Twin Peaks Season 3, Star Wars, JJ and Fan Service

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mtwentz
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Re: Twin Peaks Season 3, Star Wars, JJ and Fan Service

Post by mtwentz »

At the end of the day, I don't think Star Wars is really that great, except for that John Williams score, which is fabulous, and of course, the special effects.

I thought it was just me, but apparently Sir Alex Guinness wasn't a huge fan himself.

I can appreciate Star Wars contribution to cinema; I just don't think any of the films are truly outstanding, and ultimately the franchise is just a giant cash cow for a large corporation. I will probably never waste another minute on anything related to Star Wars. Life is too short.
F*&^ you Gene Kelly
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Mr. Reindeer
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Re: Twin Peaks Season 3, Star Wars, JJ and Fan Service

Post by Mr. Reindeer »

mtwentz wrote:
I can appreciate Star Wars contribution to cinema;
I think Star Wars’s “contribution” to cinema is complex, and overall maybe more con than pro. The 1970s were an incredible time for American cinema. Small, personal films, unapologetically challenging and often defying conventional storytelling and morality, driven by character and mood and authorial vision, managed to find wide success. Mainstream audiences were being asked to think at the cinema, and for a little while, they actually seemed to like it.

The one-two punch of Jaws and Star Wars obliterated all of that (a moment in history immortalized by Queen in 1978’s “Bicycle Race”: “Jaws was never my scene and I don’t like Star Wars”). Suddenly the 1980s became a race to produce the most crowd-pleasing, special effects-driven, wise-cracking big-budget spectacle. The major studios regained their foothold in the industry, auteur-driven cinema again was relegated to the smaller houses and smaller screens (which is ironic, since Jaws and Star Wars are both auteur-driven films), and we really haven’t recovered. The pendulum has sadly never swung back in the last 40+ years, and I can’t help thinking what a world without Star Wars, where New Hollywood possibly continued into the 1980s and beyond, would have looked like. Of course, Lumet and Altman and Friedkin and all those great filmmakers kept making movies in the following decades, but I wonder what it would have been like if Hollywood had continued evolving in that direction as new young talent poured in in the subsequent years.

I don’t want to sound like an elitist: I’m an unabashed fan of what Kevin Feige has done with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and I find many of the popcorn hits of the last four decades to be terrific, fun films, many of which I own on Blu Ray and revisit. But I think I’d happily give up Star Wars and those films to live in a world where Hollywood followed the 1970s New Hollywood model and more challenging work was the norm rather than the exception.
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Saturn's child
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Re: Twin Peaks Season 3, Star Wars, JJ and Fan Service

Post by Saturn's child »

Great observation Reindeer, & one I agree with wholeheartedly (although admittedly, I haven't been able to get into the Marvel universe). There's definitely a lot of room to wonder at what might have been, but it's still fun to dig among the post-Jaws-Star-War weeds & find the gems (in saying that, I remember liking Jaws & the original SW trilogy as a young'un). Despite the Hollywood colossus, a lot of really interesting stuff was still able to be made even if it never ended up being material for water-cooler discussion.

I never thought of the line from Bicycle Race in that context; awesome! :)
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mtwentz
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Re: Twin Peaks Season 3, Star Wars, JJ and Fan Service

Post by mtwentz »

Mr. Reindeer wrote:
mtwentz wrote:
I can appreciate Star Wars contribution to cinema;
I don’t want to sound like an elitist: I’m an unabashed fan of what Kevin Feige has done with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and I find many of the popcorn hits of the last four decades to be terrific, fun films, many of which I own on Blu Ray and revisit. But I think I’d happily give up Star Wars and those films to live in a world where Hollywood followed the 1970s New Hollywood model and more challenging work was the norm rather than the exception.
So the Rise of Skywalker was available for streaming last night, so I thought, what the heck, I'll give it a try? I am not paying anything extra, after all.

I couldn't get past the first 10 minutes....

I don't know if they were always planning on Palpatine coming back, but they could have had a little build up. Just basically announcing it in the opening crawl took the suspense out of it.
F*&^ you Gene Kelly
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Mr. Reindeer
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Re: Twin Peaks Season 3, Star Wars, JJ and Fan Service

Post by Mr. Reindeer »

mtwentz wrote:
Mr. Reindeer wrote:
mtwentz wrote:
I can appreciate Star Wars contribution to cinema;
I don’t want to sound like an elitist: I’m an unabashed fan of what Kevin Feige has done with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and I find many of the popcorn hits of the last four decades to be terrific, fun films, many of which I own on Blu Ray and revisit. But I think I’d happily give up Star Wars and those films to live in a world where Hollywood followed the 1970s New Hollywood model and more challenging work was the norm rather than the exception.
So the Rise of Skywalker was available for streaming last night, so I thought, what the heck, I'll give it a try? I am not paying anything extra, after all.

I couldn't get past the first 10 minutes....

I don't know if they were always planning on Palpatine coming back, but they could have had a little build up. Just basically announcing it in the opening crawl took the suspense out of it.
I know! It was almost like something you’d see in an SNL parody. Pretty much everyone knew going into it that Palpatine was back, due to the advertising/trailers/etc. The burning question we all had was, HOW? And we get the answer in the first ten seconds: “He just is, because it’s a profitable thing to do, not because there’s any rational story logic to it.”
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Re: Twin Peaks Season 3, Star Wars, JJ and Fan Service

Post by ManBehindWinkies »

Kilmoore wrote:
Mr. Reindeer wrote: My issue with Rise of the Skywalker wasn’t that it was nostalgic, it was that its storytelling choices felt incredibly lazy.
It all boils down to the fact that there was no plan for the trilogy beyond making films to get money. No one cared about the story, and thus The Last Jedi was allowed to derail everything set up in The Force Awakens without setting up anything in its stead. So Rise of the Skywalker had to do a setup and ending for the whole "trilogy", and as a result, it's a mess. The whole opening where Palpatine is found is just the clumsiest, amateurish storytelling I've ever seen on the big screen.
I agree it was a big mistake to not have a plan, and this "relay" approach with a different creative visions taking over each episode was an inexcusably bad idea. It's actually something I've done as a writing experiment with friends, where one person starts a story and others continue with the freedom to take it where they like. It's fine as a harmless experiment like that. The results of the experiment? It went awry and there was no cohesive story. Unbelievable anyone thought that would be a good idea for a billion dollar franchise that everyone would see. I don't like a lot of the criticism Kathleen Kennedy gets, a lot of which is probably rooted in sexism, but on this point, that she apparently thought this would be a good idea for the new Star Wars trilogy, there really isn't any excuse. It should have been easy to foresee the disastrous results beforehand.

That being said, The Rise of Skywalker made the problem worse. I actually liked some of the ways The Last Jedi subverted what was being set up in The Force Awakens, namely the idea that anyone can be Force sensitive and Rey's ability had nothing to do with genetic lineage. I think ROS could have found a way to make the non-plan plan end up less of a mess. TLJ was setting up something specific: take the franchise into new territory. Don't be beholden to the past. It is I think, the right instinct for the franchise even if TLJ was flawed in many other ways. TLJ may have subverted things TFA set up, but ROS outright undid and retconned TLJ in the sloppiest ways imaginable. Obviously I think the decision to make Rey's ability about genetic lineage was a pathetic one. The choice to slam the breaks on taking the franchise into new territory was equally bad. If it was a mistake to have no overall plan for the trilogy, it was ROS that took that mistake and set it into stone for eternity.
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Re: Twin Peaks Season 3, Star Wars, JJ and Fan Service

Post by Kilmoore »

I think ROS could have found a way to make the non-plan plan end up less of a mess. TLJ was setting up something specific: take the franchise into new territory.
While taking the story into a different direction would certainly have been welcome in the trilogy, the second part of is absolutely not the place to do it. TLJ completely derailed any chance of the trilogy linking together in any sensible way. ROS was a mess, and could have treated TLJ better, but the movies were doomed from the start. No one cared about telling a story, they just wanted to print some money. And it worked, so there's no reason not to do the same again.
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