Star Wars 8 shit talk

Not so! Though Pete is a paragon of the form, of course.

because they lucked into youtube fame. it is their day job to do this, to talk about these shit movies. if they ceased all comic book and Star Wars related videos and spent a few months on a longform review of "Juliet of the Spirits" they would go bankrupt. remember that they got their big break talking about "The Phantom Menace"

I was being rhetorical, of course I know why they don't do it. But my broader point is that by failing to deviate from these movies, they're no better than the vloggers and sequels they deride.

cogs in the machinery etc.

but they are better because they are consuming from a distance. they are consuming with detachment, with an air of intellectual superiority, simply through the act of claiming that it is beneath them. they are "putting on a performance" to use the very popular modern excuse. their fans are implicit in this. they get the joke. they joke is that they are above whatever it is they are doing. it's the same po-mo "what is authenticity" dance favored by pretentious musicians and artists, only dumbed down to the Walmart checkout line.

the Father John Misty thread is over there

not sure i'd take directions to threads from Οὖτις today

heyo

For the record, no, they did not review Moonlight.

FWIW I think there are models where they could broaden their coverage a bit without necessarily screwing themselves or biting the hand that feeds or whatever. The F This Movie model might fit the bill for example - podcasts are dedicated to a specific movie, usually a big geek crowd-pleaser, but the opening twenty-ish minutes are a roundup where the host asks the guest host what they've seen lately and you get some conversation going around kind of whatever - minor new movies, old things they just saw, etc. It's not a perfect show or anything but that tactic does kind of broaden the coverage quite a bit.

Of course some people will just skip past to the main movie - offering an out to the kind of geek that really only just wants to click in, hear if the podcasters agreed/disagreed with their own hot-take, and click back out - but they'd still get their clicks and maybe the main conversation would even be enriched by this bigger discussion going on. I mean idk why I'm trying to back-seat drive their show when I have so many beefs with them but it's a whole genre of shows like this.

I'm just a little surprised they never even accidentally invoke or reference a movie outside their bullseye. They could stick to their usual fare forever, that's fine, but it's weird that even when they're ripping on stuff their examples always seem to be directly related to the movie at hand. So a big complaint about a new Star Trek might be how it's not as good as an old Star Trek, though better than the last Star Trek. A new Alien movie is discussed almost exclusively in the context of old Alien movies. They can go deep on Star Wars, but only how it fails or succeeds compared to old Star Wars. I don't know if this is intentional, some sort of hyper-myopic discipline, but it's just so ... circular. They do do annual (I think?) catch up episodes that tackle other movies outside their typical purview, but it's obviously rushed.

I actually like the show and reviews and observations, but can't quite figure them out, and don't always feel it's exclusively cynicism at work. Like, sometimes Mike will reveal some massive gap in his knowledge, and I think, you're a professional film geek who went to film school who watches movies for a living, and you haven't seen x?

"man that new Star Wars was so far inferior to Gunga Din"

Most of these kind of folks - meaning uber-pop culture nerds. And I say this from personal experience working around people like this, etc - only truly care about watching things that are part of a "franchise" or related to some major pop culture phenomena. To them, "The Godfather" is an art film. Wouldn't be caught dead - or would probably die - watching a Bresson or even something like "Stalker". And quite a few of the ones I had gone to NYU Film School!

*And quite a few of the onesI knew had gone to NYU Film School!

Eh - I'll retract the snarky "Godfather as art film" comment because they mostly had a good or at least solid education in cinema studies but I never heard them reference anything outside the pop stuff when talking about the pop stuff.

It would be funnier if they reviewed something like Gunga Din or whatever and kept comparing it to Star Wars.

tbf, these franchises and blockbusters are such a huge part of popular culture and clearly like 75% of what Hollywood focuses on, so there's nothing innately wrong with zeroing in on them. But it does often feel like a more constructive MST3K. "We're stuck in here and all we can do is watch b-movies and blockbusters!"

now keep in mind that mike and jay neved completed a film studies course
because they used their extra time to build a wheel of the worst

I feel like we need a separate thread for this topic if there isn't one already because it's interesting to see where people draw their aesthetic lines. Like I'll watch almost any older horror/sci-fi movie without regard to where it hits my brow (within the past week I've watched Red Planet Mars and Critters 2 and Kwaidan) but I won't touch that SyFy Mega-Sharkulapus shit with a ten-foot pole.

More interesting than talking about Stars Wars 8.

I love sci-fi, but I've never been into shitty b-movies for the sake of b-movies, and generally don't like winky movies that emulate shitty b-movies. But that's sort of self-affirming: if I like it, it's not that shitty. Tying into RLM, when they review "Escape from New York" they essentially talk about it like it's a schlocky b-movie, which I suppose it (like most/much John Carpenter) is. And yet, I've never thought of it as a schlocky b-movie, just a cool John Carpenter movie that I've always loved. Maybe it's just the ineptitude of much shlock that bugs me? If the acting and directing and writing is competent, I usually don't have trouble getting behind it.

In 2017, all movies are schlock

Sorry - where's the post a controversial opinion / trenchant social commentary self-clowning thread

If things are more interesting than talking about Star Wars 8 then maybe reallocate priorities about posting on this thread imo

Let's switch out the Chapo thread with the Brexit thread and the Brexit thread with this one

tbf I am mostly just bitter about nerd-dom's transition from a marginal culture w/a heavy DIY & countercultural context to a mainstream culture eagerly strapping on corporate feedbags, cuz I definitely remember/still enjoy the former, while the latter has become one of the most nauseatingly oppressive cultural forces ever

Heh. Yeah, part of what a couple friends & I have talked about in our last few shows. It's one thing to enjoy what you like, but what happens when your leanings get are so predictably monetizable that endless megacorps just shit out cheap dollar store detritus stamped with a recognizable logo.

when your leanings get are so predictably monetizable

This was always the case, it's just the money sources are bigger now.

On the other hand, the bigger fandom gets, the more opportunities there are for different types of people to participate. Would stuff like Clexacon exist if it Star Wars hadn't made genre fiction huge?

i do like some of their 'best of the worst' stuff. it would benefit from much more serious editing, and kicking rich evans out of their crew. and adding the voices of women and people of color. but i've said all this before.

― long dark poptart of the rodeo (Doctor Casino), Friday, April 21, 2017 11:34 PM (five days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

TBF they used to have Jessie but she opted to stop going in front of the camera due to getting too much negative attention from creeps.

I appreciate that their Re:View strand is an attempt to talk about non-current films, but it's odd that they never discuss non-English language films. It's like that sort of thing is just not on their radar at all. I've also noticed that there's a clear divide between the "art films" crowd (e.g Jay and Josh) and those who just like dumb blockbuster stuff(Mike and Rich).

spent some time daydreaming about directions they could take Star Wars 8 last night, now to work on my fanfic

On the other hand, the bigger fandom gets, the more opportunities there are for different types of people to participate.

TBF they used to have Jessie but she opted to stop going in front of the camera due to getting too much negative attention from creeps.

Yeah, kingfish pointed this out the last time we were talking about this, and it's kind of been niggling at me ever since. Not meaning to in any way diminish her agency in that choice, or the very very very real array of massive creep presence for any woman who basically makes herself public in Internet nerd circles.... but I feel like there's more that could be said or interrogated about this. Without knowing any of the actual details, I wonder: do the RLM dudes do much, or anything, to discourage negative attention from creeps, or create a space that says that kind of attention is uncool and unwanted? I could be wrong, maybe each of them puts in six hours a week going through their comments threads and clearing out shit, but their actual on-camera decisions and content don't really sustain that.

They could, for example, state outright that being creepy is unwanted, and that their goal is to create a great discussion place for thoughts and LOLs about movies, and that that requires making people feel safe, and that means pushing out harassment and creeping. Or even stick it as a standard disclaimer in their episodes. Or even say "you know what, seven years ago we thought the kidnapping-rape-murder stuff in the Plinkett videos was just a laugh but we've come to see it as not really that funny, or worse, and we're pulling it from the site"? Or plenty of other roads that they could go down, but don't. Not only have they not done that, to my eyes they've done the opposite by speaking a language that's just this side of Gamergate - especially in their coverage of Ghostbusters 2016, which was 75% devoted to mocking strawpersons for whom ~any criticism of the movie means you're a sexist~ etc. So I think it's not really enough to say that the fans were creepy and that was that.

Beyond their specific choices I think it raises some interesting questions about the structure and format of shows like this. Given a sexist Internet culture, where the presentation of people's bodies and faces operates differently for people of different genders, is there something about the "talk show" format that needs examining? That is, you mostly see the hosts in chairs/couches, interspersed with clips from the movie - their appearances are part of the content and so at the least maybe there's an extra onus to take on the kind of disclaimers I'm thinking of, especially when the hosts are overwhelmingly male and there was only ever one woman per episode (not counting the person-on-the-street interviews and the victim-in-the-basement 'comedy' in the prequel reviews). It's just a very bro-y format and I don't think that's neutral either. This dovetails with some thoughts I was having about ILX on another thread recently so sorry if I seem to be talking in three directions at once.

It's almost as if we need a RLM thread at this point?

I don't think I've watched more than five minutes of those dudes and it was years ago, so probably

jesus christ you guys, talk about Star Wars

idk about a whole thread for RLM especially as it invites irate googling gamergaters but i would be into a thread about gender and cultivating healthy audiences/spaces in nerd vlogcasts generally or something

I have some theory that while some people are naturally stronger in the force, Jedi and Sith using the force distorts the fabric, kind of like how large masses and gravity distort spacetime. So Rey, while naturally very force sensitive, is suddenly capable of things someone untrained shouldn't be in TFA

Either that or she's some sort of sink for force energies, so Kylo Ren being near her both weakens him and gives her this power to tap that she was previously incapable of

idk probably neither and she's just strong in the force and having her do shit in TFA was just a plot device

xp I am down with irate gamergaters invading a couple threads, we could use a shake up and could always just ban them

fair enough i just also think RLM by themselves are the interesting thing about this, even if they've been the lightning rod for my thoughts in this area.

er AREN'T the interesting thing about this

The scene when Kylo Ren is interrogating Rey is the turning point where she starts actively using the Force as opposed to being very sensitive to and experiencing visions as a result, isn't it? My theory is that her Force sensitivity allowed her to sense what KR was doing when he was attempting to read her mind, allowing her to mimic some of his skills. It seems like a similar thing happens during the fight in the woods, where initially she is overmatched but grows in proficiency as the fight goes on and she watches/absorbs more of KR's technique.

And then Luke spends this new movie going "Yes but."

"To truly be a Jedi, you must-"
"- sit on a mountain and glower? Got it."

imo if everyone force sensitive just stayed at home and talked to flowers or w/e we'd have fewer issues. that's what Luke is on about with this island thing

Getting this image of Luke just wandering the island with an acoustic guitar, singing to the birds.

maybe talking to Ben and Yoda, hanging out with birds, etc

"Really, I just wanted to be Jack Johnson."

my other high concept idea was that the trailer is being literal -- seeing the light and the dark is very jedi/sith-centric and it's a really reductive view of the force. just like the republic (and the core/outer rim worlds and other known sectors) is a really reductive view of the universe -- there are other beings beyond the outer rim and horizons should be broadened

I'm curious what they'll do with design this time, of ships & droids.

I read something about a casino planet (!!) in this one so ... uhh ... expect that?

How about a planet...with lots of different types of enviro-*ethered*

like a luxury casino planet, or like nal hutta which is mostly crime but lots of gambling