Bongo Bill posted:

Yoda picks up an entire army and brings them with him on a rescue mission for three people. The fact that they start the movie saying they can't fight a war and then end the movie fighting a war is significant. What do you think this fact means?


The Jedi live in a spacious palace just down the street from the Senate and towering over the slums of a densely-packed city. The robes they wear, ostensibly symbols of voluntary poverty, are made of noticeably finer materials than the coarse-spun ones that actual farmers wear. They openly plot a coup d'etat to preemptively protect the Jedi Order from the political repercussions if they should move against the Chancellor. The war begins with Jedi-led clones invading the droids' homeworld. The villains' goal is to secede from the Republic, which even you can see has problems.


Clones are people. Droids are people. Darth Sidious is never depicted using mind control powers; only Jedi are ever shown to do this.


Yes: if only the guardians of peace and justice had murdered a child, they might not have suffered karmic punishment for their hypocrisy.

Tezzor posted:

Why are you attributing so much more thought to the consequences of this bowel movement than the guy who wrote it and made it into a movie? Are you aware that your "basically competent stoner-undergrad insight" into the breaches of logic in this movie will not net you any money? If not, I'm sorry. If so, I'm sorry. This Is Tragedy

Fuligin posted:

This thread made me rewatch the prequels and I do, indeed, now enjoy them.

Fuligin posted:

This thread made me rewatch the prequels and I do, indeed, now enjoy them. Thanks thread! I Like Star Wars. I still found the dialogue horrible, some of the all CGI shots are flat and gently caress ugly, and the action sequences all go on too long- but I enjoyed them.

Bongo Bill posted:

Actually, it's philistinism of the highest order to suggest that the producer, director, and writer of a movie put less effort into producing, writing, and directing it than an internet man puts into an internet post. Like, I wrote those words on the shitter. This is not even my job.

Tezzor posted:

It is not philistinism to assert that a manchild on the spectrum failed to create art without the help of others, unless you believe that The Legend of the 10 Elemental Masters by Ulilllia was the singular appreciated masterwork of our times

homullus posted:

The thing that disappoints me more than anything else about the prequels (and the one episode of The Clone Wars I've seen) is that they were overinterested in regularizing Yoda's speech. More poetic and interesting phrasing like "Luminous beings are we!" would get chopped up into "Luminous beings, we are" in Episodes I through III. Everything he says becomes "Rest of sentence, subject verb." I don't know why they bothered, since they gave unusual speech to Jar Jar too.

Bongo Bill posted:

The dialog throughout the prequels lacks texture. To the extent that characters (excepting those with contrived affectations like Yoda) have distinctive voices, it clearly originates in the acting rather than the script. Far less characterization than could have been is delivered by this vector; many lines add little more than plot context to the emotional situation that is already plainly evident. Although the phrasing is strong and clear, it's largely graceless statements of fact. Scenes of types that are traditionally carried by dialog lack tension as a result. For example, the scene on Kamino where Obi-Wan confronts Jango badly wants to be filled with verbal sparring, double entendres, a show of wit; but instead some characters who are clearly not fooling each other tell a few perfunctory lies. You might say that the dialog reveals too much about what the characters think and feel.

Y Kant Ozma Diet posted:

This is a big deal to people though. If the dialogue is real stiff and unconvincing it completely undercuts the emotional pull the films have. You care less about the characters and you're left with a movie that relies more on action sequences for enjoyment.

Bongo Bill posted:

I am talking about the "you put more thought into this than George Lucas" meme. I promise you, I did not. Least of all in that post, which contains very basic factual observations.

It takes a lot of thinking to direct a series of films, quite independently of the fact that it is a collaborative process. You seem to be unaware of this.

Tezzor posted:

-Not militant, actively resisting having to fight a war, actively uncomfortable fighting a war, not very good at fighting a war, by their own admission incapable of fighting a war without the army whose creation they were unaware of and not involved in, forced into the war by circumstances beyond their control
-Not obsessed with keeping power, apparently lack much if any benefits of power beyond political clout they do not seem to parley into material benefits, concerned perhaps with maintaining the status quo, against an invading army of robots led by mustache-twirling villains whose motivations are unclear other than that they hate the Republic for no clear reason, and are being manipulated by Dracula
-An inhumane and corrupt government. That is, a government where everything bad that happens to anyone is ultimately the fault of one guy with incredible mind control powers. A government that votes off-screen to continue using what we have no reason to believe are anything other than replaceable, indistinguishable, irrelevant sub-people who conveniently appeared, instead of sacrificing millions of real people's lives or surrendering to evil robots.
-Teach radical detachment from normal emotions: while perhaps ultimately an inadvertently terrible policy, nevertheless one that had previously apparently persisted without much trouble for centuries. Failure to conform to the policy by one rear end in a top hat was the problem, not the policy itself, or perhaps their irrational decision to train the little child version of this rear end in a top hat despite feeling weirded out and predicting grave danger, rather than just sending him back to Tatooine or throwing him down a well.

The Empire Strikes Back posted:

LUKE: But how am I to know the good side from the bad?

YODA: You will know. When you are calm, at peace. Passive. A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack.

Attack of the Clones posted:

CLONE COMMANDER: Master Yoda, all forward positions are advancing.

YODA: Very good. Very good.

Revenge of the Sith posted:

YODA: Into exile I must go. Failed, I have.

Tezzor posted:

It is not philistinism to assert that a manchild on the spectrum failed to create art without the help of others, unless you believe that The Legend of the 10 Elemental Masters by Ulilllia was the singular appreciated masterwork of our times

Bongo Bill posted:

Yeah, I fully understand why people don't like 'em, and the script is the biggest part of the reason why. They don't give as much to the viewer. It is more difficult to like the prequels, but it is worth it.

Jack Gladney posted:

Carrie Fisher seemed so normal in Star Wars and Blues Brothers. What happened to her after?

turtlecrunch posted:

The Clone Wars TV show gets into the whole morality dimension and pretty much every other kind of dimension in a far more satisfying way than the movies so you can effectively skip the first two movies, watch the show, then I suppose watch ROTS though the conclusion is explained in ANH anyway. At least ROTS is a shot of Ian McDiarmid's SUPREME CHANCELLEMPEROR PALPATINE straight up your nose which is a lot better than it sounds.

Cnut the Great posted:

Tezzor posted:

Jabba The Hutt's Previously Unknown Vaguely Gay Goofy Southern Purple Cousin With a Ridiculous Accent and An Inextinguishable Number of Owed Favors

Tezzor posted:

"I am a poo poo writer" - George Lucas

Cnut the Great posted:

The prophecy was about destroying the Sith as the cause of the imbalance. By the time of Episode III, the imbalance was already self-sustaining. It didn't need the Sith anymore. The Sith were no longer the cause. Evil was everywhere. The transformation of the Republic into the Empire was greeted with thunderous applause.

quote:

Mark: ‘The thing is, what is amazing about Harrison is like I was over there for a couple-three weeks. And then Harrison comes along and, up until then, I’m the only American there. My first movie, all these things going on. And then, finally, you have somebody that comes in that you can bounce ideas off of. I mean, not me... he had total.... He came in with amazing things in his own mind about the film. And I was just- I was literally doing every comma, every period, every semi-colon. And in comes Harrison, he’s got big speeches crossed out in the script with arrows. With lines written out.’
DJ: ‘All you screen-writers out there, listen to this....’
Mark: ‘That’s the way he did it. It’s not in that novel because they did it earlier- before they knew Harrison was gonna do it. And I think they’re very nervous about the whole thing.’
Laughter.
DJ: ‘You have to have a director who’s got a lot of confidence if he’s willing to cut speeches and cut ‘em down to lines.’
Harrison: ‘It’s not a matter of that. It’s really a matter of making things work. I mean, we’d come into a scene and we’re faced with dialogue straight from Buck Rogers.’
Mark: (chuckling) ‘I loved it.’
Harrison: ‘I mean, I used to threaten George with tying him up and making him repeat his own dialogue ‘
Laughter.
Mark: ‘He kept threatening to do that all through the film. At gun-point.’
Harrison: ‘But then, the task is to make it work somehow. And that’s where the actual fun and energy of the whole thing came from. Was making this stuff work.’
DJ: ‘When you would cut a speech, you would tell Lucas first or would you walk on, do 2 lines....’
Mark: ‘Normally, you’d try... you’d do a completely different dialogue. If George didn’t like it, you know he’d come up and say ‘Don’t do that’. But 90% of the time, Harrison would do the lines, you know. The same thought, the same theme....’
Harrison: ‘The only person it really bothered was the script girl, who had the original script.’
Mark: ‘Her hair’s white now.’
Harrison: ‘But George would often not notice that there was any changes made...’
Mark: ‘No.’

Bongo Bill posted:

The dialog throughout the prequels lacks texture. To the extent that characters (excepting those with contrived affectations like Yoda) have distinctive voices, it clearly originates in the acting rather than the script. Far less characterization than could have been is delivered by this vector; many lines add little more than plot context to the emotional situation that is already plainly evident. Although the phrasing is strong and clear, it's largely graceless statements of fact. Scenes of types that are traditionally carried by dialog lack tension as a result. For example, the scene on Kamino where Obi-Wan confronts Jango badly wants to be filled with verbal sparring, double entendres, a show of wit; but instead some characters who are clearly not fooling each other tell a few perfunctory lies. You might say that the dialog reveals too much about what the characters think and feel.

quote:

Harrison: ‘But George would often not notice that there was any changes made...’
Mark: ‘No.’

Bongo Bill posted:

The Jedi live in a spacious palace just down the street from the Senate and towering over the slums of a densely-packed city. The robes they wear, ostensibly symbols of voluntary poverty, are made of noticeably finer materials than the coarse-spun ones that actual farmers wear. They openly plot a coup d'etat to preemptively protect the Jedi Order from the political repercussions if they should move against the Chancellor. The war begins with Jedi-led clones invading the droids' homeworld. The villains' goal is to secede from the Republic, which even you can see has problems.

Neurolimal posted:

The north had problems; the answer to those problems was not to allow slaveowners sovereignty. We were right to go to war in reality, and the movie peoples were right to go to war over the decadent and unproductive tradesmen who's most notable quality is the mass exploitation of a "sub-race" for all labor needs. The fact that their lincoln happened to be Evil Space Lincoln is a strike against Abraham Von Dracula, not the war.

Clones are heroes my friend.

Empress Theonora posted:

One of the things that bugged me the most about the prequels' writing, even in my recent rewatch where I found way more to enjoy about them than I ever had before, was the jokes. Not that there were jokes and comic relief in the first place, since that's always been part of Star Wars ("Trouble with your droid?") and it seems especially important in the prequels (the various conflicts Palpatine is phantom menacing having farcical elements seems very appropriate), but that most of the jokes just didn't land. TFA had a lot of pretty funny lines delivered with wit and charisma; the prequels had deathsticks and a space horse farting in Jar Jar's face.

Empress Theonora posted:

One of the things that bugged me the most about the prequels' writing, even in my recent rewatch where I found way more to enjoy about them than I ever had before, was the jokes. Not that there were jokes and comic relief in the first place, since that's always been part of Star Wars ("Trouble with your droid?") and it seems especially important in the prequels (the various conflicts Palpatine is phantom menacing having farcical elements seems very appropriate), but that most of the jokes just didn't land. TFA had a lot of pretty funny lines delivered with wit and charisma; the prequels had deathsticks and a space horse farting in Jar Jar's face.

Bongo Bill posted:

The Jedi live in a spacious palace just down the street from the Senate and towering over the slums of a densely-packed city. The robes they wear, ostensibly symbols of voluntary poverty, are made of noticeably finer materials than the coarse-spun ones that actual farmers wear.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

It's a counterpart of the scene in A New Hope where he just unthinkingly dismembers the alien guy in the cantina. "You'll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy." Really, Obiwan?