Haven't seen it. Probably will see it this week but don't really care. So spill. Chewie dies, eh?
Didn't Yoda die after telling Luke about his attempted incest.
They all die except Horatio. And Fortinbras, I guess.
Yoda and Obi Wan are both fine with using cloned soldier-slaves, but only the latter was willing to see if twincest would happen.
at the end, it turns out that Han Solo is a sled. and that he's been dead the whole time. the aristocrats.
Ultimate team player: Chewbacca. That's why I put him on my fantasy space fantasy team. Draft Kings!
No reinvest but some first cousin sexual tension.
Huh, autocorrect doesn't recognize twincest.
Rey uses the spice to locate the Infinity Gauntlet.
14: I want to find if phone voice recognition knows it (it got "Hell You Talmbout" this morning first try) but I'm in public.
I need closed captions, I could get anyone's names during the movie and had to look them up. Wren? I thought they called him Kyle a second ago. Poe I got, did the old dude have a name that I missed? And who knows what Yoda prime's name was.
My wife tried to set a Siri voice reminder "remind me to call the soccer guy" and it went on the calendar as "remember to cocksucker".
It got "twincest" on the second try.
I was actually relieved when Han bought it, because I was thinking up to that point he was getting too much screen time if they wanted to pass the torch at some point.
Spoiler alert:
Soylent Green is people!!
20.2: So Harrison Ford finally got his wish after all these years?
17: Kylo Ren was the bad guy. Poe Dameron was the ace pilot. No idea about the old dude in the opening scene or the yellow Yoda with glasses.
I enjoyed it, but I stand by my prediction that once the sugar high wears off, the reputation of this film will decline sharply. If the next two aren't better and less derivative, the trilogy ends up in the crapper with the prequels; if they are, this will be remembered as the least of the new series, a perhaps-necessary bit of table setting.
The callbacks and remixed elements didn't really bother me up till Starkiller base. That was just such an unnecessarily literal reworking of an already-recycled plot device. (And their attempt to lampshade it was amusing but insufficient.)
You don't need to know Max van Sydow's name, since he died five minutes in. If in a future installment they mention so-and-so who was sent to Jakku to keep an eye on Rey, that's him.
I liked it but I hate that it basically felt like a giant setup for a sequel.
20.2: You might be interested in Tony Zhou's take.
27: This. All of the previous films, except maybe Empire, have been far more self-contained. Ending the movie mid-scene was wildly off-brand.
22: And for only 35 million plus 0.5%
30: 0.5% of gross? That's likely to be a big number...
So who's thinks Rey's dad is Luke and who thinks Han? I was pretty firmly on team Han until I read that Vox article about British accents in the Star Wars universe. Now I'm a little less sure.
32: The writings of Yglesias are non-canon. The Han theory makes no sense and would require some crazy plot contrivances. I think it would be more interesting if she were Obi-Wan or Palpatine's bastard granddaughter.
Before the film, I went to the bathroom and overheard a little kid saying to his father "why did he stab his dad?" So close.
The internet is very thirsty for Finn/Poe romance--impressive since it seems pretty obvious that Poe was meant to die in the crash, and presumably they kept him around for the chemistry. If they would've kept him dead, that would've been good, too--you thought it was about a white dude with the right stuff, but actually...
32: I mean, it's one or the other, presumably, but does it really matter? I guess I'm mildly on team Han but don't care much. Blah blah blah genetic aristocracy blah blah blah. The galaxy would be better without the Skywalkers.
The problem with the saisegly is that a British (/Coruscanti) accent points neither away from Leia/Han nor to any other characters in particular. If she's Leia and Han's lost child, she obviously didn't grow up with either of them, so there's no reason she should share their accent. And the only reason it might have pointed toward Luke was by pointing away from Leia/Han, which it doesn't.
I do think her accent is going to turn out to mean something in the end, though, since both the leads are British and only one put on an American accent.
It would be better if her parents were completely different. Let's get away from all the pedigree shit.
If the accent thing is canon, why does the First Order raise their stormtrooper kids with a hick accent that none of them speak?
I loved how they got the actor that played Voldemort to be the big bad guy
I don't understand the argument for Han at all. If it was Han, maybe he would have mentioned something?
If the next two aren't better and less derivative, the trilogy ends up in the crapper with the prequels
The prequels failed because they were built around awful characters (Aniken the annoying brat/teenager, Jar Jar as Jar Jar, Obi-Wan being dull, Amidala was interesting, but basically a prop by the last movie). This movie didn't have that problem. I actually liked the new characters.
Midichlorians live in your tongue so your accent correlates with your force ability. And when you make out with your force sister crazy things happen.
I liked the idea of Finn and I enjoyed Rey kicking-ass-and-taking-names, but they were a bit sketchy and underdeveloped as characters (probably because they lost a big chunk of screen time to Han Solo). Poe was a lot of fun but clearly a secondary character.
I liked the characters. It's an origin story, right? It feels just like 4.
43: I've heard a lot of nerd complaints about that, but screw 'em. It had great characters and was a lot of fun, and that's all you can really hope for from a Star Wars film. Glad I had a few drinks beforehand.
It also had the money shot with the Millennium Falcon flying out of the explosion from a fucking Death Star. That's your Star Wars, right there.
The best part of the movie for me was the re-emphasis on dramatizing force sensitivity as a way to intuit people's unacknowledged fears and other psychological motivators (rather than a way for, say, Yoda to do hundreds of backflips in combat). My favorite scene was when Rey flips the mind-reading on Kylo Ren.
46: So on Kylo Ren vs. Rey force battles, we have the scene where Rey's/Luke's/Anakin's lightsaber is in the snow, and Kylo Ren is trying to pull it out but has trouble--perhaps because some other Force user is fighting him for it? Eventually it looks like it's going towards him but it zooms past him into Rey's hands. This implies that the lightsaber, Kylo, and Rey are almost collinear. Shouldn't she have made it easier for him to pull it out? Or is The Force, unlike force, not a vector? (I mean, sure, shoot whatever's the most dramatic, but I was genuinely confused when Rey got it.)
She did make it easier for him to pull it, but by the time it got to him, it had enough momentum that it was moving too fast and it went to her.
Hrm...okay...but why was it even hard? I mean, it's just a few inches in some snow. Doesn't he do a few force pushes that move people around? And stop light? It almost makes me think that the Force is a vector but only in some control-by-individual-users space. They both wanted it to go the same direction, but were cancelling each other out by being different users. Or something. Whatever, I shouldn't expect consistency from either Star Wars or J.J.
No reinvest but some first cousin sexual tension.
The Missus had to leave the theater before the end, and when I described the last few minutes, I mentioned the cousin relationship (although I referred to it differently, of course). She asked me how they revealed that, and I said they made it clear long before she left. But now I see that this isn't considered necessarily correct (as 32 et al note).
I enjoyed it, but I stand by my prediction that once the sugar high wears off, the reputation of this film will decline sharply.
Yeah, I liked it a lot better walking out of the theater than I do now. (Much like Abrams' most recent Star Trek effort, and each of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.)
If the next two aren't better and less derivative, the trilogy ends up in the crapper with the prequels
Nah. This one is clearly the third best in the series. And a Star Wars that isn't derivative isn't Star Wars. I had a friend say that it didn't look like they were going to do anything new in the new movie, and my response was: Let's hope not. They didn't do anything new in the 1977 original, either. That's what made it great.
My guess was that Rey was Han & Leia's daughter. They send her as an infant to Luke's academy. She survives Ren's slaughter, but Luke makes everyone think she's dead in order to protect her.
This gets you:
1) Built-in psychodrama to the Kylo / Rey antagonism that's likely to define the trilogy
2) Luke pulling the Obi Wan noble lie move that he himself hated
Its possible that Kylo Ren's force ability is actually pretty shitty. I mean, sure, he can do some mind scanning tricks, but he's no Vader. Even his light saber has training wheels.
53: I liked the hypothesis that even in-universe the crossguards are seen as over-the-top and silly. See also Emo Kylo Ren, which is absolutely perfect.
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I'm not reading this thread, because I'm trying to avoid spoilers for now, but I wanted to drop in for a moment.
I just finished watching Born to Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity and I think it's an extremely good documentary and wanted to recommend it to everyone.
What can I say about it: I ended up watching is over three nights -- about 25 minutes each -- just due to time constraints, but I think that may have been the best way to watch. At the end of each 25 minutes, I felt almost overloaded trying to emotionally process the material. It's intense, but not draining or difficult.
I don't want to try to analyze it too much, because one of the strengths of the documentary is that it doesn't off any analysis, it just introduces you to Elizabeth Streb and shows you some of her work, but I think the filmmaker has done a remarkable job of shaping the work to raise (but not answer) certain questions and to provide a climax which feels very satisfying and pays off in that it is completely convincing that the questions that the film raises are worth thinking about.
I hadn't heard of Elizabeth Streb before watching the movie, but she's a dancer, choreographer and leader of a troupe who, apparently, for 30 years has been working somewhere in the intersection between dance, gymnastics, athletics, and stunt work (for lack of a better term). She describes her work as both "pop action" and "extreme action" but doesn't provide a definition for either (and it would seem superfluous).
The questions that it raises are: what can one learn or take away from watching action done as art and is it worth asking people to take meaningful physical risks for the sake of art and, perhaps, in that particular niche, how is the work affected by scale -- it shows some both very small scale pieces and others that are much larger and more dramatic.
Here is a youtube video which shows some of what she does without, I think, presenting it in a way which might prejudice you towards you would think about those questions (which, disappointing, I think the film trailer does).
I am tempted to buy a copy and start loaning it out to people, but hopefully this comment tempts somebody else to watch it, because it's really good.
And, I realize, this is the most Bob McManus-esque comment I have written on the site. . .
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47: perhaps Rey is holding it in place for a while, then yanks on it so it overshoots him? (I haven't seen the movie, but that's a good old humor chestnut.)
52: See I thought it wasn't Luke who saved her, but Kylo Ren himself (he couldn't kill his little sister), as shown in the flashback scene. This is also why he thinks he's not strong enough to kill Han, because he already failed to kill Rey once. I'm totally onboard with your reason one though. I mean Kylo Ren has to be redeemed a la Darth Vader in VI, and "cousins" just doesn't have nearly the pyschological power to match up with father/son. They have to be siblings.
I thought it was really interesting that they shot the light-saber battles as though the last 40 years of fight choreography never happened. It's interesting because the better light saber battles was one of the few things from the prequels that people actually preferred over the originals. But it shows a real dedication to being as much like the originals as possible.
I'd kinda like to see Kylo Ren not be redeemed. That arc's been done.
But if he has to be, Leia can do it. Rey's future lies on a different path.
58: That's interesting, since I thought the big lightsaber battle in the snowy forest was a ripoff of old samurai movies, in grand Star Wars fashion. Which I guess is consistent with what you said. (admittedly, I don't know samurai movies, only anime that apes them. I'm sure bob could fill me in.)
Incidentally, I think Patton Oswalt has the single best line about The Force Awakens:
There's no way Kylo Ren didn't 'force choke' himself while masturbating as a Sith teen.
The idea occurred to me that Rey was another of Luke's students, but Kylo doesn't recognize her. And says she's untrained. And she never mentions it despite many times it would be a propos. He could be wrong and she could like keeping secrets, of course, but still, weird. And besides all that, she seems to be feeling her way through using Force abilities, like she's surprised they work.
On another note, I doubt Kylo gets redeemed. Or if he does it'll be even harder for him than it was for Vader. He hasn't done as much evil as Vader in an absolute sense, but he's killed more fan-favorite characters than Vader did.
30/31: I'm reading that none of the actors get points until the gross hits a billion. Hamill and Fisher both made low seven figures, impressive for Hamill given he had pretty much no lines, but I imagine it's tied to being in the next movies too.
Has the plot of the next movies already been determined by whoever determines it?
I'm sure bob could fill me in
I don't watch that many samurai movies, "chambara," mostly the classic arty ones like Kurosawa and Kobayashi. I do watch some, enough to say a lot, but they pumped out hundreds in the 50s. Am currently watching a maximal grimdark anime about a 1625 dojo, Shigurui Arty and nihilistic as all fuck.
Samurai don't "fence." Sword meeting sword or armor ruins sword...you die. More often a quick draw art, like two gunslingers facing off on a street. Good examples are at the end of Kurosawa's Sanjuro and near the end of Kitano's Zatoichi both of which may be on youtube
Jidai-geki, historical narratives, usually of Meiji but often Edo, are very much like Westerns, except the Shogunate setting is very different, so they work off the themes of repressive constraint rather than lawless chaos. Still, the variety of stories range in tone from Little House on the Prairie to Shane to Hateful Eight. Anything really.
The next movie is already in production (it comes out in ~18 months). One assumes they have a script.
Mifune vs Nakadai in Sanjuro. Very famous for the ridiculous blood spurt.
Can't seem to link the actual scene, try the one 1:50 in length.
One of the very very rare times they got Nakadai to wear the bald piece.
Kitano vs Tadanobu Asano in Zatoichi
Just finished the Rurouni Kenshin OVA's (highly recommended) and a movie called Gojoe by Sogo Ishii, which is about Benkei meeting Yoshitsune in Heike wars. Weak
Guess I have seen some swording. Don't remember a duel in a forest
I feel like they did a fantastic job of continuing the dusty, rattan furniture and khaki clothes, jalopy rust 70s aesthetic of the first set, actually. That was probably my favorite part.
Merry Christmas, Unfogged.
They didn't do anything new in the 1977 original, either. That's what made it great.
The nature and scale of the borrowing don't really feel comparable.
1977 mashed up a series of traceable influences: Joseph Campbell, Hidden Fortress, Buck Rodgers, some rando's theory of life and the universe that was a voice over to a non-narrative collage film Lucas had seen in film school, etc. Out of that, Lucas built a meticulously imagined visual world and a new kind of commercial action-adventure quest cinema that Spielberg would turn into the default blockbuster template.
The new movie, on the other hand, borrows characters, character arcs, and plots arcs from an earlier film in the same world.* It feels much more like a reboot than a sequel.
*So much of the impact of the original trilogy was in being presented with that world for the first time. That's why the act of comparing individual movies in the series always feels a bit misplaced to me. Once you are re-watching the earlier films or watching the later films in order to compare them, you're taking the world-building for granted and just comparing scenes, characters, acting, etc.
A bigger, badder Death Star was already tired in Ep 6.
Yeah, but this Death Star was WAY bigger.
24: I bet that the sugar high will wear off, and it won't seem as great, but there's no way that this movie will ever be as badly regarded as the prequels. The prequels are some of the most poorly executed movies ever made. The only reason they aren't total disasters is the sheer acting and special effect talent brought to bear.
And besides all that, she seems to be feeling her way through using Force abilities, like she's surprised they work.
Maybe I'm forgetting a scene, but prior to when she mind tricks the guard into releasing her, has she ever seen that mechanic before? If not is it really a detail she could be expected to know from vague Jedi mythology? Or is it possible it's something she's aware of from some sort of training?
I think it's something that could bleed into mythology, sure. Perhaps the stormtrooper is even ironically playing that up by pausing so long on the first try.
As to why major events that happened a mere 30-40 years ago to major public figures have to be lost in the mists, the theory that most people in the Star Wars universe are illiterate seems to be just as sound as it was before.
That they are just dumb as bricks would explain that and how Jar Jar was a senator.
And the "compact the garbage so we don't fill up space."
Space junk is really dangerous. Making it more compact reduces the chance it'll take out a lightly-shielded TIE Fighter. This is standard Imperial Best Practices.
The force can exert a powerful force on the weak minded. The Jedi had hundreds of generations of rule to try to maximize the number of people they could control.
In that sense, the Sith are saving humanity from complete Jedi control by being unpredictable agents of chaos. Tree of liberty, blood of patriots, hot take, etc.
65: fencing just means swordfighting so of course samurai fenced, and of course they used their swords to parry. there are Hokusai prints of them doing so. Sword meeting sword doesn't always ruin it because you don't grind cutting edges together. even if it does, better than dying. Samurai movies may not be accurate historical records!
Forgot to respond to bob: thanks for the knowledge. I was thinking of the exploitative 90s anime "Ninja Scroll," which I recall having similar scenes.
For your time wasting pleasure, screenwriter Todd Alcott has a characteristically thoughtful analysis of the new Star Wars movie here: http://www.toddalcott.com/.
Sun rose in east this morning. It's Friday. Sky is blue and it's warm outside. Happy holidays, ajay.
If you watch in the clips above, the samurai are going for slashes across the torso or belly. Bone is not good for swords.
These is a terrific/horrific scene in the Greatest Movie of the 20th Century, Kobayashi's The Human Condition where an intelligence officer is calmly and cheerfully instructing Nakadai on craft, and the wear and care of blades...in the moments between a series of beheadings.
I stand by my fairly unpopular opinion that that best movie in the entire series is episode 1: the phantom menace. I honestly don't understand why people don't like it. Is it really just jar jar?
84: Why is it your favorite? Have you seen others?
What makes Human Condition the GOAT is not just the brilliance with which fascism = bureaucracy + Tech + barbarism is explored, but the addition of Nakadai, the moral social democrat to every scene. He has some power and agency, and his character makes us confront questions of what is could or should be done. In that scene above, he does manage to save two lives, but at the cost of being tortured and sent to the front. Thus we move into Part Two, and the self-sacrificial mode of engagement.
There are women in THC, and their issues are addressed, but it certainly fails the Bechdel Text.
What passes Bechdel is a currently-watched anime, Shirobako about five young women starting in the anime industry. All about work here, and ambition, and office politics, and food.
Interesting scene last night as the voice actress was practicing her lines in her tiny apartment there appeared to be a scruffy-handsome young man in the background lying on her bed watching her. That's it, no closeup, no name, no details. Don't know that I have seen that before.
85- Interesting theory except for the penis problem.
I was about to say the same thing.
Also the lyrics "My, my this here Anakin guy. May be Vader some day later, now he's just a small fry" are stuck in my head.
83: Japanese battlefields are full of skeletons with skull injuries from swords, bob. Guess all those samurai were just DOIN IT RONG.
85: maybe a deep frozen daughter of Vader? Which would make sense as an enemy for Kylo, of course, because Lucas would be well aware of the mythopoeic power of the Eternal Aunt.
In case it isn't gotten, the guy is there to just add a little detail about her, but whatever is going on, the point is purposely made that if there is romance it isn't part of the story. Story is about work.
86: I've seen all of them more times than I can count. I don't think any of them stand up to scrutiny as high art; they are mindless eye candy entertainment. (I say that as someone who actually likes all of them.) As mindless eye candy entertainment, episode 1 delivers the most.
If Tom Cruise has taught us anything, it's that white Americans are better at being Japanese swordsmen than the actual Japanese.
82 I thought that was pretty interesting.
I hate, hate, hated the original Star Wars movie, and all the other cinematic victory-in-Vietnam fantasies. Not for the move itself, I guess -- although I really was not impressed -- but for what its unexpected success revealed about us.
There doesn't seem to be any interest in the household in seeing this one.
88/89: Not a problem for that theory. Even ignoring the possibility that Rey is trans (I mean spaaaaacetrans), the Y chromosome is just unnecessary; copy the X chromosome so that she'll have two per cell and out comes a phenotypically female person, assuming that having the X chromosomes be perfectly identical doesn't produce any abnormalities.
She won't be able to tell good from evil because there's an increased chance of colorblindness so she won't see the different blaster shot and light saber colors.
96: How are the Star Wars movies "victory-in-Vietnam fantasies"? Just that Americans wanted a military victory where the unquestionably good white protagonists win? The movies aren't just that, though: the little guys win. Particularly so in Return of the Jedi, where the Ewoks use low technology traps in their forest home to defeat and demoralize the foreign high tech invaders. It's been explicitly acknowledged that in that sense they're modeled after the Viet Cong. (Probably not in the being-cuddly-teddy-bears sense.)
99 That's not the original movie. The first move is an explicit return to childhood fantasy. Without nuance, or what in mid-70s cinema amounted to art.
It was a huge success. So, up to now, is Donald Trump's presidential campaign.
Return to childhood, sure. I don't see the Vietnam thing in the first one either.
Jaws was the real victory-in-Vietnam fantasy. If only the Pentagon had given the soldiers their bigger boat.
Return to childhood, sure. I don't see the Vietnam thing in the first one either.
According to Freud, all children pass through a "We would have won in Vietnam if it hadn't been for the damn hippies" stage sometime around age 3.
Or maybe that was Lacan.
Lacan was the guy who tried to arrest Stallone in "First Blood"?
A B Movie in exactly the Gil Scott-Heron sense.
It's the posited answer to the question whether we wanted to be Matt Dillon or Bob Dylan that bugged me about Star Wars: being Matt Dillon was so obviously the wrong answer.
Wasn't every war movie in the 70s about Vietnam? Maybe the 80s too?
As to world building, I suppose there are world-builders who are not trying to say something about their present. Maybe one of the literature mavens can correct me on this, but it strikes me that such would be the exception rather than the rule.
As mindless eye candy entertainment, episode 1 delivers the most.
I wonder how people rank if they were 8-11 when Episode 1 came out, and saw them all at the same golden age.
Do we have any 25 year old commenters?
Holy shit, I think I was 25 when I first commented here, and I was squarely middle-of-the-pack, age-wise.
That can't be right. Nevermind. I was 27 or 28.
You still had no kids when I came.
I started front page posting when I was 30.
I didn't realize you FPP'ed so shortly before I started commenting here. Did you jump in when ogged went to go live on a farm?
Yep, that was the same summer. I didn't overlap with Ogged until he came back.
Besides a few bits here and there, I first saw Star Wars with the remakes, and I think Phantom Menace is meh at best. And I also started commenting here around 27 or 28 and I'm clearly in the first quartile of age.
What I remember as most egregious was a little kid shouting "woahhhhhhh" a lot in a clearly computer-graphics spaceship, and an interminable chase sequence in the middle that felt video gamey but in an inauthentic way. (The second movie had a lot of that, too.) But I'm also viewing it with the shit-colored glasses of fandom's hate so I can't really say I even have an authentic opinion anymore.
I think Episode 1 is a little underrated. I mean, it's not good, but Episode 2 and the first part of 3 are even worse.
Episode 2 sucked so bad I've never seen three.
The pod racing sequence in TPM always struck me as entirely unnecessary. It was there because Lucas thought it was neat and because it could sell toys. There's a similarly unnecessary action sequence in the second act of TFA (on Han Solo's freighter) but it's much more smoothly integrated into the plot.
I thought the point of that action sequence was to tell us that Space Scots exist.
I know science fiction types love their acronyms, but "TFA" already has a meaning.
Isn't the big problem with the second batch of Star Wars movies (besides the horrendous dialog and wooden acting) the CGI? I don't remember which one I saw, but it was like watching a video game, not a movie.
You say "the big problem" as if there's exactly one.
Yes. The pod race as a video game was pretty fun. I should see if Dave and Busters still have it.
neb, I think your 126 recapitulates the subtext of my parenthetical in 125. I'm not saying you didn't add value, I'm just saying I don't see that you did.
127: I've heard a lot of good about it; Star Wars games can be hit or miss, but people seem to like that one. I didn't remember it was also an arcade game--I hope it has one of those ridiculous lean-into-it mechanics.
BTW, if you're in a good mood and are enjoying the holiday spirit, don't go looking up what Jake Lloyd has been up to since The Phantom Menace.
And I should note that I quite liked the second one (maybe even better on a second viewing). I don't think that it will go down in cinematic history, but a capable, workmanlike extension of the original trilogy.
92: Yes! We need Bertie Wooster's report of his holiday on Tattooine
124: Star Wars: Teach for America
Having Adam Driver in it made the mind-rape scene extra rapey.
I hate, hate, hated the original Star Wars movie, and all the other cinematic victory-in-Vietnam fantasies.
Star Wars is not a victory-in-Vietnam fantasy. Gremlins, on the other hand, definitely is. The final sequence alone proves this. With the choice of an entire town in which to set the confrontation between the kid and the final gremlin, where does Joe Dante pick? The garden centre. A dark, dripping environment full of tropical plants. The only place in a typical Midwest town in winter that even remotely resembles triple-canopy jungle.
We need Bertie Wooster's report of his holiday on Tattooine
I aimed a sceptical glance at the object in question. "What is it?"
The old chap looked at me with an expression that I can only describe as rummy. "Your uncle's cow creamer. Not as clumsy or random as a blaster. An elegant object from a more civilised age. Eighteenth-century English."
I curled the Wooster lip. "Pah! Modern Dutch."
"Sir Watkyn never told you what happened to your Aunt Dahlia, did he?"
"Well, I mean to say, not in so many words, but he said enough to give a chap the general gist or essence of it. He rather seemed to think that you'd given her the push."
"Of course not. I am your aunt."
"Oh, I say!"
"Search your feelings, Bertie, you imbecile. You know it to be true."
"Well, dash it all, really!"
Strong language, I admit, but I was much moved.
141: yes. Thanks!
Oh, and: more Nixon at nixoniad.blogspot.com. I know I said I'd have it finished by Christmas. I didn't. But probably by Hogmanay? I haven't got much more to do, and the weather here is shocking enough that I'll have plenty of time to write.
Isn't the big problem with the second batch of Star Wars movies (besides the horrendous dialog and wooden acting) the CGI?
yes indeed. well, it's A big problem. the acting is the worst. or maybe it's the plot.
we rewatched them over thanksgiving and i was struck by how plastic and sterile looking everything is - especially in Ep 2. Ep 3 looks a lot better. Lucas had big ideas, but the state of the art just wasn't up to it.
Ep 7's CGI is excellent.
OK, finally saw it so can comment here.
It was good and fun and got the action movie beats and effects very right while slimming down the world-building nonsense stuff to a bare minimum, which was great.
The emo boyfriend from Girls as incompetent Darth Vader is a poignant metaphor for the lame-ification of the world.
Why they had to blow up Death Star again (the third time!) was a mystery and some kind of weird fan service.
Ultimately, though what a stupid-ass fictional universe. Look, "The Republic," you have exactly one job, which is to prevent the rise of a new Empire. How about investing in some kind of national security system? Look, "The Empire," your one job is to take your inexplicable advance over the competition in planet-destroying planet technology and design them without obvious, fatal flaws or AT LEAST heavily guard the places where there are obvious, fatal flaws.
OK, finally saw it so can comment here.
It was good and fun and got the action movie beats and effects very right while slimming down the world-building nonsense stuff to a bare minimum, which was great.
The emo boyfriend from Girls as incompetent Darth Vader is a poignant metaphor for the lame-ification of the world.
Why they had to blow up Death Star again (the third time!) was a mystery and some kind of weird fan service.
Ultimately, though what a stupid-ass fictional universe. Look, "The Republic," you have exactly one job, which is to prevent the rise of a new Empire. How about investing in some kind of national security system? Look, "The Empire," your one job is to take your inexplicable advance over the competition in planet-destroying planet technology and design them without obvious, fatal flaws or AT LEAST heavily guard the places where there are obvious, fatal flaws.
What if Rai Rai Ken didn't actually kill his father when he killed Han Solo because his real father is . . . Luke? That would explain so much.
Street Fighter: the forerunner of MMA?
I think Carp is totally right about the politics of the first one, btw. Not that it was specifically about re-fighting and winning the Vietnam War, but the not-so-subtle message was that by re-focusing on all-American gumption and traditional values and turning away from cynicism we, combined with technology, can beat back the Evil Empire. It has very little to do with political reality, but a lot to do with Americans' self-image as plucky, democratic underdogs fighting the big bad empires of the world.
I saw it too. Twice, to be honest. The first time was in 1977, though.
I don't know if it matters that George Lucas thought of it as a Vietnam protest film, but he did.
I vaguely remember reading that somewhere, and of course it fits with Lucas' general crowd at the time. But the movie sure seems more tied into Reagan-esque themes than the rest of 70s New Hollywood.
Right, but I think the public took it the other way altogether.
It's usually -- nearly always -- not the fault of the participants/authors when something goes viral. An alignment with the Zeitgeist is what that takes, and most attempts at this fail: whether because of timing or misreading. The original movie went viral -- people standing in line to watch the movie for the third time -- which was a complete surprise to everyone involved. I don't blame the movie, I blame us.
And I'm still mad at how stupid the new Empire is. Exactly the same shit happened to you twice! Morons! Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, fool me three times, maybe I should rethink my whole "I am invincible darkness, destroyer of worlds" self-image. Also maybe don't rely on the Fredo-like stylings of Han Solo Jr for one of your two major field generals. Powerful dark side of the Force my ass.
I think the incompetence of whatever it's called, New Order, is supposed to be apparent. They're not as good as the Empire was. Their generals are all way too young, for one thing, and not scary, and not scared of Vader Jr. because he's prone to emo fits. What's incongruous is that they managed to build the giant death planet. But even with that, they did a terrible job.
I think the general problem with Star Wars as a continuing franchise is that the coolest thing about the original movie, and to some extent the second movie, was that they gestured at this whole, vast universe, with all kinds of cool but only partially revealed social, political, and technological aspects. The later movies fill those in, and it's always unsatisfying. This is only going to get worse as Disney cranks out one film per year until the heat death of the universe or the abolishment of copyright, whichever comes first.
158 seems right. That's why I thought the best thing about this one was that it stayed action movie-ish, with a nicely done overlay of TV serial-plotting to move the plot forward, and stayed pleasingly vague and generally away from too much laborious explanation of world-building or complicated political plotting or whatever. If the cost of that was that the plot didn't make much sense or was insanely derivative of the original three, whatever. The good parts in all the movies are the combo of action sequences followed by ultra-vague gesturing underscored by John Williams' music (which is the single best thing in any of the movies.)
But also: there are limits with what you can do with the good side of the force/bad side of the force dichotomy. I mean there could be more interesting things too, but there's a kind of built in difficulty in keeping that theme interesting. Yes we get it, bad side of the force is bad, how about maybe trying to create some structures to keep them from literally killing everyone in your universal government every 30 years. I guess the bottom line is that Star Wars is dumb but they did a good job in this one of making a dumb but fun movie.
Yes we get it, bad side of the force is bad
Tell it to Bill Kristol.
I found BB8 super cute (I know so basic) and also I loooove people aging playing characters aging.
Admiral Akbar looked younger. Do Lobster People age in reverse?
Hard to know what old Admiral Akbar had been up to in the intervening years. According to something I think someone linked here once when I asked, it was his planet of lobster people who financed the entire rebellion. But, notably, EVEN THOUGH THEY WON THAT WAR AND SHOULD HAVE HAD THE ENTIRE FINANCING MECHANISM OF LIKE ALL THE PLANETS IN THE GALAXY AT THEIR DISPOSAL TO BUILD A REAL NAVY, he still seems like the "Admiral" of a craptastic fleet of shit-vessels (like the one Leia lands in) that can't do anything whatsoever to pierce the shields of even the demonstrably incompetent New Order's Death Star III. Old Akbar may not be much of a military genius.
I mean, I guess the real lesson of the new movie is that the Rebel Alliance must have done an incredibly shitty job of governing after coming to power. I don't know who was actually in charge but they sure fucked up bad. Why trust them again?
Because the other side is objectively evil? I haven't seen the new movie, but I'm really fond of Hillary for basically that reason.
165: the rebel alliance successor state The New Republic doesn't rule all of the galaxy yet. The Resistance, the Rebel Alliance reunion band, is working in First Order space to expand Republican influence but perhaps not everyone in the Republic feels it's safe to tempt war that way, which is why they're somewhat clandestine. I think. This is a JJ Abrams show, after all, so making sense isn't high on the list.
VOTE ACKBAR!
IT'S A TRUMP!
(Look, they can't all be winners.)
That kind of makes sense. The Force is like a shitty two-party system, and the franchise is just a chronicle of its inescapable, never-ending oscillations between a bad option and a worse one, with no progress possible.
167 -- I thought that during the "stormtrooper sieg heil" speech given before Death Star III destroys the Republic's city planet makes clear that New Order sees itself as ruled by the Republic but is rebelling against it. Could be wrong.
The later movies fill those in, and it's always unsatisfying.
I have no opinions about the later movies but I do think this is a real and completely general structural thing. These things work better when the half-or-less–revealed stuff isn't more fully revealed! The gigantic amounts of backstory (that in this case didn't actually exist when the first movies were being made, I am 100% certain) that you don't reveal informs what you do reveal, but you don't reveal it too, sheesh. Everyone knows that.
157, 164, etc: I assume the Empire bankrupted itself to build Death Star building capacity, and probably exhausted some vital resource to do so. The First Order and the Republic are therefore doomed alike to diminish, as has happened in the aftermath of most empires.
I always think this, of course - Firefly, the Ogallalla Aquifer, wevs.
OT, but still nerd. Setting up a next X-box takes more time than playing several levels of DOOM.
161: Heebie is completely right on both counts.
I saw the movie today (in 3D, the first 3D movie I've seen in the theater). On a minute-to-minute level I mostly didn't enjoy it but I was in a surprisingly good mood after I left.
I feel like they did a fantastic job of continuing the dusty, rattan furniture and khaki clothes, jalopy rust 70s aesthetic of the first set, actually. That was probably my favorite part.
I agree with this completely. I really liked the the Storm Trooper armor looked like clunky plastic, and how much the Falcon looked like a "rust-bucket."
I didn't like 3D at all and wouldn't go see another 3D movie. I also didn't like the pacing; I wanted a little time to breathe between battle sequences. I missed the equivalent of them all hanging out in the Falcon needling each other from the original movies.
Also, good lord did I feel cranky about them blowing up the death-weapon planet. I enjoyed most of the borrowing from the previous films, but that just made me groan.
I also agree with HG that, "I loooove people aging playing characters aging..
screenwriter Todd Alcott has a characteristically thoughtful analysis of the new Star Wars movie here: http://www.toddalcott.com/.
Thanks. Reading some of the posts, I really like his analysis of Kylo Ren.
Kylo Ren, on the other hand, we find in the midst of a change. He very much wants to be his grandfather (he apparently has taken the trouble to go to Endor and fish his helmet out of an Ewok barbecue pit) but he's worried that he's not up to the task. Like Finn (who we'll discuss later), he hopes to gain his father's powers by adopting his father's attitudes and clothes. As Kurt Vonnegut said, "We are who we pretend to be, so we must be very careful who we pretend to be." As he strains toward fearsomeness, he's prone to flashes of rage when frustrated. We can't imagine Darth Vader taking his frustrations out on a control panel. That makes Kylo Ren a less mature character, but also a more approachable one. Vader, as I say, was closer to a Terminator in his effect -- unbeatable and implacable. Kylo Ren, on the other hand, we see "has good days and bad days." Anakin Skywalker is an arrogant hothead right up to the point where he's crippled and cremated by Obi-Wan Kenobi, at which point he's reincarnated as Vader. Kylo Ren, on the other hand, has no equivalent transformative moment (that we've seen) -- he's got to make the conscious effort to transform himself.
I liked it better than I was expecting to.
I got sucked into being sentimental about Ford; all the young people were adorable, including Emo Vader, and thin as all the plotting was, I wasn't griping about it in real time. (Except for one thing Todd Alcott mentioned too. Where's the parking lot for the bar? It's in the middle of the jungle -- how do the customers get there? That annoyed me.)
The Ewoks ate Vader's corpse? I really have to see this.
I liked the young people too, especially Girl Power, who did good job at what she was called on to do. And yeah the set and effects were seamless and great. Spherical R2D2 was good.
Wait hold up, Max von Sydow was in this?
For thirty seconds in the beginning. Blink and you'd miss him.
I knew that guy looked familiar. Seems a bit of a waste.
181: well, the Ewoks eat human flesh. That's what they were planning to do to Luke and the others. And the last we see of Vader's corpse, it's being baked en croute. Or rather in its armour which would have much the same effect. So, yes, it's reasonable to assume that Anakin Skywalker's final fate was to serve as post-party nibbles for a bunch of stone age cannibal Viet Cong gonks.
183-5: "So, here's the deal. Can you be the poor man's Alec Guiness for 45 seconds?" "Fuck you, I was in the Seventh Seal! Have you ever heard of Ingmar Bergman, motherfucker! Also, Strange Brew. What the fuck did Ali G ever do."
Beyond question it would have been better with Klaus Kinski. As would every film ever made, including "Notting Hill".
I eat various types of fresh, including the package of Bob Evans pork links in the stove right now, but if I came upon a dead, burned pig, I'd probably give it a pass.
I liked Max von S. It's always nice to see an old pro at play in the field of the nerds.
Charley's presented very well how the situation appeared to an educated adult when the first movie came out: obvious escapism, apparently consciously so, was fun.
But it very soon became evident that it was much more than that to huge numbers of people. That's when bemusement, giving way to despair and disgust set in.
Those two 1977 viewings of the original movie is all I've ever taken in, or wanted to.
So, I finally saw the movie. It was remarkable how much it was just copied from the old movie with slight changes. Still, I liked it better than "Annie Hall" but not as much as I would have liked "Annie Hall: Now with Light."
Darth Vader 2.01 looked a great deal like young Snape.
Christ, if neckbeards were mustard gas, I'd already be blind.
I like Darth Adam. For all the rigmarole aboutfear leads to anger, " anger leads to hate" the other villains were never angry.
Anakin was more petulant than angry.
I guess the real lesson of the new movie is that the Rebel Alliance must have done an incredibly shitty job of governing after coming to power.
The previous administration left them with a massive bank bailout to handle. It would have been a burden.
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2015/12/its-a-trap-emperor-palpatines-poison-pill/
Revolutionary movements always start off doing a shit job once they get to power. The Articles of Confederation, France's First Republic, the Bolsheviks. Mounting a revolution and providing effective governance for a new state are completely different skill sets. No reason the Rebel Alliance would have been different.
The Rebel Alliance was lead by the children of the second in command of the Empire, so really it was much closer ordinary monarchical succession. They should have done better.
You know what other country didn't do well despite being led by a child of the former second in command?
...who also skipped out on vital military training before completing it...
It seems like Han and Leia's situation in TFA is kind of sad. She's still devoting her life to leading the rebels, he's still trying to stay one step ahead of gangsters to whom he owes money.
These characters are essentially exactly where they were when we first met them in the first movie way back in 1977.
The worst part is he's still bragging about how fast he can travel by using a measure of distance instead of time.
The revival of this thread gives me a chance to link this unbelievably prescient WSJ review of the original Star Wars from 1977. Everything predicted came true in spades, only 100x more so. I actually like Star Wars and was age appropriate for the first movies but holy crap would we be better off if the thing had never existed, major newspaper movie reviewers could still write reviews like that one, and childhood comic books were still the province of children.
You're probably just another industry player upset that Lucas figured out how to make all the money by keeping merchandising rights.
But then, as that review itself acknowledges, everything that is apparently wrong with Star Wars had been a staple of movie-making for decades before Star Wars came out.
It's interesting, for example, that the reviewer starts off by saying "this is basically just like an episode of those old weekly serials", but (after admittedly mentioning Flash Gordon) then goes on to say:
"Our heroine Leia, for example, is a dead ringer for Snow White and has about the same dimension and depth."
So she's a movie character.
"Leia's faithful servants, the movie's two wittiest creations - a lanky golden robot with the manners and speech of an Edward Everett Horton and his pal, a squat little computer known as R2-D2 - seem a kind of cross between Mutt and Jeff or Abbott and Costello."
Abbot & Costello made dozens of movies.
"There's also a community of little folks whose squeals and diminutive size make them space age Munchkins, while Hans Solo's co-pilot and companion is a 7-foot, green-nosed version of our friend, the Cowardly Lion."
Characters from "The Wizard of Oz", which is a movie.
"There's the standard western shootout, here situated in a kind of space age saloon;"
As seen in, well, any Western movie.
"there are duels (albeit with swords made of beams of light) straight out of Errol Flynn swashbucklers"
Errol Flynn swashbuckler movies, that is.
"and even an interstellar dogfight patterned on World War II movies."
Yep.
Finally saw it this weekend! Now I can see if anyone else cried as much as I did when they killed Han.
"this is basically just like an episode of those old weekly serials"
That's exactly what my dad said on walking out of the first Star Wars. It's possible he read the WSJ back then, but probably it was just that obvious to anybody of that age.
It is also exactly what George Lucas said about it...
There was a high-modernist period in movies that Star Wars helped kill, but that article, like any article that approvingly quotes Dwight Macdonald, is delusional. Star Wars and comic book stuff fills exact niche that Westerns once filled. Anyone who writes a sentence like "the triumph of the standardized, the simplistic, mass-produced commercial artifacts of our time" in 1977 has been living in a coma for 50 years. It was the 70s that were the weird outlier.
Basically an aside, but you could write a pretty good three-part history of pulp-adventure inspired genres. Early adventure fiction is straightforwardly colonialist -- Westerns and "darkest Africa". Later works sublimate this impulse by moving it into the fantasy past or science-fiction worlds. Finally, the works begin to interrogate the impulse. Star Wars is in the second phase, while Hugo-winning science-fiction is frequently falls in the third.
ajay, as usual, says it better than I can. ajay, I hate you so much.
It was the 70s that were the weird outlier.
Except in clothing.
Finally, the works begin to interrogate the impulse.
You've got your parts out of order. Revisionist westerns were a thing.
It seems like Han and Leia's situation in TFA is kind of sad. She's still devoting her life to leading the rebels, he's still trying to stay one step ahead of gangsters to whom he owes money.
Intentional, right? I got the vibe that losing Ben made Han fall back on old patterns, maybe Leia too.
215: Fair enough. But Westerns are noticeably sublimated in "Princess of Mars" in 1912. When was the first revisionist Western (presumably a novel)?
This implies that the lightsaber, Kylo, and Rey are almost collinear. Shouldn't she have made it easier for him to pull it out? Or is The Force, unlike force, not a vector? (I mean, sure, shoot whatever's the most dramatic, but I was genuinely confused when Rey got it.)
Nerdiness knows no bounds.
It's not that pop-comic book culture didn't exist -- what else would the pastiche come from? It's that it became economically dominant for the cultual industry as a whole and culturally dominant as camp.
219 gets it right. I imagine that what's behind that review is the sense that this is what even the grown-ups are talking about and taking seriously, and it certainly was prescient about that.
Now I can see if anyone else cried as much as I did when they killed Han.
Annoyingly, despite having tried to avoid spoilers, I still found out about that plot point before seeing the movie, and it did somewhat spoil the impact.
Top 10 box office films in 1976 were:
1. Rocky
2. To Fly!
3. A Star is Born
4. All the President's Men
5. The Omen
6. In Search of Noah's Ark
7. King Kong
8. Silver Streak
9. The Enforcer
10. Midway
A different era, for sure, but something weirder than a lost golden age.
I really should watch Rocky someday. I keep hearing about it.
Now I can see if anyone else cried as much as I did when they killed Han.
Don't worry, he'll probably show up in the next movie as one of those glowing blue force ghosts like Obi Wan.
"Ancient superstitions and hokey religions are no substitute for...hey wait a minute, how come I'm not dead?"
I thought the point of that action sequence was to tell us that Space Scots exist.
And a clear signal that the first movies are about not Vietnam but Scottish independence.
47: THAT'S NOT HOW THE FORCE WORKS.
223: Also if you watch Rocky then you can watch Creed, which is really shockingly good. (Also hits heebies point of watching aging actors play aging characters real hard.)
It's not that pop-comic book culture didn't exist -- what else would the pastiche come from? It's that it became economically dominant for the cultual industry as a whole and culturally dominant as camp.
But I'm saying it already was economically and culturally dominant - look at the lists of high-grossing films from the years before Star Wars came out. Full of Westerns and cartoonish action films and special-effects-laden monster movies.
I saw annie hall recently. It is a real good movie.
I pressed my luck and watched mahattan. Not as good as annie hall. So weird about the high school kid dating a middle aged woody and nobody caring. Apparently it was based on a real high school kid who dated woody allen.
206/219: Yes, I too miss the days when elitists were expected to write off and ignore entire genres, and consumers had to choose between their media being fun and intelligent.
/sarcasm
Lest anyone accuse me of calling Star Wars "intelligent," I'm thinking of all the more recent fantasy and sci-fi that's complex, multilayered and thought-provoking. Sandman, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Game of Thrones, the Battlestar Galactica remake, basically anything by Charles Stross - if you don't like them, you don't like them, but pop sci-fi/fantasy definitely exists with the depth of stuff from more "serious" genres. Even if we say for the sake of argument that Star Wars is to blame for the current popularity of its genre, I'd say overall we're ahead.
229.2: I went through a stretch last year where I watched a bunch of 70s movies in a row. It was jarringly clear that there was a weird underage girls thing going on during the second half of the decade, at least in the more artsy corners of the film industry.
231: I think what was going on there was that the sexual revolution hit before second wave feminism or anything like modern thinking about consent (you're talking about the 70s, so second wave feminism had hit, but wasn't really entrenched in mainstream thinking yet). So you've got a progressive bohemian norm where any kind of rules around sex are silly and obsolete, without an atmosphere where the interests and needs of underage people for protection from exploitation is being seriously considered.
more of 232: Remember that weird SF fandom story -- Marion Zimmer Bradley's husband? Ex husband? Guy named Breen, anyway, was molesting multiple children (that is, not late teens, but children) in the SF community in the Bay Area in the Seventies, and the community was kind of flummoxed about how to deal with it, because they were all sexual-revolution non-judgmental, and weren't sure if this was something to be non-judgmental about. There was a bizarre contemporary account of the situation that was published in some fandom newsletter, written by someone who clearly strongly disapproved of the whole child-molesting thing, but was unclear on what an appropriate response was, and didn't want to be uncool about it.
Also, Woody Allen made like half of the art films of the 0s.
I don't know if if this list of top grossing films by decade is accurate, but if it is, it's revealing.
236: My take home from that list is that Spielberg/Lucas came along and kicked Disney's ass.
But now Disney owns Star Wars, so I guess they had the last laugh.
I'm with ajay. Starwars is (are?) the Westerns and WW2 movies I grew up with only with less oxygen. The original working title was probably "Hopalong & Oerlikons in Space"
When was the first revisionist Western (presumably a novel)?
Beats me! But High Noon seems to arguably deserve inclusion and it was pretty early (1952). The Man who Shot Liberty Valance is 1962.
There was a culture of middlebrow aspiration that hit its high-water mark in the 70s, and has since died out. Possibly Star Wars helped kill it, but I think it was the highbrow contempt for the middlebrow of the Dwight Macdonald's of the world that did it in.
Starwars is (are?) the Westerns and WW2 movies I grew up with only with less oxygen.
Right, but per ogged and Tigre, the claim isn't that Star Wars was a new thing under the sun in being juvenile, or that formerly children didn't speak, think, and understand as children, it's that previously when the children became adults, they (to a greater extent) put aside childish things, or that the juvenilia wasn't so ascendant, or something like that.
Only children saw John Wayne movies?
There was a culture of middlebrow aspiration that
has migrated to television?
Middlebrow culture is also just more fragmented than it was 50s-70s (and a more global culture). Pulp fantasy plots can still thrive as mass entertainment because the points of appeal transcend the points of fragmentation.
Only children saw John Wayne movies?
Biohazard said "Hopalong & Oerlikons in Space", not "The Searchers in Space".
I imagine that what's behind that review is the sense that this is what even the grown-ups are talking about and taking seriously
Just read about 300 comments on The Hateful Eight, which may or may not be "grownup," but I don't recommend you take elementary school kids to it without checking it out first.
But that is a different crowd, age group, a different experience, than the ones who go in a group to SW on Sat night, or take their kids to the movies.
There was a crowd in the 70s who didn't go see Star Wars, maybe saw or Cassavetes or Wim Wenders.
Turning it around, maybe it's that we now define adult culture, at least in cinema, as being stuff that is actually inaccessible to children (either violent, indecent, or just far too complicated), and we didn't use to.
And this is very much a cinema-only argument. You won't get far arguing that, say, the world of novels is dominated by juvenile and comicky stuff now and it wasn't in 1960.
I can imagine someone attempting such an argument with reference to what houses publish what now versus then, and divisions between pulps and other productions, and whatever, but at least the first part of that would be kind of ruined by the consolidation of houses, and it certainly wouldn't convince anyway who didn't already believe it.
I guess the question for me, and it is just curiousity more than any judgement, is why this crowd, one I know a little bit for a decade, is talking about Mad Max and Star Wars rather than Hateful Eight or Leviathan or Winter Sleep or About Elly.
I must admit that it's awfully tempting to posit a correlation between a culture where adults are no longer expected to consume (primarily) grownup entertainment and a democracy where discussion of, let alone action on, serious issues seems almost impossible.
But surely most of the same (types of) people who consumed high- and middlebrow stuff back then are now consuming Mad Men and the like, and hoi polloi going from Ponderosa to Marvel movies hasn't really changed the character of their consumption either.
The solution to "those were the days" narratives is almost always that things are a bit better than they seem now, and were a bit worse then. Not that there's never a golden age, but they're maybe more limited than we tend to think: fewer and narrower and more flawed.
why this crowd, one I know a little bit for a decade, is talking about Mad Max and Star Wars rather than Hateful Eight or Leviathan or Winter Sleep or About Elly.
Because Hateful Eight hasn't come out yet, and Leviathan looks terrific but as far as I can tell exists only in the form of a thirty-second trailer, and the other two came out the year before last and seven years ago respectively.
210. It was obvious to me when I saw it in 1977. Remember that Flash Gordon was serialized on TV when we boomers were kids, not just something our parents had seen in a real movie theater.
219. I've read more than one critic who says the dumbing down of movies is happening partly because the country of origin (the US, in this case) is no longer the main market. Today movies are written and edited to appeal to (e.g.) Chinese sensibilities and taste. It's easier to do that if the movie is mostly action sequences and explosions, rather than long searching dialog between deeply troubled characters.
No one watches French movies outside France, so they can still be "deep."
Revisionism is usually a little hard to pinpoint because the classical form to be revised (revisioned? revisionated? revisionized? revisioneered?) takes a while to coalesce from all the eccentric early attempts at genre formation. In my experience it pays to be vague.
The weird thing now, also in my experience, is that the sense of cultural obligation attached to high art back when that distinction was live has also, uneasily, been attached to genre work like Buffy or GoT. It's intelligent and complex, so you must like it if you are cultured, or else you take an explicit cultural-conservative stand and get ironic and jokey about how you genuinely like those dour Russian novels and incomprehensible modernist doorstops, yawn. People can't seem to shake that shit off. I have no sense of what will follow this cultural moment. Also, enough of the TV critics I know are/were English PhDs that I genuinely worry that weird academic norms are influencing the way people talk about watching TV, but that is extremely likely just to be the bubble I'm in.
You won't get far arguing that, say, the world of novels is dominated by juvenile and comicky stuff now and it wasn't in 1960.
Given all the adults reading Harry Potter, Twilight, The Hunger Games, and other stuff influenced by YA and genre fiction (The Martian?), there isn't nothing to that claim, though. I bet it's been attempted many times.
Because Hateful Eight hasn't come out yet
Also, it really wasn't a very good movie.
246. And to expand on lk's 252, YA seems to have been devoured utterly by "juvenile and comicky" genre, lots of genre crossovers (paranormal romance, etc.) exist at the low end of the novel spectrum, and lots of ostensibly high-brow novelists are grabbing "j&c" tropes by the bushel basket.
As ajay surely knows...
Did ostensibly high-brow novels actually sell all that well back in the day? (I don't know.)
OT, but this thread has helped me discover my new favorite thing on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_computers
I've read more than one critic who says the dumbing down of movies is happening partly because the country of origin (the US, in this case) is no longer the main market. Today movies are written and edited to appeal to (e.g.) Chinese sensibilities and taste. It's easier to do that if the movie is mostly action sequences and explosions, rather than long searching dialog between deeply troubled characters.
Meh. The timescales don't work if this is a trend we're tracing back to the late 70s. No one was looking at the Chinese market in 1983.
No one watches French movies outside France, so they can still be "deep."
On the other hand, "Les Visiteurs" is still one of the highest-grossing French movies ever in France, beaten by a 1966 farce about escaping RAF pilots starring Terry-Thomas.
252, 254: the part of that sentence I should have emphasised is "and it wasn't in 1960".
The last few comments are reminding me of this list of books that seemed to spark some minor hissy fits a few months ago. It's kind of random, but if you focus on the stuff from the 70s-early 80s, there's definitely a middlebrow feel that seems very characteristic of the era.
That films by decade thing is pretty telling. Compare the list for the 60s with the list for the 80s: it's like comparing the appeal LBJ with the appeal of Reagan.
No one was looking at the Chinese market in 1983.
I think what's a little off here is actually the timeline. Lucas/Spielberg started a trend that was successful in the 80s but not culturally dominant until the last few years. You still had room for stupid comedies and drama/melodramas to top the box office in the 80s.
Top 10 1985:
1 Back to the Future
2 Rambo: First Blood Part II
3 Rocky IV
4 The Color Purple
5 Out of Africa
6 Cocoon
7 The Jewel of the Nile
8 Witness
9 The Goonies
10 Spies Like Us
Top 10 2015:
1 Star Wars: The Force Awakens
2 Jurassic World
3 Avengers: Age of Ultron
4 Inside Out
5 Furious 7
6 Minions
7 The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2
8 The Martian
9 Cinderella (2015)
10 Spectre
I must admit that it's awfully tempting to posit a correlation between a culture where adults are no longer expected to consume (primarily) grownup entertainment and a democracy where discussion of, let alone action on, serious issues seems almost impossible.
I now share this awful temptation. I can develop the sub-argument concerning dead-end higher education.
No one was looking at the Chinese market in 1983.
But the claim was about internationalization in general; China was an example.
On books that literally all white men own (yes, serial previewing here): I've long believed that there was this noteworthy gender segregation of literary fiction in the postwar Anglosphere, or at least U.S. But I realize I don't know what belongs in the canon on the women's side. Maybe it's just that fiction for women got sidelined in general? What is the list of "books that literally all white women own," from say 1935 (to be consumed in 1945 or later) to 1985? Are they still happily chugging along reading Dickens and the Brontes? Are they all reading Mary McCarthy, lol? Minor threadjack, but I really am curious.
Although 246.1 is largely right, I'd love to see a good list of counterexamples. For example, I think Brooklyn is a great counterexample.
What is the list of "books that literally all white women own,"
If Leon Uris and John Irving are exemplars of white guy middlebrow from the 70s/early 80s, then maybe Eica Jong and Marilyn French work for the white woman's middlebrow list? How about Amy Tan?
261:
I'm curious too, especially since I've only read maybe a quarter if that of the white men books. I'm wondering how many of the WMB the women might own too.
"books that literally all white women own"
A) Most people don't read
b) Having grown up in a house of women mid-brow readers of say the 50s, I would suggest you look at BOMC lists, family sagas, historical romances, current event melodramas: We had Thomas Costain, Irving Stone, Leon Uris, Taylor Caldwell, Shellabarger, Michener on the living room shelves, along with classics.
c) Private stock was the Angelique series, Georgette Heyer, classy bodice rippers
Read all this shit before I entered HS
But the claim was about internationalization in general; China was an example.
Suddenly Hollywood got more internationally-dependent in the late 70s than it was before? Hmm. Not sure about that.
If Leon Uris and John Irving are exemplars of white guy middlebrow
Don't exaggerate how much adult men read, especially those outside a professional or academic environment. My guess is that women were those guys readers.
You still had room for stupid comedies and drama/melodramas to top the box office in the 80s.
I don't think those lists are as different as you think. I mean, Rambo and Rocky IV vs. Furious 7 and Avengers isn't much of a change. Cocoon is more cartoony than The Martian. Spectre is on a par with The Jewel of the Nile, but much less juvenile.
Top 10 1985:
1 Back to the Future
2 Rambo: First Blood Part II
3 Rocky IV
4 The Color Purple
5 Out of Africa
6 Cocoon
7 The Jewel of the Nile
8 Witness
9 The Goonies
10 Spies Like Us
Top 10 2015:
1 Star Wars: The Force Awakens
2 Jurassic World
3 Avengers: Age of Ultron
4 Inside Out
5 Furious 7
6 Minions
7 The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2
8 The Martian
9 Cinderella (2015)
10 Spectre
I'm wondering how many of the WMB the women might own too.
I assume lots. Since books by men were/still are more readily classified as "serious" than books by women, I imagine that an aspirational middlebrow woman in 1980 would have read most of the Uris-Irving-Roth stuff from the WMB list.
The suggestions I made in 263 were more along the lines of what would be on the middlebrow WW's list that likely wouldn't make the WM's list.
One turning point was Jaws and the abandonment of the "roadshow" business model, in which the availability of a movie gradually filtered down fro metropolis to small town. Jaws like today's movies, opened everywhere at once, and seeing it early became a sort of social necessity, inexorably swamping the competition.
I suspect Bob is right in 267.
And Nora Roberts, these days
Since 1999, every one of Roberts's novels has been a New York Times bestseller, and 124 of her novels have ranked on the Times bestseller list, including twenty-nine that debuted in the number-one spot. As of January 24, 2013, Roberts's novels had spent a combined 948 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List, including 148 weeks in the number-one spot. As of January 9, 2009, 400 million copies of her books are in print, including 12 million copies sold in 2005 alone. Her novels have been published in 35 countries
She has her own bookcase in this house.
Bob is 100% right in 270 and Jaws was the turning point. Would participate more but today's not the day.
There's a category of middlebrow books that I think of as very marked-as-female; sort of family sagas? I'm thinking of things like Maeve Binchy or Pat Conroy. Not genre romances, but almost as gendered. My mother's fiction reading was heavily driven by paperbacks abandoned on airplanes, and she read a lot of those.
260 shows that RT and nosflow and ogged have this right.
Press for time but this is my kind of thread.
I actually clicked through and now I get it. I had this confused with Rebecca Solnit. The corresponding "women's" list here is much easier to envision (Eat Prey Love, Eat Shoots & Leaves, Eat Me with Apples, Eat Tuscany and Die, whatever). (Impressively, of that whole list I think I "own" only Gravity's Rainbow, and I own a fuckton of books by dudes. And I'm white.)
All comments appreciated, though. This nicely complicates my picture of the 50s and 60s.
268: if we'really talking about artistic quality, no. But I am also on team remember-Aplpe-Dumpling-gang was a hit in 1970s. If we are talking about genre, then the fact that The Color Purple or Rainman could top box office in the 80s is different.
What makes revisionism period/historical movies? I seem to remember Red River (1948) being revisionist in the sense of trying to be more historical and not just about gunfighters (though there is a fight), while Dead Man (1995) is more critical than historical.
And then there's movies like No Country for Old Men or Chinatown, which are western but not Westerns.
OT, but this thread has helped me discover my new favorite thing on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_computers
More off-topic cultural history: the history of designs for the two-pound coin is very neat (and much, much more impressive than the US state quarters).
Correct link: http://www.royalmint.com/discover/uk-coins/coin-design-and-specifications/two-pound-coin
For WMBs, in my demographic--men I might end up talking with and hoping to have something in common with--the list doesn't have enough accessible history. She's got Shelby Foote, but there ought to be more books like Evan Connell's Son of the Morning Star, or by the late John Keegan.
In the 60s, Bruce Catton's Civil War histories were common, and actually read.
By the 80s, Da Capo was reprinting paperback copies of titles like Grant's or Sherman's memoirs, and the kind of man I have in mind would have picked up and read that kind of book too.
I think you may be approaching the list in the wrong spirit, idp. It is not intended to be complete, accurate, or fair.
I honestly thought that list was just confusing and off-target (and therefore not actually funny), but it set itself up nicely to make it look like any critique was special pleading, which in itself is kind of awesome.
Oh my god I accidentally named half my kids after main characters in a Piers Anthony series.
I may have also mentioned that before but the shock is real every time I re-realize it.
You know that there's a very particular group of nerds -- nerdy enough to have read a bunch of Piers Anthony, in contact enough with consensus reality to heartily disapprove of him -- who will never ask you about it but has noticed and is judging you hard.
If I knew you in person, I would be a member of that group.
287: I judge you for remembering the names of characters in Piers Anthony books.
that list was just confusing and off-target
I've basically accepted that there are several versions of reality that overlap to some extent, but that mine does not overlap at all with the one The Toast is in. That's probably all to the good for them, though.
288: Actually, I'm not sure that I do enough for a cluster of names to pop out at me. But if I did notice, my brow would be subtly furrowed, you betcha.
I'm pleased to discover that even though I read a bunch of Piers Anthony books in my thereby misspent youth I can recall no names from them.
I really should watch Rocky someday.
They won't let you move to Philadelphia until you do.
Rocky is a disconcertingly good movie. I came across it on TV a couple of years back, not having seen it before, and was expecting sort of pre-processed dumb formulaic nonsense. And it's actually weird and interesting.
292: Isn't there a provision that you can punch a slab of meat a few times instead?
I don't usually remember his characters either, I read his books around 4th through 7th grade, hence the re-realization shock every time I read a list of the characters. I followed the link to computers which had a link to the series with the main characters in each book and there were the names.
I wonder whether Stallone, Ford, Fisher and Hamill would have believed it if someone had told them, back in the mid 70s, "Hey, guess what? In nearly 40 years, you'll still be playing the same characters your playing now!"
293 - First Blood is similar too. It's still an action movie, but Rambo isn't really a morally upstanding hero in any way as much as someone with really severe PTSD who gets treated really badly by corrupt small town police and freaks out to the point where they have to call in his old commanding officer to talk him down. Sylvester Stallone had a weird start to his career, because both of them were actually pretty intelligent movies with flawed working class protagonists, and then they were immediately followed by a string of ridiculous action movie cliche sequels. I think Stallone actually wrote Rocky, too, which is kind of impressive.
296: I actually did that. Stallone, Ford and Hamill were just happy to know that they would still have jobs. Carrie Fisher lost her mind.
I'm pleased to discover that even though I read a bunch of Piers Anthony books in my thereby misspent youth I can recall no names from them.
None leap to mind for me other than Stile which I remember only because it was also a vocabulary word (in the book).
First Blood is similar too.
Things John Rambo Is Cheered For Doing in First Blood Which, If Black People Did Them, Would Be Used To Justify Their Deaths (which, merging the sub-threads, is from the-toast, but is also short enough that it isn't a problem that it mostly but doesn't completely succeed).
297: Did you know that Rambo is named after Rimbaud?
Ivy would get a pass and Humphrey is old-fashioned but not crazy, I guess, but Bink? Dor? Grundy? Rapunzel? I assume they get a lot of funny looks.
Also it turns out my brother's middle name also qualifies but he was born before the series. It's like the three year old girl named Elsa in my kid's daycare- bet you didn't see that one coming, Elsa's parents!
A representative for a company we do business with is named Isis. Poor woman!
But with the speed of gazelles!
305: Apparently we grew up watching the same crappy Saturday morning TV shows (or was Isis a weekday afternoon thing? I can't remember).
I knew Stallone had written Rocky, but had no idea how many other movies he's listed as a writer for. Eg, several Rambos, and all the Expendables.
I haven't seen Hateful Eight, but its Tarantino, so I'm guessing that a bunch of motherfuckers get killed and there is a soundtrack featuring deep cuts that are unusually good. Am I close?
It's a full on spaghetti western love letter. He got Ennio Morricone to write the score.
309, 310: there's also a White Stripes tune during the movie, and the end credits have a song I didn't recognize.
I can hardly imagine an actual spaghetti western that spent so much of its time indoors, though.
313: Seen it?
I haven't, and probably never will, but have read enough spoilerific commentary that I feel I can recreate the fucker, including overhead, tracking, and quasi-splitscreen shots. I will follow the reception in depth though. Slate calls it "evil."
There is an idea in visual language studies that the context of a shot matters much less for the meaning of a shot or affective effect than either the Soviets montagists (Eisenstein? Vertov?) or than the context of a representation in text. IOW, a white guy using the N-word or a woman getting punched in the face are irreducible signifiers. Quentin understands that shit.
Quentin also understood that a large part of the audience, especially the ones that go to see QT movies, will laugh and cheer at the N-word and punching of the woman. The hate isn't only on screen.
Oh, a whole lot of the commentary is dedicated to finding some level of meaning in THE (hmmm...), something that isn't nihilism or rampant misanthropy, a MORAL CORE.
There is something funny about an audience of fucking Americans trying to weigh the souls of these dead cruel motherfuckers in the movie, and determining that this asshole is slightly less evil than that motherfucker.
Something actually hilarious about the search for an uplifting message. Something fucking American.
I think it marks an interesting stylistic turn for Tarantino. The entire thing has about (this isn't really a spoiler I swear) three sets, and almost all of it is confined to a single room. If the dialog style wasn't recognizable as Tarantino it could easily be a Mamet play or something.
317: Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and umm True Romance derive much of their power from claustrophobic interior scenes. The basement cafe scene in IB.
Haven't seen Django, because that is after I got all hateful.
I think that list of books was just common books that she saw on men's but not women's bookshelves. The middlebrow books are just books read in high school or something. I like a lot of the list
Somebody had an essay saying that men's favorite female authors were flannary o'conner Virginia wolf and Jane Austin. That was pretty acurarate for me.
Hateful Eight reimagines the western as "what if the early scene where people stop at a trading post is most of the movie?"
I think I'd get interested in this stuff if Lars von Trier decided to remake a Tarantino film shot for shot. No real preference as to which one. (For your files, bob, Tarantino is so exclusively tied to adolescence for me -- my second date in tenth grade! -- that I don't think I could possibly take his work out of that box again. It wasn't such a fun date and the influence of "Pulp Fiction" on youth culture, not negligible in my circle, was pretty irritating.)
319.2 is blowing my mind with its typos.
Jane Austin, the well-known Texas author.
Oh, if I were to recommend anything in this thread, it would be About Elle (Elly?)
To quote Slate, in a Quentinish mode, and to reveal a spoiler that isn't much of one, a woman gets slapped by her husband, and the audience is asked if "the bitch deserved it." The last scene involves said woman sitting alone in a kitchen deeply contemplating herself if indeed she did deserve a slap or worse.
Go out on a limb and say I don't know but tend toward not.
When TWYRCL was on the same Letterman episode as Stallone, she was astonished to hear him talking to DL about his paintings.
When TWYRCL was on the same Letterman episode
Wait, what?
You didn't know that TWYRCL is B/rigitte N/ielsen? Thought that was an open secret at this point.
Sylvester Stallone had a weird start to his career, because both of them were actually pretty intelligent movies with flawed working class protagonists
This reminds me of a thought, which should possibly be a separate thread -- I feel popular entertainment in the 70s and 80s was much more aware about class dynamics, and that it's occasionally weird how much of contemporary pop culture avoids dealing with class in any meaningful way.
I have, actually, quoted Halford's comment, "Slap Shot is one of the best American movies about class and deindustrialization, period." In a real life conversation (sadly it did not convince the person to watch it).
In that vein, I recently happened across Cindi Lauper's version of, "Money Changes Everything" and was surprised at just how much it felt like a product of a very different time.
You didn't know that TWYRCL is
I enjoyed looking at people who have appeared with Stallone on Letterman. Lunchy is either Public Enemy, Melissa Etheridge, or Tommy Lasorda.
Tommy Lasorda, that fat pasta eater, is 88. He signed with the Phillies in 1945.
This is very sad.
In 1991, Tom, Jr. ... died of complications related to AIDS.[11] Lasorda was reportedly estranged from his son at the time of his death. Not only does Lasorda vehemently deny that his son was gay,[12] according to sportswriter Bill Plaschke, he insists his son died of cancer.[13]
I hope you can bring him around, Flip.
the influence of "Pulp Fiction" on youth culture, not negligible in my circle, was pretty irritating.
Heh, I have a line from pulp fiction in my yearbook write up.
330- One complication of AIDS that causes death is a virally-induced kind of cancer you only get with a weakened immune system, so it's possible he's not really lying.
Death certificate apparently said pneumonia caused by dehydration caused by AIDS. I didn't click on the cancer claim reference.
I am far from a Lasorda fan but (a) Plascke is far worse (b) he gave the world this and many similar, unrecorded rants, so all is forgiven.
Also he straight-up attacked the Philly Phanatic. Good times, can't hate on the guy too much.
Heh, I have a line from pulp fiction in my yearbook write up.
Given a choice between that and Piers Anthony, I'd go with Tarantino too. Which line was it?
Just the number of the bible verse. Maybe people who didn't get it thought I was a fundie.
That's high school all right! (Mine was from this.)
We didn't have quotes. I did put in a picture of my grandmother. She volunteered at the library and I like trivial nepotism.
These days, given the number of recent school shootings, I'm not sure someone could get away with putting Ezekiel 25:17 in their yearbook writeup. Tarantino wrote a whole fancy paragraph for Jules to say, but the actual verse is just:
And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the LORD, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.That's the sort of thing that can get kids long discussions with the principal and/or therapist and/or the police.
omg 329 i'm dying
Tarantino is so exclusively tied to adolescence for meTarantino
The guy is like an incredibly talented 13yo boy, with all the sociopathy and shallowness that entails.
I've gotten older. Tarantino's stayed the same age.
The guy is like an incredibly talented 13yo boy, with all the sociopathy and shallowness that entails.
I don't think that's a fair description of the director of "Jackie Brown". I really rather liked that one.
317: I think it marks an interesting stylistic turn for Tarantino. The entire thing has about (this isn't really a spoiler I swear) three sets, and almost all of it is confined to a single room. If the dialog style wasn't recognizable as Tarantino it could easily be a Mamet play or something.
This is also a good description of "Reservoir Dogs". There's the diner, the warehouse, and short flashbacks in Nice Guy Eddie's office, a bar somewhere, a rooftop and a couple of streets.
316 rather impressively anticipates an unbearably pretentious/self-regarding discussion of H8 guest-posted on Kotsko's blog. I was rather annoyed by it, but knowing that this twit is saying the same thing as bob makes it all better.
I have, actually, quoted Halford's comment, "Slap Shot is one of the best American movies about class and deindustrialization, period." In a real life conversation (sadly it did not convince the person to watch it).
I actually had to take a break from watching Slap Shot because using the death of steel in Johnstown as background color* was too upsetting for a basically comic movie.
*even though that's not really what it is, but it kind of is
I have, actually, quoted Halford's comment, "Slap Shot is one of the best American movies about class and deindustrialization, period." In a real life conversation (sadly it did not convince the person to watch it).
I actually had to take a break from watching Slap Shot because using the death of steel in Johnstown as background color* was too upsetting for a basically comic movie.
*even though that's not really what it is, but it kind of is
guest-posted
APS is one of the oldest co-posters there, and IIRC a cofounder of the blog.
Dammit.
Anyway, finally saw TFA tonight, so I could come back to read this thread. I liked it a lot, and being aware of the first, positive reviews, and then the (inevitable) backlash, I came down pretty strongly on the "it's actually good" side. I tend to think that a lot of the criticism comes down to retconned admiration for the first 2, the desire to turn a nostalgic appreciation for movies that were entertaining first, and good second (if that) into something more. But a movie can be exceptionally fun without being exceptionally deep, and that's ok. In that sense, this movie is extremely true to the original.
Also, having been primed with the idea that it was just a beat-by-beat repeat, I was pleased that it's not, exactly. I mean, it's close enough that the point is valid, but I'd read stuff implying that it was the equivalent of the student rephrasing an encyclopedia entry for his research report, but there were repeats, echoes, rhymes, and actually new things (did Rey's scavenging repeat anything? Not AKAIK) that added up to pleasure.
And, on top of all that, just fucking gorgeous throughout. Which, again, is a real value, but one that the people who want it to Mean Something have to downplay
Oh, and the kids, who saw the first two once, years ago, enjoyed the hell out of it. IOW, the pleasure was not just about nostalgia.
I do agree with the general point that this movie has set the stage, and that the next ones need to do something interesting/different. But I think "reboot" is a bit too dismissive for what Abrams did.
The whole scavenging thing made me wonder how the economy is supposed to work. You've got what looks like basically limitless power and still you have Rey hauling junk across the desert in a net? Why doesn't somebody just cut it up and tractor-beam it up?
352: Probably for the same reasons that our high energy society has near- or actually-slave labor doing things like shelling shrimp and recycling electronics.
Kudos to whoever linked the Todd Alcott stuff. I like and agree with basically all he says.
Maybe their robots have more rights than some humans.
Actually, the AI of droids seems to be top notch, but I don't think we see a lot of evidence that they've solved the specialization issue. Right now, IRL, you've got incredibly capable robots... who can do one thing. They're working on mobile-capable robots like those cheetah units or whatever, but those things can't actually do anything else. Point being, were nowhere near able to build a robot that can e.g crawl through a window, quietly open a cabinet, and manipulate what's inside it. And I, at least, think that claims that we're anywhere near doing so are blindly optimistic.
Now look at droids in the SW universe. The battle droids are pathetic. In the original trilogy, none of them are remotely as physically capable as a human across a range of activities. Maybe I'm forgetting something, but I can't think of any examples of a droid that could do what Rey does. Whether that's a conscious decision or just Lucas' barely-considered choice, that seems to be how droids work: smarter than ours, and with certain capabilities, but not swappable for sentient bipeds.
As for cutting up chunks and salvaging, I think the answer is simply that, on a bang for the buck basis, there's no upside. Any power capable of it can get better/newer equivalents cheaper/easier. But poor, marginal communities can't buy new, so they scavenge. To me, that's a very appealing aspect of the SW universe: it's not post-scarcity along all axes or for all populations.
I finally saw it tonight. I liked some aspects, like the new characters and their interactions with Solo, but you could have shuffled the scenes and ended with roughly as good a story.
Thinking on it a little more, I very much liked the dynamic between Rey and Finn where he was ostensibly the more worldly, but she's always a half step ahead of him (and really not because of the force stuff; OK, she can pilot the Falcon because of Force, but otherwise, she's scrappy/street smart). It allows for some nice one-liners (e.g. when she comments how lucky it is that the blast door closed to save him from the beastie), but also helps build rapport.
I've seen a lot of stuff discussing how their relationship subverts gender expectations, which it does, but the other part of the dynamic is a smart choice, too.
One other thing: I've seen a few things questioning how events just 30 years old can have been lost to the mists of time, but that's not right. It's not that people like Rey don't know what happened, it's that they, with good reason, don't believe the more fantastical parts. Rey wants it to be true, but she doesn't take it on faith. [This is covered upthread, but I wanted to reiterate].
The part that makes less sense is that, up until ~60 years ago, there were 1000 (10,000?) Jedi all over the galaxy, a memory that should be less likely to fade*, but that's a problem with the prequels, not with TFA. You can't expect the new movie to magically fix a mistake made in previous ones, because that paradox/difficulty was baked into Han Solo's skepticism in the original.
*although I recently read an interesting blog post discussing that the essentially fabulist Geoffrey of Monmouth got 2 unlikely facts about Stonehenge right (that it was originally built in the far west, and then rebuilt on Salisbury Hill), which raises the possibility that somehow this fact survived thousands of years. The post notes, however, how quickly memory fades, giving as an example a poem written in 8th C. England that talks about ruined Roman cities, obviously without the slightest idea of how the cities worked. If 200 years is enough to forget what an aqueduct in your back yard is for, then maybe 60 years is enough for people to to stop believing that knights with magic used to lead armies into battle on distant planets.
Han's skepticism isn't that hard to explain. If the same storm troopers who can't hit him with a blaster killed thousands of Jedi, it seems reasonable to doubt that the Force is worth a shit.
Stonehenge was the first mobile home. The owners of the first unit tried to take a vacation to Wiltshire, but couldn't make it so they sold it as a used temple. The company folded due to lack of a second customer.
I would like to subscribe to 363's newsletter.
What's the real life equivalent to getting tractor beamed in via geriatric Han Solo? Driving across the desert, being stopped by an armed convoy and learning it's led by the Henry Kissinger?