Wednesday, January 17, 2018

attack and defense

I'm only a few paragraphs from being done with my magnum opus of a meditation on "The Last Jedi." In the meantime, to keep you entertained, here are two takes on the movie—one an attack, the other a defense.

First, the attack: a guy named James Raney claims "The Last Jedi" is objectively bad:


Next, the defense: Jenny Nicholson (whose humorous shtick seems to involve an autistic avoidance of eye contact with the camera) offers up "The Top Ten Worst Reasons You Hated 'The Last Jedi'":






at

1 comment:

  1. CharlesJanuary 17, 2018 at 4:41:00 PM GMT+9

    I watched these in reverse order, because I suspected I would be more inclined to agree with the first one. To my surprise, I ended up agreeing with most of what was said by both of them.

    However, Jenny seemed to be fixating on a lot of straw men, at least from my perspective. That is, none of the reasons she cited (except the single one I disagreed with, #4 (everything is Holdo's fault)) are reasons why I didn't like the film. Maybe there are people out there who didn't like the film for those reasons, but I am not one of them. (I did really enjoy her take on snakes in the SW universe, though.) Aside from the fact that I hated Holdo, my main disagreement with Jenny is that subversion of expectations is automatically a good thing. Yeah, that only works if you have something meaningful to bring to the table instead--otherwise it's just snark.

    I didn't like the film mainly for the reasons that James cites: It was just a poorly written film with main characters who were not compelling. I completely agree about Rey. She is the worst Star Wars character, perhaps next to only Jin Urso (we go from a strong female character who has no agency to a strong female character who is way more powerful than she has any right to be... hmmm). And I think James makes a very good point at the end about critics giving the film a pass when it is so poorly written. I could speculate on why that is, but then I would be getting political and I don't want to do that. Not in public, at any rate.

    Bottom line: I didn't love the film, but I didn't vehemently hate it, either. Maybe that is why I found something to agree with in both of these videos. (And also because they are not talking about the same things, I guess.)

    ReplyDelete

READ THIS BEFORE COMMENTING!

All comments are subject to approval before they are published, so they will not appear immediately. Comments should be civil, relevant, and substantive. Anonymous comments are not allowed and will be unceremoniously deleted. For more on my comments policy, please see this entry on my other blog.

AND A NEW RULE (per this post): comments critical of Trump's lying must include criticism of Biden's or Kamala's or some prominent leftie's lying on a one-for-one basis! Failure to be balanced means your comment will not be published.