TheBoost

Akwat Kbrana said:

I don't know if it qualifies as "great" or not, but I'd have to go with The Goonies. Boy, that movie pisses me off.

 Listen. You can hate "Casablanca" or "Citizen Kane" or "Starship Troopers" or anything you want. You can even call my wife ugly and my kid stupid. These are all matters of opinion.

But NO ONE gets to say anything bad about the Goonies!!!! No one!!!!!!!!!

Warbler said:

 

   Another movie that I say I hate, but it just confuses me: 2001.

 2001 doesnt confuse me at all.

It just bores me to tears.

15 minutes of slitscreen photography and odd colored landscapes? Endless shots of things moving in zero gravity? That great "oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo" drone sound that is used endlessly?  I get what the movies about, and I just wish it was a lot shorter.

Wait a minute!!!!!

Every single person on this board likes "Star Wars!"

So does most everyone!

We're all sheeple! Sheeple!!!! Wake up!!!!!!!!! WE ARE THE HERD!!!!

Warbler said:

TheBoost said:

On the less arty front, I don't like any TOS Star Trek films except "Undiscovered Country."

 

what's wrong with Wrath Of Khan?    Voyage Home?

I don't hate hate them, but I don't ever plan on watching them again. 

I hate "Dr. Zhivago." Hate it hate it hate it. It's not that I'm opposed to older films, I love many old classics. I just hate Zhivago. SOOOO much.

I also was bored to tears by "Nashville"  and I think "2001" was 40+ minutes too long.

On the less arty front, I don't like any TOS Star Trek films except "Undiscovered Country."

So, what great movies do you hate?

The entire "Border's Cafe" coffeeshops inside Borders stores. Specifically their line of thick, sweet Chai-style drinks.

Now it's all "Seattle's Best Coffee" which I find to be an inferior product.

Vaderisnothayden said:

I'm going to stop debating the herd mentality thing, because people won't appreciate the argument much, but don't expect that my opinion on the matter is going to change. I don't mean any offense to anybody with the herd-think viewpoint, I just believe in it and I brought it up because I felt it was unavoidable at that stage of the discussion.

 

Warbler said:

 

TOS is crap????     to me and every other TOS fan, that is blasphemous.   It is certainly not crap.  Are the special effects crap?  maybe.   But you have to realize they were made in the 60's and they didn't have much of a budget.   I find many of the episodes have a powerful message.   Take City on The Edge Of Forever.   That is certainly not crap.   I don't how you can call TOS crap.   If it was, explain how  5 series and 11 movies have come out of it.  

I wouldnt go so far as to say TOS was crap, but I myself have never particuarly cared for it. I like TNG more, but I prefer the films in general.

When I read something like the compelling, suspenseful, dramatic events of 'Undiscovered Country' are somehow bad because  they're not well enough in line with the Utopian ideals of the series, my feeling is always that I'd rather have a good epic movie than some episode where the Enterprise meets the Greek gods or breaks the Prime Directive so Kirk can monologue on morallity.

That 'First Contact' is bad because it kicks ass and has intense human emotion, rather than a Captain who drinks some tea and decides he's philisophically opposed to stopping the Borg and then makes a speech about secular humanism and socialism strikes me as a fairly irrelevant argurment against my favorite TNG film.

Vaderisnothayden said:

Bingowings said:

Ricardo's performance is broad in the same way that the Shat's is in that film.

There was no taste to Montalban's hamming in Wrath.

 I just don't see a guys who's spent 20+ years on a hell planet obsessing over revenge and quoting Milton as the sort of performance that calls for extreme subtlty.

Krakatoa said:

Normally the heroes/villains authors come up with just aren't strong enough to stand up on their own for a full-length story (actually a reason why I like the cartoons usually - they can make cool-looking characters while focusing on a short, self-contained story).

 I think short, self-contained stories, would be the best way the EU could proceed. Not 19 novel epics that redefine the fictional universe. just adventures, that may connect, but each work should be mainly independent, with a climax all its own (you know... like the movies had!)

Vaderisnothayden said:

The eu past about 1986 isn't worth paying much attention to anyway. Some of that later stuff is good, but it gets farther and farther away from the spirit of Star Wars. The Zahn books were a revisionist take and Dark Empire was bull and the rest of it followed on from there.

 I've always thought the Zahn books suffered from a couple major flaws. Not that they were revisionist, but that they neglected the Star Wars heroes.

Look at Thrawn. Cold, brilliant, a real threat. But Zahn clearly liked him more than he liked the heroes.  So on top of that, Thrawn is fairminded, egalitarian, and only brought down due to treachery over an atrocious crime he didn't commit.  If Thrawn had been a brilliant, cold, sadistic psycopath, then he would have been a great villain. Adding three or four more books of Thrawn worship later didn't help.

Han and Luke and company seem to be there so they can observe how fascinating, moral, and brilliant Thrawn, Jade, and Carde are.

Who takes out the villains? Mara Jade kills the clone of Luke, Jade kills Cboath, some Nogrhi kills Thrawn from behind while Thrawn is winning. I found that irksome.

I think if you look at the EU overcomplicated mess, the solution shouldn't be "how can we make this a whole lot more complicated? I know, let's add alternate timelines and time travel! That'll make it less obtuse to read!"

I say wipe it clean and salt the Earth.

My dream show would be a cartoon following the adventures of Luke, Han, and the gang between SW and ESB. Rebels on the run, space pirates, smugglers, new villains, new love interests, crazy adventures, new monsters etc.

Because any sequal has to take the "And they lived happily ever after..." from the end of ROTJ and add a big "BUT!" to it.

If they did, I'd like to see it be based primarily on smaller adventure stories about

a: Cleaning up the now increasingly pleasent galaxy from small time tyrants, crime lords, and misc. baddies. It will take time for the great New Republic to really straighten out the Galaxy.

b: Searching for new Potential Jedi and lost Jedi Knowledge to rebuild the Order. This would be Luke's life's work. The Order shouldn't be totally rebuilt in 10 or 20 years.

Bingowings said:

 

 

Boost I've already posted about what he is satirising by adopting this style (it's not as important a target as the terrors of Nazi fascism but it's still a worthy target as this thread illustrates).

Then I think the crux of our disagreement is whether he's actually satirizing anything. I see it as just a cheap shock with no bearing on anything, but I do suppose it's possible he's tying to make some kind of humorous point (although even if he is, in my opinion he fails miserably).

I can agree to disagree on this, comfortable in the knowledge that neither of us are actually for murdering women.

Bingowings said:

Hasn't it been done to death by now?

BTW I wasn't saying the humour was of the same quality as Charlie Chaplin but just as Charles was not being a Nazi in The Great Dictator this guy isn't being a misogynist in this review.

 Chaplin used humor to ruthlessly skewer Naziism and intolerance.

This dude,  'I hate Star Wars and by the way, look, a woman being tortured in my basement. Isn't that funny?' He never even made a joke or a point, or a humorous observation. It was nothing but a cheap shock. I think humor and satire can make a lot of offensive stuff acceptable, but its not just that this dude isn't funny, it's that what he puts there isn't even trying.

Imagine if he said "I hate The Phantom Menace, and I'm molesting kids in my basement."

captainsolo said:

It shouldn't be rebooted, but more stories should be written that are in the original spirit of the films. How about that bounty hunter on Ord Mantell?

 I think there are at least three versions of that story, including one radio drama and a comic.

TV's Frink said:

Ha!  Power of the People!  Come on gang, let's stick it to the big faceless company that gave us this thread and then pulled the rug out from under us.  Down with xhonzicorp!

 This thread is so selfreferrential and surreal... I don't even know who I am anymore... ... ...

Darth Solo said:

Im making the presumtuation that most people are disgruntled with modern cinema and home movies.

 I wonder, was there ever really a point that most movies being made were actually any good? Ever? I'm not so sure.

 (1) "Easy Virture"

(2) My wife rented it because she likes movies with pretty dresses.

(3) For a Noel Coward period piece, I rather liked it. Damn funny at points, with an interesting undercurrent of disillusionment at the end of an era. I never thought I'd laugh so hard at a film that deal with the horrors of surviving WWI and euthanasia.

(4) 8/10

Bingowings said:

Vaderisnothayden said:

Bingowings said:

The humour is only misogynist if he is being serious, which clearly he isn't.

Certain types of things are misogynistic even when they're meant as humor. The humor here is clearly misogynistic. Clearly he is not being serious about keeping women tied up in his basement, but putting it forward as a joke is misogynistic. And humor is often used as cover for bigotry, such as in various comedians' routines -fake bigotry that really is real bigotry.

What utter twaddle.

So The Great Dictator is a pro-fascist film?

 Come on Bingo.

Are you really comparing the satire of Charlie FREAKING Chaplin, one of the greatest comedians of all time, to this Star Wars dude's non-sequitor 'jokes' about torturing women in his basement?

Vaderisnothayden said:

It's disturbing to see people being ok with the misogyny in the review. 

 I for one don't find violence/murder agaist women jokes to be funny. I also tend not to laugh at jokes about lynchings or child abuse... but that may just be me.

This thread is whack. I'm putting it on Darth Solo's one.

Who thinks it would be a good idea to reboot the entire EU? Just wipe the slate clean.

Let authors have fun with the material again without having to try and be bound by 10,000 previous projects. Let the world feel fresh and exciting again, not filled with tons of repeated refrences to the same concepts, terms, and hackneyed philosophies espoused in earlier books (Isn't "Fate of the Jedi" literally all about retracing the philisophical path Jacen Solo took over the two previous 19 novels? What happened to rescuing the princess and blowing up bad guys?)

Let them try and capture the spirit of the films, not the spirit of slightly better EU works from a decade before.

No more confusion about canon between the PT and the EU because it is obvious Lucas doesn't give a flying fig about EU canon. Let the new material have 12 hours of movies to be consistent with, and ignore everything else. No more decades long repercussion of soul sucking alien invaders, or 8 or 9 new Sith Organizations that seem to coexist. No weird plot twists to cover-up, retcon, or explain away inconsistencies or plotholes. Just new adventures set during and after the films.

I still read the EU, despite generally not liking it, since an average EU novel takes me an afternoon (I always skip most of the last third) and I love Star Wars. I just wish they didn't suck.

Vaderisnothayden said:

xhonzi said:

Back to the Marvel comics... are these collected somewhere?  My googling says "no."  And my magic 8 ball says "Ask again later."

Yes, there's a series of trade paperbacks called Classic Star Wars: Along Time Ago. http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Classic_Star_Wars:_A_Long_Time_Ago...

 And they rule!!!

QUEEN AMIDALA: Jennifer Connely. (regality and can play young or old at that age)

ANAKIN: (grown up) Robert Downey Jr. (charming, but skilled at dark characters)

ANAKIN: (lil Kid) who knows.

QUI GON: Frank Langella

OBI-WAN: Kenneth Branaugh (was born to do it)

MACE WINDU: Rutger Hauer (a bad MFer if there ever was one)

COUNT DOOKU: Louis Jordan (aristocratic with a real good twisted side)

DARTH MAUL: Young Jackie Chan (would blow the audiences away in 1985)