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  1. You’d have to do a lot of work to take footage of Fisher from one film and put it in another one, in a different location with different people. Even if you weren’t just recreating her completely, there’s a lot that could go wrong given that the original footage will have been intended for a completely different context.
  2. The approach for the new Star Wars stuff was to have director-led films that give each director a lot of leeway to do what they want, rather than to have producer-led films that follow an overarching plan. The Marvel films (with a few exceptions) are not director-led at all, and are generally helmed by TV directors, older journeyman directors for hire, and younger directors who can copy the house style. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with either approach in itself, and I’d say it’s resulted in more interesting films on the Star Wars side, but it does mean there’s less consistency. I strongly suspect that you’d find it more difficult to recruit a-list directors to make a Star Wars film if you told them they’d have to follow the overall plan, rather than telling them they’d have a blank page (subject to the producers liking their take on it). The problem with the Star Wars approach is that it’s probably too expensive to have multiple teams working on each main-sequence film, so they only have eighteen to twenty four months to do each one.
  3. Shenmue kind of highlights how ridiculous it is giving a score out of ten to something as complex and subjective as a videogame. To be honest, that applies to most games, but given that Shenmue will be a ten to a specific group of people and a much lower score to anyone else, it particularly highlights the situation. It’s impossible to give it an “accurate” score and probably impossible to review it in the conventional sense, but I’m really interested to see what they have to say about it.
  4. Yeah. I was surprised to read that Tarantino's bit in Sleep With Me, where he goes off on that Top Gun gay subtext monologue, was in fact Roger Avary's party piece that he stole outright. He seemed to have been living off that legendary script they wrote together for some time, and needed a bit of time to build up more material.
  5. To be fair, that dude wrote Argo as well, which was a pretty good film. Even if you got the Coen brothers working on a Zak Snyder film, they probably couldn't counteract Zak Snyder's essential Zak Snyderishness.
  6. I really loved the Sith planet, especially the way that it was this mad alien monolith that forged starships in this huge plain of dust. It was hard to get my head round it geographically, but I think that helped make it seem weirder and more alien. I guess they could have had completely new Sith warships, but the new films have gone all-out to make frequent usage of the Star Destroyer silhouette as a storytelling device, so it works thematically and it provides a kind of visual linkage to the other films. New ships would have been a bit extended universe. I liked the dagger too, in the same way that I liked the weird altar in the middle of a forest at the start of the film, protected by what may or may not be Darth Vader cultists. The film doesn't explain where either of them come from, and I quite like that kind of loose end in terms of storytelling technique. It reminds me of the caverns underneath Dagobah that look like they were carved by intelligent beings. Who built them, and why? Were they really there, or just part of Luke's Dark Side vision? Did Yoda just spike him with space shrooms? The film doesn't even ask the question, it just leaves you to speculate. It makes the universe feel bigger, and more mysterious. There was quite a lot of that in Rise of Skywalker, like the O2 Arena crowds of Sith (or something) that started to fill the stadium towards the end of the film. What the hell were they? Revived Sith? A figment of Rey's imagination? A cinematic affectation by JJ Abrams? Something from the reshoots that is no longer explained, but was too expensive to remove? I don't know, but it was pretty cool nonetheless.
  7. Yeah, the ancient Sith planet ran on mysterious ancient technology that was known to that extinct species but lost to the galaxy at large. It was a classic sci-fi mcguffin, I don’t think it needs to be explained any more than that. We don’t need to see the logistics of crewing those ships, any more than we need to see them loading up loo roll and pillows.
  8. I’m really enjoying replaying Reach on Legendary, except the space combat sequence in Long Night of Solace for which there are not enough dog’s dicks in the universe for it to suck. I love it on Heroic, but on Legendary it’s a complete clusterfuck of getting continuously battered by enemies you can’t see or shake off. The only way I managed to get through the second section where the human space station is attacked en masse is by hiding behind the station itself and popping out every so often to take down a single ship. I managed to get through it eventually, but I am never doing that again solo.
  9. I would agree pretty much entirely with that list, except I’d swap From Dusk Til Dawn with Django Unchained, and would probably move Once Upon a Time a bit further down. I loved the insane ahistorical bloodbath ending in Inglorious Bastards as it fit perfectly with the rest of the film, but didn’t think it worked in OUATIH. I’d love to see the film it would have fit with, but it wasn’t this one. Man, he really lost it between 1997 and 2009, didn’t he?
  10. Linking two sentences with a “but” doesn’t imply any connection between those two sentences? The word “but” can’t change the meaning of a sentence all by itself? I’m not saying you’re full of shit, but
  11. One thing to bear in mind is, if you ever find yourself saying something like “the abuse Kelly Marie Tran suffered is obviously completely unjustified, but” or “the treatment Tran received was horrendous and she in no way deserved it, but”, then go back and delete the “but”, and end the sentence there. Loads of people - including people in this thread - don’t end the sentence there, and go on to inadvertently justify the abuse and tacitly suggest she did deserve it.
  12. It seems like he doesn’t like it, so while I like filmcrithulk and respect his opinion for the most part, I don’t want to contaminate my enjoyment of Rise of Skywalker with his no-doubt thoughtful and well-argued criticisms. So I’ll probably give that article a miss.
  13. I think the best description of JJ Abrams’ style and limitations was by that filmcrithulk bloke, which is that he’s amazing at making you feel a particular emotion in a single scene, but has tunnel vision when doing so and doesn’t particularly care how this might affect the next scene or how it might jar with the previous one.
  14. I don’t think the chaos of the original should be emulated; I’m just saying it’s possible to go too far the other way and to create this conveyor belt of content that’s pretty much all in the exact same style. Consistency shouldn’t be the goal. The inconsistencies are some of the most interesting bits. To be honest, all they need to do with the Star Wars films is give them to interesting directors with their own voice, and to give them three years to make each one, rather than 18 months. It seems a bit weird that Activision give the various Call of Duty chop shops more time to make each game than they give A list directors to make a Star Wars films. I’d say just giving people the space to work out their own ideas has more bearing on the quality of the final film and the series than having some overarching plan.
  15. To be honest, the last thing I want for the future of Star Wars is for everything to be part of some heavily supervised, painstakingly-planned Marvel-style content roadmap. I quite like the fact that every one of the new films has a different feel and a different voice behind it; even The Force Awakens and Rise of Skywalker feel like very different films. My problem with the Marvel films is that I care less about the fact that they’ll tease a character in film three that will appear in film seven than I do about the fact that, with a few notable exceptions, they all feel like the same film, with the same look, the same brand of humour, and the same fights. The original Star Wars films weren’t in any way consistent or planned-out, so you got things like the “another” that Yoda talks about turning out to be someone else entirely and the Emperor turning from a woman with a monkey‘s eyes into Ian McDiarmid, and Luke turning out to be Darth Vader’s son (spoiler) even though that retroactively makes Obi-Wan into a congenital liar. I like the loose ends and the inconsistencies to a certain extent, it makes a series feel more interesting - jagged and messy, rather than neat and smooth. For all their faults, the new Star Wars films each have an authorial voice behind them that isn’t just a house style. The one time they bottled it and went for a safe journeyman rather than someone a bit more distinctive, they got Solo, and while I really liked that film I bet they wish they’d stuck with Lord and Miller (and maybe let them write it rather than just direct someone else’s script).
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