone else for that matter, that isn’t at the top of the ladder. Military isn’t in the habit of sharing… everything with everyone even if we sometimes go back and wonder, why didn’t they share that. That happens in history a fair amount of times and we still do it, today.
As with many things in storytelling, the finesse with which you spackle over these things counts for a lot.
i suspect the problem here is that Star Wars movies have never depicted the Rebellion as having anything like a strict military chain of command. It’s always been a very ragtag, “You’re a general, Harry” kind of thing. So while Holdo’s reticence may have come across as perfectly sensible in a realistic war film, in a Star Wars film it’s essentially out of character. That puts the responsibility for bridging the expectation gap on the director, not the audience.