Roujin wrote:And yet it's possible to enjoy a great number of films for children as an adult which are competently made with well thought out plots and dialogue and character behaviour without having to say to yourself, "It's fine, this is a film for children (which contains scenes of a man being sliced in half) so I don't expect care and attention to have been paid to anything other than shiny colours and loud noises"
That's like going somewhere to eat, ordering a kids meal and then saying "Well the food was shit, but it was a kids meal, so I just ate my greasy deep fried waffle chips, watery beans and bread filled sausages and enjoyed it."
Roujin wrote:No, no. I understand that people like the film. What I find fascinating is that people either don't care or don't register that characters are saying and doing things that are totally jarring with the story or the tone.
This film is poorly written, I have a real bugbear with anything being given a huge budget and then turning out sub par work, especially since I'm going to be expected to pay top whack at the cinema these days to see anything I'm interested in.
Back to my food analogy, people don't put up with being served shitty food from anywhere claiming to be a competent eatery, but what's interesting about media is that frequently people are prepared to swallow a load of tripe. It's genuinely a source of some intrigue for me.
I've watched quite a few kids films about laser wizards. Some of them i really enjoyed, some of them i didn't it.pantyfire wrote:I didn't try and justify anything. I just watched the kids film about laser Wizards and enjoyed it.
Tempy wrote:I find your middle paragraph interesting because it suggests that there’s some kinda platonic high for story writing that should be achieved by pouring money into a project, which only leads us to the kind of anhedonic, focus tested and homogenised story that gets derided over in the MCU. Stories are an art, not a science. They don’t generally get better with more money
Tempy wrote:The issue I have is that this kind of new criticsm, this overwhelmingly thorough, hugely reductive and painstakingly analytical style of inspection of a film that has been fostered online would probably crush any number of classics including the OG films by virtue of ultimately not being a useful mode of understanding stories. It’s all about formalisation of ideas into hard logical ideas, very game feeling systems of progression and so on that have to make absolute logical sense at all times... and that’s simply not what stories are about? They’re full of contrivances and shortcuts to reinforce themes and ideas. They’re full of mistakes and concessions, of characters doing what they want as opposed to perfectly following on the arcs of expectation. Resolution is allowed to be unsatisfactory, because in life it so often is. Tying things up with a bow is equally criticised, so the line of acceptance feels incredibly narrow. I understand why this mode of criticism is popular, and why it tends to rear its head more around things like Star Wars and the Marvel films and so on, but I am not sold on it as being in any way constructive. It’s definitely reductive, and I think it may well lead to safe studio films being made even safer, but I worry that we’ve reached a critical mass online of a certain type of review being tolerated and accepted over any other type. I dunno, I’m rambling here, but ultimately I think there are plenty of valid reasons to dislike TLJ and plenty to love it, but as someone in the middle but closer to the latter side, all I ever seem to hear are arguments that paint Rian Johnson as some kind of cartoon villain who incompetently failed upwards and made a SW film that was utterly full of mistakes that no one at any production level noticed, instead of someone who attempted to tell a story that they thought would resonate with a modern audience. The tools being used to prove that seem to me fairly unhelpful. There are more pertinent things to deconstruct, such as whether the ideas and and themes presented are even worth attempting in a big race to the bottom franchise like SW. But sure, the inconsistency, childishly calling Rian names, a stupid petition to get a film remade instead of just accepting it and moving on.
pantyfire wrote:You know what? I'm going to hatewatch TLJ right now just to fuck with everyone.
pantyfire wrote:You know what? I'm going to watch TLJ right now just to fuck with everyone.
pantyfire wrote:You know what? I'm going to watch TLJ right now just to fuck witheveryonemyself.
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