I did it. I opened a private tab and checked Truth Social. Trump is obsessed with Walz misspeaking on school shooters. He also screamed in all caps that he would veto a national abortion ban. Also his usual weird fixation with the moderators’ ratings in other shows, and still asserting that anyone who said he lost in 2020 is lying.
I think it sorta works, mostly because I never really bought the original as being particularly authentic of, well, anything. It’s a fun party song just begging to be covered on cruise ships for the next 40 years. Astley is a solid pro who clearly never stopped performing and didn’t skimp on the arrangement.
Over the years, I’ve come to understand a lot about what people didn’t like about The Last Jedi. There are pacing issues and some of the setups strain credulity even within the gossamer veneer of Sci-Fi that’s wrapped around Star Wars. A lot of it is sort of nitpicking that would be forgiven if Luke had stormed down a hallway slicing people up in Act 3, but I get it. Ultimately, they just couldn’t buy what Rian was selling, but I did.
If you can roll with Luke being capable of backsliding just a bit and being flawed (and FFS, this is a fan base that rolled with letting him freakin’ join the Empire multiple times in their precious EU), then I think TLJ was actually trying to do something thematically and narratively interesting with a franchise that was stuck in the past. I thought it set up a really solid final chapter, though I too thought that with the lack of a time jump, maybe we could do 9 movies plus a capper. Critical to all of it is accepting that Snoke was a red herring, and that poor Ben Solo, conflicted and prescient as he was, was a tragic figure too deeply broken to be saved.
Also, sort of tangential here but just because I want to talk about it, the “tone poem” of Rose’s sister in the bomber is some straight up beautiful filmmaking that channeled George Lucas at his best, and while I didn’t grok it all until a few minutes later, it’s intentionally juxtaposed against Poe’s your-mom joke before the battle and lame excuses after. Now, the joke was still a bit too broad and Marvel-y for my taste, but I think it was a smaller miss than the haters declare.
Here you go. Check the Behind the Scenes section. Sounds like it wasn’t going to be explicit in the movie, but heavily implied.
The whole editing and pacing reminds me a lot of Rise of Skywalker, the entire movie felt like they crammed 2 or even 3 movies into one.
I’m an unapologetic The Last Jedi fan, so fair warning, but this is a huge part of the issue with The Rise of Skywalker. It was such a knee-jerk, panicky reaction to the mixed reception of TLJ that it materially made TROS worse than it needed to be. You can walk back some of the more divisive stuff in TLJ in a way that’s much more graceful and isn’t lampshading it with stupid shit like, “Come with us Rose! I can’t because Leia gave me homework!” or having Force Ghost Luke literally catch and return the Youngling-Slayer lightsaber. Even if you want to go a different direction, it needed to be “Yes, and…” rather than simply undoing TLJ. It left no one satisfied and wasted run-time.
Beyond that, I agree, there was just too much, with the redemption of Kylo Ren (assuming you needed to go that direction… I don’t agree) being enough to fill out an entire movie if done with care, and then the rebuilding the resistance and invading Exegol being plenty for another.
One of the true unforced errors of the Disney era, particularly the ST itself. I get that they didn’t want to be “MCU, Space Opera Division,” so they wanted to get a little auteur thing going on and let JJ et al do their own thing, but Lucas et al created literally dozens of aliens and for the most part none of them were in the ST, even in background roles. It made it feel disconnected. “The universe is too small” has also been a fair criticism, but (1) you don’t fix that all at once, and (2) they didn’t really do that anyway, just made all the aliens into pufferfish or catfish.
If we’re ever gonna get Hondo, this is probably it. Knowing Lucasfilm, it’ll probably be as a five-second end-of-season stinger though.
I agree the trailer looks fun. Goonies in space, plus a Jedi.
There’s just been a certain cheap and rushed quality to recent Star Wars outings, both in writing and actual production values, that has made them a lot less enjoyable than they could be. I actually kinda liked the Acolyte and hope in particular that we see Manny Jacinto again, but I can’t deny it was mostly just “kinda okay” and definitely seemed to squander its budget on cheap fake beards and fat toy lightsabers.
A breezy, fun story could handle that campy vibe a little better than ponderous end-of-galaxy stories, though. We need an infusion of charisma, too. I dunno. As always, I’m cautiously optimistic.
Yeah, that’s the part that doesn’t work. Even if they needed to cram the exposition in between the world-changing call to action and the hero’s refusal, you have to tie them together and give then some stakes: “Before I decide anything, you need to tell me WTF she’s talking about” or the like. But then you need more dialogue and it changes the tone of the scene.
It tracks better to have us drop in on the almost completed exposition conversation/rest and recovery after the sand people attack, before jumping into the next crisis.
I’m not much of a coder, but even if they’re doing something procedural, it can and should still have a blacklist.
So like, it wasn’t just hiding in the game’s dictionary, but someone or some pre-coded algorithm selected it to feature?
Well, that is exactly the song I would have expected from the Fancy Like Applebees guy if he were tasked with writing a soul-searching meditation on family life and addiction.
A little bit of casual misogyny and toxic gender roles here. A little bit of underexamined personal philosophy there, where the subtext of self-loathing is literally the only interesting direction the song could have gone. We’ve got soft-pedaling the message enough that no one in the audience feels compelled to change their behavior (we all need a beer, just trying to “avoid AA”). We’ve got the dissonant images of “can’t afford $35 for an oil change,” but also writing a mainstream country radio hit as a reasonable professional goal. We have bizarre shoutouts to (famous college football coach) Nick Saban, John Deere, Skoal, and Nicorette. All of it in a sing-song cadence a toddler would be proud of and ending up in a line-dancing bar with big tiddies dancing around.
Fucking hell, Nashville, this is why I have to justify and cajole people to listen to anybody with a southern accent. Contrast the Walker Hayes garbage with Jason Isbell also doing a lightly up-tempo song about the struggle to stay sober and do the right thing.
Or, if that one’s too subtle, here’s him doing a semi-autobiographical (and it’s only barely “semi” from what I understand) roots rock confession that’s literally about an alcoholic in recovery. Seriously, compare “Keep muh dawters off the pole!” with “Last night I let myself remember… my daughter’s eyes when she’s ashamed.” There’s probably half a dozen other lines like it, that are “comparable” but… well… NOT comparable.
Also, what the heck is up with your link #5? It’s definitely not the linked song, I don’t think it’s a Walker Hayes song, and I can’t seem to find any of the lyrics on the interwebs. Is it an AI hallucination? If it is, it’s somehow slightly better than Walker Hayes.
But when I went back to my alma mater, the University of Iowa in Iowa City, I went to the library where they have all my papers, and I was stunned to see an exchange of memoranda between me and Gene Roddenberry that I had totally blocked out. Once I read them, I understand why I blocked them. It was very toxic, very venomous. He hated the script. I guess I didn’t know any better, so I was intemperate. I responded intemperately.
Anybody at UI who can get access to those memos, LOL? That sounds catty and fun. I know Roddenberry never truly came around on TWoK, but IIRC he acknowledged it was well-made for what it was.
What the hell are they talking about? She’s been part of Star Wars for years!
Janeway: Let me tell you, it’s unwise to enter heated scientific debate with a Wookiee…
I would have preferred a debate with Professor Kashyyyk.
If anybody actually wanted a non-terrible keyboard for a ZX81 emulator, I could do it, but this one is staying an homage. I might add a secret layer to have it output the closest Unicode to the symbols I did include, LOL.
I use a Cricut infusible ink marker to get a shallow dye-sublimation just from the heat of a diode laser on very low power. I can’t get it as intense as I’d like, as the heat starts to spread and makes the legends blurry, but with appropriate expectations, it works pretty well.
You know what? Sue them ALL for false advertising!!! I bet this thing can’t even travel underwater.
Yeah, I think the MAGAs will run mostly with the unfortunate garbled school shooter phrase, mostly because the eternally 12 year old bully Donald Trump seems to think it was some sort of fatal gotcha moment and not a facially nonsensical mis-speak. Ironically, I think this will mostly squander some generally skillful sanewashing BS from Vance.
Kamala’s campaign on the other hand will get very good mileage out of the refusal to concede that Trump lost on 2020. Somebody on CNN said it would be the best “campaign ad” moment of the debate.
Overall, it is what it is, and it will be impossible to tell how many people will really be swayed by the debate, but I doubt it’s a particularly large number. In particular, “leave abortion to the states” is unlikely to resonate with women in any state with a Republican legislature, including GA, AZ, and NC.