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Yaws posted:It is kinda unsophisticated the way Lucas handled slavery in TPM. It's so whitewashed and sanitized. Like a what a naive childs view of what slavery is. It means a slave built a slave to suffer more than him. Anakin is a monster from the start.
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Feb 2, 2016 05:45
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Tezzor posted:I need my fictional stories to give me some reason to care about these things and the people affected by them; as a normal member of the human race who is not previously emotionally invested in defending the embarrassing diarrhea of George Lucas. You don't need to be told what to feel. You can observe and decide for yourself.
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Feb 2, 2016 05:48
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So how about those Droids cartoon?
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Feb 2, 2016 05:50
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Tezzor posted:I need my fictional stories to give me some reason to care about these things and the people affected by them; Fictional stories make poor authority figures.
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Feb 2, 2016 05:50
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Strangely enough, I think people who watched more older movies appreciate the prequels more, as they follow the old rules and style of Classic Hollywood instead of more modern movies. Since my father was a cinephile, I'd watched a ton of old movies by the time TPM came out and did not find myself put off by the different style of filmmaking. Watching more foreign movies would also help, I think.
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Feb 2, 2016 05:52
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MonsieurChoc posted:Strangely enough, I think people who watched more older movies appreciate the prequels more, as they follow the old rules and style of Classic Hollywood instead of more modern movies. Since my father was a cinephile, I'd watched a ton of old movies by the time TPM came out and did not find myself put off by the different style of filmmaking. Yes, if you watch old movies you'll notice that the romantic scenes are similar to the ones in AotC. They exchange stilted dialogue and say exactly how they feel in no uncertain terms. It's an odd choice inserting that into your science fiction movie made 40+ years later.
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Feb 2, 2016 06:00
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Yaws posted:It is kinda unsophisticated the way Lucas handled slavery in TPM. It's so whitewashed and sanitized. Like a what a naive childs view of what slavery is. Absolutely. It feels completely empty. Really it's kind of insulting to the history of slavery having it be some clumsy and awkward - like we don't really want to show how bad it is because that's really dark (which Star Wars has never had, like the guy's arm getting cut off, the burnt up skeletons, the bloody Stormtrooper hand, the Rancor eating someone...) but we still want that to be a main point about a character who's in a bad spot. It's boring. If you turn the volume off is it even possible to tell he's a slave? There are times when dialogue can articulate the horrors of slavery pretty inextricably from a movie but the writings doesn't exactly service it in this case.
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Feb 2, 2016 06:02
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Slavery is not all bloody whipping and rape. The point of the scenes is that Anakin lives a life like Luke but - unlike Luke - he literally has no choice in the matter. Like "if I try to leave, my dad will kill me!" Luke might complain like that, but the subtext is that Anakin's dad will literally kill him. Shmii is in the same supportive, motherly role as Aunt Beru, but the subtext is that she has been beaten into hopelessness. The counterpoint is Rey, who is seemingly in the worst situation of the three characters but is actually the least encumbered. She fully chooses to remain in the trash.
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Feb 2, 2016 06:04
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It doesn't have to be bloody rape and beatings but for god's sake, Rey's boss treats her worse when she looks at an old lady for two seconds.
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Feb 2, 2016 06:05
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korusan posted:It doesn't have to be bloody rape and beatings but for god's sake, Rey's boss treats her worse when she looks at an old lady for two seconds. Not actually. The blob guy doesn't force her to accept him as her daddy, under penalty of death.
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Feb 2, 2016 06:10
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korusan posted:It doesn't have to be bloody rape and beatings but for god's sake, Rey's boss treats her worse when she looks at an old lady for two seconds. He is also a Bad Guy, yes. I don't know, man. I don't look at a movie and say "Okay, yes, in theory alien invasion of Earth is a bad thing but why should I care?" I tend to accept the story the film's telling me unless I'm given a good reason NOT to care.
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Feb 2, 2016 06:11
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MonsieurChoc posted:Strangely enough, I think people who watched more older movies appreciate the prequels more, as they follow the old rules and style of Classic Hollywood instead of more modern movies. Since my father was a cinephile, I'd watched a ton of old movies by the time TPM came out and did not find myself put off by the different style of filmmaking. As someone who's watched a bunch of older movies and a couple foreign films, that didn't help the prequels.
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Feb 2, 2016 06:12
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G-III posted:Yes, let's see someone's head get popped off Running Man style in a movie aimed at children. I'm sure that would have gone well with the MPAA ratings board. Tezzor's problem isn't that they're incapable of empathizing, it's that they honestly believe that they're not supposed to because the movie didn't pause and directly tell them to. Caring about the slaves distracts from the 'true' point of star wars, which is being awed by whizbang spaceships, in suspense as the heroes adventure, and then eventually elated at their victory over the pure evil bad guys. The prequels, additionally, are obviously bad because they do an inadequate job of conforming to this emotional roadmap (ie bogstandard action film).
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Feb 2, 2016 06:15
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RBA Starblade posted:As someone who's watched a bunch of older movies and a couple foreign films, that didn't help the prequels. I'm sorry your random hate was this strong.
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Feb 2, 2016 06:16
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Not actually. The blob guy doesn't force her to accept him as her daddy, under penalty of death. What we see of Anakin's predicament likens him to more of a Little Rascals type, disadvantaged and subjugated yes but visually still falling short of the common emotional hallmarks of slavery. Even if he had a space collar or something this would mean so much more because we are constantly reminded by his appearance of his oppression. People like visual things - it makes them care more. The whole thing in his head is more befitting of Roman theater, or perhaps an old Shakespeare play put on in the middle ages - not a film series which up to this point is very explicit about visual symbols. quote:I don't know, man. I don't look at a movie and say "Okay, yes, in theory alien invasion of Earth is a bad thing but why should I care?" I tend to accept the story the film's telling me unless I'm given a good reason NOT to care. It's kind of like if someone tells you in passing something bad that happened without elaborating or having any sort of body language communicating why this is so bad - you can empathize obviously but it resonates a lot more if you see the effects of it a little. The Golden Gael fucked around with this message at 06:29 on Feb 2, 2016 |
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Feb 2, 2016 06:23
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Not actually. The blob guy doesn't force her to accept him as her daddy, under penalty of death. The blob guy isnt her boss. She gets scolded when she is cleaning junk. The stuff she brings back is things she found.
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Feb 2, 2016 06:25
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While there's certainly no real rules when making a movie you generally want to make your point with clarity. The "droid slavery" aspect of the prequels isn't given much thought by people because their person hood is somewhat muddled. Our heros cut them down without thinking about it and not all droids are portrayed equally. Protocol droids are clear examples of droids that achieved person hood but those droideka certainly aren't. They don't speak or emote it in any way. They exist to kill. So some droids are people and some aren't...? Even ignoring all this, the 'person hood of droids' and 'droid slavery' chaff in well trod ground. It's been done to death, and done better. Lucas himself touched on it in THX-1138. It doesn't redeem these movies one whit.
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Feb 2, 2016 06:27
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Watto forces Anakin to love him - and posters say 'but look how much they love eachother!' The scenes of Anakin's home life, contrasted with the dialogue about slavery, serve the dual function: 1) Showing that Anakin's 'family life' has obvious undercurrents of coercion and abuse. 2) Demonstrating the protagonists' difficulty in understanding this coersion and abuse as just part of a massive system of exploitation. Note that I have formed an interpretation that does not discount any textual evidence. This is the strongest reading of the text.
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Feb 2, 2016 06:30
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Watto forces Anakin to love him - and posters say 'but look how much they love eachother!' What's lost by not making this a bit more overt? Why doesn't Anakin have some kind of symbol on his outfit, maybe Watto's emblem or something, to visually communicate his station in relation to Watto? It doesn't make it any more clever leaving it out.
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Feb 2, 2016 06:32
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korusan posted:What's lost by not making this a bit more overt? Why doesn't Anakin have some kind of symbol on his outfit, maybe Watto's emblem or something, to visually communicate his station in relation to Watto? It doesn't make it any more clever leaving it out. Making everything "overt" (in the way you're describing) is what gives you a bloated mess like TFA. You're talking about adding shots to the film. Mechafunkzilla fucked around with this message at 06:37 on Feb 2, 2016 |
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Feb 2, 2016 06:34
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korusan posted:What's lost by not making this a bit more overt? Why doesn't Anakin have some kind of symbol on his outfit, maybe Watto's emblem or something, to visually communicate his station in relation to Watto? It doesn't make it any more clever leaving it out. It's already communicated by him being an eight years old kid made to work in a junkyard, who winces instinctively whenever his 'father'/'employer' raises a hand.
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Feb 2, 2016 06:35
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He also straight up says his current owner is way better than his previous one, who used to beat up his mom.
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Feb 2, 2016 06:38
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:It's already communicated by him being an eight years old kid made to work in a junkyard, who winces instinctively whenever his 'father'/'employer' raises a hand. If I didn't already know and the sound was off I'd take him for more of a drunk alien stepfather. Obviously still bad but to some people slavery's a much heavier and more encompassing subject than what was shown might suggest - you could make the argument that such a scenario is to a degree a form of slavery, but the problem remains where we are told it's bad. Not with any raw emotion but instead the disconnect of a small child who doesn't understand what's going on acting as the surrogate for the audience. For some people to drive this home it needs to be more vicarious - hence why it seems cardboard, slavery for the sake of having a bad situation, much like a lot of the conflict in Avatar. It seems like shallow emotional manipulation. The Golden Gael fucked around with this message at 06:44 on Feb 2, 2016 |
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Feb 2, 2016 06:39
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korusan posted:This just sounds like a smug version of "don't question it, just feel the way this character's wooden dialogue tells you to". No, it's just, why shouldn't I care? I'm shown a beautiful pastoral world invaded by skeletal robots, I'm shown the bad guys blowing up spaceships full of innocent people and trying to kill negotiators, and Obi-Wan and Qui-Gonn are trying to stop this so why shouldn't I be on their side? Sure, you could have ratcheted it up with some shots of starving children or whatever, but again the Invasion of Naboo, while it's the catalyst, isn't all that's going on in this story. It's what starts the ball rolling, and in that sense it works to have it be a very straightforward, downright optimistic story- because what's REALLY happening is anything but. It's a bright, colorful, cheery movie where the good guys win, but so does the bad guy. That's what I like about it.
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Feb 2, 2016 06:41
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Mechafunkzilla posted:Making everything "overt" (in the way you're describing) is what gives you a bloated mess like TFA. You're talking about adding shots to the film. "Bloated mess"? How quickly the facade of condescension towards the newest entry falls when noone is around to judge. There is nothing wrong with being overt. Subtlety is oft abused to mediocre results. You can't hop from "its good that the shot is dense" to "using a lot of visual symbolism makes your film a bloated mess" to "watch it with the sound off" without sounding incoherent.
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Feb 2, 2016 06:44
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If an opportunity for a simple visual element that better persuades the audience while maintaining the integrity of the shot is found absent, that is a missed opportunity, not an invitation to Chez Subtle'.
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Feb 2, 2016 06:47
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Neurolimal posted:"Bloated mess"? How quickly the facade of condescension towards the newest entry falls when noone is around to judge. TFA was incredibly bloated. The whole film felt like it was cut like a trailer -- the Dark Knight Rises effect, you could say. There was so much visual information trying to be conveyed that even 2.5 hours wasn't enough to allow the film to have any kind of breathing room or for particular shots and character moments to be given the time they needed to establish themselves and create pathos. A good example of too much information being conveyed would be the attention given to the Resistance and First Order agents contacting their superiors in Max's bar. Did we really need to follow each of those two and listen to their phone calls? Obviously this is all based on my subjective experience of watching the film. But are there seriously people out there who would argue that TFA is a tight, efficiently-told story? Mechafunkzilla fucked around with this message at 06:53 on Feb 2, 2016 |
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Feb 2, 2016 06:49
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korusan posted:If I didn't already know and the sound was off I'd take him for more of a drunk alien stepfather. Exactly: the movie shows very clearly that Anakin is being abused by his stepfather. This imagery of child abuse illustrates the more abstract concept of slavery for the audience. Slavery is likened to child abuse and, simultaneously, child abuse is likened to slavery.
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Feb 2, 2016 06:49
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Neurolimal posted:"Bloated mess"? How quickly the facade of condescension towards the newest entry falls when noone is around to judge. It also misses the point that for a lot of people who don't always read into these things like a film major or video store clerk talking just doesn't go far enough. You can tell someone things are really bad in part of a world and they can agree and say "yes this is bad" and expect it to resonate with them the same way seeing the reality of it does, especially in these movies where the set up is generally overt with the more important questions coming should you choose to read into it (or often times more overtly in the following part in the saga).
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Feb 2, 2016 06:50
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It's a good example of the PT attempting to address things like slavery but being hamstrung by dint of being children's films. You have [toothless] portrayals of slavery and government corruption juxtaposed against Jar Jar flaying around like a jackass and characters exchanging dialogue that sounds like it came from a 1950's romance film. It's jarring. These films are so bizarre.
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Feb 2, 2016 06:53
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Exactly: the movie shows very clearly that Anakin is being abused by his stepfather.
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Feb 2, 2016 06:54
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Mechafunkzilla posted:Obviously this is all based on my subjective experience of watching the film. But are there seriously people out there who would argue that TFA is a tight, efficiently-told story? I honestly wouldn't say any of the Star Wars films are tight or efficient (closest would be A New Hope, since they were planning for no sequels). I would also say that a lack of tight and efficient story-telling allows the films breathing room to display irrelevant aspects of the universe which builds up immersion and engages the audience; after all, the reason these films have such notoriously dense EU is specifically because of all the loose characters and weird bits of planets we get to see.
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Feb 2, 2016 07:00
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korusan posted:It seems to me if this is the case then Anakin's initially warm interaction seeing Watto years later is misguided. We do know he's a bit off emotionally but it doesn't seem to jive with the rest of the issues he has. I guess you could say this goes back to his whole attachment thing but I don't know if being someone who deals bad with attachment would necessarily mean you share a fond moment with a former tormentor. Anakin is actually very cold and composed when talking to Watto, keeping his anger in check. He inly speaks to ask about his mother. It's Watto who's actually really happy to see Anakin.
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Feb 2, 2016 07:02
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Are you interested in buying yourself a decently-priced replica of Poe Dameron and/or Han Solo's jacket(s) from The Force Awakens? If so, this link is for you.
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Feb 2, 2016 07:04
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korusan posted:It seems to me if this is the case then Anakin's initially warm interaction seeing Watto years later is misguided. We do know he's a bit off emotionally but it doesn't seem to jive with the rest of the issues he has. I guess you could say this goes back to his whole attachment thing but I don't know if being someone who deals bad with attachment would necessarily mean you share a fond moment with a former tormentor. People who are abused don't perceive their abusers as horrible monsters. Watto is first and foremost Anakin's stepfather - the one who didn't hit him as much. Lucas is providing a nuanced depiction of child abuse where Anakin got used to being abused. Watto is both abuser and father. So, when Anakin returns as an adult, he obviously has mixed feelings. It's similar to when Anakin massacres the sandpeople and Padme comforts him by saying 'to be angry is to be human'. In the case of Watto, 'to enslave people is to be human'. The characters are all, realistically, creating rationalizations for exploitation and atrocity.
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Feb 2, 2016 07:06
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:People who are abused don't perceive their abusers as horrible monsters. Some do.
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Feb 2, 2016 07:11
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RBA Starblade posted:Some do. the thing is, watto actually is a terrible monster, so
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Feb 2, 2016 07:22
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Here is the gif of Anakin being menaced by Watto I don't really buy the flinching aspect of it but its probably just more of that classic prequel CGI bad acting, though Anakin immediately backtalks Watto anyways the thing I notice the most in this scene though is Jar Jar just loving up the entire thing with really bad slapstick. And of course Ani's classic 'are u an angel' line.
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Feb 2, 2016 07:29
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Jerkface posted:Here is the gif of Anakin being menaced by Watto A disheveled boy, ANAKIN SKYWALKER, runs in from the junk yard. He is about nine years old, very dirty, and dressed in rags. WATTO raises a hand, and ANAKIN flinches. WATTO: What took you so long?
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Feb 2, 2016 07:33
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Here's the Episode 1 script: So it just ends up being a bad child actor being unable to deliver on the script when interacting with a fully cgi character, which must have been very hard for a little kid. Rewatching the whole Watto scene, Watto himself oscillates between really good and pretty meh, I think the darker scenes are easier on him.
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Feb 2, 2016 07:36
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