I liked it okay. Better than Rogue One.

Did it have a title crawl? Because that's about the only thing Rogue One didn't have.

Maybe Disney's plan was to completely screw up Star Wars so a reboot will feel necessary.

(This genuinely made me laugh)

I saw it with my brother today. I had pretty low expectations and found some things fun here and there, though as a whole it was pretty forgettable. I feel like it tries to copy Guardians of the Galaxy too much in humor and tone, just like TLJ. There is even a sassy four-armed monkey who feels like a ripoff Rocket Raccoon.

As for Donald Glover, he was good, there were even some glimpses of Lando in there. Han, well, same thing, but not nearly enough to make it stick. The humor felt far too self referential. Remember how Lando wore a cape in Empire Strikes Back, and in Return of the Jedi? Yeah, well, in this the Falcon has an entire room dedicated just to Lando's cape collection.

Its follows the same line of thought that say you once had a friend who ate a bag of Cheetos during a few LAN parties. You then write an origin story about him, and every second of his life he has Cheeto stains on his fingers, and is now an anthropomorphic cheetah with sunglasses.

Ugh.

I was seriously thinking about this yesterday. What would I do if I were put in charge of the Star Wars brand right now? (No delusions, just a mental exercise.)

The original three Star Wars movies are keystones of modern American cinema. I don’t think you could reboot the original trilogy without making the brand itself worthless. Whatever you built as a product of that effort might as well be for a new property.

It would be hard to get rid of the prequels, too, because (as bewildering as it seems) those movies developed a pretty strong fan base. Much smaller than the original movies did when they were new, but they’re out there, and would be as incensed as anybody else if you made those movies non-canon.

The only “disposable” movies are the new ones. IMO those movies have turbo****ed the franchise, so I’d say they’ve gotta go - that’s the stuff that needs to be rebooted, not the prior stuff. Where does that leave you? If you took a mulligan on episodes 7-9, you’d have no way to tie it back into the original trilogy. Carrie Fisher is gone, Harrison Ford is done, and I don’t know what it would take to bring Mark Hamill back after his experiences on TLJ (he was very unhappy).

Probably the best thing to do in a business sense is finish out the trilogy and quietly put those characters and plot lines aside. Let the property go fallow for a couple of years, then come back with parallel projects that target both core audiences (35+ y/os and 15+ y/os). I’d probably scour the Japanese film industry for a director for the adult targeted series, and put some beautiful weirdo like Taika Waititi in charge of the teen oriented one.

The big decision for me would be a major management overhaul. I think Marvel Studios showed how a studio run by fans for fans can put out work that resonates with broader audiences. Current management seems fixated on trying to grow the Star Wars market by changing the product, and that’s the wrong way to do it. Sustainable growth has to be organic and it needs to start with the people who are the most passionate about your product.

The trick is to never listen to what fans say they want. But build products for them.

So apparently Dath Maul returns ??¿?

The ****, Disney?

Are they going to do that thing where nobody ever dies and nothing of consequence ever happens (like in Marvel movies) because they need the world to be static in order to push 800 movies.. or something?

I too was pretty flabbergasted by the appearance of Darth Maul . But I'm also like, what the hell, why not, let's get wacky with it. Though I imagine they'll probably treat it Super Seriously™.

The worst stuff in the prequel trilogy you can just pretty much ignore and the films themselves aren't that bad. Midichlorians, Jar Jar, awkward romantic dialogue, and platform game droid factory antics aren't things that completely destroy the feel of the franchise. The new trilogy, however, feels like fan films but not fan films made by regular fans that like Star Wars. More like fan films made by SJW (a term I generally dislike and hardly ever use) fans that want to "fix" Star Wars.

People are also talking about Marvel-fatigue, Star Wars-fatigue, super hero-fatigue... I think it more "I only got so much money and time to spend in movie theaters"-fatigue. I also make this comment regarding Walmart in our area. There's four Walmarts each within probably 20 minutes from my house. At some point, they become their own competition. How many films does Disney put out in a year? It's highly unlikely for me to see maybe two in a year (from any studio) moving forward and it used to be a no-brainer to see a Star Wars film in the theater. It is really sad what Disney has done to Star Wars. Lucas must be rolling in his grave. With John Williams, of course.

I don't know. The Force Awakens was most definitely made in the shadow of fifteen years of RLM-style "this is why the prequels suck and the original trilogy is good" fan criticism, and does a pretty great job of being what Star Wars fans have been saying they wanted since Episode I--a campy adventure with likable characters and not a lot of political bloviating. Only it turned out, whoops, there were other things that made Star Wars good that nobody noticed until they were gone. So if anything, TFA set out to "fix" the prequels while fetishizing the original trilogy. It's maybe "SJW" insofar as some of the main characters are A Black Guy and A Girl, but I think that's more a function of the movie coming out in 2015 than any kind of attack on Star Wars in specific.

Rogue One was made to cater to a very specific kind of 30+ year old Star Wars fan, who grew up immersed in the EU and wanted a serious Star Wars movie. It doesn't acknowledge the prequels and continues the fetishization of the OT by dredging up and reusing old footage from the space fight in ANH. (don't get me wrong, I thought it was cool) It didn't really acknowledge the prequels. The main character is a girl which I guess is SJW but not out of step with a lot of the EU material it's clearly emulating.

Solo is a campy, insubstantial adventure movie with basically nothing to say. Here's how Han Solo became a devil-may-care smuggler guy and met Lando and Chewbacca, the end. I don't know that it's SJW except that there's like three girls and Lando in it and a robot talks about robot rights (which is played for laughs and they cannibalize the robot's body after it dies to upgrade their ship's navigation ). It's got nothing negative to say about Star Wars and is loaded with references to OT, Prequel, and EU trivia.

The Last Jedi actually DOES have a lot of criticisms to make about Star Wars, to the point of undermining itself. I don't know if the intent is to "fix" anything about the original trilogy so much as have a dialogue with it (as opposed to TFA which definitely wanted to "fix" the prequels). It's probably the most interesting of the four movies and (probably rightly) made people the most mad. It's also got some very facile political commentary which I guess you would call SJW, so I guess fair enough on that one, haha

I always read Kylo Ren as the writers basically ****ting on worship of the original trilogy.

I think they intended for Kylo Ren to be a character we don't like. What they forgot was to make any other character compelling at all, so it kind of backfired.

Maybe, but so much else of the making and marketing of TFA is steeped in that kind of worship--practical effects! Bringing back the original actors! Real film! Simon Pegg consulting! The Millenium Falcon! I think it's important not to forget how the movie was presented before release--they were going out of their way to do everything right that the prequels didn't, to do right by Star Wars and Star Wars fans.

They were always doomed to fail (Rian Johnson was right that everyone's got a different idea what "real Star Wars" is) but the narrative that Disney was betraying the Star Wars brand, and that, actually, it was the prequel movies were good, I don't think really developed until after release. Before that it was like, the opposite.

Rogue One is the only Disney Star Wars film I have zero problems with. In fact, they're all somewhat watchable. The Force Awakens bothers me less now that the initial shock of how dumb it is has subsided. I have no idea what I will think of The Last Jedi upon second viewing but since it's coming to Netflix in June I may find out. I thought the gorilla walkers looked cool. The interior Star Destroyer battle looked good until BB8 was controlling a walker. The Luke non-lightsaber battle was cool until you realize he's not actually there.

Solo seems it would be like a very decent, enjoyable Netflix watch though. Possibly an overreaction but I've heard it looked too dark for theaters anyway.

That said, it's kinda weird to me that this and Rogue One seems to have less creative freedom involved than the new trilogy (particularly with Last Jedi), considering the large amounts of reshoots and rewrites. I would have thought it would be the other way around, having these spin-offs being more ...experimental?

But the new trilogy is fundamentally transforming Star Wars where the "Star Wars Story" films (can only speak to Rogue One) logically should feel closer to the films proximate to their timelines.

So I haven't been paying attention to the content but I'm seeing things about how Disney has heard the fans. I fully expect (well, wouldn't be surprised if) they do a film with everything thrown in that any fan could ever ask for, it's terrible, bombs, and then ultimately and with finality dismiss the fans forever. That or they'll do a great one because money.

I read part of the issues with Solo came from Lord and Miller not being up to the challenge of managing that type of production + their heavy emphasis on improv undermining Lawrence Kasdan, who Disney had to coax back into Star Wars with the offer of doing a Solo movie. So Solo might have been a special case. Maybe not though.

I don't really know much about Rogue One. I loved the atmosphere and ships and setpieces, and it really felt like an EU novel come to life. The plotting was kind of bad but it seemed like it was taking a bit of a risk going so bleak--was it more bleak before the reshoots or something?

My problem with all the new SW movies is that it's the action sequences and circumstances of coincidence that drive the plot forward, rather than a good story that I have a reason to care about. Add to that Rogue One and TFA being quite dark, TLJ throwing away the best remaining character of the franchise, and my eyes begin to glaze over.

Definitely not watching the Solo movie.

Saw it. Meh as ****. All these new films are just lame fan films in my opinion. But also BoaM is canon in my opinion, so maybe that shouldn't count.

Such a shame George Lucas isn't in charge of the Star Wars sequels

Haha, nice.

I'd never heard of this "whills" thing before.

actual lol

This is interesting. If he had it in mind for this long, I wonder if the midichlorians stuff was him laying the groundwork for a potential osmosis jones sequel trilogy

It would have been interesting to see what Lucas would have done. Instead, he chose to have the last laugh.

More of the interview can be found here, where midichlorians are mentioned.

I really can't even take GL serious. His defense of TPM was that he made it for his kids (and for kids in general). So which is it? Were you really laying the ground-work for this master piece or did you just make a fun movie for kids? For 7, 8, & 9, the interview above with GL isn't consistent with what Mark Hamill has said that GL told them while making the original trilogy which was that the final 3 movies were basically just a way to revisit their characters later in life. I think GL just likes to tell people what they want to hear. I think without Ralph McQuarrie, John Dykstra, Ben Burt, and John Williams Star Wars would have been a flop.

75 million years ago, in a galaxy far, far away:

"You see, Stan, there is a reason for people feeling sad and depressed. An alien reason. It all began 75 million years ago. Back then there was a galactic federation of planets which was ruled over by the evil Lord Xenu. Xenu thought his galaxy was overpopulated, and so he rounded up countless aliens from all different planets, and then had those aliens frozen. The frozen alien bodies were loaded onto Xenu's galactic cruisers, which looked like DC-8s, except with rocket engines. The cruisers then took the frozen alien bodies to our planet, to Earth, and dumped them into the volcanoes of Hawaii. The aliens were no longer frozen, they were dead. The souls of those aliens, however, lived on, and all floated up towards the sky. But the evil Lord Xenu had prepared for this. Xenu didn't want their souls to return! And so he built giant soul-catchers in the sky! The souls were taken to a huge soul brain-washing facility, which Xenu had also built on Earth. There the souls were forced to watch days of brainwashing material which tricked them into believing a false reality. Xenu then released the alien souls, which roamed the earth aimlessly in a fog of confusion. At the dawn of man, the souls finally found bodies which they can grab onto. They attached themselves to all mankind, which still to this day causes all our fears, our confusions, and our problems."

http://southpark.cc.com/clips/104274/what-scientologist-actually-believe

I have a love hate relationship with that show: in theory I should hate it because it's annoying as hell, but I absolutely love it.

Turn That Poop Into Wine

Hannibal Buress is hilarious

Too bad he's a wimp



http://www.vulture.com/2013/10/talking-to-hannibal-buress-about-the-eric-andre-show-his-comedy-central-pilot-and-broad-city.html

oh, he's not really important then

Not if he can't bring himself to carry out cruel questionable practical jokes, sorry.

yeah, he should just kill himself

Probably not. He's going to want to try and stay alive for as long as possible:

I went and saw it this morning, it was fine. Better than Rogue One.

It has no real reason to exist and adds literally nothing to the franchise overall, but that's exactly what I anticipated when they announced that they were going to do a bunch of spinoffs.

I actually kinda enjoyed the Darth Maul cameo. The Clone Wars and Rebels are apparently canon so I'm ok with it.

I saw it this evening. I agree with Boco. Everyone did a serviceable job and there were the usual silly star wars action scenes. It was fine. I enjoyed it, the same as I enjoyed Rogue One or Thor or Justice League or Planet of the Apes. A big, dumb, loud, exciting movie.

Well, apparently it's serviceable. Of course it's backlash from how bad the sequel trilogy is. I joked on Facebook that I hated the sequel trilogy before it was cool to do so and that is certainly the case here. I am curious, however, when Steven mentions Planet of the Apes is he referring to the original or the Tim Burton remake.

Also, to me it is funny when people compare any Star Wars film to Rogue One. Is Rogue One polarizing?

Not overtly polarising, but I know some people that absolutely loved it whilst I didn't really care for it.

I'm referring to the currently produced franchise. The first one had James Franco, the second one had Jason Clarke, the most recent had Woody Harrelson.

The original with Charleton Heston was great, the one with marky mark was terrible.