I never said that you’re not allowed to say a movie is good or bad. That’s completely retarded.
I said you’re wrong for claiming that a movie can be objectively good or bad, or that a filmmaker can be objectively good or bad at doing something, as if there’s a scientific metric for proving that one film technique is objectively better than another.
“Objectively better”. Ye gods, I can’t even find a way to reword what you’re trying to say without it sounding ridiculous.
No. I am, however, baffled that you would make that leap, instead of simply recognizing that I’m using one movie that everybody knows about as a basis for comparison with another. Would you prefer that I compare Star Wars to Diary of a Country Priest?
I’m expressing a contrary opinion. I’m not sure that qualifies as telling other people what they should think.
Still surprising to me that after 13 years people still have the enthusiasm to let everyone know they didn’t like the prequels and heres 20 reasons why…
Thrawn is stuck in my memory permanently. It would take a bad movie to ruin him. Once the movies come out, I cannot escape the audio and visuals when I read the book.
So on that note, I hope I don’t need to see a Lucas made Thrawn, or well any of those books. The Thrawn trilogy is like a slightly weaker sibling to the original trilogy. It’s good, I enjoyed it, but is it worth doing? The actors are all too old now anyways.
I have spent way too much thought on how to fix Return of the Jedi’s plot. Could have been so much better. I wish the word Ewok was just another weird, random creature in the Star Wars Galaxy, obscured by much cooler and better races.
Context was his ability as a movie maker. About his ability to make a movie.
So there are no cinematographic skills or storytelling devices used in this medium? And that everyone is just as good at it than everyone else? I think you’re taking it to the other extreme. Why can’t I say that the storytelling devices this movie uses are bad? Those exact devices and the scenes outlined in those reviews?
Crappy film student Joe Schmo executes framing, continuity cuts, storyboards better than Alfred Hitchcock? Or are you saying there is no basis for comparison there at all? Why can’t someone be better at executing film techniques than someone else?
But how? How can a movie be good or bad?
If it’s subjective, then those concepts don’t even exist. There must be SOME sort of non-subjective quality that is associated with a movie, otherwise the concepts of good or bad don’t even exist. Otherwise it should be I like this movie or I don’t like this movie, and no one’s allowed to comment on good versus bad, only on like versus not like.
Objectivity is just forming an unbiased opinion, judgement without distortion from personal or emotional bias…does this not apply to movies even in the slightest?
So how do you acknowledge that a movie is good or a movie is bad, and not acknowledge that there have to be some basic points of comparison?
How do you define good versus bad movies then? Just based on solely how you FEEL about it?
Neither of those things have anything to do with “everything is as good as everything else”. I have no idea where you’re getting that.
There is no such as an unbiased opinion. Opinions, by nature, are a function of the values of the person having them. Values are necessarily biases.
Yes, you define good versus bad in movies based on how you feel, in a very reductive sense. Film criticism is essentially the game of being honest (with yourself and others) about how a movie is affecting you, and attempting to figure out what a movie is doing to achieve this effect. This necessarily varies from person to person. That necessarily means that it is subjective.
Between this and the Spawn comic, I am beginning to think you’ve made it your purpose in life to torment me.
I didn’t even send you that Spawn comic, I’m pretty sure it was Zephy or something, albeit possibly under my direction. Why would you even complain about that in the first place, there’s kids in Ethiopia starving for early 90’s comics with anatomical liberties and excessive cross hatching, you should stop taking that treasure for granted.
I’m saying everything is not as good as everything else, that we can measure things against other things. We would descend into insane subjective hell if we couldn’t claim objectivity in things, a hell in which we couldn’t deride other people for having unpopular opinions about stuff that were different than our opinions.
I don’t want to live in a world like that. I want to be able to say you are a shithead if you like a certain movie and that I am better than you if I do not like it.
I mean you can make a movie better than some other guy makes his movies, that’s why we have favourite directors and favourite screen writers and etc. If you feel a way about a movie, that is someone deliberately causing you to feel that way, it is a technique which deserves credit. I think a movie is good and therefore you are affected, I don’t think you are affected and thus the movie is good.
In the future I will avoid referring to the existence of objective goodness/badness and just stick to “universally panned” or “universally considered by everyone with sense to have sucked.” To me they mean the same thing, but it’s more a case of efficiency of language versus accuracy of semantics.
It was either Zephy or RockB. I’ve gotten comics from both of them, and one of them passed onto me your unholy STD of an excuse for a comic.
How can you know if a movie is affecting until it affects you? I will remind you that it is the audience who makes meaning from a text–the text, in this case, being the movie. Taxi Driver is my favorite movie because of how it made me feel, and, by extension, the craft and artistry by which it was able to do so. It was not my favorite movie until it did that.
“Universally panned”, eh? Now we’re actually getting into the territory of objective claims–i.e. things that can be proved/disproved based on observer-independent evidence, such as movie scores. (Which, themselves, are an unreliable heuristic, but them’s the breaks.)
Though I admit, I wonder about the implication that an opinion is more valuable for having a lot of other people agree with it. I’m not sure I buy that.
Since consensus is apparently a useful piece of information, here are the Tomatometer ratings for all six Star Wars movies.
The Phantom Menace: 57%
Attack of the Clones: 67%
Revenge of the Sith: 80%
Star Wars: 94%
The Empire Strikes Back: 97%
Return of the Jedi: 79%
None of these is a universal pan, though The Phantom Menace is at least certified “rotten” by the Rotten Tomatoes benchmark of 60% favorable reviews. On the flip side, Star Wars and Empire both come within a Jedi-twirly-flip’s distance of universal praise.
I’m pretty sure the only part of the Star Wars ‘fabula’ that Lucas is interested in telling chronicles Anakin. Star Wars movies, at least anything before Episode I and past Episode VI, will never happen until he dies and some company tries to wrestle the IP from the estate (don’t hold your breath).
Any Star Wars fan who says the expanded universe is better than the prequels is talking out his ass, and I don’t like the prequels.
The expanded universe is “Hey, wasn’t that character/scene cool in the movies? Let’s recycle, reuse, and rip it off a few dozen times!” Stuff like universal Sith lightning, superweapons that destroy solar systems, a few dozen Death Stars, and every character ever being related to the main characters in some form all make me gag. It’s like they’re afraid to tell an original story with the universe the original trilogy created.
EDIT: Sorry, forgot about the Thrawn trilogy. That one’s decent.
George Lucas isn’t really much of a director. He’s always been a far better producer. Look at his list of Producer credits…
Empire Strikes Back
Return of the Jedi
Raiders of the Lost Ark
The Last Crusade
Willow
The Land Before Time
All great films. Of course, he’s also produced some abominations (Howard the Duck, anyone?), but he certainly has always been better at it than directing.
And he’s a decent writer when he’s not alone, although he’s always been a pretty big cheese.
It would be MY DREAM to see a movie adaptation to the Thrawn Trilogy by Timothy Zahn. MY DREAM. If they get a good director and make it work I would probably cry. Seeing Mara Jade and Thrawn on the big screen… oh god.
I’m not really a Star Wars fan, but I don’t think that’s true. Maybe you should read some of the Star Wars comics. There are some stories based on imperial soldiers that I remember being pretty good.
I really just came in here to say this is the best Jedi ever. Darkside and lightside. Not a bitch about using something other than a lightsaber
These sound like the better sort of stories for the expanded universe. We’ve seen the main characters and glimpses of this huge, unexplored galaxy; why does every conflict have to center around the same guys?
Why not a story about some random farmer who has to deal with an Imperial tithe, or a war between two species that the Rebellion has to solve, or hell, how about the Clone Wars? Not the war from the prequels, but the epic conflict barely described in the originals. I would have loved to see someone else’s take, especially since Lucas’ was so disappointing. I imagined Jedi Knights suited in armor on the tops of mountains clashing with their equally proficient clones (Yeah, I know, clones don’t work like that) 100 years before Luke left for Alderaan. Seriously, you don’t need to have the Clone Wars 20 years right before the movies.
That’s one of the things KoTOR got right. The thing it (and so many other EU stuff, and the prequels) got wrong was making everything too big, bigger than the films even. It makes the films feel less special when, for example, everyone can use force lightning instead of the evil Emperor, or everyone has their own private planet destroying superweapon.
I just recently bought the original Trilogy and watched New Hope and Empire (the theatrical versions) and they were a fucking blast, I hadn’t seen them since I was a kid so I was basically watching them for the first time. The Luke and Vader battle in Empire just looks so awesome.
I think I might watch Return either tonight or tomorrow, how is it?
