Star Wars Celebration

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Dalty
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Star Wars Celebration

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My mate, who is an even bigger SW geek than me, is there. He is sharing stuff.

OMG - how freakin' good does Rogue One look?!?????
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Re: Star Wars Celebration

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Re: Star Wars Celebration

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Re: Star Wars Celebration

Post by Mal Shot First »

I really hope that the next Star Wars movie doesn't actually feature yet another death star that needs to be destroyed.
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Re: Star Wars Celebration

Post by The Swollen Goiter of God »

VIII won't. All bets are off for IX, though.
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Re: Star Wars Celebration

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I want to see Super Star Destroyers return.
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Re: Star Wars Celebration

Post by Mal Shot First »

Do you really want to keep watching the same movie over and over again?

Don't get me wrong - I really enjoyed The Force Awakens, but they got a lot of mileage out of mirroring the plot of A New Hope. I was okay with it since it was Disney's way of reconnecting younger audiences with the OT and establishing their own legitimacy in continuing the canon. However, I was actually hoping that they'll introduce some different plot lines in future installments of the series.
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Re: Star Wars Celebration

Post by The Swollen Goiter of God »

Rian Johnson wrote and directed this one, so my guess is that he'll take things as far afield as Disney will let him. I also think (maybe I should say "hope") Disney and Lucasfilm did things the way they did them, in a way, so they could give themselves a little breathing room in terms of approach. Disney has shown with their more recent Marvel movies that they're willing to play with their franchise formulas a bit and let things grow, and I think they know TFA's only the kind of thing they'll be able to get away with once.

Here's a list of the movies Johnson encouraged his cast and crew to watch before setting out to make VIII:

http://www.ign.com/articles/2016/07/17/ ... -episode-8

I chose not to read any of the article, but it's an interesting list of films to encourage people to see. (My decision not to had more to do with encountering accidental spoilers, but when writers for sites like IGN, io9, ScreenRant, and SlashFilm get speculative, it's usually pretty embarrassing.) If anything, it shows that Johnson has put some thought into what he's doing and where he wants to take things.

I already know Johnson's a pretty big filmhead. It's obvious when watching his stuff (his understanding of the specifics of noir, for example, is pretty keen; see Brick for evidence of this), but it's also obvious from having read interviews with him and from having read lists of his favorite movies. Here's a list of his favorite Criterion releases, with a line or two from him about his selections:

https://www.criterion.com/explore/37-ri ... n-s-top-10

Here's the list of favorites he gave Rotten Tomatoes:

https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/ar ... n-johnson/

He and I like a lot of the same things, looks like. I think he goes less for humor than I do. If I'm worried about anything, it's that he'll go a touch too serious for my tastes. It can work--Empire Strikes Back still works for me, and it's mostly a downer--but he'll have to make it work in a way that feels true to the characters as they've been established. He has used humor to good effect in the movies of his I've seen, but the humor's often dark, or it's sandwiched by darker scenes.

The only feature-length Rian Johnson movie I haven't seen, oddly enough, is The Brothers Bloom. (He's only made three features, so it's not like I've had to work really hard to keep up with his output.) That's a comedy, I think. I should watch it to see how he handles outright comedy.

He's a seventies kid with a deep interest in film. I'm pulling for him. I feel like Disney and Lucasfilm will give him enough space, as long as he's doing something they believe feels Star Wars-y enough, to do his own thing. By this I mean that they will probably only rein him in if what he's making looks like pretentious horseshit without any feeling to it.

They're almost sure to expect this one not to do as well as The Force Awakens (so far, the first one of the series has been the biggest earner), so I'm sure some of the pressure is off. They're also probably relying on people out there expecting this one to be as different from The Force Awakens as Empire Strikes Back was from A New Hope. Again, though, they're probably not laboring under the delusion that they can get away with something that mirrors Empire Strikes Back plot point for plot point.
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Re: Star Wars Celebration

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Brick remains one of the very small handful of films I deplored so strongly I couldn't handle finishing the whole thing. And I sat through all of Sucker Punch!

I really liked that Bruce Willis/Joseph Gordon Levitt time jumping one though. That was him right?
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Re: Star Wars Celebration

Post by The Swollen Goiter of God »

It was. I'm not surprised that you don't like Brick, but I'm still interested to hear why you don't like Brick.
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Re: Star Wars Celebration

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Mind you it's been at least ten years since I watched roughly half of it, so I can't give you a ton of specifics, but I remember being very very annoyed by how amused with itself it was. I remember wanting to (or may actually have. Who can say?) yell something to the effect of "YES! YOU'RE A NOIR! THAT'S GREAT FOR YOU! MOVE ON WITH IT!" but instead it just. kept. pounding. that gimmick home instead of using it to develop any semblance of an interesting plot.
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Re: Star Wars Celebration

Post by The Swollen Goiter of God »

How much noir had you seen up to that point? Did you go in with a lot of noir awareness? Did you watch it after having heard the word "noir" used ad infinitum to describe it?

(Note: I'll be using the word "noir" a lot, but some may feel Brick is better described as a "hardboiled" narrative or a detective story. I guess there's some argument for that, but the Gordon-Levitt character isn't technically a detective, and I'm too far removed from my viewing to remember if he shows any evidence of "occupational burnout" or a seen-it-all worldview. I think noir's general enough and applicable enough to suit my purposes, so I'll just stick with it.)

I don't really remember Brick calling attention to itself as a noir exercise beyond its adhering to the major noir conventions. (There's expressionistic lighting, deep focus, and dutch angles, it starts off with a murder, there's a femme fatale, there's clipped and witty dialog, it employs flashbacks, the lead gets knocked out when he starts making headway, and cigarettes are made abnormally prominent. There are more examples, but these are the ones coming to mind at the moment.) I suppose it inherently calls some attention to itself because it's a noir in a high school setting (noirs usually play out in a more adult setting), but it mostly plays things straight. It doesn't wink-nudge the way, say, Breathless does. It doesn't acknowledge that noir is a style of film, and it doesn't have an anti-hero who worships Humphrey Bogart in it.

I thought the central mystery was pretty engaging. I don't know if you'd consider that the same thing as an interesting plot, but, like any good noir, it asks us questions we can't know the answer to right away, it drops some bread crumbs, and we, along with the guy looking for answers, start to suss things out and connect people to other people.

While it's true that a noir can be so slavish to its noir trappings that it never manages to break free and be its own thing (this happened even during the first wave of noir pictures), I didn't feel that was the case with Brick. I felt it was a classic noir in a contemporary setting, the central mystery grabbed me, and I found the characters I was introduced to interesting. I guess its having been released in a post-noir era makes it technically neo-noir, but I often think of neo-noir in negative terms and connect it to things like Sin City. I would say that Sin City feels far more like soulless, "Look at how noir I am!" gimmickry than Brick does.

Brick and Sin City came out pretty close to one another (within days, if you count Brick's Sundance release), so it was an easy comparison for me to make back in the day. They're both reverent to noir, but they're reverent in different ways. Brick was made by a student of noir. It was also made by a first-time filmmaker with a passion for telling stories visually, so it wouldn't be surprising to me if it got too clinical with its noiring on occasion, and it wouldn't surprise me if I were to see it this way upon revisiting it. Sin City is a Rodriguezed retelling of some of Frank Miller's schlockiest writing. Sin City selfies itself fucking noir's corpse and group e-mails the photo to all its bros. In short, I feel like Brick respects noir while Sin City fetishizes it.

Then again, I was in my mid-twenties when I saw Brick. (You were twentyish? Twenty-one?) I might think less of it if I were to rewatch it. At the time, it felt like a new talent's fresh-yet-studied take on the noir.
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Re: Star Wars Celebration

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I agree with most of what Goiter wrote, but I can understand how a viewer could come away feeling the way Adam did. I assume that Adam's reaction is mostly due to the dialog, which can feel very out of place not only for the high school setting but also for the time period. If there is a major criticism I have of Brick it's that the dialog feels too stilted and more like it's trying to emulate '40s noir rather than be its own thing.
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Re: Star Wars Celebration

Post by The Swollen Goiter of God »

That sounds right. Actors tend to have a tough time with earlier styles of delivery, and most of the actors in Brick are fairly young.

A lot of Lucas's actors struggled with his faux pulp/serial-like dialog in the prequels. Poor Samuel L. Jackson chokes on nearly every line he's given. Of course, the right actors can usually pull it off, but Lucas and Gurland often did a pretty poor job of getting the right actors. (There's evidence of this in the Phantom Menace documentary. We see what we're supposed to believe are the three "best" Anakin options, and one of them was clearly better than Lloyd. Like, almost inarguably better. He's blond, and he looks like a miniature Leonardo DiCaprio, and it only reminds me that they were courting Leonardo DiCaprio for Anakin in Attack of the Clones [he passed on the offer], and, boy, were the prequels shitty. And then you find out that Haley Joel Osment was also up for the role but was passed over because the first part of the audition process had the casting director and Lucas sitting behind a one-way mirror and watching as potential Anakins played with Star Wars toys. You know, to see how good they were with "imaginative play." And Osment's father's all like, "My kid's an actor. He's good at acting. He's not big into toys. Now, if you'd told him to act like he was playing with toys, he'd have knocked your fucking assholes off your butts, but NOOOOO, you just put him in a room with toys and watched him like a couple of pedophiles, you stupid dickshits." All right. That's not a direct quote.)

It doesn't help that Lucas's writing was shitty on top of being written in a style unnatural for modern actors.
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Re: Star Wars Celebration

Post by Adam54 »

Mal Shot First wrote:I assume that Adam's reaction is mostly due to the dialog, which can feel very out of place not only for the high school setting but also for the time period. If there is a major criticism I have of Brick it's that the dialog feels too stilted and more like it's trying to emulate '40s noir rather than be its own thing.
This sums it up pretty well. They could've told the hard-boiled detective story in a 90s/2000s high school without the 40s dialogue and had a better movie. It just really, really grated on me and I couldn't get past it.

And again, the timeline is a little hazy at this point but I don't think I'd had much experience with noir before I tried watching Brick. I've since taken a college course in it (best. class. ever.) and still have no desire to revisit Brick.
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Re: Star Wars Celebration

Post by Master Skywalker »

The more I see/read about Rogue One, the more excited I am to see it. And I was already really, REALLY excited when the first trailer appeared.
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Re: Star Wars Celebration

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I am positively giddy about a "grown up" war/team on a mission movie set in the Star Wars universe. Seeing the full military might of the Empire flexing its muscles. After all, bad guys always have the best toys!
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Re: Star Wars Celebration

Post by Space Tycoon »

I wonder if this, and the Han Solo movie, aren't part of a concerted effort to create an unofficial prequel trilogy.

'Cause why not.
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Re: Star Wars Celebration

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It could work. I still hope they do an Obi Wan on Tatooine movie with McGregor.
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