I love how the rhetoric is “dey turk our jerbs!” While lawmakers are lowering the work age requirements so that kids can be forced to fill those “jerbs”.
Also, throw massive temper tantrum about “crisis at the border,” but refuse to do anything about it. If anyone is wondering, the answer is no, the Republicans do not want to make a deal with Biden on border policy; it’s way too politically convenient for them to have it both ways.
They want to use it as a campaign talking point and as a political cudgel, while also refusing to do anything about it. Also they can’t give Biden anything that might look like a win, no matter how much the American people want it.
Unfortunately they have right wing media on their side so their constituents will never understand the two-faced game they’re playing.
The more recent racism: “they gave us covid because of eating bats!” While they chew on some prion infested venison while insisting mad cow isn’t real.
Covid is real and dangerous when they feel like justifying their racism.
Yet Covid “is no big deal” or even “is not real” like you say, as they threw one lazy selfish tantrum after another, refusing to mask up, abusing essential workers.
The Extended Cut version of the first movie is actually an okay time. It boggles the mind anyone would think it’s a good idea to pull every bit of backstory and subplot and give us the mess of a theatrical version we got.
That’s the beauty of the Suicide Squad, they die or escape or there are other teams, so they can wipe out the whole cast without hesitation because it fits into the plot constraints.
Bad writing for film and television really irks me because of how avoidable it is. I’m not talking about mediocre or lackluster writing, but the actual bad writing.
TV shows and movies are tremendously expensive to make. Every part of it costs a fortune except for one: the writing. Even if a studio or production company was paying for a whole team of writers to work full time it’s still only a fraction of the cost of paying film crews, actors, editors, and VFX artists.
Given the relatively lower expense, relative lack of time constraints, and enormous importance of the script to the overall quality of the product it absolutely boggles my mind that production companies consistently fuck up the writing process.
My pet theory is that this is because of the assembly line way of thinking of studios. Script -> Casting -> Shooting -> VFX -> Editing -> Profit.
It takes time to develop a good idea and script. If you force a writer to adhere to a strict schedule you’ll get a rush job and bad writing. As long as money keeps flowing in, their assembly line theory is validated.
It’s like reading a news article and seeing horribly constructed sentences and typos. Like, this is your main job! I know there are a lot of English majors out there who would love to find work.
At least for some of those there’s an excuse of needing to get the news out ASAP, but there’s no reason an in depth piece or an online article that’s been up for a few days should be butchered.
Really though writing should be the least important part of a journalists job, digging through stories and finding the truth or understanding the complex strands of the story should be and that often involves going back and editing, restructuring, reediting, reworking and adding to it over and over again.
It gets really hard to see your writing with fresh eyes once you’ve got it so perfectly constructed in your head, it’s super easy to miss awkward mistakes that have crept in - this is why editors were a thing but newspapers rarely bother anymore or the editor is too focused on political and social acceptable to notice grammar or word choice errors
I’m sure there’s plenty of those making a mess of things, but taking time in the writing process, getting input from relevant parties, and doing as much preparation as possible cuts out a myriad of problems.
Studio got a product placement deal? Great, let’s integrate that into the story long before filming even begins so it feels natural.
Director doesn’t know if he wants plot point A to happen or not? Good thing he heard about that while the movie was just a script instead of having him decide with dozens of people on set.
I’m sure there are uncontrollable, unforeseeable problems that will come up in any production. There is no reason to exacerbate those by being willfully unprepared. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure but it seems like film studios reliably hamper the “prevention” part to shave a few weeks off on prep time and end up losing more time or huge piles of money because of it.
i wouldn’t be surprised if a big part of it is that the higher ups don’t know much about what good writing actually is, or they’re too focused on ratings and they don’t dare deviate from “what works”. it also wouldn’t surprise me if writers weren’t allowed to make “major” changes to scripts after seeing how the writing looks after scenes have been recorded, because it might be “too expensive to change”.
It’s crazy cause if you hear writers in tv talk about it, they’ll get contracted like a month or two before they have to finish the first batch of scripts. Writing in Hollywood is as much about learning quick writing shortcuts/tropes to move the plot along to get the product out on time as it is being able to develop a plot.
That’s what sticks in my craw. If I’m a studio exec who’s going to invest potentially hundreds of millions of dollars it’s beyond stupid to jeopardize that to get a payout a little faster.
It just seems stupid to put a time crunch on the most important phase of your investment. I don’t see how taking a greater risk of a project being a flop is worth getting the script a few weeks sooner.
I think a lot is because Hollywood became a Henry Ford production process, one part feeds into the next so they’d have empty studios and workers idle if the next idea isn’t ready to go.
Also it literally doesn’t matter, this marvel film has literally the same plot and jokes as the last one? That’s ok we cooked up a drama where we pretend villainous gamers are against it to get people talking about it, we seeded stories into the media we own about it and forced our celebrities to pretend to love it…
They can make the absolute worst shit and as long as they link it to something vaguely related to some culturally significant thing it’ll be huge, even more so if they can link it to a social divide or political division they have no intention of ever actually caring about.
Childhood toy + social flag = money, it works for comic books ‘i had a the flash t-shirt when I was six I have to like these new films’, it worked with Barbie ‘this proconsumerism corporate tat which was heavily criticised by notable feminists has made a film attempting to shoehorn social progress back into a corporate friendly sales generating mush, they say the baddies don’t like it so I have to go see it!’, and it works with endless sequels ‘this franchise now makes zero sense, has the most painfully predictable plots, has gone so far off the rails jumping sharks that literally nothing makes sense and there are zero stakes to any of it which totally ruins everything that made the first one good…’ and you can’t even tell what I’m talking about with that because it’s everything (i was thinking john wick btw)
Make something actually good and no one will care unless the media circus tells them to, that’s how you get s flop. Make something even slightly changing intellectually or from a certain point of view and instantly most your audience is gone or angry, but be like Barbie and put sparkle on social concepts 90% of the world has agreed on for decades while actively avoiding anything more contentious then you don’t need to worry about alienating the audience or going over their heads.
And for some reason people just won’t stop watching it, they won’t watch indy stuff made with passion or small budget things no matter how good they are because they HAVE to see the big releases, like you’ll lose touch with society and be unable to make friends if you don’t force yourself to endure at least a dozen painfully dull industry movies a year.
Basically movies that cost almost nothing to make and use great writing to build up the world. Our minds are really good and fleshing out the rest as long as their given good writing as a foundation. Productions could save a lot of money with good writing. It blows my mind you could sink $200 million dollars into a project and not have an absolutely flawless script.
I never said they’re mutually exclusive. There’s tons of big budget explosion movies that have great scripts. Dark Knight, Casino Royale, Matrix, The Bourne movies, Heat. The best movies have legs and continue to sell for years after release, exploding sun only gets you a good opening weekend.
It’s completely beyond me why scripts get rushed out the door before they’re at the very least solid. Sure, a production company might make their money just a little bit sooner but they run a massive risk of losing all of their money making a movie that completely bombs.
It’s impossible for every script to be a masterwork, but holy crap it seems like an audience wanting a competent script is too much to ask. It’s not like there’s a shortage of aspiring writers that can take a crack at a script until it’s at least passable.
Because writing doesn’t really work like that, the reason we get bland writing is because they keep adding extra chefs.
Thay get these professional writers that learned formula in school and apply it to sections of someone else’s work and wonder why the result is an ugly tapestry of formulaic rubbish.
All the things people love are written by people with passion for the project, then they get a budget increase and professional industry writers get brought in and it’s all shitty generic snappy dialog and dramatic posing that feels uncomfortable and awkward in the scene.
DC’s direct to video animation department consistently puts out absolute bangers, so that’s not surprising. It’s the live action stuff where they continuously drop the ball.
Yeah I hesitantly tried out Andor as somebody who isnt the biggest Star Wars junkie, and it quickly flew to being my favourite Star Wars content by a mile. Really excellent writing imo
The narrative of friends and family from the small town I grew up in and left, to rarely if ever revisit, reason that the immigrants work illegally for cash at meat packing plants, roofing, etc. This while drawing benefits, as unregistered/illegal immigrants. I don’t know how an undocumented person could collect benefits. Frankly I don’t know enough about any of it to say whether their narrative is accurate or not.
I have always held the opinion that even if their likely false narrative is true, those sound like extremely hard working folks being exploited and taken advantage of and points to an underlying problem that immigrants are not effectively integrated into our society through accessible legal procedures in a way that enables them to positively impact society to the greatest extent of their potential. I’d bet with living wages these folks would be filling up trade schools and all kinds of additional skilled labor roles that would be built upon and advanced generationally. I don’t understand why a country wouldn’t want injection of realized opportunity and advancement into its society, economics, and culture.
It is not uncommon for illegals to obtain someone else’s documents for use. $50 and you can have enough of someone’s information to claim benefits or get “lawful” employment.
Not everyone who does that uses that information to abuse the system, many don’t take benefits or get credit cards to abuse, most just use it to get a job that pays better than cash under the table. They do occasionally need to get new information, I don’t think I ever asked what caused the necessity to switch.
Source: Worked along side illegals and formerly associated with connected individuals.
The word Fascism was coined be Mussolini because it was a reference to the Roman Empire. Fascism is often about restoring past Empires.
Luke tried (and succeeded) to bring his father back from the dark side.
Rey does not attempt to ring her grandfather back from the dark side. Why not? because he’s dead. You can redeem your family but you can’t redeem your ancestors because they’re dead. You also can’t confront your ancestors, but science fiction allows characters to do things that aren’t possible to do in the real world.
Rey confronts her evil ancestor and rejects him. Takes on a different name, She understands her ancestor doesn’t define who she is.
Children in school right now learning about what their evil ancestors did, what should they do? Take their side? Or realize like Rey did that they don’t have to identify with what their ancestors did. You can identify with the good people from the past even if you aren’t related to them.
Fascism relies on wanting the things that your ancestors had. Reject that idea and you reject fascism.
Also if you’ve ever seen a statue of some evil dude being removed, you will see a reproduction of an evil person that died a long time ago being moved around on a crane.
The problem with RoS isn’t that it didn’t do anything interesting, it’s just it didn’t tell you that it was doing interesting things. So people would know what to post on twitter immediately after watching the movie.
TLJ has the appearance of an interesting movie but actually did nothing. RoS tried to appear like a dumb action movie while actually doing interesting things.
And I didn’t even go into the layer about the grieving process, but that’s obvious isn’t it? Movie starts with a guy literally denying death and ends on Chewie inheriting Hans’s medal and Rey burying the lightsabers. The Sequel Trilogy was about death after all, so it’s obvious the last movie had a layer about the grieving process… right? RIGHT?
The look on Oscar Isaac’s face as he delivers that line is something else.
It’s the face of a man who has been back and forth with the scriptwriter and director all day, and is resigned to the fact that this is the best they can come up with.
Even the writers didn’t seem to know. It was like they’d been handed some weird madlibs type shit and had to work Palpatine back in, even though the previous two movies hadn’t alluded to that in the slightest.
Even the groans from the rebels sound like “Jesus, three movies for this shit?”
If you look at Alan Rickman saying “By Grabthar’s Hammer, what a savings” and Oscar saying this, it’s the same pained expression, but only Rickman was acting.
Poe doesn’t know or care why fascism returned, he just knows he’s going to fight against it.
The hot take internet culture rejected the movie simply because people don’t have the capability of understanding the layers and interpreting anything. It’s a shame really it’s the most interesting of all the Star Wars movies (though not the best, the editing was janky as hell). But people are more interested in consuming nitpicky memes about Star Wars than watching an actual Star Wars movie.
But it’s a movie that provided petty nitpicky assholes on the internet many hours of entertainment repeating the same false memes that only indicate that they didn’t actually watch the movie. You got what you wanted, so you should appreciate JJ Abrams for satisfying your cynical and petty nature with all the negative memes you’re still repeating over four years later.
I’ll just be over here enjoying a Star Wars movie that has layers about the relationship between our connection to our ancestors and fascist movements, the grieving process, and still isn’t so overly serious to not have a layer with the Emperor blasting lightning bolts at X-Wings.
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