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Filthy Casual posted:I agree that Padme is a good person caught up in a bad scene, but the Jedi are entirely too complicit in being the Republic's thugs, turning a blind eye to slavery, casual genocide and arguably being child slavers themselves (how can a 3 year old consent to joining the Order)? I think there's an important distinction to be made between the individual Jedi and the Order as a whole. As with many issues in real life, the problem isn't that any particular Jedi does something evil. However, their dogma colors their interpretations of events, sending them down the wrong path. For instance, the Order believes in defending democracy—but it identifies "democracy" in general with the Republic specifically. This is made explicit by Obi-Wan and Mace Windu. Unfortunately, the "democracy" seen in the Senate is a farce that ignores the suffering of common people and literally empowers corporations. But since the Jedi Order views the Republic as the embodiment of democracy, equality, and enlightenment, becoming the galactic order's enforcement arm seems like a reasonable choice. To the Order this looks like a great bargain: they get broad political and legal authority, and all they have to do is fight for the good team. But of course the Order has lost something: by enmeshing itself so firmly in the Republic, the Order limits its own ability to address problems beyond the Republic's borders and to defy the Chancellor's will. The Jedi end up complicit in many of these crimes you speak of because of this one unexamined assumption that the Republic is inherently good. Obi-Wan himself can't get past it even when he knows that politicians can't be trusted. So that's the tragedy of the thing: Obi-Wan and Yoda and Padmé realize that something is deeply wrong, but they can't identify the real threat, so they have no way to fight it until it's too late. RBA Starblade ably shows us that the Order's rule about taking only small children can be rationalized as a necessary unpleasantry. It does seem to work until Anakin comes along (Dooku excepted, perhaps). But that's the trouble: if you have a rule like that, what do you do when someone comes along who is absurdly powerful, but is a little too old to just accept all your dogma? Do you take him anyway, on the risk that he won't absorb all your teachings? Or do you turn him away, knowing there are other factions of much more evil people out there who would love to get their hands on him?
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Oct 17, 2016 19:07
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porfiria posted:It seems really weird (and kind of offensive? I don't know) to characterize what Luke does as a suicide attempt. It's a suicidal act of defiance but that's a very different thing. What is the difference between a suicide attempt and a suicidal act of defiance? Isn't a failed suicidal act of defiance a suicide attempt? Luke tried to kill himself by throwing himself off of the ledge thing. He did not die.
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Oct 17, 2016 19:07
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RBA Starblade posted:I was thinking the thing that guarantees the Empire is Anakin stopping Mace and events spiraling from there, but also forgot that he's the one who tells him about Palps in the first place. I don't recall if he was already heading over to remove him from emergency power though. Mace wasn't, he was worried about Palpatine relinquishing power but nothing concrete at the moment.
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Oct 17, 2016 19:13
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computer parts posted:Mace wasn't, he was worried about Palpatine relinquishing power but nothing concrete at the moment. Mace was on the way to arrest Palpatine before Anakin told him Palpatine was a Sith Lord. He was just about to hop into his gunship and head over when Anakin caught up to him.
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Oct 17, 2016 19:15
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Waffles Inc. posted:What is the difference between a suicide attempt and a suicidal act of defiance? Isn't a failed suicidal act of defiance a suicide attempt? It's to do with intentions. Luke wasn't trying to kill himself, he was trying to defy Vader. It's possible to interpret the scene as "Luke chose death rather than face up to Vader's truth/temptation" (although I think it's complicated somewhat by the look he does and the fact that doesn't break all his bones on impact, weird little shaft at the bottom of the pit or no), but if he were trying to kill himself, why not just drop off the weather vane? Did his psychology really change in those five seconds? It's connotation. When a villain says, "Surrender, or die!" and the protagonist doesn't surrender and in fact goes on to die, do you really think, "Wow, I can't believe the protagonist committed suicide?" I don't, but maybe I'm weird.
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Oct 17, 2016 19:19
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Electromax posted:I find it hard to interpret because stuff like LotR ghosts... are in the story the movie was based on, and it isn't clear who is comparing two stories and who is comparing two film trilogies. The ghosts don't function in nearly the same way in the books. In fact Peter Jackson changed huge swathes of the original story to make his films, and if you compare them side by side only a few of his scenes closely resemble the source material. Apart from the broadest of strokes of the narrative nothing was really considered "sacred" or outside his purview as director. Hopefully that makes comparing films a little easier for you.
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Oct 17, 2016 19:27
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computer parts posted:Mace wasn't, he was worried about Palpatine relinquishing power but nothing concrete at the moment. I think part of it was that Mace (correctly) knew that Palpatine could pull any number of strings in the Senate to get off on any charges the Jedi put on him. So he had to die, but it would be a murder without trial, which goes against the Republic, which is allied with the Jedi, which  At the same time, Anakin is arguing for the right thing (the Jedi aren't murderers, he must stand democratic trial) for the wrong reasons (I need him alive to teach me how to save Padme). I'm not sure if it's specifically said, but I had this feeling that Mace was expressly going to get Palpatine to relinquish his powers (and arrest him if need be), but his discovery that he's a Sith Lord put him on track to just murderize him instead. MisterBibs fucked around with this message at 19:35 on Oct 17, 2016 |
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Oct 17, 2016 19:32
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The best part is that an extrajudicial execution of the head of state by the Jedi would leave them just as boned as Order 66. Trying to justify that to the Republic by claiming that he was a Sith Lord would sound insane. Anakin was completely incidental to Palpatine's plan, but both of them were part of the larger prophecy.
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Oct 17, 2016 19:35
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Zoran posted:I can't speak for everyone here who likes the prequels, but I'm not one to condemn the heroes of those movies. I love cheering for Obi-Wan and Padmé! And every time I watch Yoda confront the Emperor, a part of me still hopes that this time he's somehow going to win. So the bad guys won? This post reads like Anakin was oppressed by Jedis and sought liberation. But the story clearly punishes him and leaves him in anguish. The jedi are both heroes and villains and that's convenient double speak. There was no reason for Anakin to be of interest other than storyteller wants him to be. He had no significance for bulk of the story. The Jedis didn't have to love him. If anything, Obi-wan failed him. So, why was Anakin punished?
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Oct 17, 2016 19:37
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temple posted:So the bad guys won? This post reads like Anakin was oppressed by Jedis and sought liberation. But the story clearly punishes him and leaves him in anguish. The jedi are both heroes and villains and that's convenient double speak. Yeah sometimes people who need help are shat on, and sometimes the perspective characters are also pretty terrible. This happens in real life too *cue a million "lol Star Wars is totally realistic " responses *
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Oct 17, 2016 19:39
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temple posted:So the bad guys won? This post reads like Anakin was oppressed by Jedis and sought liberation. But the story clearly punishes him and leaves him in anguish. The jedi are both heroes and villains and that's convenient double speak. Yes, the bad guys won. I don't see how it's double-speak at all; the Jedis were well meaning heroes, and a third party knew how to manipulate their desire to be good heroes into villainous, detrimental acts. To borrow from another property, give a good man an army and he'll never run out of people to kill. With regards to Anakin, he seeks liberation from the status quo so strongly that he aligns himself with the status quo's opposite. That opposite is self destructive and self-consumptive. Anakin thinks it will give him the power to liberate himself and others from the status quo, but in the end it leaves him encased in a metal coffin.
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Oct 17, 2016 19:48
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Waffles Inc. posted:You don't think Kamino is a character? Yawn let me tell you why a life-less Wing Commander scene is as good as one filmed in real locations, with interesting characters, and heavy emotional moments.
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Oct 17, 2016 19:55
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Palpatine presents outright fascism as the only alternative to the status quo, but that's a false dilemma. He gets away with it because the Jedi Order agrees with him.
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Oct 17, 2016 20:03
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Shageletic posted:Yawn let me tell you why a life-less Wing Commander scene is as good as one filmed in real locations, with interesting characters, and heavy emotional moments. I'd prefer it if you talked about Star Wars tbh
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Oct 17, 2016 20:07
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Serf posted:The best part is that an extrajudicial execution of the head of state by the Jedi would leave them just as boned as Order 66. Trying to justify that to the Republic by claiming that he was a Sith Lord would sound insane. "What The Hell Is A Sith?" Ask Trillions 
RBA Starblade fucked around with this message at 20:12 on Oct 17, 2016 |
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Oct 17, 2016 20:10
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Shageletic posted:Yawn let me tell you why a life-less Wing Commander scene is as good as one filmed in real locations, with interesting characters, and heavy emotional moments. anything, like, real to add? maybe why you just dismissed the kamino scene out of hand? maybe shot comparisons that show what you like and not like? i mean maybe i'm misunderstanding you but are you suggesting that animated movies can't be good? can movies with special effects not be good? like, helms deep was all miniatures and cgi, is that bad?
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Oct 17, 2016 20:19
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It's a tragedy.
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Oct 17, 2016 20:20
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Zoran posted:Palpatine presents outright fascism as the only alternative to the status quo, but that's a false dilemma. He gets away with it because the Jedi Order agrees with him.
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Oct 17, 2016 20:23
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Bongo Bill posted:It's a tragedy. These are probably the same type of people that refuse to acknowledge that Romeo and Juliet are meant to be dumb, naïve kids, and that this fact doesn't take away from the tragedy of what happens to them. In fact, it makes it even more tragic.
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Oct 17, 2016 20:23
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Waffles Inc. posted:anything, like, real to add? maybe why you just dismissed the kamino scene out of hand? maybe shot comparisons that show what you like and not like? Shot for shot comparisions are the worst kind of internet pedantry. You can't take a scene out of a movie, use arcane complicated calculations, and say that the movie is amazing therefore. What counts is characterization, plotting, and thematics. LoTR isn't exactly the smartest things in the world, but they have great characters, engaging plotting, and enough zip and energy in their general themes (purity over darkness) to make you want to watch them over and over. The prequels, outside of maybe the RotS, is something I don't care to revisit, like at al.. EDIT: Also yes animated movies bad.
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Oct 17, 2016 20:27
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Shageletic posted:Shot for shot comparisions are the worst kind of internet pedantry. You can't take a scene out of a movie, use arcane complicated calculations, and say that the movie is amazing therefore. What counts is characterization, plotting, and thematics. I mean i disagree with you on basically all of this so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Oct 17, 2016 20:29
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Shageletic posted:Shot for shot comparisions are the worst kind of internet pedantry. You can't take a scene out of a movie, use arcane complicated calculations, and say that the movie is amazing therefore. What counts is characterization, plotting, and thematics. Interesting.
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Oct 17, 2016 20:30
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Shageletic posted:Shot for shot comparisions are the worst kind of internet pedantry. You can't take a scene out of a movie, use arcane complicated calculations, and say that the movie is amazing therefore. What counts is characterization, plotting, and thematics. Indeed, the visual parts of film are meaningless.
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Oct 17, 2016 20:33
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temple posted:There was no alternative in the Star Wars universe, at least until Luke. But by the time Luke came around, the Empire was the status quo. Sure there was. Our heroes could have launched their own rebellion, for example.
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Oct 17, 2016 20:43
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Shageletic posted:What counts is characterization, plotting, and thematics. That's only one tiny part of a movie. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r0b_XeRkG4 VIsuals are super important, which themselves are made up of lighting, backdrops, set designs, costumes, special effects, stuntwork, pyrotechnics and more. Sound too, with music, and sound effects and more. Montage is SUPER DUPER important, with bad movies suddenly becoming great when a good editor reworks them. Themes, characterization, dialogues and acting are another important part too. Movies can be good for different reasons, with different aspects being good and bad. And then tast eintervenes, with different people putting emphasis on different aspects. One of my favorite movies is almost entirely dialogue, with not much else (the french Le Diner de Con) while others are pure audio visual feast with almost no story. This is what angers me about the whole stupid Prequels flamewar. Not that people hate movies I like or that they put emphasis on different aspects of moviemaking: that's normal. What pisses me off are people deciding that only one aspect matters and trolling anyone who disagrees with them, going on these insane rants about how "everyone" agrees with them and the few who disagree are either lying or crazy. The whole takes an almost religious overtone and it'S just maddening! You don't like the movie, sure, move the gently caress on.
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Oct 17, 2016 20:45
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It seems especially odd to claim that visuals aren't important in a discussion about Star Wars, as if the special effects and overall look of the OT weren't a huge part of their success. The prequels have a much different aesthetic going on than the OT did, so its ok to say that you happen to prefer one over the other. You can also acknowledge that the prequels have some very nice looking shots in them without agreeing that the movies themselves are good. That's where we're at with this though, some people hate the prequels so much that the idea of praising any aspect of them would be blasphemy as if prequel hate is some sort of religion. Basebf555 fucked around with this message at 21:00 on Oct 17, 2016 |
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Oct 17, 2016 20:56
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Shageletic posted:Yawn let me tell you why a life-less Wing Commander scene is as good as one filmed in real locations, with interesting characters, and heavy emotional moments. Matte paintings are dope and have always been dope.
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Oct 17, 2016 21:37
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It's endlessly fascinating to see people say that Lord of the Rings is a story about an external conflict between good and evil, because the parts of the story with battles and glorious charges and so on are, as explained in the text, all a sideshow. The important stuff comes down to an internal conflict, expressed by two foil characters- and evil wins. Victory is only achieved by blind chance/the Hand of God, in response to previous actions by the protagonist, and the price demanded is death, though in a comfortable fashion where you get a free boat ride to heaven.
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Oct 17, 2016 22:23
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MonsieurChoc posted:That's only one tiny part of a movie. Case in point: Try to pretend you've never seen Star Wars before and have absolutley no context whatsoever for these images. What is going on with this guy Luke here?    Okay, he seems to be a bit unhappy about something he's looking at, sure. But would you ever guess that he's upset because he's looking at the burnt out husk of the only home he's ever known, and the charred skeletons of the two people who raised him from childhood? No, you'd never get that kind of pathos and intensity of emotion just from Hamill's performance, which is very subdued. But once you insert the images of the burnt homestead and charred skeletons, Hamill's subdued performance is suddenly transformed into something powerful and emotional. And that's by design. Hamill wanted to play the scene very broad, full out with Luke falling to the ground on his knees and sobbing. Lucas told him not to, because he wanted the editing to do the job of creating the emotion of the scene, not the performance. He wanted Hamill's performance to be as neutral as would be plausible for the situation, so that it would be easier for the audience members to transpose their own subjective feelings onto the performance instead of the other way around. Lucas has always been a vocal proponent of the montage theory of film, considering himself a disciple of Sergei Eisenstein, and he carried this filmmaking philosophy all the way with him through to the prequels. In this respect, nothing about how he directed the films ever changed. The Star Wars films are intended to be carried primarily by the visuals, and any emotional response to be elicited primarily by the juxtaposition of discrete images that in isolation would read as being comparatively emotionally neutral. That's one of the ways Lucas has always been more experimental in the way he makes movies, as opposed to following mainstream trends. The mainstream trend for a long time since then has been to increasingly play everything to the hilt, there being this widespread obsession with "naturalistic" (often just over-the-top and straight up exhausting) performances achieved through method acting--the prototypical Oscar bait kind of performance. That's just a different style and that's fine, but films are a simulated reality where the manipulation of temporally or spatially non-contiguous images flashed one after another in close proximity plays a much larger part in the generation of emotion. A performance is not necessarily better or more effective just because it is nominally more "realistic." For instance, when people cry, they often appear kind of ugly and unpleasant to look at--even comical:  Yes, obviously the scene still works miraculously well despite everything but come on, you've gotta admit Hamill comes across as pretty goofy. As a result, most movies even today prefer to have the actors "cry" in an objectively less realistic manner, so as not to distract from the important emotional content of the scene. Some movies, depending on their overall style or the nature of the specific scene, can make more realistic performances work, but the point is that it's not always the right or only way to go. But the general opinion of a lot of folks today seems to be that it is the only way to go.
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Oct 17, 2016 22:51
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Phi230 posted:
Why? In dialogue scenes sometimes you don't want to call a lot of attention to what you're doing with the camera. It's not like there aren't lots of moves and swoops and such in action sequences, or that the visual composition within frames isn't good. Overall it does come off a little old fashioned compared to the modern approach, but that has its perils as well (I find I notice the backgrounds less in a lot of modern blockbuster films, because the movement of the camera more heavily focuses you on the foreground- which is what's important, but you risk losing atmosphere sometimes.) I feel like for the PT Lucas specifically borrowed some visual grammar from the old DeMille-esque Biblical epics, which were a little slower and more static to focus on the MILLIONS OF EXTRAS and giant sets and setpieces and such. Of course it's more mobile than those, because you were much more limited then by things like matte paintings.
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Oct 17, 2016 23:29
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Maxwell Lord posted:Why? In dialogue scenes sometimes you don't want to call a lot of attention to what you're doing with the camera. It's not like there aren't lots of moves and swoops and such in action sequences, or that the visual composition within frames isn't good. Overall it does come off a little old fashioned compared to the modern approach, but that has its perils as well (I find I notice the backgrounds less in a lot of modern blockbuster films, because the movement of the camera more heavily focuses you on the foreground- which is what's important, but you risk losing atmosphere sometimes.) Shot-reverse-shot isn't bad. To even say such a thing reveals such an ignorance of filmmaking fundamentals that it's not even worth arguing. I doubt there's a single movie in existence featuring dialogue between two people which does not make copious use of shot-reverse-shot. Even if they're actually criticizing something else about the scenes, the fact that they peg shot-reverse-shot as the culprit instead of that something else shows that they don't really have any idea what they're talking about. It's probably one of the most embarrassing aspects of the RLM reviews.
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Oct 18, 2016 00:23
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Cnut the Great posted:Shot-reverse-shot isn't bad. To even say such a thing reveals such an ignorance of filmmaking fundamentals that it's not even worth arguing. I doubt there's a single movie in existence featuring dialogue between two people which does not make copious use of shot-reverse-shot. To give an example, almost every dialogue scene in Pulp Fiction (and pretty much every other Tarantino film) is done in shot-reverse-shot. And you'd have to argue from a position of total insanity to try and say Tarantino doesn't know how to use a camera or know anything about film history or scene composition.
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Oct 18, 2016 00:39
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You can know a ton and still make really bad stuff. Look at the prequels, for example.
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Oct 18, 2016 00:45
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rear end Catchcum posted:You can know a ton and still make really bad stuff. Look at the prequels, for example. Yeah, eyeline matches and continuity editing are inherently bad.
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Oct 18, 2016 00:49
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rear end Catchcum posted:You can know a ton and still make really bad stuff. Look at the prequels, for example. Here's your juice bottle.
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Oct 18, 2016 00:59
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If you follow the 30-degree rule or 180-degree rule, you're a loser and a total failure as a film editor. Sorry, but I don't make the rules.
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Oct 18, 2016 01:01
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Walking, and talking!
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Oct 18, 2016 02:31
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People sitting on couches....talking....shot reverse shot....my God....the amateurishness of it all....    Where the gently caress are all the snap-zooms and camera shakes? But wait, it gets worse...     It's the same drat thing! More couches! More sitting! More talking! More shot reverse shot! Is Kershner trying to bore us to death? Why do we need to see people talking to each other in an action movie? Why couldn't he have had more mynocks swoop in and start attacking them, or something? e: RBA Starblade posted:Walking, and talking! Walk, talk, stop, talk again. Kershner the hack strikes again!     Cnut the Great fucked around with this message at 03:14 on Oct 18, 2016 |
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Oct 18, 2016 02:55
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When it opened up with a bunch of Shot/Reverse shot idiocy I had to face the facts: The Maltese Falcon was loving hack garbage.
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Oct 18, 2016 03:15
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Basebf555 posted:It seems especially odd to claim that visuals aren't important in a discussion about Star Wars, as if the special effects and overall look of the OT weren't a huge part of their success. I just wish the prequels didn't look like fan films half the time. Is it too much to ask that a big budget movie at least look like a big budget movie? Just ugly ugly movies
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