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StarWarsLegacy.com - The Official Thread — Page 72

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Yeah, those stupid, sucky movies. I long for the good ol' '00s, with classic films like "Battleship," "Transformers," and any of the "Fast and Furious" franchise... :)

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I frigging loved Battleship.

I know, I know, I know... but... BATTLESHIP!

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Really? Well, I won't hold it against you... lol

To be fair, I never saw it. Was it really that good?

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ww12345 said:

Yeah, those stupid, sucky movies. I long for the good ol' '00s, with classic films like "Battleship," "Transformers," and any of the "Fast and Furious" franchise... :)

 Awww. I the naughties weren't all bad, I enjoyed Match Point, Requiem for a Dream, Before Sunset, Children of Men, Million Dollar Baby, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Borat, WALL.E, No Country for Old Men, High Fidelity, The Red Balloon, Iraq in Fragments, Whale Rider, L'Enfant, Donnie Darko, Millions, Ghost Dog, Pan's Labyrinth, In the Loop, UP, The Royal Tenenbaums, Lost in Translation, Some movies about a Ring or something, Zodiac, and a bunch more I enjoyed but probably can't think of.

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ww12345 said:

Really? Well, I won't hold it against you... lol

To be fair, I never saw it. Was it really that good?

 Going in, you know it isn't going to be a Cohen Brothers film, and if you set your mind that way, it is a shitload of fun. Giant Battleships, getting the USS Missouri out of retirement, really old Navy Guys entering the fray, guns, guns, GUNS, big mofo GUNS being loaded by hand. Fun writing, surprisingly good performances. I didn't know who Rhianna was, and thought she was possibly actual Navy. Guy with prosthetic legs is actually a veteran with prosthetic legs, great Geek moment with a briefcase...

It is just big, stupid fun, like Pacific Rim. Switch the brain off and enjoy the show.

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I haven't seen a lot of those, but will cue them up on Netflix... Actually, a lot of the VFX for Pan's Labyrinth were done within like 5 miles of me... Was kind of a big deal at the time. Now, not so much, but still. :)  I think I'm just jaded about the '00s because I was a pesky teenager at the time. lol

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 (Edited)

mverta said:

There is truly no force in the universe more powerful than the human ability to rationalize.

Have to throw my predictably pessimistic hat into the ring with you, there, Mike.  While it's true in a general sense that 90% of everything is crap, and we tend to only remember the good stuff, so the past has a rosy tint, there are other trends, big trends that outweigh all of that.

In my opinion, sometimes studios are risk-averse and sometimes they're not.  When they take more risks, they can produce truly great (and also terrible) things.  When they feel risk-averse, the best they can usually hope for is decently entertaining.  We have been in a risk-averse period for a long, long, LOOOONG time.  Not saying good stuff isn't made, but often it happens outside or in spite of the studio system.  The last long-lasting "risky" period was the so-called auteur movement, lining up more or less with the seventies.  The crap was phenomenally crap, but the good stuff was divine.  Nowadays, it's generally by-the-numbers with good execution, or by-the-numbers with poor execution.  Bleh.

My wife and I have been complaining about the "Hollywood Writer's Strike" for the last ten years or so, even though we know there sadly isn't one to explain all this.

EDIT: I'd add City of God and Amelie to poita's generally pretty good noughties list (Million Dollar Baby notwithstanding...)

Project Threepio (Star Wars OOT subtitles)

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what's the noun for "crotchety"? Is it "crotchetiness"? If so, the crotchetiness is strong with this thread.

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The other problem is that movies will never again have the impact on society that they did before the 1980s, no matter how great they might be.

When I saw Star Wars in 1977, I had no idea what it was about, there was an oddly cryptic trailer, and that was about it.

When I saw it, my mind was blown. If I wanted to see it again, the only way was to head back to the cinema, and even then, once it left the cinema, it was quite possible that I would never get to see it again!

There was no home video, no VHS or DVD, bugger all on television, and the truly gigantic television that our neighbours owned was a whopping 27 inches in size.

Movies were something you could only see occasionally, there wasn't much else out there as story telling goes, so a good story and amazing visuals would sear into your brain like nothing else could. It was a huge experience.

Now, there are so many ways to consume movies, we watch, many, many more than even the hardest of hard core movie buffs did before the 1980s. Story telling has increased in quality with the explosion of higher quality television series where you can develop characters and stories over 10s or even hundreds of hours, they are the novels of the visual world, instead of the little haikus that movies are.

Never again will movies hold the kind of power, influence and spectacle that they did before that time, partially just because they literally cannot, as the world has changed.

I enjoy movies more now than I did ten years ago, I practice good movie hygiene, I don't watch trailers, I avoid internet reviews, I don't follow the actors' private lives and I don't watch any behind the scenes until after I have been to see the film. It lets me enjoy movies much more, and in a similar way to how they impacted me when I was younger, but it is still a paler experience than before, and that has as much to do with the changes in the non-movie world as those within it.

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Plus you get old, you have heard the stories before, no matter how good the writing. Assuming you didn't happen to see an absolute dog, the first heist film you see is always the best. The first 'gone girl' type psycho thriller you see is always the best. Quite often the case for SciFi and other genres. The first cut is the deepest...

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 (Edited)

joefavs said:

what's the noun for "crotchety"? Is it "crotchetiness"? If so, the crotchetiness is strong with this thread.

 Crotchetivity..ness..ation.

and I am pretty sure I am older than all you young punks!

Now get off my lawn.

Oh wait, it is Mike's lawn... how did I get here... where's my hat?

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Your hat is next to your walker, poita... haha :)

In all seriousness, though, I follow a lot of the sentiments of the "older" generation here...

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I'll agree with no fight at all that the mainstream movie machine is by and large broken, but to suggest that this century hasn't produced anyone worthwhile is ludicrous. anyone who really believes that either isn't looking in the right places or else has warped standards.

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poita said:

Yeah, only shitty movies from the 80s like Empire Strikes Back, Indianna Jones, Ghostbusters, Aliens, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Down by Law, Full Metal Jacket, The Shining, Platoon, The Breakfast Club, Back to the Future, Raging Bull, Scarface, E.T. , Princess Bride, Gremlins, Poltergeist, Evil Dead, Stand by me, The Thing, Die Hard, Robocop, and (Insert David Lynch film here).

Yeah I was just giving examples. The two Timothy Dalton Bonds are quite well critically rated.

[ Scanning stuff since 2015 ]

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Battleship!? Really? God that was they one movie I wanted to walk out on. The biggest problem I had was that the aliens didn't seem like they wanted to blow up the earth. They felt to me like they were just trying to phone home because they were lost and needed a spare oil filter for their vehicle or something and they only got destructive (I would argue self defensive) when we went all gung ho on them, guns a blazing ('muricah!).  

At least it gave me and my wife a stupid thing to quote to each other: I'm gonna die, you're gonna die. We're all gonna die... But not today!!! 

What’s the internal temperature of a TaunTaun? Luke warm.

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Can we all just agree that not all old movies are good and not all current movies are bad?  Cheese and crackers guys, seriously what is the point of all this pessimistic attitude?  Enjoy the good, try to forget the bad and just have a good time at the movies.  The problem with modern movies isn't that they're getting worse, it's that modern audiences don't know how to just sit back and enjoy a movie.  If it's not a goddam masterpiece, people can't enjoy it.

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Let's not derail the thread too much?

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Where were you in '77?

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poita said:

Yeah, only shitty movies from the 80s like... Princess Bride...

 Am I the only one who didn't like this movie?

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What did I just say?

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Where were you in '77?

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mverta said:

There is truly no force in the universe more powerful than the human ability to rationalize.

 WRONG AGAIN VERTA! The hydrogen bomb is more powerful.

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The 70's and 80's were quite exceptional times in film making where directors seemed to have more control and creative power.

But there are still good films being made.

The best films I have seen this year either in cinema or on DVD would be..

Nightcrawler
Gone Girl
Ex Machina
Mad Max

The only other film apart from the Force Awakens I am looking forward to is "High Rise" by Ben Wheatley. I am hoping they will both be good.

Congratulations on finishing up Legacy. Stunning Work.

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I just have to say, battleship is dog shit.

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Can't you read?

Last warning.

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Where were you in '77?

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Wook, for what it's worth, I don't mind.  I like organic branching.

However, watch as I seamlessly blend this off-topic tangent with a return to the discussion of Legacy:

My (now) 5-year-old has just seen the original, restored Star Wars for the first time.  In a theater.  He freaked the fuck out.  It is now, predictably, all Star Wars, all the time, in the house.  

Despite growing up in what is essentially a Star Wars museum, he's never really looked sideways at the models, costumes, props, posters, even the life-size R2 in the house.  Asked a couple of questions, but that's it.  He's never heard me talk about Star Wars (because I don't), he'd never seen a frame of the film, and he'd never heard a note of the music.  He was not excited about this plan I had for his birthday, to take him to a theater, and he was not excited to "see Star Wars."  Those were just words, to him.  He even asked, "Do I have to?" to which I merely replied, "Trust me."

In his periphery are things much more sophisticated than Star Wars, visually.  I do a lot of VFX work in the house, which he sees.  We've done some shooting of short films together, where we shoot him and his toys over greenscreen and do effects far more convincing than were ever in that film.  I sort of wondered if it wouldn't ruin the film for him; his eyes are much more attuned to vfx work than ours were in 1977.  It doesn't matter to me if he likes Star Wars or not, but I was curious to see how the experiment turned out: would a child born in 2010, surrounded by more sophisticated visuals, who works GUIs on tablets effortlessly, who is not being swept up into fandom and enthusiasm and hysteria about the film; for whom Star Wars has no intrinsic value, and is surrounded by enough iconography to take it completely for granted, still be affected by the film?

40 years old or not, that film has something special to it.  And for my son, suddenly the house he's grown up in has instantly become a billion times cooler.  It's like he noticed the stormtrooper in the corner for the first time.  He's asked me to turn on R2 and drive him around so he can play C-3PO, etc.  He's listening to the music, he's having lightsaber fights.  He's doing the dialogue, he's dressing up, he's asking questions, he wants to be a Jawa for Halloween. 

Also, he saw a picture of the upcoming Star Wars stormtroopers, and asked with a frown, "What's wrong with those stormtroopers, Daddy?"  "Everything." I told him, and kissed him for an hour.  The Force is strong with this one.

_Mike

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