The Star War of today

[Natemans]

I fucking despise RedLetterMeida.

Very cool!

Very cool

Very cruel

I also hate CinemaSins and Screen Junkies.

I do respect Chris Stuckmann, even though he has been a bit too...snarky of late.

CinemaSins is about nitpicking the shit out of every movie. Which can be fun, but maybe not when you videos go on about more that five minutes.
Don't watch Screen Junkies or Stuckmann.

EDIT: Never mind about Chris Stuckmann

And also I hate RLM for thier dissing of the DCEU movies because obviously.

And you know, everytime I browse youtube, I keep getting recommended videos of "Why X DC movie fails, why Marvel did it better, why Hobbit sucks" everytime I see that it triggers me because I haven't been seeing anything related to those movies at all in a LONG while.

And lately I have been getting The Last Jedi is a travesty themed videos recommended to me.

Honestly is movie criticism in the internet dominated by spreading bad press about movies?

I like Chris even if I disagree with him sometimes.

Dude, they didn't like a film. Who cares? I hate the DCEU films and I don't have a problem if people like them.

The thing about that is mostly a fair discussion as to why what one works and what one doesn't. Its just a fair discussion on film. Nothing wrong with that.

Don't get me started on the Last Jedi videos. I'm so sick of those. I love the film and the constant recommendations is just annoying tbh.

Not really. Film criticism is mostly dominated by what the opinion is on the film. Like do they think X or Y in terms of their thoughts, what works or doesn't.

 

[Natemans]

I fucking despise RedLetterMeida.

Very cool!

My hatred for them began when they dissed the Hobbit movies.

Oh no, how dare people not like these films that I liked. /s

Dude, I like the Hobbit films, but that doesn't mean I'm ignorant of flaws or hear from the other side of the argument.

Its the dishonesty they spouted by the 3rd film that made me wrote them off.

You wrote them off.......because of their opinion on the Hobbit? Jesus Christ, its just a movie. Calm down.

 

[immortalfrieza]

The only reason the Original Trilogy was considered great or even so much as noteworthy to begin with was because of how revolutionary it was. Character development, effects, and storytelling was forever changed by it, every remotely similar movie has copied the techniques and story beats that the Original Trilogy introduced to some extent or another. That plus nostalgia is ultimately the real reason why people praise the Original Trilogy while at the same time being extremely critical of the Prequel and Sequel Trilogies despite the fact that most if not all of the flaws these other trilogies have are just as present in the Original Trilogy but were overlooked because as a name implies the movies were fresh and original. The Hobbit Trilogy is another example of this, a series that is only considered crap because The Lord of The Rings came out first and thus did everything The Hobbit does already along with plenty of other movie series like say Harry Potter at about the same time The Lord of The Rings came out. It's not so new and exciting anymore plus it doesn't have nostalgia to back it, so people are much more willing and capable of noticing the flaws in The Hobbit has whether The Lord of the Rings (another example of "most of them" BTW) also had them or not that they otherwise wouldn't have noticed or cared about had The Hobbit come first.

If 40 years ago the Prequel or Sequel Trilogies had come out with the other two to follow they would be considered excellent movies and masterpieces of storytelling, The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi are good examples of both sides of this phenomenon. The first because it follows the beats of the Original Trilogy very closely, so Star Wars fans screamed bloody murder because we've all seen all that before in dozens of movies by now. The second as a direct response to that criticism went out of it's way to avoid treading the same ground and subvert audience expectations, so Star Wars fans screamed bloody murder because it didn't follow the old comfortable beats. In either case, the Sequel Trilogy should in the future be considered the ultimate example, the ultimate proof that no matter what you do you will NEVER satisfy fans of anything, even by giving them exactly what they asked for. This is particularly true of "fans" who decide long before they ever walked into the movie theater that they are going to hate the Sequel Trilogy just for the mere fact it exists, which seem to have come out of the woodwork in droves ever since Disney bought the license, again, just because George Lucas isn't making the movies anymore. I've seen people actually screaming for him to get it BACK, just goes to show the fans don't have a clue what they want.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

I get what you mean though. Sometimes I feel that without Saving Private Ryan, WW2 movies would still be allowed to be fun.

I doubt it. Without SPR we might have gotten another 3-4 years of humoristic war movies, but it was already a genre of movies in decline (as was war movies in general when SPR hit), and with 9/11 what was acceptable within a war movie was radically altered. If SPR and BoB were the forerunners of the "honor the veterans"-drive in media, then 9/11 cemented that the only narrative that was acceptable was that of brave men being scared but doing what needs to be done. With the necessity of getting civilians to sign up for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it also became necessary for the US movie industry to ensure the people who enlisted that they would not become the next generation of Vietnam Veterans. So instead Hollywood made a lot of war movies that was all about the sacrifice, the duty and the humanity of the people who went to fight wars. It was a crafting of a hero narrative that we had not seen since the 50's.

The Pacific can, in this interpretation, be seen as the eventual backlash at the tail end of the 00's, when the issue of War on Terrorism Veterans, their poor mental health and trouble with re-integrating into normal society came to the fore. The Pacific portrays the war as miserable, if maybe just and in need of fighting, and as taking a terrible toll on those that fought it. It was a way for Hollywood to remain on topic, and a reminder that even The Greatest Generation suffered long in the aftermath of WW2.

Generation Kill was also sort of on this ball, even if it did not focus on the post-war experiences of the men it portrayed (many of who struggled with mental health issues according to the book). Instead it preferred to tell the story of how random, stressful and often pointless a war seems to the men actually fighting it (Jarhead was arguably ahead of the curve in this regard, all the way back in 2005 when Operation Enduring Freedom hadn't yet soured). Just like the Pacific, Generation Kill is in many ways a backlash against the patriotic hero epic that most war movies made between 1997 and 2006-ish were. That being said, there's some great humor in Generation Kill, especially for those of us who's done military service.

So I think that War movies would not have been fun much longer either way. The societal attitude towards war today is much more cynical and bleak then it was in the 60's-80's, when war movies (with a few notable exceptions, mostly about Vietnam) still often portrayed war as the great adventure that defined men. And that was really the generation when the "funny" war movies like Kelly's Heroes were made.

 

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

I fucking despise RedLetterMeida.

Very cool!

My hatred for them began when they dissed the Hobbit movies.

Oh no, how dare people not like these films that I liked. /s

Dude, I like the Hobbit films, but that doesn't mean I'm ignorant of flaws or hear from the other side of the argument.

Its the dishonesty they spouted by the 3rd film that made me wrote them off.

You wrote them off.......because of their opinion on the Hobbit? Jesus Christ, its just a movie. Calm down.

Also their fanbase and their arrogance made me wrote them off the sycophants.

One youtuber tells me that the RLM guys have college degrees in filmaking or something like that.

And yes they were dishonost and lied to, they applauded that Peter Jackson unlike George Lucas was an Actor's Director, he knows how to make charcaters, but by the third review they act like they forgot the story because they lost interest, how did they lose that investment into the charcaters in the first movie other than they are being dishonost.

And then they called Peter Jackson, Peter Hackson in the Django Unchained movie and that review just showed their true colors that they are a bunch of old school film snobs that thinks the 1970s was the last decade when movies were good. And the rise of CGI and corporistism ruined movies.

 

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

I get what you mean though. Sometimes I feel that without Saving Private Ryan, WW2 movies would still be allowed to be fun.

snip

Without Saving Private Ryan war movies would stop copying its visual aesthetic and apply it to every period of war.

Not all battlefields were grey, foggy, and discolored.

 

[Hawki]

Okay, dropping in, because my opinion matters (shadup, it does!), because this thread has taken a turn into some unexpected subject matter

-To be honest, I kind of despise RLM. While considering if I should answer this, I came across a good article* that examines their style, but watching the prequel reviews, it makes me feel very uncomfortable in a lot of ways. It goes far beyond the point of examining the flaws in the films (and the prequels have flaws, don't get me wrong), to the level of personal attacks and innuendo. Most of these are applied to Lucas, but they extend to fans as well, basically boiling down to "if you like the prequels/disagree with me, you're stupid." I have similar misgivings with CinemaSins, but at least Sins does portray itself as a comedy. But there's such a mean streak with RLM that I find it unpaletable. Plus, the whole hostage 'jokes' - I know humour is subjective, and you can call me an SJW if you want, but I don't find the notion of an elderly man keeping hostages in his basement for shits and giggles funny. In the context of where the fanbase is now, with the abuse heaped on people like Johnson and Tran, I can't help but wonder if RLM played a role in normalizing it. Of course, people would attack Lucas and Lloyd anyway, but even so...

...ever remember the phrase "attack the product, not the person?" What happened to that?

-With the Hobbit movies, I've discussed these at length before, so I'll leave this - if we judge the Hobbit movies as adaptations, they're pretty lacklustre, most notably by deviating from the tone and themes of the novel. However, if judged as movies in their own right, I'd say they're good overall. They're overshadowed by a trilogy of excellent movies that came before them, but on their own terms, I think they do the job well enough, even if BotFA is really stretching its premise. However, on the issue of synchronicity, I'll point out two things. One, it was established from the start that the films would be borrowing heavily from the appendacies, of things happening during the novel but not shown in it. Secondly, it's also very much a PJ work, in that it's designed to try and mesh The Hobbit with Jackson's previous trilogy. There's nothing wrong with that IMO. There's been adaptations of the Hobbit before, we're easily at the point where it can do its own thing. And on the subject of adaptation loyalty, off the top of my head, Starship Troopers and Shannara Chronicles. Both of these adaptations take heavy liberties with the source material, even being antithical to it, but they manage to at least be decent on their own terms.

*See https://filmschoolrejects.com/spare-us-your-90-minute-video-takedown-of-the-force-awakens-986a0bda2fa1/

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

Without Saving Private Ryan war movies would stop copying its visual aesthetic and apply it to every period of war.

Not all battlefields were grey, foggy, and discolored.

That's true, but it is also not an aesthetic that became particularly common in movies and series (the only real offender I can think of off the top of my head is Band of Brothers, which goes for the same 'colorized journal movie'-vibe of SPR). Video games on the other hand embraced the aesthetic like crazy, only forgetting that the washed out colors, jittery camera and spiked contrast were also complimented by quite a lot of color. It was CoD which first copied the aesthetic, but forgot to add the diverse color palette of SPR, which eventually would turn an entire generation of games into dab brown.

Just to drive the point home:

Saving Private Ryan has muted colors, but it also has a lot of colors and a wonderful naturalistic lightning. These were things that got lost in the translation to video games.