Authors: “There was supposed to be a deeper meaning?”

English Teachers: “You are already dead"

Salman Rushdie: “I know that was figurative, but it still hurts!”

pointless if there’s nothing to follow the origin

I have to disagree. There’s any number of adventure stories where the “conclusion” is that the immediate conflict is resolved and the characters go off to continue their lives in a changed state. Lanterns wasn’t perfect, and I know it was smaller in scope than some GL fans were hoping, but…

• Rushville was saved
• A manhunter was unconvered and dealt with
• Hal’s murder was solved
• Hal’s legacy as a heroic but tragic figure is established for the people who matter
• John got his powers on his own terms, climbing out from under the thumb of his mom and the Guardians.

He is now physically and emotionally equipped to function as Earth’s Green Lantern. At the end, it’s almost literally “Second star to the right, and straight on til morning.” While it certainly seems like we will see some of them, we don’t have to experience every single challenge he’s ever going to face, even the ones introduced in season 1, for his origin to have been a meaningful and self-contained story.

Just watched the two episode premiere of VisionQuest. Seems decent, and Spader chewing scenery is definitely the best part, but the little dose of Philomena Cunk is also welcome.

https://www.philnewton.net/blog/atari-microemacs/

Some projects are weaker than others, of course, but there is a part of the Marvel audience that can let an Antman movie slide by with little comment, but if they have to watch a girl be strong for 100 minutes, and it’s not some hybrid of peak George Lucas, Mel Brooks, and Shakespeare, then clearly it’s fucking awful garbage and they need to tell everybody how bad it is, but also they’re not sexist because they liked Scarlett Johansson in those other movies.

The Marvels was fun and better than several Antman and Thor movies, among many others.

For my money Dehaan was the worse of the two. She was sort of written as a stick in the mud, but Valerian himself was supposed to be, y’know, fun.

While I know we’ve all soured on Chris Pratt, I do like the joke that Passengers and Valerian should have just traded leads.

Rogue One has some banger set-pieces, and it’s a decent enough war movie in Star Wars cosplay, but while it’s fun to watch it after Andor, doing so also really underlined to me how thin and overhyped I think it was.

But that’s the thing, they only have one song. (They all sound the same.)

Mumford & Sons, Hootie & the Blowfish, and Live all say “Hi!” and want to know if they can join the party.

You see, i don’t think so. I think it is definitely redirecting the setup, but apart from sheer number of remaining rebels, I think it tracks really well with ESB. The great victory from the opening movie reveals vulnerability and removes the threat of clean and instant apocalypse, but doesn’t truly alter the new balance of power (sigh… JJ could have given us a functioning New Republic dealing with an insurgency of its own, but no…). Our chosen one meets a reluctant mentor who eventually acquiesces to train her. She has a troubling but cryptic dark side experience and leaves after learning some but not enough. Hero confronts a dark truth about her history but ultimately can’t truly defeat the villain. Through pluck and sacrifice, our heroes live to fight another day and we are left only with the implication of useful resources (“the fleet” in ESB, the allies who hadn’t yet answered in TLJ).

Now, I’ll concede the time jump would have needed to be more like ANH->ESB than ESB->ROTJ for it to work, but I also think the set up for an Episode 9 where the call is answered/being answered could work. In Canto Bight we’re made aware that the Alliance/Resistance’s iconography is inspirational, and we learn that the Force is out there, and there are people who want to believe in the cause of both. Additionally, we have a villain who is struggling between the light and the dark, but ultimately rejects both, as he understands them, to make his own path and pursue his own goals, motivated by emotional torment and a tragic sense of abandonment. There’s good bones there, much better than “here’s a hatful of fan theories. Pick one and let’s chase some mcguffins.”

flawed, but ultimately solid films rather than ‘disasters’.

I think they might still be at least verging on disasters, though certainly more interesting ones than JJ’s movies (see elsewhere in this thread for my thoughts on TLJ). The PT actually reminds me a lot of other passion projects (Megalopolis is probably the most recent, and surprise surprise, Coppola is a friend and mentor) that reveal the limitations of deferring to the auteur’s singular vision in a collaborative artform.

The “saved in the edit” narrative for ANH is disingenuous I think, inserting a miracle for a particularly strong example of how the workflow for a weird project should work, but it does hint at the truth that somebody like Lucas has as many bad ideas as good ones, and only the ones he can sell to fellow respected professionals should stay in the final product.

I also think it’s fair to say that because he was frustrated by the “compromises” with actors, writers, directors, and studios who all felt they were equal stakeholders, the unfiltered Lucas was a jarring departure from the OT, yet ostensibly targeted the exact same demographics, and that made it even harder to evalute the PT on its own terms. For me personally, I could never truly get over the stilted line readings that felt exactly like the cheesy serials that Lucas loved, but that the New Hollywood “kids” and British stage veterans refused to let infect the OT. “You can write this shit, George, but you can’t say it.”

It took a huge chunk of the second act, and it basically amounted to nothing.

Love it or hate it, and the fact that some people will decide they hate it is what I had to come to terms with, this was very intentional and played into the theme of Poe’s arc while letting Finn get the small amount of character growth they layered on in TLJ. It also made it clear that Rose is not so much a fully fleshed-out character as she is a stand-in for the entire Resistance, so she gets a chance to make its case and show its impact. Fighting the good fight is worth it even if, in the short term, it seems doomed. Narratively, I thought Canto Bight did a lot.

I do think the movie was weak on the handwavium when a few lines could have turned the siege/chase into something a little more compelling. Some of the dialogue skewed a bit Marvel-y, and Finn’s TLJ arc was way too similar to his TFA arc, only nudging forward his circle of empathy a bit. I also wish wish wish somebody had simply said the Holdo maneuver worked because she locked onto the hyperspace tracker: BOOM, two birds with one battlecruiser. Casino planet dragged a bit, but I didn’t mind it nearly as much as others. Maz was wasted, and in some ways, the whole movie actually mapped too closely to ESB (subversion indeed).

However, Luke’s arc hit me exactly right given that they were forced to revisit a Hero’s-Journey hero whose journey was done, because JJ Abrams set up the galaxy in possibly the least compelling way possible. Luke’s return from backsliding into his own old habits, accepting his failure, and using the energy he had left to secure a future for the next generation… that’s good stuff, and a lot of the boomers and older X’s who idolized him would do well to heed the lesson.

The initial tone poem with Rose’s sister was beautiful. DJ absolutely fit as a tweak on Lando and commentary on what all this is supposed to mean. The Poe arc that he can’t simply Maverick his way into leadership, the idea that Rey was no one and yet everything, that Force users and resistance could come from anywhere, and that Ren was on a path apart from Snoke’s but equally irredeemable, all these things were HUGE improvements from TFA and were setting things up for a very compelling finale.

Instead, JJ crammed in his own Episode 8 into the first 45 minutes, left no time to have his own movie make any sense, just channelled Harry Potter and the Avengers for its conclusion, and repeatedly reminded people that TLJ was being undone (“come with us, Rose!” “Can’t! Leia gave me homework!”… We picked “Yer a Palpatine, Rey!” from the hat full of fan theories!), thereby reminding TLJ’s fans that it was being undone, and its haters that it existed. Just a piece of shit movie all around, and to top it off, with my “ACKSHULLY” cap on, it still didn’t connect the tracker with the Holdo maneuver!!!

Finally, for what it’s worth, TLJ is the only ST movie to engage in good faith with the PT, which is something you need to do, even if (like me) they’re far from your favorites.

Luke’s story hit home in a weird way

IMHO it it home because that is almost the only way it could have been done, especially after what JJ set up in The Force Awakens. We know that Luke blamed himself. We know he ran away. We know not even Leia can locate him via the Force. At least being a grumpy hermit was a way to take back a little bit of agency. When you have a hero’s journey, and the hero’s journey ends, you’re not really supposed to revisit them thirty years later with a massive new threat, because now they have to face it, but not as the hero. Once you decide you have to have Luke in the damn story, there is nothing you can do except make him a mentor or a villain. Villain was right out, but having him fall back into old habits (doomerism, jumping to conclusions, whining) and having all that make him start as an ineffective mentor was actually really clever.

It also maybe hit a little close to home for the generation that grew up idolizing Luke, re-evaluating what he was after reaching his heights in his mid-20s. That said, it also tells that same group, “Yes, you are fatter and angrier and grabbing breakfast and a latte is the most interesting thing you’ll do most days, but you have wisdom to pass down, and you have the power to beat back the darkness and learn from your own mistakes, and there is so much more to you than you’ve come to believe about yourself.” I actually walked out of the movie thinking that once you have a Luke that let the First Order arise at all, then this Luke was a god-damn hero and saved the galaxy one last time.

The Last Jedi. It took me a while to even process the hate, and I still don’t really respect it, but I think I understand it. TLJ is flawed but by far the best sequel, and an Ep9 where Kylo is beyond redemption and rebels and force users are bubbling up from everywhere could have been really interesting.

Even if they’d backtracked thematically, The Rise of Skywalker made a huge mistake in overtly shitting on it, literally fucking over its own story (such as it was) and pacing to do so, and thereby pleasing no one. Even if you don’t like what your partner did, you have to “Yes, and…,” not go full “Michael Scott in improv class.”

Yes. So genuinely folksy. I have an entirely Southeastern Conference education. Now, I definitely knew some kids who never shed their accents after law school, and frankly I had at least one professor whose public persona, including his teaching, was not a world apart from Senator Leghorn here, but all of them could code-switch and tone it down considerably. It’s basically mandatory to succeed as a lawyer. The fact that he talks like he does says as much about the voting population of Louisiana as it does about Kennedy.

Agreed.

You can tell where they went in with the fork, but yeah. Well done.

Those are rookie numbers. I reckon you can get that down to six without even tryin’.

Kennedy would be a lot of fun if he weren’t 95% MAGA and 5% “oil industry wherever it is slightly different than MAGA.”