BahRamYou
5m ago
That's true, but I think it's a good feel it's a good example of what I mean when I say that the Jedi from the original trilogy are just very limited and stretched to the limits of what you can narratively do with them. It's very interesting to see a quasi-pacifist hero in a war movie, but you have to really rig the plot to make that work. I don't want to see Luke sitting around in a swamp offering mystical mumbo-jumbo doing nothing, like Yoda, but I also don't want to see him charging in killing everything. He sorta got lucky with RotJ that he could be a pacifist so that Vader could do the actual killing. It's fine to be in inspiration or philosopher, but someone still has to do the actual fighting, and they just never really had a good answer for that.
BahRamYou
37m ago
i have not. I played Star Wars: Jedi Knight but I don't remember any story from it.
BahRamYou
49m ago
I sympathize, I've also mostly stopped watching any new mainstream movie or TV show. But I'd suggest giving TLJ a shot with interpretation- the resistance is led by incompetents who wrangled their way to power for political reasons. They're being steadily ground down to nothing by white male space Hitler, who has somehow rebuilt a large and very functional Galactic Empire. He has no magical powers, but he still wins out in the end through good old fashioned military force. The good guys win.
BahRamYou
52m ago
which made the post Empire republic look stupid, partly vindicating the Empire
I feel like that's a recurring problem in Star Wars. The original gets away with handwaving it away like "now we suffer under an evil empire, but once we had a glorious republic!" But every time it actually shows the details, the republic seems to be completely feeble and inept, while the Empire can at least make the trains run on time defend its people against alien threats. Like, in the Phantom Menace, it seems that slavery is openly practiced on some worlds and the Republic just doesn't give a shit.
BahRamYou
1hr ago
Yeah I could get behind that. I would even ship them as a couple. I think that would have hilarious for what a shit storm it would have caused Disney, but the actors had real chemistry together. After they separated it was like... wait, what is even the point of either of these two characters?
BahRamYou
9hr ago
I'll have to yield to you on the books. Like I said I really haven't read much, and it was a long time ago that I read any.
I'm not saying that anything needs to be different in order to be good. Like I read a lot of manga that tends to stick to the same structure over and over again... I'm fine with that. Sometimes there's value in just finding something good and sticking with it.
I think Star Wars is weird because the Jedi are just inherently a bit silly. The originals somehow managed to make them look cool by only using their powers sparingly and not going into too much detail about their religion. But every time we see more of them, it starts to fall apart a bit. Their swords don't work very well for fighting in space, they talk a lot about pacifism but mostly they're going around fighting, and they never seem to achieve any sort of real lasting peace so they're just failing at their jobs.
The way I see it, it's sort of like a magic trick. It looks awesome the first time you see it. But when you go back to look at the same trick again and again, in great detail... you start to see the hidden wires and the magic falls off.
BahRamYou
10hr ago
As you say, it's not very logical but the vibe goes hard. I think a big part of that vibe though is the Jedi, and that's really a problem. They looked so cool in the original movie, because the original was basically rigged to make them look good. The storm troopers had these clunky blasters that could only fire very slowly, plus they missed a lot, so the Jedi could just block all their shots with a sword. And they were easily brainwashed. And there were no computers, so the Jedi having "supernatural timing sense" was a big deal, since everyone else was just guessing at the bomb timings.
But their power is so limited, and their philosophy is just not that deep. Empire and RotJ are already hitting the limits- Luke can lift rocks with his mind, and that's neat, but isn't going to do much in a big space war. Yoda talks in riddles to avoid every having to say something specific. And Lucas was adamant that the Jedi were always pure good, no shades of grey, so you can't even explore that road.
It seems like the reason the side stories can be good is that they mostly avoid the Jedi? That gives a lot more space for other characters to have agency, and they can use more realistic technology instead of having to pretend that a sword is still the most powerful weapon in the universe.
BahRamYou
10hr ago
That's really funny that you can enjoy the content bashing it without even seeing the actual movie!
BahRamYou
11hr ago
I admit, I'm headcanoning that part pretty hard. But it really does help me enjoy the film if I imagine that Holdo really is just some incompetent buffoon who got the job by political shenanigans, and now everyone is just stuck dealing with her. Sort of like character Umbridge in Harry Potter 5 I guess.
BahRamYou
11hr ago
I saw it in theaters. It was, indeed, very disappointing. Turns out my childhood hero was completely useless. But then, I don't know what i really expected from one kooky old man.
Chopping the ship in half made me think: "wait, they can do that now? Could they always do that? Makes all their previous fights look kinda dumb if that's the case. Maybe the rebels are all going to become suicide bombers now and kamikaze their way to victory? That's uh... an interesting tactic to show to kids..."
BahRamYou
12hr ago
I, Jedi
So, looking up the AI summaries for these books, this one says that "The story is unique for being the only Star Wars novel told from the first-person perspective of a character not seen in the films." That's uh, damning with faint praise. The others seem to be about either Luke going off to fight "the Empire Reborn" or him going off to fight a new big threat to the galaxy. "Luke Skywalker is guided to Bakura by a vision of Obi-Wan Kenobi, who warns him that the fate of the galaxy is at stake. "
I admit I haven't really read much of the star wars books or comics, but they don't exactly seem to be taking it in bold new directions.
BahRamYou
12hr ago
The thing is, I don't think it's possible to make another great Star Wars movie- all the good ideas were completely used up in the original trilogy. There isn't some deep, complex world building there that can be continued. Part of what makes it good is that it all wraps up so neatly. Back in the 90s they made a bunch of books to continue the story, and an awful lot of them were about the emperor coming back to life and then getting taken down again by Luke, Han, and Leia, because what else can you even do?
I think JJ Abrams is good at making fun, exciting movies, and he gave us two Star Wars movies that were just like the originals. But they're also incredibly bland and forgettable. Basically Star Wars slop. I think that any "normal" Star Wars movie would be pretty much the same.
Also, for what it's worth I'm a fan of Rian Johnson's other movies. I thought that both Looper and Knives Out were great. Also that one weird episode of Breaking Bad about the fly. So it's not that he's incapable of making good movies.
BahRamYou
13hr ago
Ah, sorry for getting the subreddit wrong, I didn't really look at it that closely. But they're both plenty active. An eternal war of light and dark, fighting each other in the star wars...
But yeah, I think this:
Secondly, Star Wars wasn't Rian Johnson's to destroy. On December 15, 2017, Star Wars meant something. On December 16, 2017, Star Wars was a joke. I went into The Last Jedi excited to see the movie. I went into Solo and Rise of Skywalker excited to see the RedLetterMedia review afterwards. These are two very different things.
Is what I was getting at it. I think a lot of people felt that way. It's actually kind of amazing how it managed to completely destroy the franchise, or at least change it into something unrecognizable. Imagine if Disney made a princess movie that completely soured everyone around the planet on the entire idea of "Disney princesses"- that would be kind of amazing and I have no idea how'd you make such a thing, let alone get a big budget from Disney itself to do it.
You know what movie I'm kind of coming around to? The Last Jedi.
I know, I know, it's a terrible Star Wars movie, for all the reasons laid out eloquently by acoup.It's jokey when it should have been serious, it completely screws up both Stars Wars lore and actual military stuff, and it's a weird convoluted mess of a plot. None of the new characters are likeable, and it makes us retroactively dislike the old characters too.
But.... maybe that was the point. Maybe the movie did exactly what it said it would do in the title... it killed the jedis. Permanently. It's the last of them.
Imagine that you're Rian Johnson. You're not someone like Michael Bay or JJ Abrams who can endlessly churn out fun blockbusters. You're an "autor" director, who takes himself very seriously and writes all your own movies. Also, you're relatively young in your career, having made a grand total of 3 movies (all rather low budget) before being suddenly handed the reins to Star Wars. You've obviously heard of Star Wars, but you were never a big fan, and you've spent your entire filmmaking career under its shadow. Your personal inspiration for getting into filmmaking was Annie Hall, a weird surreal comedy movie that came out the same year as original Star Wars but is about as different as it's possible to get.
What do you do with this thing? The eyes of the entire world were suddenly focused on you. You know basically what they expect, of course- a fun blockbuster movie that's basically a soft reboot of Empire. You could do that. But that's boring- it's been done before.
I think what he did was to take it in a very "meta" direction. It's not really a Star Wars movie at all, it's a movie about the relationship that Star Wars has with its fans. Specifically the most obsessed, hardcore fanboys who have been rewatching the same few movies over and over for almost 50 years now while mindlessly consuming all the new products. I think he wanted to scream "get a life" at them like William Shatner. I also think he wanted to sabotage it a bit, to stop the Disney Empire from endlessly remaking this one silly movie from the 70s for all time. (part of the reason the original is so good is that it's a remarkably short and self-contained story- it was hard even for them to stretch it into a trilogy, and it really shows the cracks when you try to stretch it any further than that)
This movie is almost a parody of Star Wars, a much darker and more brutal parody than Space Balls. It starts by completely throwing logic out the window by showing a space battle with gravity to drop bombs from the world's slowest bombers. Then it portrays Leia as some sort of coward who tries to cancel the mission at the last minute when it's obviously correct for them to go for it. I believe this is intentional, to make us realize that Star Wars was always silly Space Opera and really should not be taken seriously by anyone. There's certainly no reason to think that "Princess" Leia was any sort of great military leader. She was originally just a damsel in distress, waiting to be rescued. Why should anyone be taking orders from her?
In a similar vein, I think Holdo was supposed to be incompetent. Why are all the rebel leaders in Star Wars so good at their jobs? Real militaries are full of idiots who get their jobs through political connections, and rebel forces even more so. Her strange appearance ("admiral purple hair") also suggests this. The movie is just being realistic here- an incompetent person is placed in high rank for political reasons ("the force is female!") and disaster ensues. That's actually a realistic and interesting story, it's just not the one we expected from Star Wars. It's essentially a comedy of errors.
Then there's all the Jedi stuff with Luke, Ray, and Kylo Ren. Here's where I think the movie really finds its mark. I remember a time not too long ago when "Jediism" was being taken semi-seriously by some people as a philosophy. The original movies made the Jedi look so cool and wise. But this movie just savages them. Luke is this weird, disgusting old man who has completely given up on everything. Ray is a silly, naive little girl who's constantly falling for everyone's tricks. Kylo Ren murders his own leader for basically no reason at all. Yoda makes a brief cameo just to use force lightning (!?) to burn down all the sacred Jedi texts, before literally telling us "time it is for you to look past a pile of old books." All of them completely fail at actually doing anything to affect the larger war going on- the resistance is mostly wiped out by regular guns.
I think this was done very artfully and intentionally to kill the Jedi. It's not easy to kill off a fictional character- as the next movie showed, you can always write in some excuse to bring them back to life. Even actors can now be brought back from beyond the grave by digital technology. But when you make both the Jedi and the Sith look, not just incompetent, but disgustingly, stupidly incompetent- it really turns the fans against them. It makes the producers not want to bring the dead characters back, which is what really matters.
A lot of people have criticized it for leaving nowhere for the next movie to go. All the plot beats from The Force Awakened were tossed aside, a lot of the main characters were dead, and the ones left alive no longer looked like heroes. I think that was the point. This is not a story that should be turned into an endless series of blockbuster movies. There's no where good for it to go, and it's unhealthy to just wallow in nostalgia. I feel like people have largely forgotten about The Rise of Skywalker by this point (what a bland, forgettable movie), but they definitely will remember The Last Jedi. The https://old.reddit.com/r/saltierthankrayt/ subreddit to hate on it is still, to this day, surprisingly active! People really hate this movie! (edit- I meant https://old.reddit.com/r/saltierthancrait/ but it's kind of funny that there's another active subreddit just to hate on that one, and at first glance I couldn't even tell the difference)
If I'm right, I think Rian Johnson pulled off one of the all-time greatest troll jobs in history. He got Disney to pay him to make a movie that didn't just parody its biggest brand, but made even its biggest fanboys realize some of it is. I feel like it used to be somewhat cool for everyone to like Star Wars. Or you could use it in an ironic way like the unipiper. I don't see any of that anymore. As Mr Plinkett tells us, Disney is cranking out Star Wars content for TV now, going in all sorts of crazy directions, but no one is paying attention. It just doesn't have the cultural relevance it once did. Harrison Ford might have spent much of his life grumbling about how he dislikes obsessive fans, but he still kept it going. Rian Johnson was the one man who could actually kill this franchise and save us from an eternity of shitty corporate nostalgia and soft reboots.
BahRamYou
4d ago
Yeah, I agree with you. I read Nick Bostrom's book about the Anthropic Principle. He comes up with something like 12 different versions of it, which all depend on hair-splitting pedantic differences in how you phrase things. It made me think that maybe human language just isn't capable of expressing this level of detail- you really need something more like computer code or logical symbols. You don't get these sort of paradoxes in computer programs because you can just run them and see what happens.
BahRamYou
4d ago
I think it's partly inevitable when you've got a lame duck president, especially one 79 years old like Trump. He's not going to be on the ballot anymore, and his time in power is limited, so there's no reason any individual member of the party should look to him for leadership anymore. Trump is just focused on getting through the next 3 years, but a congressman or young activist still has decades of political career ahead of them.
BahRamYou
7d ago
Well, I can't speak to your relationship overall. But as a "city guy" myself, I feel sympathetic to your partner's concerns. Living in an American suburb is just a very different lifestyle from being in a city. A "quarter mile to the bus stop" pretty quickly turns into "1 hour to do anything" when you consider the limited bus service.
Its also just a different culture. Suburbs tend to focus on the home. People live at home, do everything at home, and it's just a totally different vibe.
And yeah, career. It's fine if you're risky settled in one job. If she thinks she might change jobs in the future, what is she going to do in your area?
I know you don't like moving, and i sympathize. But what about keeping your current place, and just renting a place near her for the weekends? Yeah i know that's a huge waste of money etc. But its worth a shot, right?
BahRamYou
11d ago
I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that part of the definition for libel is that it has to be believable. Crichton's character wasn't really believable, it just seemed like a weird joke where was lashing out at someone. Not very nice, but not libel. In this case though, lots of people reading the story assumed it was based on real life and asked for more details, and lots of people in the personal life of both the main characters and asked them if it was about them. To me that sounds more like "libel" than "fiction."
BahRamYou
12d ago
Nobody would know that this story was about this dude if Alexis hadn't said anything
From what she wrote, it sounded like everyone who knew them knew that it was about them. It's a small town and there were lots of identical details. Bad enough for her, to have her private life suddenly exposed to the world. Probably much worse for this guy who is now being portrayed as something damn close to a rapist to anyone who knows him in real life. It seems to me to meet the legal definition of libel. I don't know enough to say he killed himself because of the backlash but... it sure sounds like it played a part.
BahRamYou
12d ago
I'd argue there are degrees to which that's normal and appropriate, and this goes too far. It's one thing to base a story or fictional character on a real person. Usually if it's not a public figure they'll change some details so it's not recognizable though, and try not to drag someone through the mud. In this case, she left all the trivial details identical so that all of their real-life acquaintances easily recognized them, but then also changed his character to be unrecognizable. She's basically giving everyone who knows this guy in real life that he's a rapist, or something damn close (creepy, awkward, and bad at sex), when he was nothing like that in real life. There's simply no reason to use a real person for that character- why not invent an actual fictional person if you're going to make up the story anyway? At this point it's pretty much libel.
BahRamYou
12d ago
It's certainly a story that stirred up a lot of emotions and got people talking. I remember a lot of people talking about it when it first came out, but this is the first time I got to hear the story from one of the real people involved, or even find out that it was based* on a true* story.
BahRamYou
12d ago
Her lying about it in print is bad, but the lie was that it was purely fictional, which is a way of making the real guy appear more distant from the creepy asshole that is depicted in the fiction
No, the lie is that she made him out to be something damn close to a rapist and stalker when he really wasn't at all. There are plenty of real life cases that might have been fit that kind of legally-nebulous situation, but this one seems to be completely innocent. If it was purely a fictional story it would be fine, but she left in enough real details that all of his real-life friends and family isntantly recognized him and started asking him if the story was about him. She essentially libeled him by calling him a rapist, and got away with "it's just fiction bro" as a legal fig leaf. This probably resultd in a lot of his friends and family turning against him.
BahRamYou
12d ago
Ah, thanks for linking that. I missed that earlier discussion about the slate piece. But yeah, I realize all this is several years old at this point, I don't claim to have any late-breaking news here, it's just that this is my first time reading the slate piece and seeing the true story. I guess the only difference now is the movie has been released, but I haven't seen it. It sounds like the movie is a lot more ham-handed in making the guy a pure villain.
But basically I agree with you on this:
when your current boyfriend urged you to draw inspiration from your personal experiences, I presume he meant to use them as a jumping-off point for a fictional story, not to simply transcribe them as-is
Even an amateur writer should understand that, and I'm really surprised that someone with an MFA and a literary agent could get away with it in a professional magazine.
All this plus you look cooler. I felt like a complete dork when I was riding in a car putting my seat belt on and everyone else was just freeballing it (in another country of course, with a lower standard of safety).
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