NeverarGreat

DominicCobb said:

NeverarGreat said:

If we’d gotten even a minute of broom boy in the Casino Bight scenes his ending would be much more defensible.

Um… what?

I’m saying that his part in the movie was rushed, just like the rest of Casino Bight. Just because it’s essential to the theme of the movie to place a character with little plot significance into strong focus in the final shot doesn’t mean that he shouldn’t have an arc. For example, when we are first introduced to him tending the animals, his abusive master could have knocked him to the ground and broken the Luke Skywalker toy, where he abandons it in shame. Then we would have all of the pieces of his arc in place after Rose and Finn restore his faith in the Resistance and the Jedi, and we’d see the repaired figure at the end. It doesn’t take much.

If we’d gotten even a minute of broom boy in the Casino Bight scenes his ending would be much more defensible.

TV’s Frink said:

NeverarGreat said:

My parents had a Dave Barry book which I read in my impressionable youth (I thought it was hilarious), and now whenever I bring it up I get strange looks from my peers.

This…except for the part where I bring it up now.

Well I’ve only made that mistake about twice.

My parents had a Dave Barry book which I read in my impressionable youth (I thought it was hilarious), and now whenever I bring it up I get strange looks from my peers.

The article just proves that 2017 has made it a whole lot harder to write something more absurd than current events.

Stumbled across this. Kinda weird, but less cluttered and more painterly than the original.

DuracellEnergizer said:

So tempted to make “We Are Doom” my sock now.

If fake accounts are socks, are our real accounts feet?

TV’s Frink said:

Ok but that wasn’t clear because you didn’t say so.

Top men are working on it.

TV’s Frink said:

NeverarGreat said:

Kylo Puts a Shirt On

Ha!

Although I suppose this could be considered an extraordinarily mild spoiler.

That’s why I only linked to it.

Kylo Puts a Shirt On (Extremely Mild Spoiler For Frink) 😃

Kylo tells her in the red room.

The Maz scene was the only truly offensive thing in this movie. I imagine that this was the intent though, since Rian has no qualms with destroying the stupid aspects of The Force Awakens in the most savage way possible. What better way to tell JJ that Maz is a videogame NPC than by literally putting her in one?

A well-conceived plan. However I would leave the Jakku joke, it really worked for me.

Hal 9000 said:

Have plans for editing the Hobbit already been described somewhere I can reference? I find that interesting.

https://forums.fanedit.org/showthread.php?tid=15702

The main goal would be to make a three-in-one edit that is around 2 hours 30 minutes and recaptures the magical adventure angle that I feel has been missing from both the original movies and all of the edits so far. One idea for this that I haven’t seen anywhere else is that I’m planning on cutting Rivendell entirely and keeping quite a bit from the Mirkwood elves.

Thanks, I’ll let you know in a few years when TFA and the Hobbit edit are done 😉

After seeing this again in the theater, I have further ideas on how to approach this edit.

There’s little reason to keep the opening battle, since the only players of importance in this are Leia and Poe. I believe that it’s still necessary to open the film on Luke’s island, but the film can still have much of its intercutting between the island and the chase. Here’s a rough idea of what the crawl could look like:

Hope is gone. With
the Republic in ruins,
the First Order has
driven the Resistance
from their base and
tracked them across
the galaxy.

Searching for a way
to evade Leader Snoke’s
relentless pursuit,
two Resistance agents
seek the location of a
skilled code slicer and
ally of the Resistance.

Meanwhile, on a solitary
planet in the depths
of uncharted space,
the last Jedi has
finally been found…

The scenes might follow this order (I still don’t have a good memory of every scene, so apologies if there are missing scenes):

-Luke and Rey meet, Luke throws the lightsaber.
-Rey argues with Luke, Chewie breaks down the door, Luke boards the Falcon, meets R2, Rey follows Luke on his daily routine.
-Rey discovers the Jedi Texts.
-Rey practices with the lightsaber, introduced to the Caretakers in this way.
-Luke decides to train Rey, the first lesson.

-Leia in hyperspace, the First Order arrives.
-Attack on the bridge crew, Leia unconscious, Holdo hints at secret sources of hope (It might be possible to make Finn and Rose Holdo’s secret backup plan).

-Rose and Finn arrive on Canto Bight, are put in prison (maybe give Rose a flashback of her sister dying in battle so we understand the significance of her medallion).

-Rey and Ren, darkside cave, Luke’s flashbacks.

…and so forth.

The rest of the movie would play out as it does. It would be simple to cut out Finn’s superfluous battle with Phasma, and cut from them running to the shuttle to escaping the destruction. It would be nice if Luke had his green saber at the end, but it’s probably more work than it’s worth.

ChainsawAsh said:

Okay, last one for a while probably - alternate TLJ with the Dolby Cinema poster on front. I don’t know who did the logo removal on the source I used, but it wasn’t me. It had a prequel-style “Episode VIII” logo on it that I cropped out.

Here’s a textless version of that poster I made using the highest quality sources I could find:

https://mega.nz/#!LM0xFIBK!OE1LrWmMmgXb5DqYHOMzYhLv36gmK7_gU1tSM47j7vc

Now that TLJ has been out for several weeks, it might be good to talk about that penultimate Snoke scene in this edit. In TLJ Hux has a line that would be perfect for the beginning of this scene, so maybe that would be a good v3 addition at some point. 😃

chyron8472 said:

This is the Random Thoughts thread, so…

All these birthday wishes are making me want to wish suspiciouscoffee a Very Merry Un-UnBirthday, which makes me want to wish a Merry UnBirthday to a raven which is apparently somehow not unlike a writing desk.

Ugh, I just watched this today. Definitely the most UnGood Disney animated movie.

Even George Lucas admitted that becoming a parent changed the way he made movies. You’re no longer a rebel fighting the system, but a responsible adult and a role model for your kids. I do not doubt that Hamill’s view of Luke is filtered through this lens. Who wants to be a parent who even for a moment contemplates the murder of a relative? Anyone would rightfully be uncomfortable with such an idea, so sometimes it takes an outsider to admit unsavory elements of a character that have always been there.

If you wanted to be really daring, make the last paragraph of the crawl say that Rey has offered Luke the symbol of the Jedi so that he may return to the fight, then pan down to the planet and Luke chucking the saber. If done well, it would be as interesting as any space battle.

It sounds to me that Hamill was being truthful when he said that he initially had doubts with Rian’s version of Luke, and he’s being truthful here when he says that the movie is nevertheless great.

He doesn’t strike me as the sort of person to lie; he probably just regrets giving cover to angry fanboys.

I’m not super concerned about small things or moments of humor, except perhaps BB-8’s AT-ST antics. My idea for editing this right now is to remove the evacuation of the Resistance base entirely, and make a crawl that implies that the First Order already has the Resistance on the run. Start the movie with Rey on the island, and spend the opening scenes there and with her communications with Kylo. Then bring in Canto Bight as a re-introduction of the Resistance, and only after this do we meet up with Leia and Poe.

I’ll be seeing the movie again tomorrow, so I’ll be looking to see if this is at all feasible.

DOONEY SAVES STAR WARS WITH AWESOME GUITAR SOLO.

DigMod said:

BleuAsh said:

Somebody Neverar had the idea of opening the movie with canto bight. Finn is simply awake. You cut maz Kanata explanation. Cut the drippy Finn scene. Cut scene with rose and him in the escape pod and she zaps him. The last scenes (minus the ring) could set the stage as part of the canto bight sequence either at the front or at the end of it. Truncate this sequence a lot overall. Cut the chase. Cut the beach landing. They find DJ in jail and get on the stolen ship back to the fleet. Then cut to TFA chewie and Rey landing on achto.

I like he idea of Finn already being awake. That would imply time has passed. I’ll have to think about this one. The crawl would need to set these scenes up but I’m not sure we have a reason for this to happen without he opening scenes.
I suppose this movie could start with the implications that the Resistance is going to cut off the snakes head so to speak. Finn could be locating a slicer that will allow him to infiltrate the flag ship of the First Order and destroy it from within. That could go wrong and they could trace the Resistance base through the band Finn is wearing leading to the opening scenes. Hmmm, I’ll have to think about this one more. Thanks for spurring on this thought. 😃

My idea was to open with Rey on the island so that the normal version of TFA could be viewed before this, and only after time has passed on the island would the Resistance plot begin on Canto Bight. Of course with DigMod’s TFA edit this ‘time has passed’ idea would be easier.

I hadn’t considered changing the plot to one of assassination, but that would go a long way towards making the finale work: ‘That’s how we’re gonna win. Not fighting what we hate, saving what we love.’

This guy’s comment/review is a fair summary of my own thoughts. Here’s his whole review:

Henry Gorman said:

This is a frustrating movie.

It has an impressive and noble ambition: to expose the fundamental hollowness of the Star Wars franchise’s heroes and their conflicts, and then, to give them some kind of substance. The Luke Skywalker who appears here is shockingly caustic and cynical, but the selfishness he displays has long been part of his character. He’s always been pulled into heroism by his hungers for recognition, fame, and family. Even though he’s a hero of the Rebellion, he has no organic connection to it, and never shows much interest in its overarching goals (which have almost always been irrelevant to the movie). If he had gone to the Academy a few years ago, as he had wanted to, he likely would have become a TIE fighter pilot. The younger heroes of The Force Awakens are not so different. Rey, a total social outcast, is fueled by a hunger for any sort of connection and purpose; Finn, the cowardly former stormtrooper whose behavior and background never quite gel, is much the same; Poe Dameron is valorous but, in this film, also a vainglorious death seeker whose choices undermine the cause. The Last Jedi confronts its protagonists with the limits of this selfish type of heroism and forces them to transcend it. It also tries to contextualize their struggle within the broader social and metaphysical realities. For the first time in the main saga, the Force is presented as something other than a vague abstraction, and the Resistance/Rebellion has a clear cause to fight for.

However, until the last 45 minutes or so of the film’s two and a half hours, Rian Johnson really struggles to dramatize all of this. He lacks JJ Abrams’s easy knack for creating character relationships out of thin air, which is a major problem in a film which separates its protagonists from their established friends for most of its runtime. He’s similarly clumsy with tone; the film’s opening sequence begins with Spaceballs-like farce, but pivots to Battlestar Galactica-like grim desperation without much consideration for how its comedy and tragedy interact. He also draws on a variety of stylistic influences (the aforementioned Spaceballs and Battlestar Galactica, Kurosawa’s oeuvre, Baz Luhrman’s Great Gatsby, Avatar: The Last Airbender) without constructively synthesizing them into a coherent whole, as Tarantino, Edgar Wright, or even George Lucas would have. The movie’s finale, which brings its main characters together and unifies its aesthetics, is far more effective and engaging (and beautiful! it includes both the most visually striking spaceship destruction and the most visually magnificent land battle in the whole franchise), but it’s undermined by what came before it. It also teases, then chickens out of making a few especially exciting choices.

So, The Last Jedi is more interesting than it is effective. It’s more thematically rich than The Force Awakens, but far less functional from moment to moment. I think it will produce some great fanfiction. I’d love to hear a rebuttal from one of the people who think that it’s the best Star Wars since The Empire Strikes Back.