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What MOVIE(s) have you been....seeing? watching?
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- hotseatgames
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- Jackwraith
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- Ninja
- Maim! Kill! Burn!
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- ChristopherMD
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- Cranberries
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- Don't give up.
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From an Ameritrash perspective, it lacked any emotional weight. Why should I care about Space Keri Russel? I didn't even know it was her until after I was home and got on the internet, but I sort of recognized her as she was walking away, having faithfully watched The Americans. Yes, that is creepy that some lecherous part of me memorized her silhouette.
I was telling one of my kids that the first movie dropped us into this weird and interesting place, and every subsequent movie just explained everything to death, then I came across Tim Kreider's take, which is way better written:
"Subsequent sequels, tie-in novels, interstitial TV shows, video games and fan fiction have lovingly ground this charm out of existence with exhaustive, literal-minded explication: Every marginal background character now has a name and a back story, every offhand allusion a history. But Mr. Lucas’s universe just doesn’t have the depth of Tolkien’s Middle-earth; it was only ever meant to be sketched, not charted. Sequels and tie-ins, afraid to stray too far off-brand, stick to variations on familiar designs and revive old characters, so there’s nothing new to discover."
JJ Abrams' inclusion of new stuff, however, felt kind of haphazard. Flying storm troopers! Yet another robot! The omissions were weird too. Was R2D2 even in the movie?
Like Endgame, I mostly felt relieved that I no longer had to care about Star Wars. Like the cheering Sith in the stadium, I've been way too over-invested in a reanimated corpse with grand ambitions for far, far too long.
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- Michael Barnes
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- Mountebank
- HYPOCRITE
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I’m really done with talking about it too, but the more I think about the less I like it and the more I think it is a disaster. Walking back all of the advances of The Last Jedi was such a mistake but to make it worse it’s like they parade the fact that they caved in to the trolls...when Finn is all like “no Rose, you stay here”. WTF?! Kylo Ren in TLJ- “Let the past die, kill it if you have to”. In RoS though- “well, maybe not”. TLJ starts with Luke throwing the lightsaber away, in RoS he’s talking about treating lightsabers with respect and they actually get a fucking BURIAL.
Let’s face the truth. This was a movie that was made for racist, sexist trolls and the “you destroyed my childhood” kind of fans. It was not made with a directorial vision or a desire to tell a specific story. It is the most cynical and defeatist Star Wars product -ever made-.
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- hotseatgames
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I will say one nice thing about it. The CG space ships look great. The CG overall is pretty decent.
Example of the cornball factor going on with the script... the first victim discovered is a soldier. The main character checks the ID badge. It's BJ Blazcowicz.
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And it was such an obvious reaction to and pull away from Last Jedi, which was so sad to see. Force Awakens had the same old plot, but also brought a lot of fun with new energy and characters, and then Last Jedi brilliantly charted a wider course to what could have been a more expansive future for the franchise, which Rise of Skywalker almost totally dialed back.
I suppose my reaction to RoS may have been colored somewhat by having just seen episode 7 of Mandalorian, which delivered all kinds of Star Warsian goodness in a tight 40 minutes.
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- ChristopherMD
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- Sagrilarus
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- Pull the Goalie
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So I can't speak to it.
That said I've been on this ride since 1977 and I'm going to stop one shy of the finish? Seems strange. Presumably it will be on Disney+ at some point and I'll be able to see it there when I re-sign up.
There's a need financially to give the audience what they ask for, not what they want or even what you think they will be most moved by. I think that's increased with the global conversation that's now available but it's always been there.
There were a couple of aspects to movie #8 that stayed with me afterwards, particularly the idea that Rey's parents were nobodies. That was a profoundly good choice in my view, expanded the concept of the story, even of faith. My suspicion is that they don't leave that alone in #9, that everyone in all the movies is related, and that we're more or less just watching a royal spat play out. If that's the case it's just as well I don't see it because I mean, jeeze, I've seen it a hundred times. "Luke I am your father" has become a core construct of way too many modern films. And books. I keep running into it in science fiction titles, to the point where it's the genre's equivalent of "the butler did it." Always a turn-off.
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Sagrilarus wrote: My suspicion is that they don't leave that alone in #9
They, uh, do not leave this alone. It's probably my biggest beef of the whole thing.
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Uncut Gems, which we saw on the day after Christmas, was entertainingly stressful, and well acted. It will probably make my "top" list somewhere, as I've been tending to favor movies that "do" something for me rather than stately bores.
I, too, found The Two Popes pretty good, and/but I was raised Roman Catholic though have long since left the church. Again, it was very well acted and at least operated at both human and philosophical levels, though I'm disinclined to either humanize Benedict or give Francis too much credit.
I had to work my way slowly through Marriage Story. Adam Driver in particular was excellent--his best in the four(!) 2019 movies I've seen him in--but it's all a bit much, and it seems as though the narrative deck is heavily stacked against Scarlett Johansson's character, though others may disagree. (Johansson, too, is quite good with what she was given script wise, but I think she was better in Jojo Rabbit.)
I'm still waiting to see Little Women and 1917, and maybe The Farewell, and that will round out my 2019 movie seeing for the most part for the year, at which point I can do a bit of ranking/rating. I've probably seen more films in 2019 than in any prior year, and I've become something of a cheerless completionist with regard to seeing some of these.
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