joefavs

Been reading a ton the last couple weeks.

-The Lost World by Michael Crichton - meh.
-Eaters of the Dead by Michel Crichton - delightful.
-Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer - interesting.
-Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami - much better than I thought it would be. I thought I hated Murakami, but I guess maybe I just hate Kafka on the Shore.
-The Croning by Laird Barron - only fifty pages into this one, but so far it’s checking a lot of my horror boxes.

CarboniteSolo said:

There’s a rumor going around that there’s two more sequels to this. I don’t know what they have planned.

My understanding is that Ehrenreich and (maybe) Glover are signed on for two more movies, not necessarily direct sequels. I took that to mean maybe a Lando movie with Han in it or a Boba Fett movie with the two of them in it, as opposed to a straight up trilogy of Han movies.

Anchorhead said:

Regarding Malla; I’d love it if they brought that into the light and canonized it.

I mean, Lumpy has already turned up in a canon novel, so Malla’s canonicity is at least implied.

Now that we know Enfys Nest is a woman, do we think there’s going to be some kind of big casting surprise? The only actress on the IMDB cast without a character listed is Lily Newmark, who seems to be far too young, so I have to think it’s someone else.

In all seriousness though, I’d really prefer a Lando movie to the Kenobi and Yoda ideas that get thrown around a lot. I think it would be cool to spin Solo into a sort of loose “scoundrel-verse” series. Could roll the theoretical Boba Fett movie in there too.

Oh god damn it, I just actually saw the URL and you’re probably right. Joke posts shouldn’t be this plausible!

I figured if the still-unconfirmed Kenobi movie deserves its own thread, so does this.

According to SWNN, Black Panther and Creed director Ryan Coogler is in early talks for a Solo followup/spinoff focused on Donald Glover’s Lando.

https://www.starwarsnewsnet.com/2018/04/lando-calrissians-baadasssss-song.html

How do we feel about this? Personally, I was more interested in a Lando movie than a Han one from the start, so I’m totally on board. As for Coogler, I thought Black Panther’s screenplay was kind of eh, but I liked the direction and (most of) the performances. I thought Creed had some similar issues, but I also walked away from that one feeling good on the whole. I think it’ll really come down to who works on the script, but as of now I don’t see any reason to feel uneasy about Coogler.

EDIT: there’s a vague Solo spoiler in the article, so if you want to go in completely cold, skip the fourth paragraph.

Hearing Ian again was a real treat. I thought the guy that voiced Palpatine in the early seasons of TCW did a fine job, but after his death Tim Curry and Sam Witwer never really worked for me. Nothing beats the original recipe, though (and yeah, I know, Clive Revill is actually the “original”, you all know what I mean).

CHEWBAKAspelledwrong said:

Anyone else unable to play the Blu on a Sony player? Apparently this has been a problem for Disney titles as of late. I have an S-1200, latest firmware from 2014.

It loads what looks like a menu image, dings, but no menu options come up.

The regular BD plays fine on my Sony player. My UHD player is a Samsung, so I can’t speak to the 4k disc. I had a similar issue with the Planet of the Apes BDs, though. Wouldn’t play past the Lawgiver intro on my Sony player after a certain firmware update, but worked fine on my PS4 (haven’t tried watching them on the Samsung player yet, but the internet says it’s a problem specific to Sony players so I’m assuming they’ll be fine).

Quick show of hands, who here actually has a Rotten Tomatoes account? I’m genuinely curious about how many people are active on the site, because neither I nor anyone in my social circle has ever reviewed anything there. I suspect that active RT users may be too niche a group to really be representative of audiences overall.

FWIW, Letterboxed (which is the only place I personally ever rate anything) has TLJ with an average score of 3.7 out of 5 stars, with 4 stars being the most popular response by almost twice as much as any of the other responses (I gave it a 4.5).

The only shitty audiences I’ve had to deal with for the last few years have been for indie horror flicks like It Follows and The Witch, and even then it was more an issue of people complaining loudly during the credits that “it wasn’t even scary” than about disturbing others during the movie itself.

DominicCobb said:

joefavs said:

Well it sounds like everyone’s going to get a crack at it in a few weeks, at least in the US. I’ve been seeing stuff about upcoming 70mm screenings for the 50th anniversary beginning in mid-May.

Would see again, even though the showing I went to was only a few months ago. An all time classic. (plus it was almost sold out and I got a bad seat).

Did the same thing with Lawrence two summers ago. Saw the DCP at the Coolidge in June, then found out they had a print in Somerville in September and couldn’t not go for it.

I like the Best Buy 4k steelbook art quite a lot. I’m hoping they design the inevitable 4k releases of the other movies to match.

I’m just frustrated with the way that you can’t carry on a conversation about the movie for more than a couple posts without circling back to whether the movie was good or bad. Surely everyone is on the record at this point. Are we ever going to get to the point where we can just talk about the stuff that happened in the movie without having to reevaluate why we liked or didn’t like it for the umpteenth time?

Well it sounds like everyone’s going to get a crack at it in a few weeks, at least in the US. I’ve been seeing stuff about upcoming 70mm screenings for the 50th anniversary beginning in mid-May.

DominicCobb said:

joefavs said:

TLJ did feel slightly disconnected to me the first few times I saw it in the theater, but after rewatching the whole saga in the few weeks before the TLJ blu-ray and then TLJ last night, it feels absolutely consistent. I think it’s a little difficult for me to get an accurate read on the tone of a movie like this until I can see it in isolation from theater audience reactions.

I think a big part of it must be the expectations thing. As evidenced by GothamKnight’s post, if you were expecting something after TFA and didn’t get exactly that, there might be a disconnect for you personally, even if in reality the two films actually fit very well together.

I don’t think it was even anything so neatly describable as having my expectations subverted. I just remember having this vague apprehension about how the two would play back-to-back, not so much as a consistent story but simply as a viewing experience.

DominicCobb said:

joefavs said:

To return to the WWII comparison, the First Order is more analogous to Nazi war criminals hiding out in South America than it is to post-war Germany.

Well it’s a mix of that and post WWI Germany I think (and also a bit of modern neo-nazism).

Definitely.

To return to the WWII comparison, the First Order is more closely analogous to Nazi war criminals hiding out in South America than it is to post-war Germany.

TLJ did feel slightly disconnected to me the first few times I saw it in the theater, but after rewatching the whole saga in the few weeks before the TLJ blu-ray and then TLJ last night, it feels absolutely consistent. I think it’s a little difficult for me to get an accurate read on the tone of a movie like this until I can see it in isolation from theater audience reactions.

Pickle2503 said:

So I’m on vacation and I wont be back until Friday, so that’s when I’m picking up the Last Jedi 4k blu-ray. To anyone that has it, how good is the 4k, hdr, dolby vision, or dolby atmos? I wanted to hear it from star wars fans (like myself) rather than 4k blu-ray reviewers because my opinions usually are the same as you guys.

Can’t speak to the full-blown Dolby Vision and Atmos presentation as my setup is only HDR10 and 5.1, but even watered down like that it’s really something to see.

I’m reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, because I read an article a couple weeks ago about how I ought to read Ulysses this year for the hundredth anniversary, but that I ought to read Portrait and Dubliners first. I like it a lot better than I did in high school. This could be the start of a wonderful Joyce kick.

I’m losing my mind waiting for a verdict on that job I interviewed for last week. I just want to know if I can commit fully to phoning it in at my current job.

lovelikewinter said:

joefavs said:

When people say “ROTS is actually pretty good,” I think they tend to mean “ROTS actually has pretty good pacing.” In terms of actual story content, I think it’s the PT film with the most wrong with it, but it moves well enough that watching it isn’t a chore like the other two.

I said watchable. Like Superman III is watchable.

I agree. I meant that I think a lot of other people conflate “good” with “watchable”, not that you’re one of those people.

I’m watching the 4K disc right now and the HDR is really stunning. I hope they don’t make us wait too long for UHD TFA and R1 releases.

^I just picked mine up in-store. Here we go.

The Dark Empire said:

But… if you want to justify all of this by saying “its a movie”, “fantasy” and all of that “blah blah” i have an addition:

I don’t understand how more physics-based points are supposed to be a rebuttal to “it’s fantasy so the science isn’t really that important”.

When people say “ROTS is actually pretty good,” I think they tend to mean “ROTS actually has pretty good pacing.” In terms of actual story content, I think it’s the PT film with the most wrong with it, but it moves well enough that watching it isn’t a chore like the other two.