Star Wars 8 shit talk

feel like you guys are being deliberately obtuse about what constitutes the "most geeked" audience, specifically for Star Wars

does your coworker cosplay as an imperial stormtrooper y/n

not to my knowledge

ironically I had a stormtrooper halloween costume sitting under my work desk for a couple months after I lent it to a different coworker and was too lazy to take it home, though! maybe I should ask her if she's interested

Have you met Dr. Morbius? Or Eric H? Or Alfred? Or Clemenza?

Only one! I'm sure they're nice guys, but they're a malign influence over the film polls.

see when shakey says "most geeked" he means the people dressed as the characters in line for 24 hours before the first showing actually starts and when you guys say "most geeked" you mean people who are excited in a less specific sense so that means you are being deliberately obtuse (shakey is just being obtuse)

in what way are the people "less excited in a specific sense" MORE GEEKED than the "people dressed as characters in line for 24 hours". Because there can be ONLY ONE "most geeked"

yeah i mean i am not surprised if a large subset of the arthouse audience also goes excitedly to lots of superhero movies or whatever, but vice versa? i'm thinking noooope or else we would probably notice toni erdmann racking up $50 million at the US box office.

anyway my point was about people who make podcasts/internet shows/youtube review series, and people who spend a lot of time leaving excited comments under them. i feel comfortable saying there are a ton of such shows that really only only only tackle these blockbuster-type and "geek" movies, and rave about them (or complain only about fannish things like whether they cut out an awesome scene from the comic, or wishing we could have seen more space battle footage and explosions cause everything was so badass and awesome, or whatever). and i was saying it's not really surprising or remarkable that those people aren't giving space to anything besides multiplex-released superheroes/star wars/etc. but it's a little more annoying from people like RLM, who make such a show of being critical of and superior to most of the movies that they review. like great, i agree, transformers looks like a fucking mess. how about you review something else then? this problem's not limited to them of course, it comes with a lot of internet people who find success being snarky about pop culture. i also suspect such people's fanbases skew male and skew teens/early 20s which might also be a factor here.

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.

I assure you I did not come here to attempt to stop shakey bullying nerds.

these guys saw Snowpiercer and liked it they arent total rubes

apologies for any disingenuous reinterpretation, I value cranking at shakey over clowning cosplay nerds who are generally decent people and not all obsessives who are uncritical about film

I assure you I did not come here to attempt to stop shakey bullying nerds.

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. (could say the same thing about the tech industry - hippie mathematicians building weird shit in their garages = awesome! Techbros fleecing investors for Juicero's = good god you should all be shot)

xp

star wars killed the nerdio star

lol

everyone doesn't have to be an expert on everything. these guys talk about b-movies.

Absolutely! But one of their biggest, most redundant complaints about big Hollywood blockbusters is "oh no, it's another shitty Hollywood blockbuster." Like they are some straight-faced basement MST3K, forced to watch multiplex fare against their will. Like the "fuck you, it's January!" clips - we get it, Hollywood makes shitty movies and the year will be packed with Smurfs and Transformers sequels. But their complaints feel pretty silly when there are all sorts of "indie" movies they could review, even in Milwaukee, without going full Carl Dryer and Hou Hsiao-hsien. They recently reviewed Get Out and loved it, and that was cool, why not more like that? They reviewed "La La Land" (like it was some weird artifact), did they even review "Moonlight?" Why even waste time reviewing the Power Rangers movie or Bye Bye Man? By sticking to the usual shit-sandwich suspects they are relying on the same sort of lazy shorthand that drives Hollywood sequels. Imo.

they know what gets clicks, is why

Why even waste time reviewing the Power Rangers movie or Bye Bye Man?

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".

^^^

would be interesting to see them acknowledge this, but of course they won't. can't bite the hand that feeds!

the strange ppl andrew knows are also most of them ilxors or former ilxors i suspect

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