RedLetterMedia's Revenge of Nadine [TPM 108 pg Resp. [RotS Review+RotS Preview+ST'09 Reveiw+Next Review Teaser+2002 Interview+AotC OutTakes+Noooooo! Doc.+SW Examiner Rebuttal+AotC Review+TPM Review] — Page 25

Ghostbusters said:

I was a little disappointed with RedLetterMedia's coverage of ROTS. He did a good job but he generalized too many things that I was hoping he would elaborate on like he did in episodes II and I. I was dying waiting to see what he would say about Darth Vader saying Noooooooo!!!! But he just jumps right past it with no comment at all. Maybe he felt like there was enough comments on that already. I think he does speak to the audience that keeps up on the prequel hating discussion and tries to add things that he feels hasn't been discussed heavily yet.

I see what you mean - ultimately, I remember being somewhat disappointed at the end, too, but if I'm honest to myself, I was pretty much hoping for an epic 3 hour takedown that would cover EVERYTHING... not just the whole ROTS movie, or prequel plot... but EVERYTHING! :D

But yea, although there are, of course, exceptions everywhere, he does seem to follow the pattern of trying to focus on the less obvious things that aren't on the number 1 complaint list.

Like in I he almost completely left out complaints about Jar Jar's personality, and didn't mention how stupid the Neimoidians were, or anything about the annoying podrace commentator, Boss Nass, everything that basically ruined the movie's tone. Like "wait, hold on guys, it gets better!"

In the Clones review, he didn't particularly dwell on how we had no idea where the Separatists came from or who Sifo-Dyas was, or WTF Boba Fett (;) is doing all over the place, because those were were like the most obvious WTF moments of the film - so he just kinda glossed over those in a dickish manner, making derisive jokes about the plot, and left the details over to the ordinary mortal critics watching the review.

It's like he's not even giving those turds enough respect / recognition to bother with them.

Also love what he did with order whaaaaaaaat in the latest one... LOL! At first, I was kinda pissed he decided not to get into it and hoped he'd do it later... when the review was over, it suddenly hit me :D

Also didn't bother with the inane dialogue during the climactic duel - everyone's already done all the "Sith deals in absolutes"s and "you have done that yourself"s and "from my point of view, the Jedi are evil"s to death, so he's just kinda "eeeehh... they exchange some boring pointless dialog, then blah, then we come to the ending.. *yaaaawn*".

Fucking brilliant, nothing to add to that :D

As for the Noooooo!, they already did a "documentary" on "The United States of Noooooo!" a while ago, it's on their website - it included the team remembering how they burst into laughter during the first viewing, inane reenactments of the scene by themselves and random pedestrians, some ytmnd spoofs... kinda made sense they'd just tenderly played around all that in the actual review.

The Cinema Snob used that trick a couple of times (with Troll 2, and Satan's School for Girls) - omitted the infamous, cheesy scream shot, or any comments about it, only to put it at the very end as a surprise. It works :)

I myself am not sure what to think of it... I mean, the nooo-oooooo sounds so damn inane, it's like they were TRYING to play that cliché with as much silliness as possible. Even the German dub doesn't sound half as stupid.

In contrast to the previous two episodes, which just had trippy, childish "fun" stuff and some lame puns in them, EpIII often ventures into pure Ham and Cheese territory, in a strange mix between serious/epic and silly that I actually find very well done (if it's intentional - if not, still pretty entertaining).

General Grievance, creepy and menacing on one hand, and utterly hilarious on the other. The timing of his coughs is so dead-on in inducing the most inane and silly effect possible, it feels like it was put in there with surgical precision (although, so is Jar Jar's speech manner, if I think about it...).

The Emperor constantly juggles between creepy and menacing, deliciously eeeeevil and downright hilarious.

The creepy robots with the capes look like nightmare fuel at first, then quickly deconstruct themselves with silly slapstick.

Then, the wonderfully epic montage of Vader's reconstruction, making it look like at least the prequel seris is gonna be crowned by a moment of sheer awesomeness... and then... and then.... NOOO-OOOOOOOOO!!!!!

I dunno man... I sometimes think Lucas was intentionally razzing the audience with all that :)

evan1975 said:

twooffour said:

Because seriously... Confused Matthew's reviews, while fun, kinda do suck...

Interesting you mention that because I finally checked his site out yesterday after hearing so much about it.  I tried watching his 2001 video, but the first two parts I viewed was basically him just shouting "This is boring!" over and over and muted video footage.  I admit I didn't finish it, but from what I saw, he seemed unable to examine the movie in a historical context.

 Yea, he said in the review he was going to purposefully neglect the, uh, "historical context" and the whole interpretations thing, and just review it as a film.

Why not. I mean, I admit I haven't seen 2001 entirely so I kinda don't wanna talk about it deeply, but the approach is both interesting and refreshing, and kinda necessary in the sea of profound interpretations.

He also kinda had only positive things to say for the direction and production of the movie...

The problem I have with his Matrix reviews, is that he mostly just doesn't think things through. It's interesting to follow his though process as being that of your average critical viewer who has second thoughts about what he's seeing and starts ranting at the screen with something that makes sense to him at the moment... but then you're quickly past that, the point's fallacies become apparent, and the whole things just gets stupid.

But his points are pretty hit-and-miss, so often, he'll manage to correctly point out a real turd and tear it down by every trick in the book.

He made a giant sloppy mistake in his Revolutions review, where, after mentioning something in relation to Bane committing the EMP sabotage, he then keeps wondering several times "where all the ships are". Ummm.... guess he just edited those parts together and didn't really check?

One example would be how he takes on an in-movie discussion about control, and how the industrial Machines in Zion indirectly control the humans by providing for their needs... then he proceeds to explain how that's not really "control", but rather dependence on one's needs that are dependent on the robots... um yea Matthew, that's kinda the whole point, you have "control" over someone by controlling their needs. At least, that's one of the meanings of "control", the other being "controlling where your car drives".

But on the other hand, he always aims at the right direction because, at the end of the day, all of that stuff is just pretentious babble thrown at the script, and the plot is a disjointed mess, so thinking that discussion about control to the end almost seems unnecessary in order to tear down that scene - in that sense, watching his reviews still provides one with the pleasure of being pointed out some major turds in the film, even if the actual commentary on them isn't always pure brilliance. If you take it with a grain of salt, in the sense of "ah whatever, this hairsplitting ain't gonna save the damn movie", it kinda works :)

PS: Sorry for my chaotic writing style right now, I kinda need to get to sleep badly...

Gaffer Tape said:

I love Confused Matthew.  I was introduced to him when someone linked to his Star Wars prequel reviews on this site nearly two years ago, and I've been hooked ever since.  Yeah, he did get a lot of flack for his 2001 review, but, yeah, he was purposely avoiding 2001's historical significance because he felt it more important to judge the film by its own merits as a storytelling entity, not in regards to its places in the annals of filmmaking history, shot composition, and special effects pioneering.

On the contrary I really can't stand him. His Incredibles and Lion King reviews were awful. Also he's not funny at all, just angry, which gets grating after a while.

Watching the ROTS RedLetterMedia review again, a few more things came up that I would like to express. He mentions how GL had two ways to do this story of the PT. Have it be a character study that focuses almost entirely on one character, which is what they did, or have Anakin be a minor character part of a bigger story, which I think is the direction they should have gone. Either direction for the PT story could have worked, but even if they did do the story well as a character study of Anakin, I prefer the idea of Star Wars being a story more about Luke Skywalker than Anakin. Lucas changed it around to be a story more about Anakin. It's obvious that Darth Vader was originally not intended to be as big of a character to the story than what he ultimately became. It was obviously originally a story about Luke Skywalker, but then took a 180 somewhere in the writing between ESB and TPM.

According to RedLetterMedia, it appears he blames the audience for making him into such a big character and Lucas's reaction to that made him write Darth Vader more into the story with ESB and ROTJ. The thing is that it works with ESB and ROTJ. It works how Darth Vader is just a mysterious character in ANH, it focuses more on him in ESB, and we truely learn who he is in ROTJ. In the prequels it is kind of the same idea with Palpatine/Sideous although the twist isn't believable because we knew who was who from the start of TPM. Anakin should not have been "space Jesus." Get rid of all this prophecy and midichlorian hogwash. Have Anakin be a normal person strong in the force. It just happens to run in his family. We don't need a scientific explanation for this and we don't need background on who his father was. You can leave that to the EU nerds.

Right now the PT is kind of a hybrid of the two, it tries to focus on too many things at once and accomplishes nothing. I think the story should have focused more about the rise of the Empire and Palpatine and less on Anakin. I would like the idea of Palpatine starting out in episode 1 as a genuinely good man and throughout the 3 films becomes a corrupt man. He is fluent in the force because was trained in the Jedi arts as a child though young adulthood, but dropped out to go into politics and was able to keep it a secret from the Jedi.

Having most of the characters return from the OT was a horrible idea. A list of characters/things that should have never been shown in the PT:

C3PO
R2D2
Boba Fett
Jango Fett
Baby Greedo
The Death Star
Moff Tarkin
Chewbacca
The Millennium Falcon, although very brief

I'm really surprised we didn't see a 10-year-old Han Solo winning the Millenium Falcon from a 10-year-old Lando in a card game in episode 3.

Tatoonie should not have been in the movie until episode 3 and it should have just been for the moment we see baby Luke delivered there to Uncle Owen and Ant Pheru? Even then we didn't really need to see them go into exile on Tatoonie, that is obvious enough in ANH. Instead of wasting time showing this in episode 3 they could use this time to flesh out a new idea. Episode 3 didn't have to be finished with every piece of the puzzle in place. They could have left the story with many years left to go before Obi Wan and Yoda go into exile. I think it would have been better to leave Anakin becoming Darth Vader a mystery and Padme having twins a mystery too so they are still surprises for future audiences.

Really what the prequels are to me is rough drafts experiments on a direction to take the story. If this material was then given to another writer/director to flesh out more it could really turn into something good. They could flesh the characters out more, they could focus in on the plot more, add more interesting editing/ideas to it, and remove things that don't work.

All the CGI madness doesn't work. They need to remove all of GL's ideas of entertianing special effects, and go back to more practical ideas used in the OT. They need to add some practicality to their moments of action, lightsaber fights, and space battles. As clumsy as the ANH lightsaber battle was it was still more entertaining to watch than any of the prequel lightsaber battles. The camera focused in more in on the characters facial expressions and they were actually fighting with a sense of urgency and strategy. In the PT it's just blank faces swing at 100 mph doing flawless choreography. In the OT, as clumsy and unbelievable as the action was, you did get a sense of strategy going on whether it was shooting at Stormtroppers, a battle in space, or a lightsaber fight, the action was far fetched but not too far fetched that you were taken out of the picture. In the PT it is just whatever GL feels like putting up on the screen. Riding a phony looking CGI lizard? A huge nonsensical space battle, jumping into a crowd of armed robots, none of it makes any sense, it's all just there because George Lucas said so.

The editing that RedLetterMedia brought up intrigued me. He mentioned how the editing is "predictable and uninteresting", using dropped lightsabers as an example. But I was hoping he would go more in depth with that. I know establishing shots is another problem with the films, there are too many of them. As far as other editing goes, I really don't know how it is "predictable and uninteresting". Could some of you help explain this to me?

Right now the PT is kind of a hybrid of the two, it tries to focus on too many things at once and accomplishes nothing.

Pretty much - maybe Plinkett should've emphasized furthermore how the PT fails to be "Anakin's story" not only because of the bad characterization, and his exaggerated importance in the universe, but also because of how he wasn't established as a proaghtganist from the start. In TPM (the most redundant film in cinematic history - Palpatine could've just waited for Valorum's term to end), he was dramatically he least important character out of the main cast.

I guess that'd tied the theses in the reviews more tightly together, because now you look back at the previous reviews and how he complains about there being no single protagonist, and are left confused a bit. Not that the picture wasn't pretty obvious enough, anyway...

A list of characters/things that should have never been shown in the PT:

C3PO
R2D2

I disagree - maybe shouldn't have been there from the start, and certainly had anything to do with Anakin, but the OT left you wondering what the backstory was, how R2 had belonged to Kenobi (and Leia knew that) and C3 didn't know anything about that because they apparently befriended each other after that.

One's left to think they met each other some time after the whole Empire thing started. So that'd have been neat to explore, but the way it ended up in the movie, C3P0 is a single entire mess - WHY THE HELL WAS HIS MEMORY WIPED?

I love his dialogue in II, though - the few minutes between their landing on Geonosis and the factory sequence were pretty funny. OT style :D

Baby Greedo

Well, the dude got deleted.

Moff Tarkin
The dude looks like Odo.

Tatoonie should not have been in the movie until episode 3 and it should have just been for the moment we see baby Luke delivered there to Uncle Owen and Ant Pheru?

I have to vehemently disagree on that.

The PT completely ruined Owen and Beru by making them into cardboard cutouts that barely know Anakin, and just get the baby at the end because they don't have kids themselves. What a cop-out.

The OT suggests a much more interesting, archetypal story of two brothers, or maybe step brothers, or cousins, of whom one is eager and idealistic and the other prefers the stable quiet life as a simple farmer. One is "the Owen", the other is "the Luke". Would've been also a nice piece of "rhyming" by Luke being a sort of a hybrid between the two, and then choose his father's path.

At the very least, Owen and Beru are hinted to know Vader's backstory in the IV scene, so having them involved more into Anakin's downfall, or at least observing it to some extent, would've been neat.

Could've all played out on Tattoine, too.

The way it ended up, Obi Wan probably spouted off some expository dialog, Owen went like "oh, that dude who once visited us at our farm! the one that looks like Christopher Lambert?", and then they started feeding lies to their adoptive son.

Not a plot hole as such, but yaaaaaaaaaawn. All leads me to suspect that the prequels were either Lucas' attempt at making some sort of profound statement on how history is distorted by hearsay (who knows, maybe his parents told them half truths and BS about his granddads, and then he got a look into their diaries?), or were, indeed, a huge practical joke.

Having Threepio, Artoo and Tarkin as real characters makes a lot of sense to me.

Having Artoo spend quality time with Ben seems a bit odd but Ben isn't exactly the most truthful character in the saga (from a certain point of view) but having Threepio built by Vader and hanging around with Owen (for months if not years) is utter nonsense.

Having Tarkin as Scorpius in a different Halloween mask for two seconds makes no sense at all.

I'm not sure if we needed to see Yoda he could have just have been referred to like Jabba in the OUT and unseen until ESB thus maintaining the surprise.

Oh holy fuck, my brain just collapsed in itself at the fucking revelation! Seems like my mind couldn't handle the sight of the horrible plot rib, and all critical thought was just sucked into the black hole of nonense... OWEN KNEW C3PO????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What???!?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Can't believe I... and I just thought it was kinda silly that Vader didn't recognize his robot... and that the idea was stupid... but holy CHRIST!! At least if he'd left with 'em in EpI... but no....

... should've just given the poor guy a wig and it'd be good.

...

What a load of crap.

Sorry, but what's a plot rib?  Do i need to watch the review to get this?

Aww fuck, I meant "rip"... as in "rift"...

You know, on one hand there's the plot hole... where certain aspects of the plot continuum are just kinda there... and then there's the space rift, that causes all of reality and existence to get sucked into nothingness.

:D

If they had to go down the rubber route they should have stuck with this guy.

I would never have believed WHO he was until Ady mentioned it.

twooffour said:

Aww fuck, I meant "rip"... as in "rift"...

You know, on one hand there's the plot hole... where certain aspects of the plot continuum are just kinda there... and then there's the space rift, that causes all of reality and existence to get sucked into nothingness.

:D

Heh heh, I thought maybe it was a term RLM came up with.

TV's Frink said:

twooffour said:

Aww fuck, I meant "rip"... as in "rift"...

You know, on one hand there's the plot hole... where certain aspects of the plot continuum are just kinda there... and then there's the space rift, that causes all of reality and existence to get sucked into nothingness.

:D

Heh heh, I thought maybe it was a term RLM came up with.

Now that think about it, I think they called the Nexus from STVI a "giant space ribbon from outer space", or something - and since it also kinda looks like a space rip, and a space rib as well, maybe that's why my fingers hit the wrong button :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h06WKYFYdlo

Funny things happen I guess...

Bingowings said:

If they had to go down the rubber route they should have stuck with this guy.

I would never have believed WHO he was until Ady mentioned it.

Heeeheheheheh

doubleofive said:

twooffour said:

Oh holy fuck, my brain just collapsed in itself at the fucking revelation! Seems like my mind couldn't handle the sight of the horrible plot rib, and all critical thought was just sucked into the black hole of nonense... OWEN KNEW C3PO????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yes, this is one of my huge problems with the prequels. You'd think a droid with a personality like that would stick with you after spending a few years with it.

That and they knew his name :P

doubleofive said:

twooffour said:

doubleofive said:

twooffour said:
Oh holy fuck, my brain just collapsed in itself at the fucking revelation! Seems like my mind couldn't handle the sight of the horrible plot rib, and all critical thought was just sucked into the black hole of nonense... OWEN KNEW C3PO????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yes, this is one of my huge problems with the prequels. You'd think a droid with a personality like that would stick with you after spending a few years with it.

That and they knew his name :P

Now its my turn for my mind to be blown. Jeez, wow.

 I tell you, man, our brains ain't made for this shit..

:D

I think maybe C-3PO's changing appearance in the PT was made to cover up this plothole?  Perhaps?  I don't know.

I was baffled as to why George would alter the appearance of such an iconic character for the first two films.  Was this going to finally explain why he had that silver leg?  (Yeah, right.)  Nope, it was completely pointless.  Scratch that.  It allowed George more action figures to sell.

I have no idea if this has been mentioned in the thread yet (If it was, I'm sorry, don't take it personally) but I love when RLM gets something wrong (Boba Fett/ Jango Fett) or doesn't mention something (NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!) and fans will try to correct him and complain about it. (Look at the comments on his Youtube videos! You'll see tons of them!). He obviously does that on purpose to mess with fans! I'm amazed at all the people on Youtube who don't understand that! 

If you read through this entire thread, I believe you'll see a little of that.

Another thing just came to me today. In TPM, Qui Gon Jinn speaks to Anakin right before the podrace and says something along the lines of "remember to concentrate on the moment, feel, don't think, and use your instincts." But then in AOTC, Obi Wan makes a complete reversal on that statement and says, "he went in there to hide not to run, patience, use the force, THINK. Qui Gon told him differently, he told him not to think, FEEL! No wonder Obi Wan failed as an instructor for Anakin.