Knights & Knaves Alehouse

francisca wrote:Sidebar: Been listening to the NPR Radio Drama of the original Star Wars. It is most excellent. It has it's own tale of how the rebels got the deathstar plans.

Chainsaw wrote:Traveling for work, watched The Last Jedi in the hotel. Horrible. I want those 152 minutes of my life back.

MageInBlack wrote:

Chainsaw wrote:Traveling for work, watched The Last Jedi in the hotel. Horrible. I want those 152 minutes of my life back.

HA! I told you you would end up watching it! I bet you held your stuffed Ewok and cried the whole time. Was your favorite part where Leia floated through space?

francisca wrote:Sidebar: Been listening to the NPR Radio Drama of the original Star Wars. It is most excellent. It has it's own tale of how the rebels got the deathstar plans.

rredmond wrote:https://www.npr.org/2015/12/18/46026988 ... lly-worked

Looks like it's about $100
But here's the article and the link is there.
--Ron--

ThirstyStirge wrote:

francisca wrote:Sidebar: Been listening to the NPR Radio Drama of the original Star Wars. It is most excellent. It has it's own tale of how the rebels got the deathstar plans.

Is this available somewhere?

rogatny wrote: 1. The Fin and Rose side quest was pretty much a complete cinematic disaster. It clearly originally was there as an excuse to reintroduce Lando and had to be radically re-written when Billy Dee Williams didn’t agree to join the cast. (Or whatever the issue was.)

rogatny wrote: I rewatched the Last Jedi last night.

Second impressions - entertaining to great first 45 minutes and a decent to entertaining last 45 minutes. The hour in between those two 45 minute chunks was pretty much where all the problems lay.

I really don’t give a crap about dubious physics or other “sci-fi” problems. I do have a problem with some of the writing. And I can break it down in two big categories:

1. The Fin and Rose side quest was pretty much a complete cinematic disaster. It clearly originally was there as an excuse to reintroduce Lando and had to be radically re-written when Billy Dee Williams didn’t agree to join the cast. (Or whatever the issue was.) Without Lando, the sequence fulfilled literally no purpose. The writers could have simply said that Fin had the know how to get on the Imperial ship, skipped the sequence entirely, and then had the rest of the movie proceed exactly as is.

Instead we get this whole side trip that feels like it came from a completely different movie. The dialogue is different. The characters are different. The look is completely different - way more cartoony. The politics are way more heavy handed. It was either written by a different screenwriter or maybe written so close to the commencement of filming that it couldn’t be polished or rehearsed as much as the rest of the movie. The whole thing felt very Prequel-y.

2. There was utterly no reason at all for Admiral Laura Dern to keep her plans from Po and everyone else. None. They were in an absolutely desperate life or death situation and “Trust me you stupid little boy,” simply isn’t going to cut it. The way she was running the ship Cute Purple Hair deserved to have the crew mutiny. They had absolutely no reason not to think they were all going to die under her command.

It felt like the movie makers were going way, way, way out of their way to make a point. Something about how wise women are wise and hot-headed fly boys are hot-headed. And if fly boys would simply shut up and let the wise women pat them on the head and speak to them patronizingly, everything will be all right. The problem was that everybody involved were adult professional soldiers all of whose performances would have been enhanced had they been in on the plan. If the movie makers were going for some greater metaphorical message, the metaphor didn’t fit. It was bad writing.

Both those issues wasted a lot of time and would have shaved at least a half hour off the really long movie if they’d simply omitted them.

Other than those two (quite sizable) issues, I thought the rest of the movie was solid fun Star Wars stuff. I liked it more than the prequels, but less than the other 5 films. I haven’t seen Solo yet.