[Tiste Simeon]

My 5 year old likes the Young Jedi series and he's getting into the idea of Jedi and lightsabers etc.

I'm thinking I'll start him on the Clone Wars TV show soon and maybe move onto the OT not long after that.

I don't want him to get too involved in the violence etc but I'm keen for him to enjoy the Star Wars universe.

[Cause]

Finally watched Andor.

Certainly some of the better StarWars of amongst all the modern takes. However there was one segment of the show that was both amongst its best parts but also left me thinking it was unnecessary and made no sense.

Spoiler

Andor commits one of the greatest crimes against the empire in recent history. He gets arrested for being sweaty on a beach planet. Rather than showing me how oppressive the empire is it just left me feeling it was overblown to the point of being cartoonish. Also despite being arrested and processed no one ever gets passed Andors fake identity? Despite living in hell and not yet having joined the rebellion in full he never once considers bargaining information for his freedom.

The empire wants a massive prison population in part because slaves are cheaper than droids? What? In law this seems to go against what we know about the separatist droid army but also it goes against what we know about robot assembly lines in the real world. There is no way that humans are tightening more bolts than an automated factory. We can employ slave labor as a punishment because it’s horrendous but please don’t argue it’s cheaper or more efficient.

Besides padding the episode count and showing the empire sucks more than we thought what was the point?

[QuickTidal]

Took the kids of Disney week before last, and went to Galaxy's Edge.

I WANT to downplay it as overhyped, and that the money you leave at the altar of Disney capitalism is too much...

But fuck me it was amazing. the Rise of the Resistance ride MAY be the best amusement park ride I've ever been on....you can FEEL the money they spent on it just standing there.

You have not been properly sassed until you've been sassed by a First Order officer and two stormtroopers who scold you for bringing children to such a place as Baatu.

And the Smuggler's Run ride where you pilot the Millennium Falcon? YOU GET TO PULL THE FUCKING LEVER FOR LIGHTSPEED AND I WHOOPED WITH GODDAMN JOY WHEN WE JUMPED.


I am not ashamed. Kid me was in heaven. And my son now has a totally healthy obsession with R2 and BB8.

[QuickTidal]

Thought the first two episodes of SKELETON CREW were wonderful. Very much what Jon Watts was aiming for (Goonies in Star Wars). The kids are well cast and aren't remotely annoying as kids in this sort or venue could be. The writing is top notch. The vibe is as Star Wars-y as you can get. Lots of touchstone nostalgia, but also blazing a clearly new trail.


It's also got very clear Pirates of the Caribbean, Peter Pan, Treasure Island vibes...hell Nick Frost's First Mate droid is SM-33.....Smee....LOL


Law is great, but I expected that.

I'm fascinated by the whole Barrier, hidden planet aspect of At Attin...old Republic credits ect. Something deeply fishy is going on.

And call me crazy, but I'm SUPER glad that Vane (From The Mandalorian) is in this, he is easily the most interesting pirate character introduced in Star Wars since Hondo Onaka.


----------

Sidebar, I know I was not here when it debuted, but THE ACOLYTE was so bad. And that 100% came down to writing and acting for me.


Like Lee Jung-Jae (Master Sol) and Manny Jacinto (Sith Stranger) basically held that show together. Jung-Jae is especially impressive since he learned English like 4 months before they started shooting.

Amandla Stenberg was AWFUL. I don't know what it was but her acting was stilted, her delivery awkward AF. Her playing twins was a mistake as they were both boring and uninteresting for the show to focus on. Every time she was on screen I cringed from her lack of acting talent. It's weird because IIRC she was good in the Hunger Games. I feel bad saying this about a young actress, but there is nothing there.

Everyone else were varying degrees of fine to middling.

Carrie-Anne moss was great (as she usually is) but she's used so inefficiently here, and she's offed too quickly. More about this later.

The worst casting is show runner/writer Leslye Headland casting her wife Rebecca Henderson as the only recognizable High Republic Jedi, Vernestra Rwoh....like I've read almost all the High Republic stuff that features Vernestra as a young Jedi and this person that Henderson plays is not a shadow of that Jedi. But moreover, just like Stenberg, she does across as stilted and dry. I wanted her to be good, as I love her character in the books, but she just wasn't. And there is no universe where Rwoh keeps information from Yoda and the Council. NONE. That simply does not jive with who she was and her lived experience.


Now let's get to the writing.

1. Headland claimed in MULTIPLE interviews that she was aping two things in the show, and one of those was Kurosawa's RASHOMON. A story (if you were not aware) that is about a samurai being murdered in the woods, and the various characters in the "know" telling their VERSIONS of the tale of how it occurred. The point of it is that everyone lies in their version and no one's is the most accurate. It's a study of the self and human nature of survival topping all else. This is a WEIGHTY film to try to ape in a Star Wars TV show, and if you're going to attempt to take a shot at the king (Kurosawa) you best not miss. And she whiffs it. Not only is the concept largely abandoned about 4 eps in, only to attempt to revisit it later...now one is "wrong" or deliberately lying...they are telling their version that they saw, and the pieces are disconnected. Like Osha and Mae see what they want to see and not the context of what happened, even Mae who is the "bad" twin sees the Jedi taking out her "mother" and considers this evil....igoring the context that said "mother" was summoning up dark magic and smoke near that Jedi who then thought the kids were in danger...like NONE of this is RASHOMON at all. It's just a tropey attempt at a narrative TV trick of not showing US what happened in full up front, so that we could be strung along to the end to see the full events which is so narratively bankrupt that it would be ridiculous in a kids movie.

2. One of these things is not like the other. In episode 3 and in episode 7 Headland hired the single-named auteur SK director Kogonada...which fine...the man is good at what he does and his stuff, while weird and juddery works in the single stories he's told in his career (AFTER YANG was solidly good)....what he is not is an ensemble piece director to brig in to helm two episodes in an 8 episode season amongst other workmanlike TV directors. Both those eps are flashback episodes, where Kogonada not only gets poor performances out of Stenberg as the two sisters, but their two youthful actors who play them young. And both those episodes yank the whole 8 episode story to a screeching halt. What's worse is that the best episode of the season and the one that followed it were all present day action packed and full of lore with Manny Jacinto acting his ass off....so to slow the whole shebang to a halt with another flashback episode that pretty much confirms the things you already assumed about the gaps in the story from the past, is asinine. You don't do a second flashback episode one episode from your finale.

3. So we had RASHOMON attempt that fails, the other major thing she claimed to be aping was King Hu's COME DRINK WITH ME (Shaw Bros. 1966) Inn scene. That whole opening with Carrie-Anne Moss and Mae fighting in an old wooden inn is meant to ape COME DRINK WITH ME. Now the whole point of the scene in that film is that Chang Pei-Pei's Golden Swallow character is ambushed in an inn, and while fighting the many men attempting to kill her, is saved by the help of a local drunk who joins her so they can escape. The scene in the ACOLYTE is basically only an homage to CDWM if you note that the inn is a wooden inn reminiscent of an old Hong Kong Shaw Bros. kung fu set, and that Moss is ambushed. She's not saved. She is killed, and none of the rest of the scene rings closely to King Hu's masterpiece...so again Headland is talking directly out of her ass about wanting to homage a famous piece of cinema and having no idea how to do that in reality and there are just visual Easter eggs instead. Nonsense. I also hate that she cast Carrie as a Jedi and then proceeded to kill her off...like I feel like she was attempting to pull a SCREAM and cast Drew Barrymore only to kill her in the prologue...except if you do that you better make sure the rest of your story makes that WORTH it, but that's not the case here...the loss of Moss is keenly felt because no one feels quite like her later in the series.


4. There is also a badly made song, an wildly unexplained Witches Coven who seem to use the dark side, a Parent Trap in space twin swap (and honestly, I truly thought that Sol was seeing through Mae's Osha disguise (which consisted of her triming her long hair with a lightsaber...feck off) and keeping it tom himself...but nope, he really didn't know that this person in the force was not Osha...sigh. Osha going bad because she ALSO misunderstood the context of why Sol attacked her "mother" for suing dark magic is just so narratively bankrupt...like really? Then to have her go with Sith boy AND be romantic towards him...yeah this dude just SHANKED a batch of people you called friends in cold blood....but sure, he seems stable enough for a relationship. Oh and here's his master Darth Plagueis....what a wild mis-swing that moment was too, same with the Yoda reveal at the end....like sorry Vernestra, it's WAY too late to go to the Council with your fuckups.

There was also terrible writing choices that assume you, the viewer, are an idiot or morally complicit. Like In the scene where Jacinto's Sith shanks Dayne Keens' Jecki character, and Sol says "She was just a child" and Jacinto's character replies "You brought her"....the writing wants to absolve the Sith for killing her so coldly by basically laying the blame at the Jedi's feet for bringing a young apprentice to a fight. Like that's not a "Let's show hoe evil this dude is" scene as it SHOULD be read....but instead is one of a myriad of choices that the writers make to try to soften the eventual Osha and Sith relationship by constantly trying to show the Jedi in a poor light. IT's stupid, and only works if you are willing to swill down what they are selling you. This penchant by (I assume) Headland is brought to a clear head when a whole as scene exists to touchstone the fall of the Jedi in the future under Yoda and Windu 120 years hence...like no, Leslye, you are NOT clever, and no, showing us that the Jedi of the High republic (a much more honourable time) are just as bad as the Jedi of Obi-Wan's time is not clever, it's fucking arrogant and petulant and I loathe it.

The show also cost $250million to make and I don't know where ANY of it went. Like most of the show was shot on a damned forest soundstage and some exteriors. The most they "built" for the show were the Inn, and the coven home, the Jedi Temple scenes (there weren't many and they could have easily been done on the Volume), and what, the interior of the Jedi ship? Like were on EARTH did that money go?

It's no surprise that it got cancelled, and I'm baffled anyone feels like it was robbed of a second season...you wanted more of this piss poorly written show? REALLY? Oof. I also lay the blame of the show not getting a second season at Heandlands feet for basically setting up a first season that acts as prologue to something bigger and treating the whole finale episode like a "to be continued". This season should have been contained as a story so that if they didn't get renewed, then everyone would not be annoyed about it's cancellation.

I maintain that they should have set the show from Jancinto's characters' POV. Show him as Rwoh's apprentice (it's clear that's what she was hiding) and the events that lead him to leave the Jedi order, and how he falls in with Plagueis, and how he starts being that Sith warrior, and THEN show him trying to corrupt someone else. Setting it from these force twins perspective was a bad mistake and the most interesting part of that whole season was Jacinto.

EDIT: My bellwether for a show that I'm into the IP of like Star Wars is truly bad, or if I'm projecting my love of the IP onto it, is my wife who is not a Star Wars nerd of any description...and she kept turning to me throughout the season going "This show is bad. Like don't you think this show is bad?" and she made fun of dialogue and acting..if the casual viewer could not get on board, then I'm not sure what they expected.

This post has been edited by QuickTidal: 04 December 2024 - 02:55 PM

[Tiste Simeon]

QT I don't know much about Skeleton Crew but is it a kids show? My son is getting into SW and I'm thrilled but don't want to jump into the movies just yet. He likes Young Jedi and I think he's watched a little bit of the Clone Wars but would Skeleton Crew be a good one to watch with him?

[QuickTidal]

Tiste Simeon, on 04 December 2024 - 03:45 PM, said:

QT I don't know much about Skeleton Crew but is it a kids show? My son is getting into SW and I'm thrilled but don't want to jump into the movies just yet. He likes Young Jedi and I think he's watched a little bit of the Clone Wars but would Skeleton Crew be a good one to watch with him?

Yeah, it's a kids show that has a lot of adults to enjoy as well.

I can't recall how old your little one is, my son who is six is going to watch (note: He's seen ANH, TESB, and half of ROTJ so far and loved them) and I watched the first two eps to be sure he could handle it.


It depends on what you think he can handle. It's definitely aimed at kids though...there are some smaller mildly scary bits (some monster faces of the pirates, the robot first mate is creepy when they first comer across him) and Star Wars-y violence (shooting guns ect.) but nothing too egregious honestly. The leads are all about 13-ish I think?

It's going to come down to what you're comfy with him watching.

Here is the opening scene, which shows you some of the space violence stuff, but the back half trailer bit which shows more of the kids is more of the overall vibe of the show itself, which is definitely Goonies in Space. I'm showing my son since he handled the OT movies well without being too freaked out.

[Slow Ben]

QuickTidal, on 18 November 2024 - 04:20 PM, said:

Took the kids of Disney week before last, and went to Galaxy's Edge.

I WANT to downplay it as overhyped, and that the money you leave at the altar of Disney capitalism is too much...

But fuck me it was amazing. the Rise of the Resistance ride MAY be the best amusement park ride I've ever been on....you can FEEL the money they spent on it just standing there.

You have not been properly sassed until you've been sassed by a First Order officer and two stormtroopers who scold you for bringing children to such a place as Baatu.

And the Smuggler's Run ride where you pilot the Millennium Falcon? YOU GET TO PULL THE FUCKING LEVER FOR LIGHTSPEED AND I WHOOPED WITH GODDAMN JOY WHEN WE JUMPED.


I am not ashamed. Kid me was in heaven. And my son now has a totally healthy obsession with R2 and BB8.

Completely off topic, but we took the kids to Universal over the summer and i felt the same way about Hagrids Motorbike ride. Its phenomenal. And as someone who absofuhreakinglutely hates waiting in lines, a 90 minute wait for that ride is worth it.

[QuickTidal]

Oh and regarding my son watching the OT. Yes, he's seeing the OT first as I feel like the Vader reveal is a better thing to preserve than doing chronological order.

And so we got to that moment in TESB...and he turns to my wife a little confused. She goes: "He's Darth Vaders SON"....and my kid goes "really? Like really really?" and she's like "Yeah" and he's like "whoa"

So not the jaw drop I expected, but his incredulousness at the reveal shows that he didn't suspect that Vader was Lukes father in ANH or up to that point in TESB, so mission accomplished?

Also, I'm really impressed that be's bucked convention and that his fave SW character is R2....like not Luke or anyone you'd expect. R2-D2. At Galaxy's Edge he was really upset that R2 was not wandering around (like Rey, Kylo, Mando, Sabine and everyone else was) and we asked a staffer who said R2 doesn't go around anymore like he used to back in the old pre-Galaxy Edge Star Tours days, and only comes out now for special occasions...which feels like a missed opportunity for Disney, but who knows.

[QuickTidal]

Slow Ben, on 04 December 2024 - 06:37 PM, said:

QuickTidal, on 18 November 2024 - 04:20 PM, said:

Took the kids of Disney week before last, and went to Galaxy's Edge.

I WANT to downplay it as overhyped, and that the money you leave at the altar of Disney capitalism is too much...

But fuck me it was amazing. the Rise of the Resistance ride MAY be the best amusement park ride I've ever been on....you can FEEL the money they spent on it just standing there.

You have not been properly sassed until you've been sassed by a First Order officer and two stormtroopers who scold you for bringing children to such a place as Baatu.

And the Smuggler's Run ride where you pilot the Millennium Falcon? YOU GET TO PULL THE FUCKING LEVER FOR LIGHTSPEED AND I WHOOPED WITH GODDAMN JOY WHEN WE JUMPED.


I am not ashamed. Kid me was in heaven. And my son now has a totally healthy obsession with R2 and BB8.

Completely off topic, but we took the kids to Universal over the summer and i felt the same way about Hagrids Motorbike ride. Its phenomenal. And as someone who absofuhreakinglutely hates waiting in lines, a 90 minute wait for that ride is worth it.

So I rode that before when it was Duelling Dragons (prior to the accidnts that made it close and get renovated into Hagrid's) and it makes me annoyed that I've not visited since it became Hagrids Motorbike ride as it sounds like an absolute stunner of a ride and DD was just a lame rollercoaster at best. Glad you enjoyed it! Hope to ride it one day.

[Tiste Simeon]

Thanks QT I'll check it out with him I think he'll enjoy it!

[QuickTidal]

SKELETON CREW episode 3 was awesome.

Spoiler

A few things.

1. The Treasure Island vibes are ever stronger here, we now know that Law's character Jod Na Nawood is Captain Silvo, also know as Crimson Jack...and that he may not be a Jedi, but definitely has the force. And I assume Silvo is a reference to Long John Silver, just like SM-33 is a reference too Smee.

2. We got a sentient owl alien in a cloak named Kh’ymm, who has this Augra-like observatory...she's cool as shit and I already want her as a plushie.

3. You can hear the score tinkle at Goonies when they exit the ship onto Kh’ymm's moon (https://youtu.be/9HB...bxUJCvwXn&t=271) <----this bit plays almost exactly in Michael Giaccino's score, and I assume that's an intentional homage.

4. At Attin being Treasure Island is already confirmed, but it's noice to now that they missed the War, and don't know Alderaan is gone...so we are talking AT least prequel Era Old Republic.....but now I wonder who is keeping it hidden behind the "barrier". See also that they use the same word for Republic credits (dataries) that Qui Got used with Watto in the prequels as more evidence it's Old Republic.

5. There's a joy in these episodes that doesn't exist in a lot of Star Wars media, and a lot of it feels super fresh.

6. Note the parents on At Attin getting irritated and demanding to see whoever is in charge...methinks their plot line will show us what's happening...but a bunch of administrators and whatnot? I wonder what At Attin's importance was to someone in the Old Republic.

I'm having a blast with this show and I can't wait to see the next episode.

This post has been edited by QuickTidal: 11 December 2024 - 02:05 PM