TreadOnMe [none/use name]

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: September 24th, 2020

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  • You basically summed it up.

    It’s more like once the money dried up for the socialist and progressive movement outside of some podcasts and the DSA, Dasha and Anna just decided to jump onto the next easiest band-wagon, which in the New York arts scene is Alt-right but hot because we’re ironic about it and everyone involved does cocaine and has money. Then Dasha got a bit part in Succession, and now has really leaned into the trad-Cath.

    At this point they are basically on the same tired hot-girl podcast grind, except instead of petty DSA stuff it’s petty NY art scene and weird religious grievances stuff. They are just provocateurs and trend followers at heart.






  • Not to argue more, but to argue more, TLJ wasn’t bad because of ‘unrealistic physics’ or whatever. It was bad because it couldn’t hold a conflict or dramatic tension for longer than 3 seconds, which meant even when bad things were happening I felt no level of stakes for the main characters. I mean, even the prequels, for how bad and cheesy they were, still managed to hold dramatic tension. Even VII held dramatic tension. VIII felt more like… idk what the right analogy is, the closest I can think of is a bad season of Buffy. Like the writers know that conflict has to happen because stories need conflict, but that doesn’t mean the conflict should actually affect the characters and their choices in any meaningful way.

    Like the big things were clear, they wanted to hit the same beats as V, so they needed a Hoth, Cloud City and everything needed to look desperate but hopeful at the end, so they just decided to mix it up alittle. The issue was they don’t seem to understand why those story beats work, and why they work in the order they were originally presented. Like, Vader and Luke’s fight leads to his isolation, but after he is rescued, he knows the allies he does have he can count on. But it still ends with just him, Leia, C3PO and R2, with Chewbacca and Lando leaving them behind for Luke to recover. Having nearly every named character with Rey at the end, especially in the final shots undercuts the mood we are supposed to be feeling (the utter loss of an entire rebel base and the death of Luke Skywalker) and is a fundamental misunderstanding of the language of cinematography. The last scenes with the broom kid itself weren’t bad cinematography, but there is no actual payoff to it, so it is mostly meaningless.

    A pretty easy change to make it meaningful would be Rey being nearly alone now or completely isolated from the crew, distraught and hopeless, then Leia comes to her, talks to her of the despair she felt seeing Alderraan be blown up, but tells her that as long as there are people, they will fight for freedom, Rey looks off into a space window or something and then we cut down to the broom-kid scene. All those people can still survive, but the focus is on the main character, what the main character is feeling, how the world appears within that feeling and the previous actions of the main character that inspired hope in a much cleaner way cinematically. But these kinds of problems are all through the movie, just very strange choices with pretty easy fixes, like it was rushed out of the writers room.