Consumption Be Done About These New Star Wars Movies ?!?!

[The Bill]

It’s the damnedest thing. I love me some 80’s Transformers, right. I can still watch the 86’ movie over and over. Since then they had stuff like Headmasters, and Beast Wars and a bunch of anime and those live action Michael Bay films… and I know they exist and have watched them but they just flow off me like rain water and I forgot it was something I saw and never think of it. Some of it is rancid but I just don’t care. I have my 80’s Transformers and I’m good with just that. But when it comes to Star Wars (and Marvel) I get so pissed off and I think about what they’ve done to my boys. Growing up I liked Transformers more than comics or Star Wars. And it’s not a vendetta against Disney as getting drunk in Epcot is one of my favorite things. So strange and annoying.

[Hunter]

This is my perspective on this, because I agree in a sense: With Transformers, He-Man, GI Joe, etc - I always knew they were for kids. Star Wars didn't feel like that, and there wasn't enough tv shows or movies for me to "grow out of it." But now, it's very clear that it's primarily made for kids, so it kinda stings. The thing is, Star Wars has always been for kids - rose colored glasses obscure that a bit for the original trilogy.

Over the past 5 or so years, millennials/gen-z tout the prequels as great... because they saw them as kids. In another 10 years, the same thing will happen for the sequel trilogy. At some point, I realized I have a choice: Give up on Star Wars entirely (I'm not the demographic anymore)... or forgive my perceived shortcomings and get what I can out of the movies/shows that look interesting - like the sound design, ships, gadgets - whatever pokes at the nostalgia and keep my expectations very low. Watching with a healthy dose of skepticism let me be surprised when things like Rogue One, The Mandolorian (at least the first couple seasons), and Andor came out. I think those were great, but I didn't hope or expect them to be good. I'm still disappointed when watching some of the trash, like Boba-Fett, Ahsoka, etc., etc., - but I don't get mad about it now. I knew what I was getting into. There's no way that nu-Star Wars can capture the kind of feeling the original trilogy gave me as a kid.

Maybe that's a weird way to approach it - but for me, having some perspective and adjusting my expectations will allow me to get a lot more enjoyment out of stuff I'd hate otherwise. Looking at something awful and being willing to find something I can appreciate makes it more interesting. Hating something and writing it off completely is easy and not interesting for me anymore, but sometimes it's unavoidable.

[The Bill]

It’s a sensible way to see things, but with the fact that Transformers the Movie (86) is more brutal than any Star Wars (well gay pre-Vader killing kids, but those kids were so lame, who cares) I don’t know. A sentient robot calling people ‘human germ’ is greater than ‘nerf herder’.

[THE KILL]

I watch the despecialized edition of the original trilogy from time to time and hugely enjoy them and despite watching some of the newer stuff (which is rarely ok, but mostly trash) I don't care about it at all. In my mind, there's three Star Wars films and that's it. I'd like to say no one can fuck with that, but that would obviously be untrue; I might not be up to date on this, but a couple of years ago, you could not buy the original cinema versions in HD because Lucas keeps fucking with them (the man's a bit of an idiot, it seems), hence the despecialized editions, which everybody should get.

[Whee of the Dead]

i think the main problem is that Star Wars was originally made by a guy who watched Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon bullshit and grew up to find and enjoy Ford, Kurosawa, and Leone and used the latter to elevate the former while still never betraying the former's pulp fantasy serial adolescent magic

...

That's one of the reasons shit like The Mandalorian sucks dick. It's just toned down spaghetti western aesthetics with a toy commercial era Star Wars veneer thrown on it. A homage to two things while simultaneously misunderstanding either.

Please explain to us how George Lucas "understood" Westerns and Chanbaras/ how these genres worked and how the people who made Mandalorian don't.


Besides, the amount of edgelording in this thread and on this board in general is astounding and embarrassing; ya people act as if Star Wars was some lucky accident (not episodes 4 and 6 though, no, they're not good movies ) and Lucas, who, of course, is a terrible director, played almost no role in the conception of these films.

because Lucas was legitimately influenced by them and used what he learned by them to make the world he invented work.

I remember watching an interview with Lucas where he said when he saw Yojimbo he had no context for Japanese culture let alone period piece stuff but he could follow the movie along just fine and all the samurai stuff that was alien to him made the world of the movie so much more expansive and interesting and it helped that it was just baked in there as opposed to explained outright for a western audience. And he applied that lesson to A New Hope pretty successfully.

shit like The Mandalorian is just 'oh, here's the spaghetti western flavor' out of the Star Wars slushie machine. Just doing pale imitations of the cinematography and mock Morricone music and a bunch of cleaned up actors playing cowboys.

Also digging myself in on that Lucas was a fine enough director in the 70's. Yes, I know Marcia and the Zoetrope gang definitely helped a lot. And Gary Kurtz who is the original trilogy's unsung hero. But Lucas was still the key. I think a lot of what makes A New Hope work is its earnest corniness and that couldn't have come from the hip New Hollywood gang that Lucas would pal around with.

[FVBTVS]

thx, american graffiti and star wars is still an insane run of different things by any measure including todays standards

[The Bill]

Lucas wrote Raiders of the Lost Arc. All clones and Jar-Jars are forgiven.

Spielberg directed Crystal Skull. That motherfucker needs to be put down.

[Whee of the Dead]

nu Star Wars is made by people who watched Star Wars as kids and grew into adults who watch Star Wars and the shit Star Wars spawned. They have no connection with the roots, they don't understand what makes any of the gears turn.

The complaints about "modern filming techniques" you can go ahead and flush, though. CGI and digital cameras don't "ruin" anything, most people are just inept at using them. The way the original Star Wars was made was absolute peak FX technology at the time, and people now pining for those good old days is just ridiculous. If you could have done this shit with a computer in 1977, they would have done exactly that.

I'm not talking modern filming technology (although I'd happily jettison all of that as well - but that's a different argument) I'm talking techniques. I guess styles would be a better word. Star Wars works because it has a classic Hollywood sheen to it. I saw a trailer for that Acolyte show and it has these Matrix style lightsaber fights and it just doesn't fit the mold at all.

[Necrometer]

sounds like you're talking about ℂ ℝ 𝔸 𝔽 𝕋

[Whee of the Dead]

sounds like you're talking about ℂ ℝ 𝔸 𝔽 𝕋

film grammer

[spacehamster]

I don't really think it's impossible to mimic an older style of filmmaking, and at the risk of citing bad examples that aren't edgy enough, I think the most recent Joker and Batman movies did a pretty good job of being sort of like 70s movies, but also somewhat modern. Whether you think those are good movies is beside the point, I'm just saying blending aesthetics from multiple decades is kind of what we're doing in the 2020s anyway. The difficulty lies in doing it in a way that doesn't come across as gimmicky - the first Captain America movie, for example, was made by the same director as Rocketeer (and the extensive IMDB research that I did for this post reveals he also worked on Raiders of the Lost Ark, incidentally), and while I think it's a fun movie, it also lays on the 30s pulp serial thing a bit too thick at times and crosses over into where it's just silly. But I think it's totally doable, Disney just isn't hiring people who are good at this sort of shit.

[Hunter]

Only Flash Gordon is real.

[Whee of the Dead]

I don't really think it's impossible to mimic an older style of filmmaking, and at the risk of citing bad examples that aren't edgy enough, I think the most recent Joker and Batman movies did a pretty good job of being sort of like 70s movies, but also somewhat modern. Whether you think those are good movies is beside the point, I'm just saying blending aesthetics from multiple decades is kind of what we're doing in the 2020s anyway. The difficulty lies in doing it in a way that doesn't come across as gimmicky - the first Captain America movie, for example, was made by the same director as Rocketeer (and the extensive IMDB research that I did for this post reveals he also worked on Raiders of the Lost Ark, incidentally), and while I think it's a fun movie, it also lays on the 30s pulp serial thing a bit too thick at times and crosses over into where it's just silly. But I think it's totally doable, Disney just isn't hiring people who are good at this sort of shit.

It's not impossible at all.

I know I was t w a t in this thread since the beginnning but I do agree with EBA that there is no reason why there can't be a good Star Wars movie but my position is the people in charge just have no idea about the how/what/why of things that make these things good. That's why everyone is so frustrated because it's so blatantly obvious to a human being who can activate at least 37% of their imagination.

Same thing with the modern Doctor Who which has also been recently Disneyfied. Everything that made the show the everlasting iconoclastic cult oddity has been bleached out, it's core idiosyncrasy's crushed to make MCU pablum and what it's doubly infuriating that everything that made it what it was is just so fucking easy to duplicate.

[The Bill]

Only Flash Gordon is real.

You sure?

[Whee of the Dead]

oops

[spacehamster]

the people in charge just have no idea about the how/what/why of things that make these things good. That's why everyone is so frustrated because it's so blatantly obvious to a human being who can activate at least 37% of their imagination.

Oh, okay. Well, that I'll happily agree with. Nothing and nobody's allowed to have any sort of distinctive style anymore because there's too much money in all of this shit, and the people who make the decisions obviously either don't watch movies or actively despise them because they have zero understanding of any of it.

But whatever, honestly, there's still probably more good movies and TV shows already made to last me the rest of my life, so I'm not going to waste my time hate-watching shitty Star Wars TV shows that I can't even remember anything about when they're over.

Also, I'll have you know, gentlemen, that the old Flash Gordon serials with Buster Crabbe were my literal childhood, and I will not stand idly by while you cast doubt upon their superiority.

[Whee of the Dead]

the people in charge just have no idea about the how/what/why of things that make these things good. That's why everyone is so frustrated because it's so blatantly obvious to a human being who can activate at least 37% of their imagination.

Oh, okay. Well, that I'll happily agree with. Nothing and nobody's allowed to have any sort of distinctive style anymore because there's too much money in all of this shit, and the people who make the decisions obviously either don't watch movies or actively despise them because they have zero understanding of any of it.

But whatever, honestly, there's still probably more good movies and TV shows already made to last me the rest of my life, so I'm not going to waste my time hate-watching shitty Star Wars TV shows that I can't even remember anything about when they're over.

Also, I'll have you know, gentlemen, that the old Flash Gordon serials with Buster Crabbe were my literal childhood, and I will not stand idly by while you cast doubt upon their superiority.

I haven't watched any new Star Wars since The Last Jedi but constantly come in to argue to stay consistent.

I'm constantly watching old shows and movies. There is so much (superior) media from the previous century alone that one lifetime won't be enough to consume it all.

[THE KILL]

the people in charge just have no idea about the how/what/why of things that make these things good. That's why everyone is so frustrated because it's so blatantly obvious to a human being who can activate at least 37% of their imagination.

Oh, okay. Well, that I'll happily agree with. Nothing and nobody's allowed to have any sort of distinctive style anymore because there's too much money in all of this shit, and the people who make the decisions obviously either don't watch movies or actively despise them because they have zero understanding of any of it.

But whatever, honestly, there's still probably more good movies and TV shows already made to last me the rest of my life, so I'm not going to waste my time hate-watching shitty Star Wars TV shows that I can't even remember anything about when they're over.

Also, I'll have you know, gentlemen, that the old Flash Gordon serials with Buster Crabbe were my literal childhood, and I will not stand idly by while you cast doubt upon their superiority.

I haven't watched any new Star Wars since The Last Jedi but constantly come in to argue to stay consistent.

I'm constantly watching old shows and movies. There is so much (superior) media from the previous century alone that one lifetime won't be enough to consume it all.

My feelings exactly. Have been on a real 70s kicker lately, while I hugely enjoy even the worst bullshit the 80s have produced, films from the 70s feel different, it's like they have a real texture to them. Anyway, apart from the films of certain horror directors (Pascal Laugier, Ari Aster, and the dude that made Barbarian) I rarely care about anything new. There's thousands of great old films to check out or rewatch. I don't mind people who enjoy MCU films, but for me, most of it feels sterile, and it's not just CGI, or rather, like Mike has pointed out, CGI in itself is not even the problem (although I'd argue that handmade effects are pretty much always superior to CGI), it's that everything looks and feels mass-produced and made to appeal to as many people as possible in a very superficial way.

[FVBTVS]

The emotional meltdown over the cancelation of the acolyte is sooo funny

[spacehamster]

The emotional meltdown over the cancelation of the acolyte is sooo funny

I've only seen Youtube thumbnails from the usual array of grifters cheering, and I kind of want to see how they get around the fact that they're technically saying Kathleen Kennedy did something they agree with, but so far I haven't beeen able to work up a sufficient amount of self-hate to actually watch one of them.

[godofdeadlydeath]

The way the perception of that show shifted from "Nu Star Wars sucks, this show is boring" to "The Acolyte is the best Star Wars thing since XYZ" by the end of it, to it now being cancelled, is very funny.

[George Lucas]

I watch the despecialized edition of the original trilogy from time to time and hugely enjoy them and despite watching some of the newer stuff (which is rarely ok, but mostly trash) I don't care about it at all. In my mind, there's three Star Wars films and that's it. I'd like to say no one can fuck with that, but that would obviously be untrue; I might not be up to date on this, but a couple of years ago, you could not buy the original cinema versions in HD because Lucas keeps fucking with them (the man's a bit of an idiot, it seems), hence the despecialized editions, which everybody should get.

I'll crush you like a bug.

[THE KILL]

Get disney to release the original versions of episodes 4 to 6 on blu ray and I might finally spend actual money on your Star wars talkies

[godofdeadlydeath]

I watch the despecialized edition of the original trilogy from time to time and hugely enjoy them and despite watching some of the newer stuff (which is rarely ok, but mostly trash) I don't care about it at all. In my mind, there's three Star Wars films and that's it. I'd like to say no one can fuck with that, but that would obviously be untrue; I might not be up to date on this, but a couple of years ago, you could not buy the original cinema versions in HD because Lucas keeps fucking with them (the man's a bit of an idiot, it seems), hence the despecialized editions, which everybody should get.

I'll crush you like a bug.

This type of post and account just gave me such a nostalgic twinge for the glory days of this board. Wow.

[Whee of the Dead]

maybe George can can awkwardly cgi some classic members back on a few pages