The MR. PLINKETT & RED LETTER MEDIA Discussion - Page 20

I second this. For all the jokiness, his story analysis skills are top notch. The Phantom Menace and Star Trek: Nemesis entries are impressive demonstrations of this.

Are you one of those folks who forgets that Han doesn't get rescued before the end of Empire?

Writing to audience (and market) expectations is one thing. Of COURSE Han comes back, because Ford is too valuable to the franchise. But as Greg elaborated, writing for story is just good manners.

Let's say Han's life-support is running out, or Jabba's planning to execute him instead of leaving him hanging on the wall-- now there's some urgency, a time factor! Or, only Han knows how to contact a mysterious individual or group that will prove key to winning the battle of Endor. Or yeah, obviously, only Han can pilot the Falcon to the center of the Death Star. Or even better: While everyone's getting all Forcey in the throne room, Han sneaks up behind the Emperor and shoots him in the head.

LULZ

I loved Jedi (and most things SW) as a kid, but especially BECAUSE of all the Muppet monsters. As stated before, there are moments in Jedi that are better than the PT all together IMO. With that said, I recognize it as the least of the OT and the start of a Lucas trend/s. But there is true earned emotion, characters (even if shells of former selves) that we love, and payoff.

Have to agree with this. The problem (well, one) with Sith is that it should be the culmination of the prequel storyline, but it seems more preoccupied with setting up the part IV than paying off I and II. The only thing that proceeds halfway organically from Clones (itself practically a reboot from Menace) is Palpatine pulling the trigger on his junta. Despite all the wheel-spinning and pointless digressions of the first two, Sith is the one that feels most like a prequel. It's so focused on the distant sequels that it becomes the most backward-looking entry in the series.

Jedi, on the other hand, is a progression from the earlier storylines involving Han, Luke/Vader, and the Rebellion. There was definitely room to tie those storylines together more elegantly, and for more originality in their execution (Death Star, take 2). But as Andre says, at least those stories exist somewhat on their own terms, and not solely to connect dots that don't need connecting.

I agree that that's all true. But it's done so poorly that I just can't give it points for that. It's like giving Battlefield Earth points for not being a remake or a sequel. Okay, but it's still a bad movie.

I wasn't mounting a grand defense of Jedi. Just saying why Sith is worse.

Also, comparing opinions about Star Wars with Battlefield Earth maybe shows that you have a bit more emotional investment in this than you let on. "Come on" indeed.

Edit: + sarcastic smiley face

If you like. As Reasor said, it's like arguing which ball you'd rather be kicked in. But I maintain that Return of the Jedi feels more of a piece with the prequels than it does with Star Wars or The Empire Strikes Back. It was a long drop from a great height, which may explain why I dislike it so intensely.

On subject, I'd almost rather see Plinkett take on Jedi than Sith. So many people still hold it in esteem that it seems the bigger target.

I would never claim that I have no emotional investment in Star Wars. Through my teens, that was as close as I ever came to being a single-franchise fanboy. And obviously, my crushing disappointment with Jedi is a wound that still itches.

One day at a time.

I think the disconnect stems from your main knock on Jedi being that it's "more of a piece" with the prequels than the OT. Which may be true, but the leap from there to worse than the prequels is the sticking point for some of us.

And I still honestly think it is. And you're all going to have to live with that.

I think people have too much of a tendency to overpraise the original trilogy and overhate the prequels. The former isn't as perfect as it's made out to be, and the latter isn't as worthless. Even Star Wars and Empire, when you emotionally divorce yourself from them and view them objectively, have some serious script issues.

Any word on Episode III review? Maybe Christmas would be a good idea to release it.

Return of the Jedi and the prequels are more of a unity than all six films as a whole for a very simple reason: Jedi is the film during which Lucas makes the turn from a great storyteller and mediocre director to a thin-skinned shill for his licensed products. It's the film where he stops listening to anyone who doesn't tell him his decisions are uniformly awesome, starts cramming everything that has the most remote chance of being a toy into the film, and so on and so forth.

From the way he handled that and the next three installments, you can't really shake the feeling that the huge leap in quality between Star Wars and Empire stoked his insecurities as an artist and seriously pissed him off.

I'll defend Return of the Jedi until the day I die.

I guess someone could make the argument that this was the start of Lucas' downfall. But I don't see much wrong with Jedi. It's a fun movie. The Speeder chase. The confrontation at the end between father and son. Sure, Han isn't given too much to do, but that's kind of moot because Vader and Luke become the forefront of the film and the emotionality really pays off for me.

Fuck. Thought it may have been up.

Jedi:
"It's a fun movie"

Ugh. I shouldn't...

But, "speeder chase!".

Speeders are fast. Radio's even faster. It's as dumb as the pod race. Cool when you're a kid. Stupid when you're an adult. SW and ESB have plenty of aspects that still work because of the story work that went into them. Jedi is lazy and shitty and the weakest options for each required outcome were used.

Leia being Luke's sister was handled terribly again and again. She was sidelined as badly as Han was. Yoda's death wasn't articulated well at all. Obi Wan strolling up afterwards and sitting on a log was appalling. Poor Mark Hamil was the only person who seemed to give a shit in the core cast. Ian McDairmid at least gave him something to play off at the end.

The space battle is great. Even thinking about the FX guys put all those elements together is mind blowing. The whole Death Star rehash is weak, but the FX guys didn't shame themselves there either.

Jabba's fine as a big rubber muppet. The staging of his court has problems that Lucas was obviously unwilling to throw money at to solve. The sarlac pit sequence has problems that can be found carved in stone in ancient temples in South America.

But hey "It's a fun movie". I think Hudson Hawk is a fun movie. I don't kid myself that it's not a huge mess though, and at least it didn't shit all over two other better movies while being "fun".

I only agree with the revelation of Leia being his twin sister as an afterthought excuse for not following through with another new character and the Death Star rehash. Other than that, I couldn't disagree more. It's no Empire, but neither is the first Star Wars for that matter.

None of the other films in the series stand up to Empire, that's true. That's because Kershner's ability to work with actors doesn't mirror the skills of a person suffering from Aspergers and Kasdan and Brackett aren't awful writers. In fact, all three people were pretty good at what they did. Any non-asshole in Lucas' shoes would look at what happened with Empire and his track record as a producer at that point and get the message that his strengths in the process were in pitching stories and working on the technical craft side of a production.

Lucas, however, proves his insecure asshole credentials by assuring himself Empire could never be repeated. I think everything you need to know about Lucas as a person and maker of films after he sees Empire is found in how he repeatedly took joy in the fact that Spielberg really wanted to pull another Kershner on that series and he was in the position to keep telling Spielberg "No." If you're the kind of guy who is willing to crank out sub-par work, in part, to bust the balls of a friend and business partner, you're kind of a dick.

Then you pretty much have no business following RLM's Prequel breakdowns, because everything he says can be refuted with "Meh, they're fun movies."

And Star Wars is no Empire? It's fucking STAR WARS.

But again, all this shit was covered in the early days of the internet. Hell, there's probably a 100 million year old monolith buried on the moon with a concise breakdown of Jedi's failures in the wake of the two groundbreaking movies that came before it written in ape feces on the side.

Once Plinkett's done with Episode 3, geek culture as a whole seriously needs to put a moratorium on Star Wars bitching for at least ten years and finally learn to move the fuck on.

I hate to shake the foundations of the geek belief system, but Lucas is probably right about Empire not being a repeatable phenomenon. If Kershner was such a world-class directing genius, where are all of his other amazing films? Robocop 2? SPYS? Where else was this monstrous talent on display?

Empire was one of those moments of rare alchemy in movies where everything came together and defied the odds. It happens. Laying all of its success at the feet of Kershner is silly considering his track record.

You have a point. But Lucas was responsible for that collaboration coming together and working. And even in Return of the Jedi he had Kasdan come back to write the script. Why hasn't Kasdan been asked back to the Star Wars well since then?

Double post.

How do you know he hasn't? He wouldn't be the only power writer to eventually sour on collaborating with Lucas.

True.

Do you remember that red carpet event when Spielberg was asked on the side what's going on with Indy IV and yadda yadda yadda. And Spielberg's reply was basically condescension toward Lucas? Or at least, the joke showed through.

Lucas is not a fan of the masterpiece, DREAMCATCHER?

The fool.

As a compromise amendment, I'll suggest we stop bitching only until Lucas re-releases the films in shitty 3D.

If only the prequels were more like Dreamcatcher.

Then they'd be half as good as the original films?

Which would be more than I could say now.

Imagine how they'd depict the Jedi Mind Trick!

Godammit. I REALLY need to cut the shit already and see DREAMCATCHER.

Did you just do that on purpose?

I'd call it the best worst movie of the past decade. Yes, even moreso than The Room.

No, but please pretend I did.

Dreamcatcher is a very professional, highly polished turd, which is a different breed of bad from The Room's "unwitting portrait of mental illness". I find the latter more entertaining personally, but there is a certain fascination to be found in watching so many talented actors and FX people striving mightily to take seriously a story so powerfully, potently absurd.

I can't not watch Dreamcatcher whenever it's on TV. It's a must see.

As nutty as everything is, I'm always stumped by the basic set-up of a bunch of guys going away on a hunting trip each year to ostensibly celebrate their bond of friendship and particularly their special friend Dudditz, whom they never actually invite along on the hunting trips and apparently haven't seen for 20 years or keep in contact with at all, and is living a sad lonely life dying of cancer by the time they do decide to drop in and ask him for help because of "Mr Gay" (who's a very camp fellow indeed and looks like a giant toothy cock).

Actually, I kind of think this is what the whole RLM series is really about. I think geek culture is pretty ready to leave behind Star Wars as the cultural touchstone that it used to be.

Speaking as someone who grew up watching the original trilogy, but couldn't tell you the names of the alien "characters" populating the cantina, watching these reviews is almost a cathartic experience. Having someone voice, in a comical and ruthlessly precise fashion, exactly how bad the prequels ended up being really puts the whole thing to bed for me.

If someone had told me in 1997 that Star Wars would end up becoming the tarnished, horrible franchise that it is today, I definitely would have called bullshit.

Yeah, that's exactly why I prefer the former.

The whole Lucas/prequel hatedom became an infinite circle jerk many years ago, frankly I just find it a pathetic and pointless waste of people's energy at this point. And despite the gushing they get from the choir they preach to, I'm not convinced Plinkett's painstakingly specific, pseudo-scientific approach is really worth all that much as criticism. Great criticism isn't defined by how far you can stretch out your laundry list of plot issues, or judge elements against a set of rigid pre-defined storytelling rules etc. Not that such things aren't worth considering, but there is far more to judging a film than assessing how objectively flawed its construction is. I mean, how many slagged off Avatar for sticking to those same rules too closely?

And for the record this isn't coming from someone with any great love for the prequels (I haven't seen them since they came out), just someone bored to fuck with not being able to read these kind of sites for a week without coming across someone whining about the exact same old shit like constant background white noise. At this point I'd genuinely be more interested in watching 90 minutes of someone explaining why they love these films - at least that would provide a different fucking angle for once, and show some enthusiasm for something other than hating things.

Gaaaaaasp

Hopefully we won't have to wait for the videos to get better resolution once they're uploaded like last time.

This is seriously the greatest news I've heard all week.

Saying that makes me need to reexamine my life. But who cares, "Revenge" review mofos!

YES! Thank you for the update.

Bring forth the pizza rolls!

I need to buy a longer HDMI cable for the TV downstairs...

While I'm excited to see this, I hope he's not going to overdo it with the epic length. I thought the Attack of the Clones review was bloated. It felt like he was doing feature length because it was expected of him, and didn't have enough material to warrant it.

I hope for the best.

I'm still holding out hope that, in order to completely subvert the ridiculous anticipation this thing has, and to shine a mirror on the people obsessing over it, it just turns out to be all Mr. Plinkett and the Hooker's Revenge, and somewhere in there he cuts in a single sentence review of Episode III. Just, "It sucks, yet you all still paid for it," and that's the end of it.

I may have commented in this thread or a related thread in response to a chewer stating that all other chewers should be interested in these reviews. I asked why a chewer not interested in Star Wars (like myself) would even bother listening to such an extensive dissection. Having listened to both of them on a whim, I now understand why.

The Phantom Menace remains the only Star Wars film that I've seen in the theater, the only one I've paid to see, and the only one I've seen all the way through in one sitting.

I thought it was fucking garbage, and at the time, that Star Wars fans (like a few friends of mine) were all a bunch of crackheads.

I can't remember a thing about it, and the review didn't jog my memory as much as provide an entertaining dissection of all the things I was too bored and disinterested to even notice. Seriously, I didn't pay attention to any of the political dialogue, I didn't really think about anyone's motivation beyond the obvious, and by the end of it I didn't really understand much about Lucas' world, and I didn't give a shit to learn. I still don't. Aside from some cool visual ideas and a cultural impact that I can't help but notice and marvel over, Star Wars is in my blindspot.

That said, those reviews are amazing, and hilarious, and actually valuable beyond poking fun at the decade old artistic failings of a man who will continue to have a net worth greater than that of God because the people that are (obsessively) shouting him down will (obsessively still) continue to pay for his product. There's good stuff about what and what not to do in the crafting of a film, and when things go south, why, specifically, they go south. Thumbs up.

I think this one needs to be long. The last 30 minutes demand a thorough play-by-play.

I just hope they don't go overboard on the Plinkett/Nadine stuff. I enjoy it, but it works best in small doses. The focus should always be on the ineptitude of the movie being reviewed.

I'm pretty excited, though I didn't like the Star Trek one much. He spent too much time on obvious points even while making fun of the film's obvious points.

As Dre has said (and as Tron: Legacy has reinforced) a lot of this isn't only about the films themselves, but how the modern blockbuster is approached, especially when it comes to mythologizing.

Also, they're extremely well produced and often hilarious.

I love the Mr. Plinkett stuff, it is quite well done, but really, my absolute favorite part of the Phantom Menace review was from a very real moment: the look on Rick McCallum's face after the screening of the rough cut. I don't know much about him, but I could totally feel the vibe he was giving off through my monitor. I'm sure he calmed down and swallowed his pride later on, but Jesus Christ, the maelstrom of negative emotions swirling behind his eyes was really something else.

Fans think they were upset about it? In that moment, probably none of them more than that guy.