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Everything posted by Chen G.
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The studio system is far less opressive than you might think. Even Marvel, by far the most opressive studio in Hollywood, let Joss Whedon have free reign with both Avengers films - the former of which was his first feature film.
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The idiosyncrasies of new filmmakers are usually more externalized than with veterans, actually. The more the filmmaker directs, the more effectivelly he can express himself in the most subtle gestures, and his style becomes more seamless and calls less attention to itself.
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Sure, it looks cool. Although again, sometimes distractingly so.
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You can make a Star Wars film that isn't a re-tread of Empire Strikes Back, without resorting to make a film that's bent on deconstructing Star Wars. And if you are setting out to make a deconstructive film, by all means go with it all the way. Don't tease us only to provide a merely cosmetic unpackaging of the Star Wars formula. Think big: no text-crawl, blow-up the Falcon, kill the Droids, end the Jedi, sever the connection of everyone in the Galaxy to The Force. Now, that's how you put together a deconstructive film. This is obviously the kind of thing that would work better within the framework of Episode IX, but if its not suitable for a middle-chapter than maybe Johnson should have realized that and gone another route?
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I hardly think that's anyone's problem with the film.
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Its thoroughly brilliant, to my mind, but that's not the point. The point is that a film can have significant tone variations, without being a "tonal mess", as internet critics/ranters are wont to call such films. It can have light, comedic moments juxtaposed - sometimes almost instantly - with moments that are dead serious, and it can be all the better for it. I don't think The Last Jedi walks this fine line well at all, but its really not that bad. Again, something The Force Awakens did better.
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I wouldn't go that far. The idea that a film must commit to one tone and not deviate from it whatsoever and that any such deviation results in a "tonal mess" is an invention of the internet, really. Just like you want to have variety of scenery, character and action, why would you not want to have variety of tone? Besides, gravity and levity aren't opposites: they work more like sweet and salty tastes - you can use one to accentuate the presence of the other. Some of the better Harry Potter films alternate between gravity and levity without disonance, vintage M. Night Shaymalan does it (Signs is hilarious!), some of the more serious entries in the MCU do it (most recently, Infinity War). The best Steven Spielberg films do it, as well. Christopher Nolan subtly does it. Peter Jackson does it. Hell, Irvin Kershner did in Empire Strikes Back, as did JJ Abrams in The Force Awakens. Recently, Hacksaw Ridge had incredibly stupid humor leading right up to one the grizzliest battles ever to be portrayed onscreen. Braveheart often had crude humor right in the middle of "the heavy stuff", including this genius piece of writing: If you can believe it, an earlier draft of the script had Wallace - as his bowls pour out - say "That'll clear your sinuses." Now, that's more in the wheelhouse of The Last Jedi, and was wisely removed. But not all of the humor in The Last Jedi does this. Why it works in one film (or in one joke) and not in another is really a thing of art, but I think we can provide some rules of thumb: First, a move from levity to gravity is less likely to cause disnonance than the opposite. If anything, it makes the audience come down into the seriousness of the situation all the more. For instance, this moment: Second, if the humorous bits are structurally separated from the serious bits, so that it starts light and becomes serious - it can work. Even a lot of the earlier examples lost the comedy by the wayside or dialed it way down after the midpoint or going into the climax (again, the deleted Braveheart joke). The Last Jedi didn't quite do that, although much of the humor in the third act adheres to the thrid rule: Third, that the humor is in-character. One way to do this to have it delivered in a way that's deliberately incongorous with the actor's expressions or with the camerawork, so its a humorous take on something that we the audience understands that the character means in a more profound way, as well. I'm thinking Tony's "throw another moon at me, and I'm gonna lose it" from Infinity War. And lastly really to just use this combination judiciously and make it gradual, so that the most serious beat of the scene isn't immediately followed by the most jovial. In other words, you can have comedy all you want, but you should keep the amounts of bathos to a minimum. The humor in The Last Jedi sometimes adheres to these rules, and sometimes aschews them, and as a result its a hit-or-miss, but I really wouldn't say its consistently bad throughout the film, although I personally rarely found it truly funny. You may dislike it on the grounds that it parodizes Star Wars, but that's another issue altogether.
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As someone who didn't grow up with those films, I don't mind a lot of the changes. I don't conceptually mind "tweaked" versions of films (e.g. Alien) and its certainly a common practice in Hollywood, and there's something to be said for George Lucas being as thorough as he was. Specifically, I do like the added windows to Cloud City, as well the inclusion of Ian McDiarmid as the emperor in The Empire Strikes Back. However, I find it mind-boggling that the director has effectivelly went out of his way to make the original cut of the film unavailable. And at the end of the day, I have to consider his Special Editions on the whole to be failure, because with them he intended to do three major things: Keep his older films up with contemporary production value standards: this one's a partial failure. Some effects are effectivelly cleaned up, but other shots add new effects that for the most part do not at all mesh with the aesthetics of the rest of the film, and often just don't look good. Bolster the series' continuity, and tie the prequels all the closer to the first three films: utter failure, this. The different entries are stylistically too removed from each other, the plot inconsistencies so numerous and the overarching story so haphazard that it was never really going to work. Recontextualize the first three films to be a part of Anakin's story instead of Luke's: utter failure, again. Its one thing to add three prequel films to your series. But to use them to try and retroactivelly change what the previous films were about has to be the biggest over-reach in the history of serialized cinema. Yeah, George Lucas was more vigorous with the changes than people realize. He was tweaking his films as early as the time between the initial, limited release and the wide release, and continued changing them as he was issuing different sound mixes of each film during their theatrical runs.
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It didn't go quiet, it went entirely mute. Usually in movies, even when you want to create quiet, you maintaim some ambient sound, a room tone. Its clear that Johnson wasn experimenting with ambience through the film, kicking it way down for the conversations between Kylo and Rey and for the moment where Rose's sister is knocked out. That moment with the suicide run was the culmination of that: a good few seconds with no sound at all. Quite effective. Does it absolve the movie of its faults? Hell no. In fact, one of my main issues is that the film didn't end there.
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Its part of the demythification of Star Wars, in general. But too often the humor in the film is pushing the bounderies, I find. This may be overstating the point, but it is a valid point nonetheless:
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You did?
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This. I didn't see Return of the Jedi too many times, so I'd have to rewatch it to really compare to Revenge of the Sith or Rogue One, but it seems about right. And yes, its better than The Phantom Menace overall, but I would say - the action setpieces in the latter are better, which in the action-adventure genre must count for something. Really, the only part of Return of the Jedi that really, really works, is the climax of the Luke and Vader storyline: just the throwing down of the emperor, the removal of the mask and the pyre. That's it, for me.
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What Is The Last Film You Watched? (Older Films)
Chen G. replied to Mr. Breathmask's topic in General Discussion
Probably Goodfellas. I can't help but marvel at how his constant movement of the camera is never overwhelming, in the way that it is in MI:III or a Michael Bay film. -
That's true enough. But than, that's always true for the third installment of a trilogy: its the climax of the story, and every story is defined by the way it ends. A....never mind. Suffice to say, I'm not a fan of The Last Jedi, but its probably the better film out of the two.
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If he did, than that would be the equivalent of a glorified second-unit director. Point is, you can't call Return of the Jedi "a George Lucas film", which is to say nothing of Empire Strikes Back. Stylistically, that film is probably more removed from the original Star Wars than The Last Jedi is from The Force Awakens. It just looks and feels completely different. Now, I can accept that a lack of stylistic uniformity can read to some (probably to our very own @Mattris, as well) as a continuity issue. But its disingenuous to say that the sequel trilogy is outright bad because they're "winging it" plot-wise from film to film, or because it isn't stylistically uniform, pretending that the original sextet was either of these two things, which it clearly was not. Really, that's how almost all Hollywood film trilogies turn out.
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Newsflash: Star Wars as a series was always without direction. In 1977, George Lucas had no concept of what Empire Strikes Back turned out to be; If he had an idea of what Return of the Jedi was going to be in 1980, it was in mere broadstrokes: like having a confrontation with the emperor, having Luke's sister present herself, etcetra. The same is true of his prequels in 1983. The prequel trilogy itself is perhaps the one to be most fully drawn in the writer/director's mind from the outset, but again only in broad strokes. In terms of realizing those concept, too, George Lucas isn't credited as director nor screenwriter on Empire Strikes Back, and he merely co-wrote and produced Return of the Jedi. I will say, however, That's correct, and that's why the entire concept of Episodes VII to IX is inherently flawed, regardless of their execution: the story of Star Wars has been told and came to its conclusion. However, when I'm looking at the Disney films as individual works of cinema? Its nothing too bad, especially the core films (the sequel trilogy)
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What Is The Last Film You Watched? (Older Films)
Chen G. replied to Mr. Breathmask's topic in General Discussion
It also shares with those films the relentness nature of the camerawork, which is usually a turn-off for me. You'd have to be the absolute master of your craft (read: be Martin Scorcese) to make that kind of lively camerawork work and not be utterly exhausting. "When every scene feels as though it’s the most important, none of the scenes feel terribly important." -
I can understand. Doesn't mean that I don't think it was something best left unsaid. Two wrongs don't make a right, y'know.
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Big deal. You should try telling Holocaust jokes in Israel.😉 People can say ANYTHING that isn't a profanity.
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There's no such thing as "threshold of acceptance", as long as we don't go into profanities.
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@Nick Parker as much as I find Matriss' reasoning to be lacking, I don't think he quite merited the kind of disdain that he sometimes gets in this thread, your most latest response being particularly vitriolic. Can we not at least be civil? Its all too easy to be accepting of those with opinions that aren't too different to yours. The trick is to be accepting of those whose opnions are diametrically opposed to yours. And the fact of the matter is that a) The Last Jedi is not without its (numerous) flaws and b) that a lot of people feel about it as Mattris does.
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A Star Wars film isn't a Star Wars film simply because it takes place in a Galaxy far-far away - Solo is a testament to this. If I made a faux-documentary about the wildlife of Naboo, would that be a Star Wars film? If there had been a sitcom that just happened to take place in Tatooine, would that really be a Star Wars film? What about a domestic drama about the raising of young Luke Skywalker in the farm? Would that count? Both individual films and film franchises aren't defined by their setting: they're defined by their central conflict. Whether its the Free People versus Sauron, Harry Potter and friends vs. Voldemort, or Jedi vs. Sith (or Sith-like villains). If you don't have a central conflict, and all your entries are defined by the appearance of a recurring character, than you're operating in a territory more comparable to that of Indiana Jones, James Bond, Star Trek, etcetra. That's the kind of franchise that the MCU is.
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And send Star Wars fans to Lucasfilm with torches and pitchforks!
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That's called a deconstructive film, and its a very established Hollywood modus operandi. You take either a genre or a film series, and turn its iconography and its tropes on their head. If anything, The Last Jedi's deconstructive efforts are honstely kind of cosmetic: at the end of the day, there's still a small band of rebels with a hero(ine) wielding a laser sword, facing down a dominant evil force with a villain holding a red laser sword. That's probably a part of why I didn't find it that engaging: if you're going to go that route, a) do it with the FINAL installment, not the middle chapter and b) do it all the way. For my money, Episode IX would open without a text crawl, and end with some cataclysmic event that severes everyone's connection to The Force, so it can't be used for good or for bad. That's how you can truly unpack this film series. You'd hate that, now wouldn't you?