Posts made by TheOnceler

@Auspice said in Good or New Movies Review:

Wow. Every year PA just looks shittier and shittier.

@Ghost said in Good or New Movies Review:

People should go see Knives Out. It's Rian Johnson finally recovering from the stumble of making a critically acclaimed billion dollar movie.

@Sockmonkey said in Good or New Movies Review:

Everyone who doesn't put The Last Jedi at the top/near top of their ranking lists is wrong.

You can't fight universal truth so don't bother trying.

There are probably good and valid reasons to dislike TLJ, but thanks to shitty Internet people over the last two years I just assume that anyone who doesn't like TLJ is trash.

Ewan Mcgregor and Ian McDiarmid kill it in three movies where no one else can really be bothered to try.

It's fun when you get the joke!

@ZombieGenesis said in Good or New Movies Review:

Rian Johnson says there was no set plan for the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy

A few times.

"Not really. That’s what’s been really cool about the storytelling process. There is definitely the idea that we know it is a three-movie arc. We know the first film is an introduction, then the middle act is training, meaning challenging the characters. The third is where they all come together and you have to resolve everything.

But I was truly able to write this script without bases to tag, and without a big outline on the wall. That meant I could react to what I felt from The Force Awakens, and what I wanted to see. I could make this movie personal. I could also just take these characters where it felt right and most interesting to take them. I think part of the reason the movie feels like it goes to some unexpected places with the characters is that we had that freedom. If it had all just been planned out and written down beforehand, it might have felt a little more calculated, I suppose."

And again.

No, he was really gracious, in just stepping back and giving us a blank slate to work with. The starting point was The Force Awakens script, which is quite a big, expansive, wonderful starting point. In that way, we are drawing directly from his work. But from that point forward it was a blank canvas.

And Abrams.

But it was a completely unknown scenario. I had some gut instincts about where the story would have gone. But without getting in the weeds on episode eight, that was a story that Rian wrote and was telling based on seven before we met. So he was taking the thing in another direction. So we also had to respond to Episode VIII. So our movie was not just following what we had started, it was following what we had started and then had been advanced by someone else. So there was that, and, finally, it was resolving nine movies. While there are some threads of larger ideas and some big picture things that had been conceived decades ago and a lot of ideas that Lawrence Kasdan and I had when we were doing Episode VII, the lack of absolute inevitability, the lack of a complete structure for this thing, given the way it was being run was an enormous challenge.

@Auspice said in Good or New Movies Review:

Now it could be said that Disney should have learned from Marvel, but saying 'they already did this....' No. Marvel did. Not Disney.

Marvel had the bold idea to do multiple movies leading into The Avengers, but the three phase structure and the overall story of the Thanos saga wasn't a thing until Marvel got bought and Disney gave Feige free rein, and the story itself wasn't fully planned out until after The Avengers.

It's also hard to ignore that pre-Disney Marvel gave us the least interesting movies (and outright two biggest stinkers) in the MCU.

The model for movies within the Lucasfilm wing may be wildly different than in Marvel.

And the point is that it shouldn't be.

Edit: Even if you want to nitpick and say that they weren't under the same umbrella when Marvel started, the fact of the matter is that Marvel was still an example. Hell, two previous trilogies weren't entirely planned out, but they still had a writing team that had an idea of what would happen in the sequels after Star Wars was a hit. I mean, guys, the Fast & Furious movies since 5 have had more of a cohesive story arc between movies than this trilogy.

@Auspice said in Good or New Movies Review:

but I liked it more than TLJ. I'll say that for sure.

Oof.

Considering TLJ rests comfortably in the top three Star Wars movies for me, this isn't much of an endorsement.

I fear that JJ Abrams, a feckless turd whose only true good has been revitalizing the Mission Impossible series, terrified of the neckbeard backlash to TLJ has decided to veer in the opposite direction and as a result crashed the Millennium Falcon directly into craptown.

And I also say that as a person who has terribly fond memories of watching Star Wars on VHS every chance I got. Someone who owns the prequel trilogy and doesn't hate them, though I gotta say, rewatched 'em recently and boy are there long stretches of those movies that are hard to watch. Someone who unabashedly loves this dumb universe. Someone who genuinely liked Solo.

In the end I think this trilogy was done in by the fact that there was no plan for it. JJ Abrams made TFA and was like, okay, someone else can figure out what the deal with Snoke is, who the Knights of Ren are, who Rey's parents are, how much good is left in Kylo Ren, etc. And then it was passed to someone who made a truly, remarkably beautiful film in TLJ, but wasn't particularly interested in any of those questions. And now it's been passed back to someone who just wants to throw as many hacky references to the original as possible. And at no point was anyone concerned about making any kind of unified story.

Which is disappointing. Especially given that Disney knows how to do this, given the success they've seen over in the MCU, where the arc of the Thanos saga was decided shortly after The Avengers.

Maybe they should just give Star Wars to Kevin Fiege.

At least The Mandalorian is still great. And rumor has it that they're talking Doctor Aphra for an upcoming Star Wars Disney+ series. That would be amazing.

I have to admit, Ken Russell's Cats would probably be a hell of a thing.

A collection of snippets from reviews of Cats that will likely be more enjoyable than the movie itself.

Boston Globe
My eyes are burning. Oh God, my eyes.
Collider
Can you make a movie so bad that the Academy takes back your Best Director Oscar? Asking for Tom Hooper.
The Beat
Cats is the worst thing to happen to cats since dogs.
Hollywood Reporter
Cat-astrophic.
LA Times
"Cats” is both a horror and an endurance test.
Slashfilm
There is a thin line between idiocy and genius, and Cats pukes a hairball on it and rubs its ass all over it.
Variety
Nine may not be enough lives for some of the stars to live down their involvement in this poorly conceived and executed adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hit musical.
Little White Lies
I felt the light inside me slowly fading.
The Playlist
Once Tom Hooper's 110 minutes of Cats are over, theater is dead. And we unchosen ones are left, tragically, to continue living.
New York Times
It's amazing to see what Adult Swim can accomplish with a $100 million budget. I never knew Tom Hooper was capable of making a surrealist nightmare that would rival Jodorowsky, that could baffle David Lynch, that would prompt even the dark god Cthulhu to emit an impressed eldritch shriek of “nehehehehehe”
Vulture
To assess Cats as good or bad feels like the entirely wrong axis on which to see it. It is, with all affection, a monstrosity.
The Daily Telegraph
Glad to report that Cats is everything you’d hoped for and more: a mesmerisingly ugly fiasco that makes you feel like your brain is being eaten by a parasite. A viewing experience so stressful that it honestly brought on a migraine.

...and on and on and on...

Having the CEO send out an email saying "everyone is getting a bonus of X!" and then the VP of your department is like "hey, secret meeting tomorrow, guys " and when you go in there he hands out envelopes and is like "gotcha something special " and then in the envelope it says you'll be getting the exact same bonus the CEO told everyone about the day before.

I mean, hooray bonus? But, like, damn son. Way to get a guy's hopes up.

I've never gotten a bonus and then immediately gone to look for available jobs in my area.

@Ghost said in Why We Don't Make New Friends Anymore (Or Creepers Do Creepy Things):

This is the same 16 year old girl who lived with her dad in a "LARP house." Basically a LarpHouse is a crack house (usually minus the drugs) where someone acts as slumlord to 7-10 larpers who pay rent on couches.

This is the most spectacularly fucking bananas thing in this whole goddam thread.

I legitimately do not want to believe that this is real.

@Roz said in Why We Don't Make New Friends Anymore (Or Creepers Do Creepy Things):

All of my closest friends at this point are people I originally met on MU*s. Including my roommate!

Basically the same. Except replace roommate with wife.

And also I didn't meet my kids MUing.

Tho I'd rather catch them doing drugs than logging on to pretend to be a vampire or w/e tbqh.

Sony and Disney finally reached an agreement and a third Kevin Feige produced MCU Spider-Man movie will hit theaters July 16 of 2021.

And how does that make me feel?!

Phone.

I was once declared 'shockingly coherent' for someone RPing from a phone. You don't get those sorts of compliments every day.

Titanshade - In a fantasy world with 80s era technology Titanshade was once the energy capital of the empire, fantastically wealthy despite being in the ass end of nowhere, thriving in a frozen waste thanks to the city having been built on the body of a dead god. Unfortunately the oil wells have dried up, along with the jobs that industry created, and times are tough in Titanshade. When an ambassador from a group who hope to revivify Titanshade's fortunes with windmills turns up violently murdered it's up to good cop nobody trusts Detective Carter and the mollenkampi (imagine 90% human, 10% stag beetle) rookie who has been assigned as his partner to solve the case before the city erupts in violence.

The Grand Dark - The war is over and the citizens of Lower Proszawa while away their days partying, drinking, fucking and doing drugs. Whatever it takes to ignore that they live in a police state, that automatons are putting people out of work and that they may very well have lost the last war, but are still gearing up for another. Largo's a morphia-addicted bike courier who route is about to put him into a world of shit.

All Cyberpunk - Do you like questions of identity and/or humanity in the face of high technology? Extreme differences between the haves and have nots? A dark setting where trust and hope are in short supply? Then you might enjoy every cyberpunk novel, movie or tv show.

I'll have a delicious LaCroix please.

Big eh on Iron Lad. Since they've not done anything with Kang yet you don't really lose out by ditching the Iron Lad character.

I'd rather see Riri Williams as Ironheart. See if RDJ wants to earn a few million for a day of ADR and have him be her Jarvis.