Star Wars 7 shit talk

I was disappointed they didn't follow up with the dog that looks like Harrison Ford

cat does not look like a Marine to me

https://www.instagram.com/p/3IH_EhI1hI/

http://youtu.be/GQQMLE4FuIQ

is it time to start the " " " " 8 shit talk thread

Benicio Del Toro, Laura Dern and Kelly Marie Tran now onboard for XIII

xp yes

amazing

http://i.imgur.com/MHclyZh.jpg

episode vii vs. iv shot by shot "echo" comp:
https://vimeo.com/160263943

I always wondered why a lone AT-AT would've been stuck out in the desert

I figured it was just global warming.

https://www.outerplaces.com/images/user_upload/jakku%20junk%20walkers.jpg

I like this concept art showing decaying, still-standing AT-ATs on a waterlogged Jakku. Pity they didn't recreate this in the film.

i finally saw this. was entertained a fair amount of the time, bored a fair amount of the time -- more of the latter after the halfway mark, at which point i started to get eager for it to end.

abrams isn't exactly a 'stylist' but i was surprised and impressed by how assured the editing and camerawork was. abrams has a way with action cutting, to my surprise, and he does good stuff with focus (selective focus, rack focus) and camera movement. nothing that reinvents the wheel, of course, but purposeful, precise, and handsome. most of the time.

as for the narrative, yeesh. i know that a million tons of virtual (and real) ink have been spilled about this by now, but it really did rehash so many of the narrative beats of the original film (and to a lesser extent of ESB and RotJ). to an astonishing degree, i'd say. in fact i think it'd be easier to name the major plot beats that /didn't/ strongly evoke, if not outright copy, the 1977 film. that meant there was very little surprise here. the many fan-service quips ("how about a ... trash compactor") were truly groan worthy, but not as dispiriting as the narrative recycling.

i guess for many folks this was just what the doctor ordered, though, huh.

some nice sound design at times, too. got the strong feeling of a ton of talented people working at top form on a story that was little better than ambitious fanfic.

somehow the way that abrams imitates the minutae of the original trilogy's visual style--down to using roughly the same lens lengths for certain types of shots--is impressive to me, in a "that's neat" kind of way, but the narrative recycling is just depressing.

in the spirit of jar-jar-free edits of the prequels, i'd kinda like to see a cut of this that purges all the really really on the nose jokey references like the trash compactor line. it would be pointless in that the entire thing is a recycle job and the thematic echoes are all over everything, but that was the stuff that really, really took me out of the movie. i enjoyed it overall but i feel like those things are only gonna wear worse on repeat viewings and i wonder how fondly i'll think of this film in future years. like will i mostly remember it as the exciting story with a couple of living breathing new characters that i like a lot, or as this hokey in-jokey fanfic thing?

in the theater i laughed aloud at the revelation of the new death planet, like okay, you're going all the way on this, my hat is off to you sirs. but mannnn would it be a better movie if it were not saddled with cutting away to the tension-free and no-character-stakes CGI bombing run with pilot guy plus schmoes. they actually don't need the death planet at all for the main story that's going on about our heroes, and it sort of screws up our sense of how powerful or well-developed this new villain organization is. the other worst element is the CGI supreme chancellor snoke, which i think we're all tolerating only because we assume it'll eventually turn out that it's a wizard-of-oz thing and he doesn't actually look like a CGI school graduating project for a Generic Monster Guy. if that turns out not to be the case the movie's gonna start to feel kinda thin and empty and video-game-ish.

and yet, i'm still weirdly tempted to go see it again while it's still clinging to a couple of theater time slots. huh.

And with all that agreed, it looked and felt like star wars,which is enough

Also it was funny and exciting and wore its updates well - the original story of Star Wars wasn't exactly a mould-breaker.

congrats amateurist on successfully rehashing the most boring criticisms of this movie for our reading pleasure

http://palidesuka.tumblr.com/post/135896928855/for-all-you-star-wars-fans

xpost Yeah, how dare you not read all 948,123,109 prior posts about this movie. What the hell.

Hahaha loony Frenchie dog

congrats amateurist on successfully rehashing the most boring criticisms of this movie for our reading pleasure

― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Monday, April 4, 2016 4:45 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sorry, man. yeah, i haven't read much about it before i saw it. i never pretended to have some amazingly original hot take. just my $0.02. would you like your money back?

oh wait, you didn't pay anything for it. you didn't even have to read it. or comment on it.

We had a different "spoilers okay" thread for the movie, I think any plot-related discussion is better suited there:

Star Wars 7 Spoilers Thread: This SPOIL bath is going to feel so good.

xpost

i dunno why i even come on ILX anymore, the typical routine is this:

1) i post a few things
2) someone either makes a pointlessly snarky response or just outright insults me in some fashion that has nothing to do with what's under discussion
3) i get a bad feeling, wonder why i bother, go off ILX for four or five days
4) after a while, get bored doing work, feel like chatting about something, post a few things
5) see #2, etc.

ILX just seems really toxic lately.

(and to clarify TH's post wasn't that bad, it's just a funny thing to see after not having posted for 18 hours or whatever. like, "geez, thanks.")

'chatting' seems like an odd description of what just happened though - turn up on a thread, don't interact with it particularly (your last post was December 17, so you wouldn't have had to go very far forwards or back on your bookmark to reach Prime Hot Take), just dump "here's what I thought" without being curious as to whether anyone else might've already thought it..

sure, i didn't read through all 8,000 posts on this thread or however many there are. i also didn't pretend my observations were novel; indeed, i know that they've been made before. (precisely how many times i'm not sure, since i haven't been following all the discussion about this film too closely, mostly b/c i'm not a big Star Wars fan). just shared my thoughts.

yeah idgi really

sorry amst it's not even just this thread it's that these criticisms of ep vii are like the coin of the realm now, 'disappointingly recycles story beats from ep iv' might as well be engraved on the inside ring of the blu-ray at this point. i know you're a film teacher, and previous posts suggest you care enough about star wars to be upset at the absence of a definitive original version of ep iv so it's not too unreasonable to expect you'd have absorbed the usual critiques of the new one by now and be prepared to offer something new?

i mean believe me or don't but i honestly was looking forward to what you'd have to say

Xpost Yeah, who cares what or when people post? More the merrier. Redundant is in the eye of the beholder. It's the internet. It's free.

i'm not a star wars specialist! i'm mostly interested in the 'original' version of the 1977 film to teach its visual effects.

i did like some aspects of the new film's style, and pointed that out.

Forgot this movie came out, tbh. Does it have cultural traction, or straight to the dustbin? Not a bad film, but wonder if kids will be watching it every weekend in DVD. Did it have any quotable lines?

everyone talked about the story being rehashed but i feel like this element wasn't remarked on enough, tho obv it was remarked on

somehow the way that abrams imitates the minutae of the original trilogy's visual style--down to using roughly the same lens lengths for certain types of shots--is impressive to me, in a "that's neat" kind of way

because it was deeply eerie imo, i'd never seen a movie before where almost every other shot i was invited to look at the structure of the shot itself or of an adjacent cut and go "oh, see, because" -- direct reference and repetition was in the movie's very mechanical bones, which on the one hand is impressive but on the other (or on the same?) felt uncanny and left me at a constant weird distance and i couldn't decide what if anything this said about me and/or the movie and/or fan culture in general

xpost are you kidding? half my wall is people quoting the new movie or Kylo Ren memes. it caught on

i know it's disingenuous to say "my kids didn't have a problem with the focal lengths" but, you know, my kids didn't have a problem with the focal lengths.

as a film-style wonk i enjoyed the way that even the lens lengths were allusive! obviously abrams isn't doing this for the kids, but for (a) himself, (b) other filmmakers (i think the extent to which filmmakers are making stuff for their peers is underacknowledged) and (c) people who know the other star wars films forwards and backwards (which is a lot of people).

there's a scene where all the x-wing (?) fighters are racing to get to their planes, there's a fast tracking shot whose movement is counterpoint to the direction of most of the characters' movements and it uses a telephoto lens... i would swear (w/o having watched it in a few weeks) that this directly evokes a shot from the last act of the '77 "star wars."

also i bet there's a lot of people who couldn't tell you the difference b/t a tracking shot and a steadicam shot, or a telephoto vs a fish-eye lens, but could tell you that one scene "looks like 'star wars'" and another sorta does not.

Xpost But isn't that Abrams' directorial m.o., though? Being an almost spot-on emulator of the stylistic tics of his own favorite filmmakers - or at least of 70s-80s Spielberg.
I rewatched VII at home last weekend and saw a lot of early Spielberg in the shots this time around (see the reactions outside Maz's castle after the weapon is put to use)

( that post is response to difficult listening's )

i like the idea of abrams as a chameleon. i haven't seen enough of his work to know! (the only of his movies i really liked was his mission:impossible installment.) but in any case being a stylistic chameleon is an impressive skill, if not a major one i guess.

I think he is doing it for the kids! If he isn't then he's one lucky sonovabitch, tumblr and actual (anecdotal) kids are nuts for it.

fwiw, this guy was the DP:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0591053/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cr15

lots of action films under his belt, including work with Oliver Stone and Tony Scott

xpost

i just meant he's probably thinking about tracer hand's kids when he discusses lenses w/ his DP

Yeah - doesn't partic. bother me, either. I'm curious what Rian Johnson's going to be coming with visually.

I wondered before seeing The Force Awakens if the shot composition would be similar to his Star Trek reboot, but it's really its own thing and much more indebted to the first SW film and Spielberg! I saw 10 Cloverfield Lane over the weekend and the theater played a clip of Super 8 beforehand and I was reminded again what a love story to Spielberg's work in the 80s that was.