Anchorhead

BiggsFan44 said:

What does time on this forum have to do with it?

Quite a bit.

Smokey And The Bandit is another movie I saw every week that summer. Huge fan.

Looking forward to seeing it on the big screen again;

https://variety.com/2018/film/news/smokey-and-the-bandit-amc-theatres-burt-reynolds-tribute-1202932915/

If any of you dig listening to deeper discussions of the scores, this guy has a site/series devoted to them. Very interesting stuff.

http://www.rebelforceradio.com/star-wars-oxygen/

To the discussion: I wore out the vinyl copy of the score in 1977. To this day, it still instantly transports me back to that summer. After 1977, nothing came close to that connection for me. Great pieces followed for sure, but they didn’t have that emotional connection. My personal favorite of all of William’s Star Wars pieces; the first 50 seconds of The Desert And The Robot Auction. That passage is like a time machine for me.

I’m not familiar with the prequel scores.

FFS, Warb. None of us can read other private topics.

Possessed said:
I was hoping she could give me her recipe for chow mein noodles.

Ms. Tran isn’t Chinese. Perhaps you could let this tangent rest.

luckydube56 said:

So…no acting like an asshole permitted in this thread. No d!cks either. Only pu$$ies?

Sorry. It was too easy and had to be done.

Reel it in.

We can discuss the state of toxic fandom without actually demonstrating it.

Z6PO said:

oojason said:

‘Kelly Marie Tran: I Won’t Be Marginalized by Online Harassment’… (in her own words)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/movies/kelly-marie-tran.html

This is so powerful. (And goes far beyond online harassment)

I just logged on to post the link. Hats off to her pushing back. We’ll be a better world because of it. The people who have harassed her and tried to silence her will eventually be gone. With a little luck, she may very well be part of the solution.

Really looking forward to following her career, Star Wars or other wise.

luckydube56 said:
You are correct. I have indeed stumbled upon the wrong thread.

Apologies to screams in the void. I will leave my posts up as a testament to my careless stupidity.

I’ll leave them up as a reminder of what we don’t want in this discussion. Looks like cooler heads have already prevailed. Perhaps we can keep it that way.

Not so much found on the internet as generated. I was looking for the location of a bakery out here in the hill country named LeDrip. My browser knows me well. 😃

oojason said:
A saturated streaming market already (all adding up $/£-wise) - and without the main films I’ll likely be giving Disney’s forthcoming streaming service a miss.

I agree. I already have physical media for the few Star Wars films that interest me. According to both the articles, with a lot of their films already on other networks, they don’t seem to have much to offer. With regard to Star Wars, only things that haven’t been made yet is a tough sell. His quality over quantity comment as a business model sounds like spin.

Even though Iger says they’ll be cheaper than Netflix, there is no way that price doesn’t start creeping up soon after. If they succeed in buying their own films back from Netflix and Starz, that jump will be substantial.

Chewielewis said:

The fact is RJ went out of his way to make a Star Wars film that challenged everything we know about star wars. About the force, the Jedi, the roles of heroes and villains, politics and economics. It’s very deliberate. And for that reason some people hate it, others think its the best film since Empire.

I think all these nit picks about Jedi training and power levels and admirals not sharing plans with captains are kind of missing the big picture.

Yes, RJ deliberately went out of his way to challenge established canon. The fact that there is a large portion of the fan base arguing about it doesn’t mean they don’t get it, it means they don’t like it.

It’s no different than Lucas using CGI to alter a long established core trait of Han Solo as a character. Lucas went out of his way to force it on the fan base and even went so far as to make light of it by selling shirts to rub it in. The fans didn’t miss the point. They didn’t like it.

For a great many fans, adding to the story is preferable to rewriting it.

We’re 140 pages into discussing the film. A great many of those pages are walls of text where people are defending their position on Rey and the nature of The Force and if they are in line with the previous 40 years of the franchise. Nothing at all wrong with seeing the TLJ characters & story in a way that fits with your personal canon.

That said, I also think it shows that the way it was written and presented was controversial. It’s managed to further divide an already very divided fan base and may very well have had a negative effect on the public view and box office of Solo.

SilverWook said:

They need to figure out how to avoid the problems that drive the cost of these films up as what happened with Solo. The Star Wars sequel that never was, Splinter Of The Mind’s Eye was conceived as being a modestly budgeted film that would take advantage of props and costumes left over from the first film. There’s probably a few warehouses full of stuff from the current films now.
A lean, mean, lower budgeted SW story film has a better chance at cleaning up at the box office.

Lean and mean budget-wise for sure. Wouldn’t hurt to go that way story-wise while they’re at it. Star Wars77, Rogue One and Solo were fairly focused in their stories, with one main arc. TFA and TLJ were very busy with multiple stories. Last Jedi was particularly busy. Give a story room to breathe.

https://youtu.be/oAeotgCHL3E

oojason said:

It’ll be intriguing to see if they continue an arc into the next standalone film - maybe a character or two from Solo popping up, a continuation of The Crimson Dawn or Nefys Nest stories etc - in let’s say… a Fett or Kenobi ‘A Star Wars Story’ film… a mini-trilogy of sorts?

A direct Solo sequel? I hope so - though seemingly not. Books and comics may be the way for any continuance of the characters & events from Solo.

A Solo sequel that isn’t burdened with back story or crowded with characters would be great. I’d also love it if they moved off the saga completely. As for continuing characters, give me Enfys any day. She’s been one of my favorite characters in a long long time. Sorry the film was so weighed down as it took time away from her. She is a true non-saga character and has a really interesting mystery and depth. She’s an awesome Random. A character who could carry a story unrelated to The Saga.

You’re right though, I’m probably looking at EU to get my fix.

mfastx said:
Also, the resistance is totally destroyed, leaving just a handful of folks in the MF. They even start calling themselves “rebels” by the end of the film.

I hope they take the story in an interesting and new way in Episode IX and flesh out some things.

Agree on both points. I hope they get us a ways away from the last film, visually as well as story. There were parts of this that had a Prequel look. Fine for a lot of this story, e.g., Canto Bight and Snoke’s red room, but I very much prefer the Rogue One and Solo look.

Story-wise, we’re deep into a sort of revisit of the OT type framework. That doesnt bother me as much as it does some around here, but I do wish they would have gone with a less is more philosophy. Both films would have worked as good or better (to me) if they would have left Starkiller Base, Snoke, and Phasma on the cutting room floor.

Either way, I’ll go see it and I suspect I won’t dislike it. I like Last Jedi more now after having watched it for the second and third times this week. Shut up. 😉

There are portions I skip though. I dont find any of that red throne room scene interesting, the Maz scene feels shoehorned and unnecessary, and I skip past most of the beginning and pick up just after Finn does the comedic leaking Bacta suit walk. eye roll

Glad I gave it a second look. There are some nuances with Rey and Luke that I really enjoy.

DominicCobb said:

One thing that I’ve mentioned before that no one seems to really talk about is that Leia left the dice behind, presumably for Ben to find. It’s a small thing that tells me she’s still trying to reach out…

I agree. She’d know they would come in there looking for any survivors or clues to where they went. Since the film ends there, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see him looking at them early in IX.

DominicCobb said:
Rian made the tough but absolutely respectable decision to keep Fisher’s work in tact. Considering as I said, Luke refutes the statement, there’s nothing about Leia’s brief doubt that ruins a perfectly fitting last scene for the pair.

I agree. I think that’s one of the strongest, if not the strongest passages in the film. I took his “no one’s ever really gone” to mean no one is ever really gone because they live on in your memories of them. They live on in the way they were part of your journey. He says that as he’s giving her Han’s lucky dice. She must also have some fond memories of her son and he lives on that way, a pleasant way.

Finished my second viewing. Not much changed opinion-wise. I still think it’s at least two movies crammed into one and done so at the expense of both. Leia, Poe, Finn, and Rose could be one film. Luke, Rey, Chewie could be another. Not sure where Kylo fits in. I just don’t find him interesting. The Snoke and Phasma stories are just more needless cramming of partial ideas.

As a narrative, it’s all over the place. I’m fine with two story lines at once and I think Empire Strikes Back did it fantastically. Films and TV shows have been doing it for decades and doing it well. This felt jarring at times. The switches seem to come at odd places and kill the momentum and engagement. Also, there seems to be so many that none are given any room to grow and they end up feeling rushed. In fact, the whole film feels rushed to me.

I was better with the Ahch-To portion of the film. It wasn’t as foreign feeling. That said, I felt even more so that Rey is nearly a one-dimensional character now. Sort of an audience surrogate so Luke isn’t just standing on the shore conversing with the ocean. She becomes even more so as the film goes along. Hopefully IX will give her some depth. Daisy has the chops for it.

The Rose and Finn storyline still interested me and I think both are on their game here. As I said before, I really hope Ms Tran gets a substantial role in IX. She has much more to offer and definitely has the chops. She and Finn work well together. The Canto portion still looks and feels like Lucas Prequel to me. BB-8 shooting slot machine coins is terribly prequel. Same for the kids at the end. The last scene looks like it was shot on a Broadway stage. Their home, clothes, and makeup look fake dirty.

Liked the Crait portion even more than the first time. There are some great visuals and they aren’t the ones they may have intended, not for me anyway. I thought a lot of the darker shots, particularly some of 3PO and Luke were nicely done. Even if they were for just a few seconds, they still worked for me. I’ll try to post some screen-grabs. Overall, I don’t dislike it and will certainly watch several parts again.

Still like the Porgs. 😃

I’ll see how I feel now that it’s had time to steep. Starting my second viewing in 3…2…

ImperialFighter said:
Personally, I’d love it to involve Threepio and Artoo heading off together towards a twin-sunset, as Threepio then says “Come along BB-8!”, and he then excitedly rolls into view behind them as Artoo beeps and whistles approvingly…before we fade to the ‘iris’ and end credits.

I think that would be an awesome end scene. Particularly if it was just the one line. Give the scene room to breathe the same way Luke and the twin sunset did in 1977. It would be a perfect way to wrap up the original saga. The droids, old & new heading off into the sunset.

Since I’m already a ways down that road, that’s most likely how I’ll continue. No Apple Music service, just big storage at a local level.

Nandi said:

Yes, its funny but more so pathetic that he takes random words from random people that seriously.

You should start choosing your words more carefully.

Handman said:

TV’s Frink said:

I don’t have any fancy solutions but I do everything physical. I don’t trust any cloud service.

1. Everything is on my home PC.
2. Everything is backed up to two separate external HDs (one at home, one at work).
3. Everything is on my phone, which is how I actually listen to it.

This is probably your best bet.

That’s exactly the setup I have now. It works well enough but it can be tedious to sit and rip cds all day at a laptop. I’m still looking at that if I go with the B2, but I’m really just wanting to get away from Apple a bit and move toward a non-Apple cloud (Jason’s Google Play) or a physical device other than a laptop or my iPhone.

I’m not chunking any of my physical media so redundant backups are a precaution, not my only source files. The Sonos will be my access and control, but it’s not a storage system. I suspect I’ll just have to continue with Apple, move my music to their cloud, and use my phone or one of my Apple TVs as the interface for Sonos.

I’d rather my NAS not be a cloud or iTunes, but as is the case for my home computing, Apple got here first and I’m a long way in to bail now.

Thanks for the responses.

I’m looking to rip/sort/store/play my 1000+ CD collection. Do any of you have strong thoughts or personal experience with any hardware or services?

I’ve been looking at the B2. http://www.thebrennan.com

Also looking at Google Play.

I don’t listen to nearly all my music because I don’t always want to go through rows and rows of CDs to either rip and listen or put in the car for my work commute.

However, I wouldn’t mind doing that for a week or two around the clock if I could find a way to build a massive library, cloud or physical, and then access it via home entertainment devices. I’m using Sonos currently.

Thanks in advance.