joefavs

No love for Thunderdome? Come on, you douchebags.

Ben Mendelssohn is in a completely different league from Gwendoline Christie as far as acting chops are concerned, though. I don’t know if any of you have seen Bloodline, but the guy’s absolutely dazzling. I really can’t imagine they’d hire him just to stand around.

Inherent Vice - I enjoyed this quite a lot. I guess I understand why reviews were so tepid, but really the only sin it’s guilty of is not being as good as most of the rest of Paul Thomas Anderson’s filmography. I think it would’ve been better received if it wasn’t destined from the start to be compared to Boogie Nights, Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, and The Master.

I give Five Armies a certain amount of credit for fully committing to its own ridiculousness. I mean, Shai-Hulud even got in on the action.

Sidenote, Kylo Ren’s look is very close to what I had in my head for Kyp Durron.

The fact that we watched Han Solo die violently and so many of us still left the theater with big stupid grins on our faces kind of blew my mind when it occurred to me after I’d seen it a couple times.

One of the big cinematic “what ifs” I think about every so often is if LOTR had been done a decade later in this “new golden age of TV” as a miniseries (or series of miniseries. Miniseriesseries? Whatever it’s called when you adapt a finite amount of content across multiple seasons. Limited series? I digress). A much more faithful adaptation (with Bombadil included) probably would have been possible with the extra breathing room. I love the films, especially the first two, but I reread the novel a couple years ago and the richness of that experience is just so far beyond anything a trilogy of feature films could hope to achieve, even a trilogy of very long ones.

Anyway, I’ve been meaning to rewatch those myself for a while (and also to reread the book because I got The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion for my birthday a few months ago, which is basically 1200 pages of chapter-by-chapter annotations for the novel, but that’s going to require some serious commitment that I can’t really manage at the moment). I only own the extended edition on blu-ray, though, and I’d really prefer the theatrical cuts for this. I think the whole trilogy is fourteen bucks on amazon right now, I should really order that one of these days.

My biomanufacturing professor told me today that she’s recommending me for a cushy internship that the biotech company near the school takes one person from my program for every year. This will solve quite a few things I’ve been worrying about if it comes to pass.

Also, my friends and I took second place at pub trivia tonight. We’ve now either won or come in second the last four times we’ve played. And tonight the team everyone hates with way too many people on it that wins 80% of the time didn’t even place, which I honestly get more enjoyment from than my own success.

I’ve been seeing how long I can keep up with the nuEU mostly because I came to the old one too late to ever have a chance at being reasonably familiar with the bulk of it and I kind of always felt like I’d missed out. I’ve been getting lazy about picking up the comics, but I’m only maybe a month behind. I’ve read all the novels except the Ventress one, the Battlefront tie-in, and that YA TFA prequel. I’ve got a handful of friends who are also reading the comics, but I don’t know anyone who’s picked up the books. Back in the day we all played the video games religiously and read whichever Bantam novels turned up on the grocery store paperback rack but I didn’t know anyone reading the comics. Myself and everyone I know who was into the EU drifted away from it around the time of the first few NJO books. So uh. Yeah. In middle school I knew maybe fifteen people who were following stuff outside the movies, and now I know three. There’s some EU readership data for you.

The color is a hell of a lot better in the 97 version. It’s also missing prequel retcons like ghost Hayden and Boba Fett’s voice and the Gungans in the victory celebration. There’s also no rock in front of R2-D2 on Tatooine, which I’ve long considered to be the most baffling change of all. I’d be much more willing to turn out for this if it is indeed the 97 cut, especially if they’re actual prints (which is the only reason I can come up with why they’d use that version).

SilverWook said:

I guess no one here went to the marathon leading up to TFA last December to see which versions were being run?

I didn’t go, but I read a recap article by someone who did that confirmed it was the 2011 version.

And as someone else posted, you really have to be from the group being stereotyped to really be in a position to tell if it is offensive.

That doesn’t exactly give white people carte blanche to screw around until someone calls them out, though.

I just came across an article on the tumblr of something called “The Wrap: A Yahoo Partner” that specifically stated it’s the 1997 version and not the 2011 one. No idea how credible they are, but if this is true I’ll try to go. The 1997 SEs in the theater were a huge part of my Star Wars history at the time, regardless of what the situation’s become since.

I’m not sure if the fact that they’re doing this should make me hopeful about an OUT release because they aren’t doing it for the 40th anniversary or if it should make me pessimistic because they’re doing it at all.

darthrush said:

The Amazon digital release is getting bombed by a lot of people, supposively their streaming service is trash and you can’t put it on a laptop. Only Amazon verified tablet and mobile devices.

Is that new? I haven’t streamed anything from Amazon on my laptop since I got my Roku, but I used to do it all the time with no issues.

Anyway, I bought the standard blu ray with the black slipcover.

No one (or at least me) is saying that the nemoidians have dead on southeast Asian accents that are exactly how people from that part of the world actually sound. They sound like any of the umpteen racist portrayals of Chinese and Japanese characters in movies from the 30s and 40s that Lucas would surely have been familiar with.i think he’s recycling tropes in a carelessly insensitive way, not that he’s trying to make some statement about the way the world is.

I am forever baffled by the amount of people who are willing to take Lucas to task for absolutely everything except for the racial insensitivity. We all agree on a thousand other ways he fucked up making the prequels, why is this one so hard to swallow?

Also, this “takes one to know one” idea I’ve seen come up a few times that anyone who detects racism in these things must be a racist themselves (“Nemoidians only seem like Asian stereotypes to you because that must be how you personally see Asians”) might just be the stupidest and most wrongheaded thing I’ve ever seen here, which is really saying something.

A close second is “This one black/Asian/Jewish/etc. guy doesn’t have a problem with it, so all other criticism isn’t valid.”

It is so painfully obvious that George lifted all these characterizations from the 1930s-40s era cinema he’s so fond of, which was absolutely loaded with unambiguous racist caricatures, and then applied them in a well-meaning but very poorly considered and tone-deaf way decades later in his own work. I don’t think Lucas had a racist agenda when he made the prequels, I think he was a kind of clueless sixty-something year old guy with no one to tell him how dated and awful this stuff was.

Shortly after the trailer dropped, someone tweeted to Pablo Hidalgo about whether or not we’re to believe that the Death Star has been under construction for almost 20 years. His response was just a link to the Wikipedia page for the Big Dig (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig for those of you outside of New England who don’t know what the hell that is). I think it’s likely we’ll see a lot of frustration on the Imperial side of things with how long over schedule the construction has taken in the film.

I kind of feel like 60% of General Star Wars Discussion is just Haseo and MalaStrana yelling at each other at this point.

MalàStrana said:

Why not, but as far as we know within the inner movie logic the saber goes to her, she does not take the saber.

How on earth do we know that? When have we ever seen an inanimate object leap into someone’s hand on its own? The saber “calls” to her earlier in a One Ring kind of way, but we have no reason to believe it can shoot itself across physical distances. You could make the argument that the saber chose between Rey and Kylo, but Rey still had to decide to go for it in the first place.

Me right now, having not looked at this thread for a few days:

I think framing the backlash from other users when someone’s acting like a dick on the internet as a free speech issue is a little unduly lofty.

I like the standard BD slipcover quite a lot. I’ve never been wild about the theatrical poster so I’m not thrilled that it’s on the case insert, but it’s not a terribly important issue for me.

These are the first five non-Star Wars films to pop into my head when confronted with the question, and I don’t feel like agonizing over it so I’ll leave it at this for now. Presented in release order because I don’t believe in ranking the top tier.

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Jurassic Park (1993)
Rushmore (1998)
There Will Be Blood (2007)