The Film Thread: Page 386 - The Arsenal discussion forum and community: One More in the Tolly

The Film Thread

flobaba

Quincy Abeyie wrote:
flobaba wrote:
Who is we?

Fans in general, obviously.

Which I think is the problem.

I read my first Star Wars novel when I was 12. There are solid, colorful back stories to almost all Star Wars characters. For Han Solo, I think the Han Solo trilogy (Paradise Snare, Hutt Gambit, Rebel Dawn), and the Corellian trilogy were fantastic novels which could have been adapted or somehow incorporated into the Solo movie instead of trying to appease “Fans in general” by linking to things and characters and ideas they are already accustomed to.

Solo failed or is failing because they sold out.

Edit: Also, Lando Calrissian is indicative to me of a push towards more cultural inclusivity and diversity in the Star Wars universe. Apart from Mace Windu (L Jackson), that’s the only other person of color about whom they already have a rich back story available. It makes perfect sense in my opinion, but these are projects that have to be carefully considered and developed in order to achieve box office success

QuincyAbeyie

I don't know. I haven't read any, but I think fans would enjoy something less connected to the classic trilogy. They have this gigantic universe with plenty of lore and they insist on making everything about 5-6 people. It seems like people are much less interested in Star Wars than just a few years ago, and personally I'm looking more forward to Johnson's unrelated trilogy than episode IX.

Gazza M

Qwiss! wrote:
Klaus wrote:
Rogue One was brilliant, but on the whole Disney have done as much damage to Star Wars as Lucas did with his ridiculous prequels.

Thats quite the hot take. 😆

I don't disagree actually. SW is just another franchise being crapped out by Disney as often as possible. The prequels, though of questionable quality, were at the very least 1 persons vision, and had the benefit of 3 years worth of airspace between each one to build some sense of anticipation

I don't really want to see any more after episode 9. After this run of films, it's hit home that there isn't much depth to star wars outside some variation on rebels vs empire, jedi vs sith, or prequels about characters we already know. At least, not enough depth that Disney is willing/brave enough to explore

goon

That’s where they got it so wrong with the new trilogy. It’s almost like a remake of the originals. I mean it even had the fucking Death Star in it again.

Problem for them is if they moved too far away from the originals folks would have moaned it’s not SW, but it could have given it a much broader scope.

Gazza M

It might not even be entirely Disney's fault. The original SW was a product of its time, and it's so shallow that its hard to give it a fresh spin in 2018 without it feeling like it somehow betrays the originals. A number of people criticised TLJ for those reasons, which felt like it tried to be different but many of the choices weren't executed well enough to convince viewers on a riskier take on the material. Episode 9 is guaranteed to be another safe effort by abrams, and i wouldn't be surprised if it contradicted alot of what rian johnson did in episode 8

Burnwinter

They do struggle with the fact that the genre Star Wars draws on the most, 30s "planetary romance", was always made up of eclectic, tossed off stories that didn't hang together properly. That's why A New Hope has that fresh first album feeling to it, but the elements it introduces are a challenge to build on.

JJ Abrams being involved in the new ones was always a bit of a bad sign. He's a very competent man with zero fidelity to art or any transcendent vision.

If I were Disney I'd be pinning millions on the writing for Rian Johnson's trilogy—the Star Wars universe needs a lot of quality world-building in a hurry, and so much of the "gimmick planet" / "gimmick character" (Canto Bight, Camino, Maz Kanata, Boba Fett, Count Dooku) inserts in both the prequels and the more recent stuff has been woeful. The settings are wafer thin, and the characters are abominable.

A quest storyline could work if the casting were up to the mark of Boyega, Ridley, Isaac, Driver etc. Give it a bit of scaffolding.

But I do think Star Wars IX is likely to have a quality plot and finale.

Klaus

My take on it is this: To me Star Wars was always movies about movies. They were collages of iconic movie history. Lucas was the proto-Tarantino the way he borrowed indiscriminately from everything he liked, high or low. Star Wars was a mashup of Akira Kurosawa's samurai flicks, Flash Gordon's light gun, cover artwork and stories from golden age scifi magazines like Worlds Of Tomorrow, gunslinging westerns, Casablanca, and so forth.

This fact didn't weaken the old trilogy; it made it captivating. Lucas was obsessed with movies to the point where Alec Guinness remarked that he thought he slept wrapped in the actual physical material. He was never a great storyteller or an amazing world builder - by all accounts Marcia Lucas wasn't just an editing genius; she also made A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back work on script level by rewriting large parts of both movies (and her absence is probably one of the main reasons that everything beyond suffered a significant dropoff in quality). But he was the founding father of modern pop culture in the sense that he made his art from borrowed media artifacts and in the process turned those into art themselves. You had Warhol and his soup in the sixties. In the seventies Star Wars arrived.

They could have gone either way in the Disney era. They could have turned the new films into similar patchworks of pop culture, or they could have expanded on the mythology and hired some exciting modern visionaries to find new stories within the galaxy far away. Instead they hired JJ Abrams: a creative fraud who perfectly embodies this era of bloated Marvel and DC films that are completely devoid of style and aesthethic values. And as a consequence the new films are about nothing but their own inheritance.

Abrams is similar to Lucas in the sense that he's inspired by other pop culture phenomenon and movies; he's the exact opposite in the sense that he isn't talented enough to take the pieces and make something of his own. You saw it with his Star Trek films too: he straight up copied what came before so he could profit from the already iconic TOS characters, and invented a complicated explanation about timeline splitting and a parallel universe to justify his not-a-remake remake. He deals in copies and skewed reflections: it's sort of the original thing that people liked, but a little less. And when the nostalgia settles down a bit it's starting to feel hollow and pointless.

Burnwinter

I don't think there's much there to disagree with in that Klaus.

I'm not seeing a methodological or conceptual resemblance between Lucas and Warhol, though.

Tarantino is a great shout.

I've actually just seen Solo, and enjoyed it having had low expectations. The space western aspect worked for me, and some of the fanservice was pretty hilarious.

Captain

Abrams made the single best Star Wars and Star Trek movies though.

Also the best Mission Impossible...

banduan

I quite liked TLJ. Far more than the awful TFA.
And I did like the Star Trek reboot.

I disagree that all the DC movies (assuming we're going past Nolan) were missing their own aesthetic. At the very least MoS and BvS had the Snyder aesthetic. That they dropped it because they didn't actually understand what was wrong with those movies is perhaps ceding to broader appeal. A poor decision on their part.

I believe what perfectly embodies Marvel movies is the fact that they have not hired JJ Abrams. As formulaic as they are, they refused to be thrown into that pot. As safe as they are, keeping their ambition to scope and scale rather than art, they still attempted to push the constricting boundaries that they created for themselves .

If you want to find the perfect embodiment of the mindless soulless trash you're talking about there's no better to look at than Transformers.

goon

Deadpool 2 was pretty good. Pretty much followed the same formula as the first for the most part. Had to walk out after the main credits began to get to my kids sports day on time, did I miss much?

Daz

Went and saw Hereditary with my partner last night after hearing some good reviews. Was really disappointing overall. First half was slow and not very suspenseful and the second half just seemed like a grab bag of horror/occult silliness with little clear direction or rationale.

Sicario

Sicario 2 coming out.

MistaT

Sicario wrote:
Sicario 2 coming out.

Looks a little too theatrical, hard to build on the first one which had nice balance

Gazza M

Sicario wrote:
Sicario 2 coming out.

you changing your name as well?

QuincyAbeyie

I didn't like the new Jurassic World very much. Everything that happened did so due to some idiotic decision, and the comic relief character wasn't funny at all. It did have good tension at times though.

arsedocmd

These Dino movies are getting lesser thought out and crazier each time.

QuincyAbeyie

Didn't enjoy Isle of Dogs as much as Fantastic Mr. Fox. It was way more weird and Wes Anderson-esque though, so big fans of him will probably like it a lot. Not to say I didn't, it's just that I loved Fantastic Mr. Fox. This was still well worth the watch.

Also didn't get that Isle of Dogs was a pun until someone asked what I was watching, and when I replied they said "I love dogs?".

banduan

I didn't get that either until someone told me. Cus I pronounced it Ahlef Dogs which sounds neither here or there.

Burnwinter

From what I hear the correct pronunciation of "Isle of Dogs" is "yet another pile of quirky saccharine Wes Andersonisms, this time with added reasonable questions about cultural appropriation"

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