joefavs

Don’t the physical releases all come with a code for the Movies Anywhere version?

I’ve still got the 4K Blu-Ray preordered, but I’m snowed in today so I figured screw it, the digital version only costs about as much as dinner and a drink at a restaurant and I’ve got a long day of nothing ahead of me, so I went ahead and watched it. Seeing it alone in my home without any sort of audience reactions reeeeaaaaaaally went a long way in making it feel more integrated into the rest of the series, and a lot of the things that bothered me in the theater don’t nearly so much when they aren’t projected 30 feet high (looking at you, BB-8 operating an AT-ST). I went for the 1080p version so I’d still have reason to be excited for the UHD disc in a couple weeks and I’m not going to watch it again until then, so I guess I’ll be back with my verdict on the HDR presentation on the 27th.

Another highlight of the video is Billie Lourd referring to R2-D2 as “my son”.

Ah, I’ve only watched each episode once as it aired, so I guess I don’t remember the season 2 finale well enough to recognize that as being definitely Malachor. I’ll probably do a rewatch in the coming months, especially if the next show is as long a way off as I fear it probably is.

Meh. I don’t love or hate Favreau. I like the idea of a live action series in general, but I’m going to need some more specifics before I get excited. I will say, and I’m not blaming any of these directors themselves, that I’m more than a little dismayed by the way that Disney’s ostensible commitment to diversity doesn’t seem to extend beyond actors. By my count, Favreau is the twelfth white male to head one of these projects since the Disney buyout (fourteenth if you count JJ and Rian twice). Someone over there has to understand how this looks.

We aren’t even positive Ahsoka got spit out of that weird Force tesseract thing on Malachor; we just saw some similar architecture through the window. If that is where she ended up, she’d be on a dead planet with no immediate way off. If not, she could be just as far-flung as Ezra and Thrawn.

Any chance Ezra and Thrawn end up crossing paths with Eli Vanto and the Chiss Ascendency? The Thrawn novel spent too much time setting up Thrawn’s long game for them to drop it. It could be interesting to explore that whole ethical dilemma through some Thrawn-and-Ezra-stuck-together stuff.

suspiciouscoffee said:

A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Actually reading some Holmes stories like I told myself I would do years ago. I like it.

Those early stories from before Doyle nailed the formula down are pretty far out. I don’t know how far in you are so I won’t go into any specifics, but that one takes a hard left turn around the halfway point and gets into some decidedly un-Sherlock Holmes-y territory.

Anyway, I’m reading The Ghost Notebooks by Ben Dolnick after reading a blurb about it on the AV Club. It’s all right. I’ll probably put a pin in it and start on the TLJ novelization tomorrow.

I was hoping for Get Out, Phantom Thread or Lady Bird for Best Picture, but I’m fine with The Shape of Water taking it. Even if it wasn’t the strongest film nominated, it’s nice to see Guillermo win.

Source Code was no Moon, but I liked it well enough. Haven’t seen any of Duncan Jones’s other stuff.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - not a good movie.

Lady Bird - a really great movie.

As far as my Oscar picks go, I’m pulling for Get Out, Phantom Thread and Lady Bird. I liked The Shape of Water and Dunkirk too, but they’re decidedly second-tier. Phantom Thread was probably my personal favorite, but I think Get Out is definitely the most important film of the year and the one people are going to still be talking about the most twenty years from now. As for Lady Bird, it was beautifully done and hit my early-2000s-Catholic-school feelings hard. I’ve been a big fan of Greta Gerwig for a while now and would love to see her get some recognition for this.

Three Billboards is the only one I saw that I didn’t like. It was very well crafted and full of legitimately Oscar-worthy performances, but I just found the screenplay to be preposterous.

I didn’t see The Post, Call Me By Your Name, or Darkest Hour.

I bought three of the five omnibus volumes that Dark Horse put out a few years ago, but I only read the first one. I need to get back on that, they’re a lot of fun. Certainly not what I’d consider “my” Star Wars, but they form an interesting little alternate canon in my mind with the OOT, the Han Solo and Lando books, and Splinter.

LordZerome1080 said:

And we could theoretically expand our restoration and fan edit reach towards books and video games.

SilverWook said:

I scanned the whole book from a copy that was falling apart quite some time ago.

Would it be a good idea to try transcribing Wook’s scans into an ebook format? I figure that’s got to be the literary equivalent of the sort of film preservations we traffic in.

They really got all Interstellar with the timeline in that last one. Any ideas where REDACTED ended up?

I didn’t mean the characters go to find DJ, I meant the script sends them there to ultimately find him. And yeah, if the rest of the movie doesn’t work for you, of course this isn’t going to either. Anyway, I’ve said my piece, I’m out again, I need to go to work.

I’ve largely been trying to abstain from posting in this thread lately, but I seriously don’t understand how Canto Bight remains so controversial. It seems crystal clear to me that the “pointlessness” of the sequence is the point. Finn and Rose go to Canto Bight so that they can pick up DJ and have the plan that they made with Poe backfire spectacularly, providing the climax of the film (in classical “rising action-falling action” terms) and underlining the “failure is the best teacher” theme that’s central to the movie. It’s not that nothing of consequence happens, it’s two steps forward and three steps back, which is not at all the same thing.

Before the Fall by Noah Hawley. Hawley is showrunner on Fargo and Legion, and this novel definitely shares some DNA with those shows. I’m only a third of the way through, but so far it’s one of the move intriguing and engaging things I’ve read in a while.

Really disappointed with how they handled Sabine and Zeb capturing Rukh. I get that you can’t have Zeb killing him with his bare hands, but Sabine could’ve Raising Arizona’d him with a real grenade instead of a paint bomb, or at the very least they could have brought him back to the rebels. Drawing goofy shit on him like a passed out college kid and SENDING HIM BACK TO THE EMPIRE just isn’t something I can swallow, especially after what just went down.

Black Panther just now. I think it was my first MCU movie since Winter Soldier. It was fine. I thought the story was pretty by-numbers, but I found most of the characters very appealing and I really dig everything about Wakanda. With any luck the inevitable sequel will get a little more adventurous with the plotting. These characters deserve it. Except Michael B. Jordan, who I thought was really terrible. If I didn’t already know who he was and this was the first thing I saw him in, I would have guessed he was a musician or something who hadn’t done a lot of acting. I remember his name being thrown around for Star Wars a couple years ago and this movie made me glad that nothing ever came of it.

Finally got around to Phantom Thread. It was excellent.

^that crazy Sasquatch thing from that game in that guy’s back yard on Tatooine scared the shit out of me.

Bumping the living hell out of this thread to share a bit of childhood wish fulfillment/irresponsible waste of adult money. I don’t know about you guys, but I used to adore the Star Wars Customizable Card Game from Decipher in the 90s. The game itself was a little over my head, but I loved collecting the cards (as much as a nine-year-old without any money can really collect anything). Anyway, a couple of times in recent years I’ve tried to make decks from my old collection, but I was missing some essential stuff and I was never able to get a satisfying game going with my friends. The other day, though, I came across a factory-sealed booster box of the game’s base set on ebay, and while it probably would have been cheaper and/or easier to order singles from somewhere, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to tear through an entire box of packs in one go like I always wanted to as a kid (they were from the much more abundant and less valuable white-bordered printing, so any serious collectors need not get stressed out about my childish need to open packages). This stuff combined with my old cards should definitely be enough to get me playing, and it only took me 16 years after it went out of print. Good lord is this packaging a nostalgia trip.

Anchorhead said:

I’m going to make a statement you guys may not expect;

This is my favorite part of Empire. https://youtu.be/KvJDItC6tE0
One of Han’s best lines; “Shut him up or shut him down”

I mean, I think my favorite part might be when they’re leaving Hoth and Han holds up his finger to Threepio and then punches the bulkhead to get the lights on, so same ballpark.

A friend of a friend and fellow cinephile who I hadn’t hung out with one-on-one before came over tonight to watch some stuff in the “definitely should’ve seen this by now” category. We watched Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up and Terrence Malick’s Badlands. I thought Blow Up was a visual treat but not much else. I adored everything about Badlands, though.

Ehrenreich signed a three-film deal, I believe. They’ll almost certainly leave room for a couple more stories between this and ANH (I really doubt they’d do an interquel).