Drowsy Emperor

Worth one watch if you're in the mood and not the most obsessed fan of SW.

Kylo Ren is the black metal obsessed, long haired dude everyone made fun of in high school.

I wonder why the big bad is so poorly done. How did they come up with the idea of calling the ultimate bad guy Snoke, make him look like Gollum with the oversize hologram and all. I mean you can take your pick of the evil Kotor characters and every single one is more fearsome, including granny Kreia.

Actually yes. Although its bad in a completely different way to the Phantom Menace.

No, it isn't. Yes, the limit is called what the screenwriter needs at any given time.

The problem is that EP IV was not only new, but also better for its time than EP VII is today. As light and archetypal as the characters are - young hero, mentor, rogue, atypical princess, iconic bad guy, robot sidekicks, they all served their purpose very well within the film. EP VII copies the blueprint but not particularly well. The bad guy is more hilarious than anything (I never thought I'd find someone more amusingly bad than Christensen), the hero's path to improvement is completely skewered, most characters are pretty undefined - the script is not as tight etc. etc. If they're going to remake something at least do it well. And, well, don't call it a sequel.

Well that would explain how she was able to beat Ren so easily (another nonsensical moment in the film).

^and I cried in the cinema like a little bitch Live and learn :D

Of course both are silly. It is, however, possible to earn a living by being the snobbish variant. We call those people art critics. Calling Michael Bay movies **** doesn't automatically mean that everyone who enjoys them is a pleb. Those are two entirely different things. It also doesn't mean that its just "a matter of taste". Eisenstein is an obligatory feature of film studies and an important innovator in the medium, and Michal Bay is a director of melodramatic blockbusters known more for making money than contributing anything of value to the medium. *shrug* Personally, I had fun watching Armageddon... when I was teenager. Eisenstein is a bit too dated for me to enjoy, like most "innovators", what was once new, after many repetitions leads to the viewer having a hard time seeing "what the fuss is all bout". So while I like neither of them today, its would be a gross error to equate things that simply aren't equal. The point is that people shouldn't consider it a personal affront when someone is criticizing something they enjoy. They're making a judgment of the thing, not the person. There is no reason to invest one's ego in, what is after all, someone else's work.

Perhaps for sci-fi franchises, but not for sci-fi movies in general. There was only one notable film that wasn't part of a franchise, Martian, and it was thoroughly average (or poor, considering who was making it). Remakes of decades old films and superhero drivel is what sci-fi has been reduced to in the last, how many (?) years. Even more disturbing than that, the other highly regarded sci-fi film of 2015 is "Ex Machina" (7.7 IMDB rating??!) , a film that would have been considered passe twenty years ago. I say its more disturbing because you can expect a franchise film to get a high rating even when its mediocre because of all the fans, but a no-name effort getting so high up tells me that either the audience has lost its compass as to what makes a good sci fi film, or they artificially inflated the rating. I have yet to watch The Lobster, its supposedly good. FYI, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 also has sci-fi elements. A lot of sci-fi elements. Particularly this last one is way more sci-fi than the last one because it involves futuristic battle scenes. Ant-man also has heavy sci-fi elements even though it was based on a superhero comic books. Jurassic World is also sci-fi. The whole "recreate and splice dinosaurs with DNA" is very sci-fi. While all three are indisputably sci-fi, are we seriously considering the hunger games, ant-man and jurassic world in a best of anything discussion? The original discussion was "It's been a good year for sci-fi franchises," not if The Hunger games, Ant-man or Jurassic World is the best of anything. FYI, based on the aggregate review scores on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB and the consensus of YouTube reviewers, all three were good movies. So, given that this year we have a large number of good sci-fi movies that are based on franchises, Leferd was correct in his original assertion, (i.e., that it has been a good year for sci-fi franchises.) I would say it is a good year for sci-fi movies in general. BTW, actually this year has had a lot of sci-fi movies, franchises or not. It is just that the franchise ones are just much better than the ones that were not based on a franchise. Like it or not, the quality of big-budget studio franchise movies have improved greatly during the past decade - and have not surpassed independent film-making whose quality has stagnant for the past decade or so. I know you want to be one of the "cool kids" who whine about "oh, studio movies suck and indie flicks are the best," but in actuality that is rarely the case any more. The quality of indie films has stagnant and even declined for the past decade, while big studios like Marvel have perfected the formulas for making franchise movies over the years. That the quality of big franchise movies have become fairly consistent and, good. They may not be always "creative" but they are almost always entertaining, enjoyable and fun. And, frankly, when pay $16 to $25 to see a movie, that is what we want: we want to be entertained and have fun. I am honestly not interesting in paying some $20 and spending three hours to see some self-absorbed artist whine about his pathetic life in his pathetic "art". If I wanted to see art, I would go to a f-cking art gallery. When I spend the $20 and three hours, I want to enjoy some good time. I want to have fun. I want to be entertained. The special effects capabilities of big budget franchise movies has improved to no end. So have their marketing departments. The actual movies are still ass. Often its because the source material itself is ass. Ant man indeed. Once upon a time the likes of Stanley Kubrick, Andrey Tarkovsky, the old Ridley Scott, Gilliam, Oshii, Lucas, Cameron etc. made films varying from high art to great entertainment in the genre. Nothing Marvel and the like has ever made, or will make, will rival even the poorer efforts from the era when the best of these film directors had more or less free reign to do what they liked. This is because all these films are just a product made by accountants, rehashes of old ideas or licenses, crafted to appeal to everyone on a superficial level from Washington to Bangalore. They can't be great films because originality is equated with risk and risk is a no-no in a 200 million dollar project. They can't even fulfill the basic demands of quality scripts and decent characters because the scripts are usually written by ten people, half of which serve only to make lines, characters and scenes desirable to a market segment to satisfy the accounting department. Frankly, I don't actually care about who makes the films. Big studios or indie productions is irrelevant - I only care about the final product. More or less all of the best sci-fi films were made under big studios anyway. I'm only pointing this out to show why films are generally so bad now. I also don't care what you want when you go to the cinema, since I'm also paying for my film experience...mmkay?. I'm not an ADHD hamster that has to be entertained - some of the best films I've watched were, by conventional standards, very boring.* What I want is the a new Solaris, a new 2001: A Space Odyssey and failing that, even if the product is purely entertainment, a new Alien, Terminator etc. equivalent. Not the seventeenth embarrassing iteration with grandpa Ford, Schwarzenegger or Hamil - but something as original and well made as these were at the time. *When Soviet critics asked Tarkovsky why the film Stalker was so slow he replied: “The film [stalker] needs to be slower and duller at the start so that the viewers who walked into the wrong theater have time to leave before the main action starts.”

Actually I have an IMDB rating list with about 1500 titles and there's the top 5% of it that I love, the next 5%-10% that are also good and then there's the rest. As you can imagine, its not hard to be in the rest.

Are those even arguments? Best micro movie award. Best money making machine award. I'd like to thank the academy...

Perhaps for sci-fi franchises, but not for sci-fi movies in general. There was only one notable film that wasn't part of a franchise, Martian, and it was thoroughly average (or poor, considering who was making it). Remakes of decades old films and superhero drivel is what sci-fi has been reduced to in the last, how many (?) years. Even more disturbing than that, the other highly regarded sci-fi film of 2015 is "Ex Machina" (7.7 IMDB rating??!) , a film that would have been considered passe twenty years ago. I say its more disturbing because you can expect a franchise film to get a high rating even when its mediocre because of all the fans, but a no-name effort getting so high up tells me that either the audience has lost its compass as to what makes a good sci fi film, or they artificially inflated the rating. I have yet to watch The Lobster, its supposedly good. FYI, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 also has sci-fi elements. A lot of sci-fi elements. Particularly this last one is way more sci-fi than the last one because it involves futuristic battle scenes. Ant-man also has heavy sci-fi elements even though it was based on a superhero comic books. Jurassic World is also sci-fi. The whole "recreate and splice dinosaurs with DNA" is very sci-fi. While all three are indisputably sci-fi, are we seriously considering the hunger games, ant-man and jurassic world in a best of anything discussion?

Perhaps for sci-fi franchises, but not for sci-fi movies in general. There was only one notable film that wasn't part of a franchise, Martian, and it was thoroughly average (or poor, considering who was making it). Remakes of decades old films and superhero drivel is what sci-fi has been reduced to in the last, how many (?) years. Even more disturbing than that, the other highly regarded sci-fi film of 2015 is "Ex Machina" (7.7 IMDB rating??!) , a film that would have been considered passe twenty years ago. I say its more disturbing because you can expect a franchise film to get a high rating even when its mediocre because of all the fans, but a no-name effort getting so high up tells me that either the audience has lost its compass as to what makes a good sci fi film, or they artificially inflated the rating. I have yet to watch The Lobster, its supposedly good.

Don't you think that when something costs 200 million $ the end result should probably be better than "serviceable remake"?

What character development. Fin goes from a green stormtrooper to resistance fighter in about ten seconds (curious for someone so obviously unenthusiastic about combat and killing). No real motivation other than "its the right thing to do". All in all, its exactly what I expected of Abrams. Easy to watch, decently edited albeit utterly unoriginal.Those are the limits of his directorial skills. Although considering how similar this is to the original film, Disney probably held tight reins on it too. The amusing thing is that because the film is so palatable everyone is going to consider it vastly superior to the prequels, whereas if you look at it objectively - the prequels were the better, or at least more sincere, effort.

Its a fanfiction rerun of Ep4, updated for 2015. audience. Luke character is now a chick, black guy for giggles - everything else remains the same - desert planet, death star with weak spot (could they change their contractor for these things?), vader, yadayadayada. Characters impossibly shallow considering the 2 hour running time. What is the best pilot in the galaxy character for, the other bad guy, the female stormtrooper? They all have 0 character development. Amusingly enough, the prequels, while being dull - at least told a different Star Wars story. Spoiler If the new death star planet is sucking out the sun, what are they going to do once it sucks up the one in their system. From what I gather its no longer a ship, so they'll basically all die of intense cold the day they use the thing.

I'll be seeing it tomorrow.

The man was also, by most accounts, a sociopath. In the typical business world - egocentric, bleed your employees dry style. A corporate shark. It says a lot about the age we live in that the man is considered "great" by any measure of the word. His greatest contribution is selling the same thing everyone else is selling at twice the price. While an admirable trait for a salesman, I can't help but ask the question - so what? How is that relevant for anyone other than him? #ThingsDrowsydoesn'tunderstand

If I was american I'd vote for Trump. He's a piece of **** like the rest of them but he doesn't hide it. Compared to Hilary Clinton he's even charming, in the "I'm a rich bastard and enjoy it" kind of way.

William Yates's "Sailing to Byzantium" as is obvious from my sig and avatar & nickname

I do not think any of those is an inherent property of secular capitalist democracies. No, but they bring it to an extreme.

Yep. "We love America, except the millions of Americans composed of [whites/blacks/the poor/the rich/latte liberals/Republicans/Trump supporters/rapists/racists/etc/etc] that are not really American" is the basic move we see all over the world. We love us and we hate the other, except we make sure that everybody we hate can be moved to 'other' whenever we need to. Which is why we need to be careful about pretending that it's some kind of eternal classification that cannot be disobeyed. No one ever said the issue is actually logical. If you want to live in a more unified society (and one not necessarily enforced through terror or fear) you have to support that sort of social order. In secular capitalist democracies, where money can buy influence to say and do practically anything, where you're encouraged to say practically anything in the public sphere to get "one up" over your opponents and where there's no overarching moral system (not "in god we trust" written on money, lol) to guide society public discourse will always be a cesspool.

In a debate you can equate the two, but in practice that's how it works. Its a basic human concept. There's "us" and there is the "other" and the other as close to you as you define it yourself. Obviously when claiming participation to a group you're not self identifying with its pathological members, rather with the average or the best of such a group and that is a perfectly legitimate thing to do.

Yet that is a very broad argument where everyone can draw their own line at will. Its nice to think of "us" in terms of "the whole of humanity", but that is at best a theoretical concept. Frankly "us" is how its defined day to day, epoch to epoch basis and even that is filled with injustice sometimes even in close family relations (aka some are more "us" than others), to speak nothing of the workplace, neighborhood, the tribe/religion/nation etc. In other words, its a flimsy social/psychological construct.