Broom Kid

I’ve heard people call it “The Bow TIE” and I like that.

Also, this is the first episode of this show that I’ve REALLY liked. Characterization was good, the interaction between the characters was good - it was the first episode that seemed to be making some serious choices and following through on them. Plus the pacing was GREAT.

Deborah Chow and Rick Famuyiwa are easily the two voices on this show with the best handle on how to make it all work.

That just… doesn’t make any sense.

Which is a thing I don’t know why it still surprises me to say. “I was wrong” and “That doesn’t make any sense” are phrases that have gotten heavy, heavy workouts in the last 10 or so years, haha.

We’re in trouble!

Even if it noses above 60% by this Friday (which is possible, no doubt) that would still make it the 2nd worst reviewed Star Wars film on RT. Just above The Phantom Menace, which only sank to rotten status thanks to the 3D re-release giving critics a second shot at appraising it with 10+ years of hindsight.

If that re-release hadn’t happened, this would likely be the worst reviewed Star Wars film on that site. (well, not counting The Clone Wars, directed by Dave Filoni)

Whether that affects the legs, who knows. This holiday season is still almost perfectly primed for a very long, record-breaking run for a movie that really keys into public sentiment in a big way. But I don’t know if Rise of Skywalker ended up being that movie. It might have the runway paved and only jog halfway down it.

I mean, if this movie is a big overstuffed mess, I’ll be okay with it. Attack of the Clones didn’t ruin Empire Strikes Back or A New Hope. This won’t ruin The Last Jedi. Kevin J. Anderson didn’t make me stop reading books. It’s perfectly Star Wars for Star Wars to end on a weirdly overstuffed and kinda unsatisfying note (ROTS, ROTJ, TROS I guess?) so I’m… fine with it. There are other movies to watch this Winter (Uncut Gems, 1917… CATS, hahaha - Oh god, what if that movie gets a higher RT score) so I’m not too worried about whether Star Wars, which is only barely more good than it is bad as a film series (which makes it pretty good so far as long-running film series go) ends on a shrug.

But that essay is sort of weird. It almost reads like a eulogy for all the time that guy spent writing about Star Wars on fansites people don’t read. “I’m sure it’s trash but I’ll like it anyway” is an interesting choice of epitaph for 20+ years of volunteer work.

That big fat 56% on Rotten Tomatoes may not make much of a difference on the opening weekend, but I’m starting to wonder if the legs are gonna be a lot shorter than expected.

This is HILARIOUS

https://twitter.com/JeremyRMedina/status/1207330912251203584

Mike O said:

Seems like an educated guess at this point, though I’d love to be wrong.

There’s nothing educated about the guess, though. It’s literally a reaction rooted in personal headcanon/fiction and nothing more. Someone asked themselves on a forum once “what could possibly prevent me from getting the product I want to purchase” and the first thing they came up with was “Lucas put a clause in the contract.” It sounded good enough, and a lot of people ran with it. But it’s not sourced to anything. It’s literally spec that people decided to accept and promote because the notion that Disney just doesn’t want to contradict Lucas’ wishes was too unbelievable for them.

act on instinct said:

Broom Kid you sort of prove my point when you dismiss one filmmaker over another, just swap the names.

Broom Kid said:
I see what he’s trying to do, and I understand why he’s trying to do it. I just think he’s not doing a very good job of communicating it.

this basically sums up my TLJ feelings, and why I made the comparison to begin with, both are using characters that have die hard fans who say the filmmaker broke the “rules” i.e. Batman doesn’t kill/Superman wouldn’t do this, and so on. But depending on which camp you’re in, one is heresy and the other is just fans mad they didn’t get what they wanted.

This doesn’t really make any sense. I’m not dismissing him, I’m assessing him. My assessment is that as a storyteller and a filmmaker, he’s ultimately very thin and surface, and he doesn’t have much more to offer as a filmmaker than anything he’s done beyond that surface decision. If my assessment is a dismissal, and dismissal is bad, why are you then directly comparing it to what you’re also doing? Either dismissal is bad, and neither you and I should be doing it, or you only consider it “dismissal” when you disagree with the assessment.

“Depending on which camp you’re in” gets to the other point I was making, which is that a lot of this discussion is about the discussion itself, and the grievance to be found once you spend enough time in there. What you’re finding fault with right now isn’t so much that I might disagree with you, or that others don’t share your opinion, it’s that you think it’s unfair that you’re being judged to be in “the wrong camp” because of that disagreement. At that point, nobody’s talking about the movie anymore at all. They’re talking about themselves, and their grievance at being misunderstood and “dismissed” (there’s that word again).

I don’t really understand why it matters what “camp” you’re in at all. It doesn’t actually affect you, and anyone who IS willing to cut you off and/or dismiss you based on nothing more than their perception of your camp and not your actual ideas that you’ve supported with your own thoughts is someone who has shown themselves to be not worth the concern anyway.

As an aside: Simply having the intent to do something isn’t enough, when it comes to storytelling. The execution counts so much more than the intent does. With your Snyder example, his intentions are made very, very clear, and there’s no real mistaking them once you see them. The problem I’ve had with basically everything he’s done since “300” is that his execution never improves, and in many cases has gotten worse over time.

If a movie is to be judged based on how well it’s trying to do what it wants to do, I find his films lacking not because he wants to do something I wouldn’t do, but because he ultimately doesn’t do it well enough to take me on his journey with him. He CAN do this, and he’s done it before (Both “Dawn of the Dead” and “300” are really good examples, and to a lesser extent, so is “Sucker Punch.”) but he doesn’t do it very consistently, and when he messes up, it’s very noticeable.

That, however, isn’t a judgment of you, or your character, or your person. It just means I don’t like the guy’s movies as much as you do. That doesn’t put you in a camp, nor does it invalidate your opinions.

act on instinct said:

Sure if you are empathetic to Rian Johnson’s vision (this is if you don’t already like the movie) and look through his lens you can see where it was coming from, but I hardly see people do the same for Zack Snyder when he attempts his own interpretation on legacy characters that have already been rebooted.

Zack Snyder and Rian Johnson aren’t very comparable as filmmakers or storytellers, though. But even if the comparison is made, I don’t find a lot of examples of people who criticize Snyder’s take on superheroes without taking his POV into consideration. Speaking for myself (which is really the only thing I CAN do) it’s not that his POV isn’t being considered - I see what he’s trying to do, and I understand why he’s trying to do it. I just think he’s not doing a very good job of communicating it. Essentially, with Snyder, the choice isn’t supported, elaborated upon, or really built upon - the choice more or less IS the entirety of what he’s doing. It’s a POV that is entirely about itself. It’s a choice whose whole aim is to say THIS IS THE CHOICE I MADE and then there’s no real attempt to make something more of it than that.

I understand people not liking the decisions Johnson made regarding storytelling and Star Wars, but I don’t know that people can argue he didn’t try to go somewhere and say something with them. Most of the complaints (the good faith ones, the thoughtful ones, at least) acknowledge they don’t like where he started from, and thus where he ended up wasn’t satisfying to them, but they at least acknowledge the start and the end were different points. With Snyder’s take on superheroism, there’s no real journey anywhere. It’s just sort of a very loud, posed, rigid stance that doesn’t lead to any further understanding or thematic depth beyond its own superficial opening statement, because all it’s really trying to do is justify itself.

I liked the Last Jedi video everyone’s talking about, not just because it’s self-deprecating in general (I’m a sucker for that sort of disarming leveling of the playing field) but it tends to get at the two major factors that I think prolong this argument/fight/discussion/anger surrounding the film: The idea that rules were broken, and the idea that voices aren’t being heard. Much of the conversation about the Last Jedi isn’t even really about the movie itself, but about the people “discussing” it, and the grievances they hold at any insinuation their POV isn’t being carefully considered, or flat out ignored. The Last Jedi has become not much more than a grievance mill, and personal grievances are what much of the discussion is about. Any video that acknowledges those conversational practices in an effort to steer discussion back towards the movie itself, and what the movie is actually trying to say about people, is worth watching, whether the person who made it absolutely loves the movie or not.

Seems like Comic Book is citing Fantha Tracks which is citing a Dutch website that’s, so far as I can tell, essentially just guessing?

I believe dates for the digital/blu-ray/4k releases aren’t decided until after the 2nd or 3rd weekend, because that gives them a better idea as to when the meat of the theatrical run is going to be over, and gives them a better idea of how much distance between the end of that run and their release date will be.

I could be wrong, but that seems to be the general practice?

I think this was probably the best directed/shot/edited episode of the whole run to this point, but I also think that unless these last two episodes significantly improve their quality (a rising tide lifts all boats and all) this is going to be, like Clone Wars Season 1 and Rebels Season 1, an overall dud. Mediocre at best.

The best thing to come out of this show is easily its soundtrack. I’m still waiting for the episodes themselves to live up to the music scoring them. It hasn’t quite happened yet.

In keeping with my volunteer role as keeper of the dim flame that is but a fool’s hope, I’m posting the transcript of this conversation with JJ Abrams, and reminding people that JJ Abrams is a very cautious and careful political animal when on the PR circuit, and chooses his words very carefully, ESPECIALLY after he burnt himself on the press tour for Star Trek Into Darkness.

Interviewer: Would you as a fan like to see the theatrical versions made available commercially?
Abrams: Yes, and I have asked about this-
Interviewer: -really?
Abrams: Well, 'cause who wouldn’t wanna see that? But I’ve been told that, for reasons that I don’t quite understand, that that’s not necessarily possible.

And then the interviewer goes on to misrepresent the whole Library of Congress anecdote and Abrams pokes fun at him for it, so on and so forth, but that’s the relevant bit.

Here’s the cracks of daylight that might be poking through the maybe not all the way closed door:

Abrams might have asked awhile ago (like, circa 2013/14) and… just never asked again, and so he doesn’t know what the current plans are, since he’s been very busy making a movie and all.

The words “not necessarily” carry a lot of weight, as does his “reasons I don’t quite understand.” It says he’s at a remove, and he’s not clear on what it is that’s actually happening with it, and more importantly, that he never really followed up.

The most simple explanation is that someone (Kennedy? Iger?) told him the same thing we’ve all come to understand over the same 5-6 year period: They don’t come out because Lucasfilm doesn’t want to piss off George Lucas if they don’t have to, and they know this isn’t a thing he really wants, so out of courtesy, they’re not doing it.

That’s confusing and weird to a lot of fans (to the point we’ve created out of whole cloth and perpetuated for the last 5-6 years a crackpot theory about contractual clauses) so I don’t know why it wouldn’t be confusing to Abrams in a quick conversation with Kathy Kennedy or Bob Iger four years ago, either. Especially if he’s coming at it from the standpoint of “but you guys own it. And you have access to better equipment than literally anyone else trying to do this work.”

But he’s still being careful. He asked once, was told a thing, and is still hedging bets on its possibility. Just because he directed the newest Star Wars movie doesn’t necessarily (hey, there’s that word) mean he knows what the rest of Disney/Lucasfilm is planning on doing with the other films, any more than John Landis (who doesn’t even work there) knew what they were doing a few years ago when he told everyone the originals were coming because he was talking to George one day.

This wasn’t a good episode of television.

Not sure how you waste Amy Sedaris and Ming Na Wen like that.

John Doom said:

I see it this way:
ANH: Vader (together with Tarkin) is the villain who killed Luke’s father and his mentor.
TESB: Vader captures and tortures Luke’s friends to get him and later reveals to be his own father.
ROTJ: Luke is said to defeat Vader, yet their conflict relationship brings them together and overthrow his master.
To me, it’s all about their relationship, one way or another.

Those first two examples aren’t really a relationship. There’s no real back and forth. They don’t interact directly at all in the first movie, only briefly interact (albeit dramatically) in the last act of the second movie, and Luke, it can be argued, doesn’t really know WHO that guy was that killed Ben by the end of Star Wars.

The third movie is where any actual relationship really happens, has an arc, and resolves. The very last 20 minutes of the second movie sets up a relationship that COULD happen. But again - you can’t really describe the first 2/3rds of Empire as a “relationship.” They don’t interact. Luke doesn’t even know who Vader IS.

And again - Vader being Luke’s father was never any part of a plan. It was introduced very late in the game and almost specifically to deploy a cliffhanger so out-of-nowhere that audiences would feel compelled to see the third movie to see how that resolved.

Spoilers for new Star Wars movies are always pretty revealing in how so much of what we enjoy about Star Wars are things we enjoy because we only ever saw the final product sans any “discourse” that consistently surrounded all aspects of production. Things we take for granted as great storytelling are often taken as such because we hadn’t yet infected ourselves with a veritable rulebook of mythology that we can’t wait to break out whenever we hear about stories that we haven’t seen yet, to pre-emptively show how deeply in violation they are.

The most impactful reveal in all of Star Wars history (and honestly, film history) was pretty much pulled directly out of Lucas’ ass VERY late in the game on the second movie alone. It turned his trilogy’s hero into the son of a genocidal fascist, and the most direct representation of evil in action up to that point.

Describing that story as a “relationship” developed over three movies is mostly untrue. There isn’t a relationship AT ALL for most of the first two movies. You only find out there’s a legitimate connection deeper than “You killed my father prepare to die” at the very end of the second movie. The third movie is the one that has to actually develop that relationship into something, and it’s arguable how well that was done. The heroic moment on Vader’s part carries a LOT of that weight.

“Universe shrinkage” ceased being a problem that was ever going to have a solution back in 1999. It’s been 20 years.

I don’t understand why Rey being the hidden/lost daughter of a Palpatine is so sacrilegous when Luke was the hidden/lost son of Darth Vader.

What is Star Wars if not the story of love being stronger than hate, even (especially) when that hate is coming from your own family?

Why wouldn’t a lost Palpatine meet Skywalkers and decide love is so much stronger? What’s out of bounds about that?

edit: My understanding re: “the original” version of the Trevorrow story, before it got canceled and Abrams was brought in, is that Leia still died in the movie, and her role wasn’t that big. Trying to remember where I read that, though.

If they’re going so far as to swap out all HD versions across all the digital outlets for the new masters they’re going to make 4K DCPs available. They’re pretty easy to create and duplicate. There’s no reason not to have it done.

That’s a really good point to keep in mind - the legs on this are going to be better than The Last Jedi’s whether it’s a better movie or not simply because of the calendar, and the placement of this film’s opening on that calendar.

And if this ends up being a film that’s more liked than The Last Jedi was, and the positive word of mouth is higher and louder, then those legs will be even longer. There’s a point at which the length of a run becomes self-marketing in and of itself, too. That sort of happened on The Force Awakens, but the best examples are still Avatar and Titanic. There were points in January and February of the following year where business was unprecedented because… business was unprecedented!

You want your movie to be in a position where its success becomes tautological, haha

It’ll probably change.

For comparison’s sake, here are Deadline’s tracking articles for the previous entries:

$185-210m - The Force Awakens
https://deadline.com/2015/11/star-wars-the-force-awakens-box-office-opening-estimate-1201636913/

$200m - The Last Jedi
https://deadline.com/2017/11/star-wars-the-last-jedi-200-million-opening-1202213679/

$205m - The Rise of Skywalker
https://deadline.com/2019/11/star-wars-the-rise-of-skywalker-box-office-projection-reasons-why-1202796194/

The tracking numbers usually go up closer to release, but then again, tracking numbers are kind of… weird. It’s been written about multiple times that tracking past a certain point is basically magical guesswork because it’s hard to really plot what a movie might make in its opening weekend when the numbers get that large. $185-200 in 2015 was considered a HUGE bet - and yet the movie hit 249. Last Jedi ended up being $20m over its first projection.

Plus, the primary utility for tracking seems to be figuring out a way to add another hurdle for a movie to clear before it can be considered a “win.” It’s not enough that it makes a certain number now, because if that specific number is under whatever this TRACKING number is, that tracking is going to be held against it. It’s how you end up with movies almost doubling their budget in three days getting labeled as “a disappointment,” because industry insiders (who have admitted they’re not great at guessing these huge numbers) stuck an estimate on the film’s earning potential pre-release and the actual money that came in didn’t hit that.

Tracking is literally a set of goalposts that move behind the regular goalpost.

I wonder if this will finally cause studios to stop being so freaked out by the possibility of “spoilers” when it turns out this weird, hugely overstated fear of spoilers is costing them a lot of holiday money now.

DominicCobb said:

But didn’t it come out after the reboot which would have meant granting it an exception unnecessary?

It got released a month after the de-canonizing, but comics scheduling means the whole run was already written and the first two issues (if not three by that point) had finished art. They had to decide to save it or not way before that date.

Ha! Those are my two favorite bits of the trilogy upon a re-read a few years ago, and I do think there are ways to transplant THOSE aspects of the tale into the new canon, and I really hope they do that at some point. It’ll probably have to be animation, but I don’t mind, I think animation is one of the best possible mediums for Star Wars. Maybe even better than live-action in a lot of ways.

They’re already starting to give us a little more Wedge, so who knows…

DominicCobb said:

Broom Kid said:

I think it’s off the table primarily because if they ever actually wanted it to be on the table they’d have made an exception to it’s being de-canonized like they did for Darth Maul: Son of Dathomir.

Not sure I understand what you mean, I didn’t think Son of Dathomir was ever not canon.

They made an exception for it while it was being made, before de-canonizing everything. When the great de-canonizing occurred, that was the one title that was spared, due to it’s being adapted from a Clone Wars script. But it was still a Dark Horse comic, and everything else from Dark Horse’s run got turned into Legends. Son of Dathomir was basically singled out for sparing.

If they were willing to single that title out, they would have been willing to single out Zahn’s trilogy. But they weren’t. Probably because they’d already decided at the time there was not future in adapting it directly. And I think there isn’t for the reasons you laid out: Zahn wrote a Star Wars trilogy that is really more like a 6 or 9 film series in terms of how much story is packed in there, and the tone of it is definitely more like a crime procedural and a military fantasy than the space opera Star Wars is.

It was Zahn writing a great sci-fi military adventure using Star Wars characters. But I don’t know that it would work as an animated Star Wars story. It’s why they’re plucking out the star character and reinterpreting him instead of bringing the whole thing to bear.

I think it just wouldn’t fit with what the sequel trilogy is working with.

I think it’s off the table primarily because if they ever actually wanted it to be on the table they’d have made an exception to it’s being de-canonized like they did for Darth Maul: Son of Dathomir.

They’re going to part it out (Rukh’s already dead in Rebels, isn’t he?) and use pieces of it as needed to augment whatever original stories they’re pursuing in the canon, but I don’t think Thrawn Trilogy is ever going to see an animated adaption.

Maybe when they reboot the entire series in 20 years, they’ll re-think it.

I don’t think they’re going to do that. Adapt OR Eviscerate it. It worked as a book but I can’t imagine an adaptation working at all. For 1991, in a Star Wars-starved time, it felt right. But it’s never been a trilogy that really FIT with the films, even then, and nothing about the way it plays fits with the movies now, either.