Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi (spoilers)

[RobW]

Only just read this thread and TAB's dissection of it is very good. I was left pretty disappointed after watching TLJ. I had listened to one review, but saw that it had received almost universal praise, utter bollocks. The OJ chase analogy is spot on, I hadn't thought of that.

I didn't think it was total dogshit, but they've wasted Gwendoline Christie's talent. Hamill was good, Daisy Ridley's acting has improved and the dynamic between Adam Driver and Gleeson is fine. Yoda can fuck off tho. Overall, they just crammed in too many characters and couldn't give adequate time for them all.

[anton pulisov]

They had so many characters that they gave Ackbar an off-screen death.

One of the most widespread internet memes in history deserved better than that.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Which is madness as you only have to do one speech - best man speech etc. to realise that. Stuff that's hilarious written down can be absolutely impossible to deliver.

hah, I'm being transported back to my first couple of speeches in the maiden speakers competition in college, nervously pushed against the table, reading hesitantly from a typed speech filled with stuff that just looked so much better written down. It's a terrible feeling when you realize that "however you're supposed to do this, you're doing it wrong right now." Whereas when the time came to actually write a best man's speech, I wrote most of it after waking up from my first operation as a means to distract myself. You are essentially only putting a structure on stories you know backwards, stories that everyone is going to want to hear. And if you have a means to tie them together, then there's less pressure on each story doesn't have to be the funniest story ever. (which is how you find yourself standing in front of a room of people and realizing that this story about the groom getting chlamydia from a koala was a fucking bad idea)

Everyone just wants to have a good time, and a good natured giggle, and the sense that the whole thing is going somewhere. And in starwars George wants to talk about midi chlorians and some other nonsense, when he should really focus on letting Harrison Ford and Alec Guinness tell the story. I mean the force is all well and good, but people loved that movie because they got their first glimpse of Indiana Jones.

[blameless]

When I gave my best man's speech at my brother's wedding I deliberately stayed away from embarrassing stories about the groom, as many of the wedding guests:

a) would have heard the stories before
b) may well have been present during the events featured
c) come out of these stories looking even worse than my brother

or in the case of his best mate from university:

d) all of the above

[hobbes]

It's a terrible feeling when you realize that "however you're supposed to do this, you're doing it wrong right now."

Which is why, the second time I had to do a speech, I read it out loud so many times beforehand that the words stopped having any meaning and I could have done it in my sleep.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Which is why, the second time I had to do a speech, I read it out loud so many times beforehand that the words stopped having any meaning and I could have done it in my sleep.

heh, that's the same path that everyone follows. If you had to do it a couple of more times, eventually you'd be looking down at a card with the order of the stories you were going to tell. Public speaking is really something that everyone should be taught in school. It's literally a matter of making people do it a couple of times, and coming to the realization that people just want you to be good. it's just a skill that literally anyone can do, to a passable degree. It's also an immensely useful skill, because if you know that standing up in front of a large group of strangers is a piece of piss, then you can speak to any group of people, with a greater degree of confidence and get your point across.

[Hot Pepsi]

Tarkin also speaks directly to the emperor in the movie doesn't he?

I don't recall that ever being onscreen. But it's possible. Like I said, it seems that Vader's power increases, by default, perhaps, after Tarkin (and everyone else on the Death Star) is killed.

Indeed, Tarkin is the nuts and bolts guy. I recall us discussing all this in college 25+ years ago and a guy explained in well - "Tarkin is the details guy and Vader is the vision guy." I also thought of Vader as a kind of Rasputin type character. A big weirdo that was just around with an indeterminate job-description who nevertheless slowly gains power because the guy on top likes him, but otherwise creeps everyone else out.

The Emperor doesn't seem to be very hands on with the military stuff. He was a senator before weasling his way into being emperor. Perhaps that's why he thought putting tons of resources in another super-powerful but super-vulnerable Death Star was a great idea. Vader is a field commander - he actually flies TIE Fighters and leads the ground assault on Hoth, etc. He's also the "face" of the operation. Really important to the Empire's brand. In that way he's a bit like Baron Von Richthofen or Vasily Zaitsev - a warrior who becomes famous in his own army and beyond, which helps inspire the side.


I assumed that they'd bring Boba Fett back somehow. Maybe they still will. There have been comics etc that show him escaping the Sarlac pit. Likewise, I don't understand why Akbar got such a dumb death. It probably came down to editing. Maybe ghost Akbar will come back. Because I have a bit of a speech impediment (fixed it a lot as a kid, but not entirely) dudes in college said I talked like him and mocked me for it. Those guys were/are dicks.

Not sure about shiny suit, whatshername. Perhaps it was a contract dispute. I think she's in a lot of the non-movie media. And maybe she's not dead. We just see her fall in deep hole. Some of the non-movie stories have Darth Maul coming back with a robotic lower half. Anything can happen.

I don't really see how the prequels were racist, tbh. I don't think Tolkien is either, unless you really want it to be. Some national stereotypes, perhaps, but it's all Europeans so it doesn't matter really.

[Hot Pepsi]

heh, that's the same path that everyone follows. If you had to do it a couple of more times, eventually you'd be looking down at a card with the order of the stories you were going to tell. Public speaking is really something that everyone should be taught in school. It's literally a matter of making people do it a couple of times, and coming to the realization that people just want you to be good. it's just a skill that literally anyone can do, to a passable degree. It's also an immensely useful skill, because if you know that standing up in front of a large group of strangers is a piece of piss, then you can speak to any group of people, with a greater degree of confidence and get your point across.

I've done it exactly once, for my brother. I winged it, more or less. Tried to keep it philosophical, as i recall, but I don't know what I said. I didn't try to make it funny.

[Lang Spoon]

Ahem HP. The Twade Fedewation, Jar jar, the flying Jewish insect slaver.

Tolkien was a bad bastard on race. And the lads from the south on their big elephants seem a Saracen stand-in.

[Lang Spoon]

Seeing as this is the thread for all things Star Wars, apparently the reshoots for the Han Solo movie are now undergoing reshoots.

Sounds great! The actor who took that part on needs to fire his agent. A thankless task.

[Hot Pepsi]

Ahem HP. The Twade Fedewation, Jar jar, the flying Jewish insect slaver.

That seems like a bit of a stretch. Certainly, the eight-year-olds the films were aimed at wouldn't get that. I actually see it more in the slaver than in Jar-Jar, but then I'm not super familiar with the whole history of black-face and minstrelsy. The overall shitness and non-necessity (unneccesity?) of that character was so overwhelming that I couldn't really pay attention to any racist stereotype he might also be channeling. It's a shame, because the idea of an underwater civilization was a cool thing to add to that universe.

Tolkien was a bad bastard on race. And the lads from the south on their big elephants seem a Saracen stand-in.


That's not right, though. I double checked and can't find anything about Muslims (so-called Saracens) using Elephants. Certainly not to invade Britain. But you know who did? The fucking Romans. Nothing wrong with equating the evil empire with the Roman Empire, IMO. Greedy murderous fuckers.

[Hot Pepsi]

I'm afraid I'm gonna have to go with LS on this, Reed. The Phantom Menace is almost bewilderingly racist.

Your threshold for bewilderment is pretty low then. Even accepting the criticisms of the characters he mentions, it's not a lot compared to many films and TV shows.

[Lang Spoon]

I’m really struggling to think of anything else from the late 90s so full of racist tropes. Most of the stereotypes were like something from the 40s. No tedious wink wink Seth McFarlane irony, just straight up racist. I’m willing to give Badgerman te benefit of the doubt though, he seems so humourless and lacking in awareness he probably thought it was all just “funny voices”.

[Lang Spoon]

Sometimes I dream of another world where both Jaws and Star Wars never had a good editor, and the Revenge of the Dorks never happened. Maybe b-movies would have stayed b-movies and 15 year old boys wouldn’t had been the main demographic to decide what’s a hit. Or maybe auteur cinema had already disappeared up its cokey arse and someone else would have started making 40 million dollar budget Roger Corman flicks.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

That's not right, though. I double checked and can't find anything about Muslims (so-called Saracens) using Elephants. Certainly not to invade Britain. But you know who did? The fucking Romans. Nothing wrong with equating the evil empire with the Roman Empire, IMO. Greedy murderous fuckers.

The primary baddies in the LOTR are gangs of giant, muscular, inhuman, savage black creatures, that run everywhere. When I was watching the first movie, I thought I was watching a remake of Zulu! Tolkien was an englishman that was born in South Africa (moved back when he was 3) in the 1890's and was steeped in the Empire. His books couldn't be anything but.

As for Lucas, I think the thing is that he's not a big thinker, and doesn't have a rich palate of knowledge or understanding to draw on. The telling bit in that Peter Serafinowicz interview is the bit where he talks about Lucas's instructions to him for the voice of Darth Maul. "Make him sound evil." He decides to make Jar Jar the comic relief so he draws on some comic figure from his childhood. Unfortunately he seems to have spent too much time watching Song of the South as a kid, because he wound up creating a minstrel speaking patois.

[Lang Spoon]

I was getting Caribbean creole.

[jeanmid]

That serafinowicz interview just reminded me of just how fucking racist that movie was. It made lord of the rings look like a sly and the family stone concert.

I think George just never really came to terms with how others (including his ex wife) completely saved the first movie, and how other people wrote and directed the other star wars movies. He wasn't going to make that mistake again, that's why he wrote and directed all three prequels, and by christ it showed. He had no-one to take the story away from him and fix it, and he had no Harrison ford to tell him "george, You can write this shit but you sure can't say it."

he really needed someone to say that to him. Or at the very least have the slave holding the laurel wreath over his head repeatedly say "remember you are only a man" in gungan.

That isn't actually true, the reality is a bit more complicated, when he first started work on the prequels he actually wanted to get Frank Darabont to work with him on Phantom Menace, but that fell through, he also asked Lawrence Kasdan to work on it, but he turned him down. The problem with Lucas, is two diametrically opposed views, one is that he was a genius, the other is that he's a hack, the reality is neither is true. SF Debris has done a series of specials on Lucas and the journey he took whilst making Star Wars, the decisions he took and why he took on them, to explain not to to excuse

http://sfdebris.com/videos/special/herosjourney.php

Watch Hermit's journey about the development of the prequels.

[Hot Pepsi]

"I’m really struggling to think of anything else from the late 90s so full of racist tropes. Most of the stereotypes were like something from the 40s. No tedious wink wink Seth McFarlane irony, just straight up racist. I’m willing to give Badgerman te benefit of the doubt though, he seems so humourless and lacking in awareness he probably thought it was all just “funny voices”."

Other than the two mentioned, what others were there? Oh, the trading federation was "Chinese" according to some. Can't think of others.

In the first series, they seemed to follow the old sword & sandals movie convention - Posh bad guys get British accents and the good-guy underdogs get American accents.
And Obi-Wan has an English accent. Of course, that's because Alex Guinness does, but it worked with the idea that Obi Wan and Qui-Gon came from one of the central urbanized worlds like most of the imperial generals. Even Leia sounds kinda British in the first one, fitting her station as princess. Darth Vader was American because Anakin grew up hard on the streets of Tatooine. It all fit.

They've messed all that up with Rey having an English accent - and a fairly southern & educated one too, I'm told. Maybe they'll try to explain that when they do her origin. Probably not. They could say that she taught herself to speak mostly by watching holo-shows or whatever counts as TV in that world, and most of that was from the Empire so she picked that when speaking English (or the lingua franca, whatever that is). She also speaks some of the local languages of the other traders she dealt with.

But otherwise, it works. Finn is English because he was raised by the Empire since birth, just like whatshername. Snoke sounds English. Kylo Ren sounds American because he was raised by Han and Leia and then Luke.

And then remember in TFA when that one guy who boards Han and Chewie's ship is Scottish. I hope the visit the Scottish planet.

[Hot Pepsi]

The primary baddies in the LOTR are gangs of giant, muscular, inhuman, savage black creatures, that run everywhere. When I was watching the first movie, I thought I was watching a remake of Zulu! Tolkien was an englishman that was born in South Africa (moved back when he was 3) in the 1890's and was steeped in the Empire. His books couldn't be anything but.

I thought the idea was that the orcs were made by evil magic, rather than a regular race like the others. As they are made, not born, it's part of the whole industry vs nature vibe.
But apparently it's more complex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orc_(M...origin_of_Orcs

Yeah, he probably saw the world in terms of "Us = Empire = Civilization = order = good" and "Them = colonies = not-civilized = chaos = bad."

But the orks, in addition to being linked to ancient folklore goblins and trolls, don't seem to be at all African. To me they seem a kind of caricature of Germanic/Scandinavian groups that invaded the Roman Empire and Britain in the early middle ages. He was obviously very familiar with the literature of that era, such as it is. The Romans thought the "barbarians" were ugly and gross. The Celts thought that of the Anglo-Saxons and the Anglo-Saxons thought that of the Vikings. Everyone in Europe thought that of the Mongols. And the Indigenous Americans thought that of the Europeans. In all cases, its somebody rampaging in from the East to fuck up our idyllic land. It's a recurring theme.

And, possibly, Nazis.

Anyway, Orcs are short and stout. Not at all the stereotype of black South Africans, as far as I know.

As for Lucas, I think the thing is that he's not a big thinker, and doesn't have a rich palate of knowledge or understanding to draw on. The telling bit in that Peter Serafinowicz interview is the bit where he talks about Lucas's instructions to him for the voice of Darth Maul. "Make him sound evil." He decides to make Jar Jar the comic relief so he draws on some comic figure from his childhood. Unfortunately he seems to have spent too much time watching Song of the South as a kid, because he wound up creating a minstrel speaking patois.

I thought Jar-Jar was mostly created by the guy who did his voice - a black guy, incidentally, forget his name - who strenuously denied trying to do a minstrel or creole accent.

But of course, when somebody says "make up a funny voice," who knows what subconscious influences or memories will come out. And even if it were a complete coincidence, somebody involved with the film should have said "Eh, that's not going to go over well."

[Lang Spoon]

The First Order would probably be met with serious middle aged women carrying anti-Ren placards of a Trump is a Cunt variety.

[Levin]

Finn is American.

I saw something on twitter a few months ago bout how awful the racial politics of LotR can be read as but suggested that is would be quite easy to stay true to the books and also have non-white elves and hobbits etc.

I'm reminded though that Earthsea got whitewashed so I'm not sure that the source material matters all that much.

[Lang Spoon]

The accents are more likely to be a happy accident of filming at Pinewood, and lots of cheap English resting Actors being in the vicinity.

[Hot Pepsi]

Finn is American.

I saw something on twitter a few months ago bout how awful the racial politics of LotR can be read as but suggested that is would be quite easy to stay true to the books and also have non-white elves and hobbits etc.

I'm reminded though that Earthsea got whitewashed so I'm not sure that the source material matters all that much.

Oh that’s right. But the actor is British. It makes even less sense.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

There has to be more to Rey's backstory, yet. She can talk to Chewie, for a start. How? Luke couldn't. Her parents might well have ended up dead junk traders on Jakku, but I bet they were Corellian pirates or something.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

There are loads of books and comics and cartoons that fill in all the bits and pieces that they only allude to in the movies, and there are a bunch of wikipedia type jobbies for star wars that give you the broad story, so you have some clue what the fuck is going on. She Grew up on a planet that was the scene of the Empire's last stand, and the surface is covered in loads of warships that are at least 10 km long. She makes her living scavenging these ships and at some point she scavenged a computer that she keeps in her at-at house, and she has taught herself loads of languages, how to fly, and all about being a mechanic and the ins and outs of all the ships she's exploring.

As for Tolkien, it seems that only the leading orcs are big black zulus. the most of them are apparently supposed to look like "degraded Mongols". So I suppose that's OK.