joefavs

I was in college when Disney bought Lucasfilm, and when my friends and I heard the news we decided to have an OT marathon. I came across Despecialized on a public torrent site while researching whether or not there was any better way to watch the unaltered versions than the GOUT. Eventually I got curious about where this wonderful bootleg had come from, and Google brought me here. I think I lurked for more than a year before registering.

Apologies if this has been covered somewhere in the 170+ pages I don’t feel like combing through, but can anyone offer any guidance about where to start with Trek novels? I’d like to check out some of the TOS stuff, but there’s so damn much of it. A local thrift store that I go to always has a bunch of the Pocket Books novels from the 70s-80s, are there any of those I should keep an eye out for?

Mocata said:

excited to get started as soon as the final season of Game of Thrones is complete.

What kind of time frame does this give us?

The final episodes of GoT will air mid-2019, so they’ll presumably start working on their Star Wars a little before then. I’m interested to see whether this or Rian’s new stuff comes out first (I hope it’s Rian’s).

I think this is a misstep, but the right director could make all the difference in the world. If it’s bad, I guess I’ll just choose to think of it as the universe reestablishing proper balance after we lucked out with Trevorrow getting fired. Still, I’m not exactly thrilled to have the geniuses behind Confederate at the table.

NeverarGreat said:

joefavs said:

DominicCobb said:

On the one hand, maybe it drains remote suns just like how it destroys remote planets. But in that case, why does it drain its own sun? On the other hand, maybe it does move around to new suns, but in that case why doesn’t it completely drain the first sun it orbits like it does the second (Hux’s speech is in daylight)? To me it doesn’t matter much either way.

I honestly never thought it was two different stars. I just figured the star that they drained to destroy the Hosnian system was large enough that they were able to get two charges out of it.

But Finn claims that the weapon draws power from the sun until it disappears, implying that once the draining starts, it will not stop until the star is destroyed. Poe repeats this during their attack.

I forgot about the Finn line, I’ll have to look out for that next time I watch TFA. With Poe at the end, I thought he just meant that it was going to drain the entire sun that particular time, not that that was a requirement every time. I would imagine that different sized stars would provide different amounts of power. SKB ought to be able to snuggle up to a larger star and get multiple firings out of it.

Alternatively, I suppose it’s possible that SKB charged its weapon at one star and then moved to another star before firing. Or maybe it was parked in a binary system.

DominicCobb said:

On the one hand, maybe it drains remote suns just like how it destroys remote planets. But in that case, why does it drain its own sun? On the other hand, maybe it does move around to new suns, but in that case why doesn’t it completely drain the first sun it orbits like it does the second (Hux’s speech is in daylight)? To me it doesn’t matter much either way.

I honestly never thought it was two different stars. I just figured the star that they drained to destroy the Hosnian system was large enough that they were able to get two charges out of it.

I’m half-expecting Harrison Ford, but not de-aged. I think it’s possible there’s some kind of frame narrative with him telling a story in a bar the day before TFA.

Now listening to Goths by the Mountain Goats. Diggin’ it.

DominicCobb said:

How the fuck do you give Modern Love anything less than a perfect score?

I know this exchange happened months ago, but this is the page my browser spit me out at and so I must voice my agreement.

Anyway, I’m digging Aimee Mann’s Mental Illness. It occupies a really nice area between the more upbeat end of Elliot Smith’s catalog and the more downbeat end of the Shins’.

Speaking as someone who does have depressive tendencies, it actually meant kind of a lot to me to see Luke portrayed that way. This is one of the only times a hero of this saga hasn’t felt fundamentally outside of my own experience. Depressed Luke not only doesn’t feel incongruous to me, it feels incredibly meaningful.

My name is Inigo Montoya, etc, etc

Frank your Majesty said:

I guess I have finally made up my mind.

1. Star Wars
2. Empire
3. The Last Jedi
4. The Force Awakens
5. Return of the Jedi
6. Rogue One
7. TPM
8. AOTC
9. ROTS

Flip the ST movies and this is exactly my list. I think TLJ is probably the better/greater/more accomplished film, but I’ve got TFA above it for the purely sentimental reason that I don’t think I’ll ever have a more joyous theater experience than TFA on opening night. It gives me the warm-and-fuzzies like nothing else outside of the first two films.

EDIT: Sir Ridley gets it too.

It’s absolutely the Anoat system, it’s since shown up in lots of books and games.

Anyway, I always just assumed the Death Star had a hyperdrive and it never even occurred to me to question it. Very much the same sort of thing as that big debate over whether Luke was really choking the Gamorrean guards a few weeks ago. Though I think my idea of the Death Star’s hyperspace capabilities likely originates with the Decipher CCG, in which the Death Star was capable of hyperspace travel but had the lowest possible speed in the game.

Hoping to get to Phantom Thread this week, but I may not have the time. I’ll also probably watch Moonraker soon since the James Bonding podcast just covered it. I haven’t seen that one since I was about 10, so this should be interesting.

I am reminded of a frequent point they used to make on the Cracked Podcast about suspension of disbelief. In The Dark Knight Rises, there’s a chase scene where Batman goes into a tunnel in broad daylight and exits at night. This is absolutely a textbook hole in the movie, but when the movie came out almost everyone didn’t notice it until it was pointed out to them. The Cracked folks considered this a mark of effective movie-making rather than an egregious mistake, because audiences were swept up in the movie enough not to notice that flaw in the logic. That’s how I felt about all of these nitpicks about the in-universe rules of space travel in TLJ. I was engaged enough in the story that was in front of me that I was not giving any thought at all to whether or not it was 100% consistent with the last eight films (which, it’s worth noting, are not entirely consistent with each other either). I get that that’s not enough for everyone, but it’s enough for me.

It’s fine. I tend to dislike Tim Burton, but that’s one of the handful that I don’t mind. I’m pretty sure I was born too late to really love it, though. Batman movie preferences are at least as generational as James Bond, if not moreso.

TV’s Frink said:

8/10 sounds about right.

That’s all I meant by “favorite Nolan film” in the first place, because Nolan isn’t my favorite.

The Man Who Would Be King (1975)- I thought this was a capital-G Great movie when I was 18, but revisiting it a decade later, I now think it’s just a good movie with a great cast.

I haven’t seen Memento in about 12 years. I have no idea whether it’s better than Interstellar or not. I just really love Interstellar.

joefavs said:

As far as next movie seen goes, my local theater finally got The Shape of Water, so I’ll be going to see that in a couple hours.

Beautiful film. Same ending as Pan’s Labyrinth, but a beautiful film.

In that /film interview, Johnson explained that the thinking for Holdo needing to stay on the ship was that an autopilot or droid would have some sort of tell that would be obvious enough for the First Order to pick up on. That makes enough sense for me; I totally buy that there would be a quantifiable difference between the way a ship piloted by an organic vs. a computer would fly.

Had a Christopher Nolan double feature of The Prestige and Interstellar this weekend. Now, The Prestige has been a favorite of mine since it came out, more on the strength of its tone, cast and production design than on it’s admittedly sort of preposterous story, but I was really knocked out by Interstellar, which I haven’t seen since its 2014 release. I get the sense that a lot of folks think it’s kind of middling Nolan, but after this viewing I really think it might be my favorite. It hits a lot of sweet spots for me.

Other than that, I watched A Hard Day’s Night while more than a little drunk on Friday, after listening to Ken Jennings talk about it on the Movie Crush podcast at work. I picked up the Criterion blu-ray of it a few months ago but hadn’t gotten to it yet. Sweet Christ is that ever a beautiful transfer.

As far as next movie seen goes, my local theater finally got The Shape of Water, so I’ll be going to see that in a couple hours.

Really good, lengthy interview with Rian on the latest episode of /filmcast, FYI. A lot of background and writing process stuff.

Collipso said:

Which one do you guys consider to be Luke’s theme more:

• The one that plays when we first see him and Aunt Beru calls his name (the main theme, or a variation)

or

• Binary Sunset (aka force theme)?

I’m pretty sure that in TFA the main theme only comes in three times, and two of them are when characters are doing things that Luke did in ANH (Finn busting Poe out of jail, Poe’s trench run). The other time is when Han first enters the Falcon’s cockpit, though, so that kind of throws off the “main theme = Luke” thing that the movie almost had going.

As far as lightsaber colors go, I’d like to see a yellow saber onscreen. Most likely due to years of exposure to KOTOR and Jedi Knight.

The impulse that some people have to try to mentally combine everything they like into the same personal continuity while rejecting everything they dislike seems exhausting to me. I don’t have any trouble accepting multiple canons. I love the Thrawn books, but I’m happy to leave them in the Legends timeline instead of going through the mental gymnastics of forcing them into the ST continuity.

Similarly, it always felt easier simply not to focus on the things I dislike than to declare that they don’t “count” and find workarounds to keep everything else consistent. Some years ago, I visited an aunt in Tampa. I did not care for Tampa, but I don’t feel the need to convince myself that Tampa isn’t there; I just won’t go back to Tampa. I feel the same way about Jabba the Hutt’s Truman Capote uncle: if I don’t rewatch those episodes of TCW, his being “real” in the context of SW canon can’t affect me one way or the other. Since the things I don’t like are almost never load-bearing elements of the things I do, I find it’s much simpler to just roll with canon and not revisit the stuff I’m not into.