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i will never be able to forget that #theresistance started as a star wars reference
also, in more substantial never stop talking about star wars news, i am almost done with rebels just in time for the new season of the mandalorian. all star wars everything. the content is placating me, i enjoy consuming content from the disney corp.
but anyway, the last season of rebels has been all over the place, but still way less uneven than the posthumous last season of clone wars (imo). i think the best part of it is the way they lean very hard into the āempire = space naziā stuff, leaning so hard that it ends up basically just being indiana jones in space towards the end.
the imperial governor who is literally just cate blanchettās character from indiana jones and the crystal skull (not a nazi, i know, butā¦ ) and the evil cloaked imperial art historian delving into the emperorās secret obsession with the occult are justā¦ very good for me to watch and enjoy. i donāt know how much of it is just genuine entertainment and how much of it is a kind of deep seated nerd satisfaction with the way the show has bridged the gap between the two different george lucas products with nazis as bad guys i guess. but iāll take it.
ironically, this means that it is YET ANOTHER thing that rebels does better than TROS, that for some reason TROS seems to be directly ripping off from rebels and yet failing at it. as iāve said before, TROS felt like a failed audition to get abrams the job as the director of some kind of indiana jones reboot. all of the pieces are there, but they are put together very poorly.
the whole movie revolves around a mysterious macguffin that is the key to unlocking the location of a chamber of secrets, poe is retconned into being a very jones-like dashing adventurer character rather than a heroic pilot-general, characters are menaced by snakes, the kijimi set looks like a rebooted version of the himalayan village jones first (re)encounters marian in in raiders, and the movie ends with the bad guyās face getting melted off by righteous energies. itās all very superficial, but seems sort of genuine in the same way TFAās aping of ANH did. itās justā¦ not as good? I mean I still think a pared down version of the movie with a different climax would have worked much better. But rebels really put into focus how much better the indiana jones gimmicks could be in star wars if executed properly. oh well.
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Mad at how much I still love The Mandalorian in the new season. Itās just exactly what I want from a Star Wars show and TV show in general. Itās just a discount Genndy Tarakovsky show that does not look as good as a Genndy Tartakovsky show but it turns out that is several steps above a lot of stuff. John Leguizamo was pretty good as comedian of the week although it was really a voice performance I suppose (unless he wasā¦under there?). It was very funny to see Boba just hanging out at the end there. I was worried that it would be too serialized in the second season but nope itās still doing decent meat and potateoes episodic stuff just with some recurring characters. Breeziest 50 minutes of live action tv this year
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it seems like if the first episode is any indication they are really leaning in to the fan service. i kind of hope they pull back a little more and let the show be its own thing? i mean, itās not that overt, but getting the droid the lars family didnāt buy, boba fettās armor (and boba fettā¦?), boba fettās armor shooting a rocket, the alien from jabbas barge (if it really is the same guy, wouldnāt he remember boba fett? maybe itās not him), krayt dragons, a krayt dragon skeleton in exactly the same pose as it is seen in anh, and (possibly?) one half of anakinās pod racer all in the same episode wasā¦ a lot
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oh, also, how could i forget - on-screen confirmation that the ice cream maker a random background extra is seen running around with in bespin is confirmed to be a portable safe of some kind
your point still stands but this was confirmed in season 1 when herzog had one
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ooh right forgot about that. it seems like a weird meme to be focused on. i want to see someone shaving their legs with a communicator from the prequels.
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also apparently the orb inside the krayt dragon is a thing but i donāt know what itās from
God that episode ruled. I really, really loved all the sandpeople stuff in particular.
I suppose it was just a straight-up western, for that ep. Natives and settlers hate each other, stranger comes into town on a hoverbike, almost gets in a shootout, inspires town to put aside differences to fight a space dragon. Tale as old as time.
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yeah i think showing another side of the sand people is one of the coolest ways the mandalorian references the original movies and i sort of wish there was more stuff like that and fewer āheyā¦ remember the 80s???ā throwaway gags. i mean i love those too. but i would prefer things to be actually good instead of just likeā¦ amusing?
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tbh a bold stance to take wrt popular media in the year 2020
(i.e., this is a really pithy way to a say a thing I feel all the damn time)
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The next real literary ārebelsā in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of āanti-rebels,ā born oglers who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse single-entendre values. Who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe thatāll be the point, why theyāll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk things. Risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. The new rebels might be the ones willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the āHow banal.ā Accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Credulity. Willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows. Todayās most engaged young fiction does seem like some kind of lineās endās end. I guess that means we all get to draw our own conclusions. Have to. Are you immensely pleased.
Evergreen. Also, congrats, now youāve absorbed the media criticism part of Infinite Jest and should only read it if you are interested in autism, tennis, or addiction.
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I hate tennis so much that it has ensured Iāll never read infinite jest despite long standing interest in both of those other things
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[quarantining my star warps posts to this thread]
and this is one of the things that i think is (accidentally?) interesting about the overarching plot of star wars, in that it tells a story of a deeply conservative institution (the jedi) that exists within a revolutionary movement. i donāt think the sequels stick the landing at all, but the first six movies at least are about the collapse of an old regime into an even worse one, and then the remnants of the old one sort of reconfigure themselves in relation to a new movement. i think itās significant that ep 4 begins with the dissolution of the senate altogether, reaches its climax with the death of (one of) the last members of the jedi council, and the destruction of alderaan, and then ends with the first major victory of the rebel alliance.
lukeās jedi training in ep 5 is radically different from what we know to be true about all other jedi before him, so even though he calls himself that and ideologically aligns with this idea that ābalance must be restored to the forceā, the movement that he is a part of is not particularly interested in reestablishing the jedi council or going back to the old way of doing things.
i think the better aspects of the sequel trilogy continue this in some ways, but not others. i mean it is definitely what ep 8 is about, but i think itās kind of ridiculous that in 7 whatever new order was established after 6 is already on its way out, which makes it feel like everyone is just fighting to return to some kind of imagined post-death star 2 normalcy, which didnāt seem to ever exist. it would have been much more interesting to tell a story about the former rebel alliance trying to create something new, but what do i know i guess.
and then i think the interesting thing about ep 9 is how it attempts to do both at the same time - like itās supposed to be this hugely nostalgic thing for audiences (everyone you liked from before is back!) but, imo, within the context of the movie it still is ostensibly about how dangerous it can be to cling to the past. i think it is possible to read the sequel trilogy as being about the necessity of finding ābalanceā not in a return to old institutions, but in between the ādestroy the past, kill it if you have toā approach of kylo ren and the literal resurrection of the past through the emperorās attempted reincarnation.
it comes across as extremely incoherent, but if youāre able to be as generous with the star wars movies as apparently only i am, i think there is a genuine difference in what it means for rey to have āa thousand generationsā behind her and yet still be in charge of her own decisions and fate, and allowing herself to just become the physical vessel inhabited by the actual consciousness of the past.
i also think there is something kind of brilliant about how ep 9 takes the thing that everyone assumed/predicted would be the āhappy endingā of the saga, the restoration of balance through the union of the dark and light, and turns it into some kind of dark and twisted omenāthe āforce dyadā that brings kylo and rey together is also something that can be corrupted and manipulated and ultimately has to be destroyed
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why you hate tennis tho
i read infinite jest because i love tennis 
bad move.
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it combines all of the worst aspects of sports and celebrity culture
Itās become pretty clear to me that while 9 is obviously the worst Star Wars movie in terms of it being a movie to sit and watch 7 is the nadir of the series in terms of pure theory. One giant shibboleth that endorses nothing except endless recursion, rendering every victory and defeat of the protagonists of the OT a meaningless wash against waves of time so fast the very same characters witness the recursion in their own lifetimes! Itās Sisyphean torture with no Camusian absurdity to laugh and embrace. Lifeless.
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They couldāve simply made a remake/alternate-universe interpretation of 4-6. Thatās clearly what 7 and 8 want to be (I didnāt watch 9).
They want to bring back the old actors as aged mentors, OK, but it would totally work to simply cast Mark Hamill as Obi-Wan and have the generational handoff thing be on a fourth-wall level, like how the action Star Treks handled it.