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stars vii the force awakens

Star Wars Rogue Y Tho?

Ok so evidently I wasn’t too hyped about this moving leaving it until now to actually watch and not spending any money to do so. And really my first thoughts are just; Why? Why does this exist?

Like seriously, I think this is the first time I’ve been watching a film and been like ‘Why am I watching this? Why would someone make this?’

The answer is obvious to anyone, it’s just money, but that makes me really sad.

The fact that this movie even exists is just so cynical and I can’t help watching it and thinking about how it feels like it was literally constructed in a board room. Even before I get down to the bare bones of why I didn’t like it, I just think it didn’t need to exist. The movie is soulless and aimless. It just exists for the sake of it. With it’s beniton advert cast with it’s token chinese person, gotta grab that chinese market there and it’s token evil white guys and cg Tarkin which was also needless.

I mean that should be your first red flag, if you need to revive not one but two people with tv voodoo you probably should just leave it alone. I know people made excuses for it but come on, it looked like crap. They could have just left him out of the movie or replaced him with a guy who just never turned around and it would have looked better than this videogame character/animated corpse. It was just wrong and anyone that says otherwise is just making excuses.

Honestly I went into this movie wanting to hate it, I really did, but any hate I could have had was overshadowed by my supreme indifference towards it. I can’t hate it because there’s nothing really substantive enough in it to hate, it’s sort of a nothing burger of a film, it’s not even really there. The characters that you’re supposed to like and care about *spoilers* and subsequently watch die are bland and uninteresting.

I couldn’t help comparing it to the magnificent seven trying to work out why that worked and this didn’t because in a way I felt it could be compared. Because you have this rag tag band of people drawn together and each person gets their own little bit where they do something brave and then die, like in magnificent seven (despite some living). But the thing about the magnificent seven is it uses it’s two hour plus screen time to build up these characters and make them distinct enough to care about them in varying degrees. I know I was more upset when Charles Bronson’s character died than I was when Red died despite the fact I liked Red but they both had their moments, their own little arcs and to see it close was meaningful and significant. It felt like a whole person died as apposed to a character or in this case a market, a buying demographic.

You don’t get that in this and what really pissed me off the most I have to say and it’s not the boring fights or the sort of stunted lame story but it’s the fact your biggest grossing actors in this case Forrest Whitaker and Mads Mikkelsen are literally in it for about two minutes collectively. And this is despite Whitaker being on the box art and promotional material.

This genuinely pissed me off because first off you see him for like a second younger when he finds, shit I was about call her Rey haha. Shows how distinctive and memorable she was as a character. Gin, he find gin and then he comes back years later with metal legs and looks like a total badass but does he get in a fight? Does he fuck, he literally gets vapourized by the death after like a minute of exposition. So that was my first red flag.

Actually no, my first red flag was why is Mads Mikkelsen in this film and why is he playing a mild mannered scientist and not some bad ass villain or sith? I mean you get one chance to use this actor, the guy who literally played hannibal and a bond villain and you use him to play some nothing character that gets killed off pointlessly and spends his like two minutes of screen time cooing over the daughter he spends all of like two seconds with.

What a waste of two great actors. You can never use either of them again now, they could have been awesome bounty hunters or assassins but no, now they’re just two dead boring guys unless they’re gonna make a prequel to this shitty movie, which I hope to christ they don’t.

That’s the main thing that really annoyed me. The casting choices just seemed to be token, just trying to find the biggest names they could get and casting them as anyone.

The other characters are ultimately forgettable even the guy who played ipman, he’s just a sort of boiled down version of any character from any kung fu movie really and he’s only there to try and make money on the chinese market. (Which they failed to do)

I didn’t care about their deaths and this is a long movie, so you had all this time to make me care about these characters and I still don’t. And this movie is actually longer than magnificent seven.

Ok onto the main character, of which her backstory fits into all of the two minutes before Forest whitaker is vapourized. So she’s the daughter of this science guy and then spends sometime off screen where she becomes the best of this guys soldiers at sixteen. Which says a lot about the rebel alliance, if their best soldier is a sixteen year old girl, you’ve got problems.

So instant Mary sue badass that everyone loves and respects and would die for check. There’s not much more I can say really, the movie is just sort of bleh, it’s cookie cutter and it was made in a board room not someone’s heart.

Gonna rant a little about the ending and the decline of hollywood and I’m out.

Right so one thing I’ve noticing about hollywood and it’s painfully obvious in this movie is the step away from moral story telling and romantic plot lines. Don’t get me wrong the romance in the prequels was cringey as fuck but to not have one in this movie was a little glaring, like why not? It’s a movie. I mean that sounds dumb, I mean just because there’s a hot guy and a hot girl in a movie doesn’t mean they should hook up. But I dunno it just made it sort of awkward at the end when they’re about to be obliterated by an orbital death lazer for them to have  a platonic hug. I was like, dude got friendzoned hard #Deathstarred.

I mean it was so odd my brother swears he remembers them kissing but they did not. It just strikes a queer note. That it would have been relatively easy to inject a moral or romantic plotline but it was purposefully left out. So this movie was more preoccupied with making a bad ass woman getting money from chinese people and signalling to fans of the original franchise than having a romance or making the female character human in anyway.

Now onto the signalling, a lot of memes I see and even my brother made a big deal about this and what we’re talking about is the end sequence when Darth Vader has a bit of a fight. I say he has a fight when it’s really just him murdering a bunch of dudes in a cool way. And yeah it was cool and I spent those brief seconds of that action thinking “Wouldn’t it be cool if the other two hours of this movie was like this?”. It was a nice little treat, like a cherry on top of a bland creampie full of empty calories.

That’s whats so bad about this movie, because it hints at the other films, you get to see the pigfaced guy from the bar scene before he gets his arm cut off and it has a little cameo from r2 and 3po and vader and tarkin but they’re not actually in the film. They don’t have an impact on the story, they’re just little extras, little titbits, window dressing, little reminders of the film you actually liked, which isn’t this.

It’s just so pathetically try hard, it’s like I’m watching a sad fan film. This is the movie equivalent of halloween harley quinn cosplayer. “Hey look at me, I’m that thing you like”. But there’s a difference between those films we liked and this film that takes the time to vaguely reference those films without having any of the memorable characters or action or story. “Hey remember those films you liked, I’m pointing at some of the characters that were in that, like me please!”

It’s just pathetic honestly. And I don’t know what’s sadder the fact the movie industry is cynical and greedy enough to roll the corpse of this franchise out into this boring nothing of a film or that audiences nevertheless pay money to watch it and will defend just because it vaguely reminds them of the films they liked but in a way that’s akin to the murderer of their grandmother wearing her skin and making you peanut butter sandwiches. It’s not your grandmother, it just looks like her sort of and that isn’t peanut butter.

I mean honestly, what next? Are they going to make a movie about c3po working on jabbas pleasure barge? Are we going to get a movie about guido shooting first? If this is the standard what can’t they make a movie about at this point?

I’d heard that these guys would be recurring as the knights of ren, this order of non-force using villains which would have been awesome. If the tone of the movie was to set up a band of villains for Rey and the gang to fight in the new movies that would have given the movie purpose and gravitas, but that seems unlikely.

It genuinely adds nothing to the star wars universe, it creates characters we don’t care about only to then kill them off with no overarching moral message or parable that makes the whole message hollow. The movie doesn’t need to exist. I mean I could understand if some of them recurred in the main arch but they all die, so what was the point? Oh right, money. I mean all my gripes with the force awakens it atleast adds new characters and plots lines to the franchise. I only really like one of them but at least it added something, this is just a completely pointless film that serves only to waylay you of your time and money in exchange for one decent Darth Vader scene.

Ok rant over haha.

 

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Star Wars the force awakens the internet’s feckless crybabies.

Ok I said I would tackle this ‘issue’ just for fun, this might not be what some were expecting when I said I’d rant about the monopoly thing but who cares, this is my opinion, don’t like it write an angry comment I can ignore and go on with your day.
When I first saw this article I wasn’t that surprised. Recently it seems like the current generation are just prone waiting for the next minor injustice to be offended by. And then let everyone on twitter know what amazing progressive wunderkin they are for being offended at said non-issue first and receive the most pats on the back from their like minded drooling idiot followers.

So down to the ‘problem’ at hand, with the release of the new Star Wars movie, the force awakens. The force was awakened to a bunch of new star wars related crap parents are forced to buy their squealing offspring to secure their love for another year. One such piece of crap was a set of star wars the force awakens monopoly.

So far so good, monopoly, harmless capitalism in a box with a star wars theme, not the first time and probably wont be the last time a new set of star wars monopoly is released. But the ‘big deal’ about this new star wars and this new set of monopoly is that the new main character of this current incarnation of star wars happens to be a carrier of a holey vagina. And that said character was not featured in the set of monopoly, oh shit I should have put a trigger warning in there, I’m sure by now people are foaming at the mouth and snapping their problem glasses in half.

Obviously the internet is in an uproar, over monopoly, no seriously.
“It’s sexist” “Holy misogyny batman” “But the force awakens in Rey!” Wah wah wah, it’s just fucking monopoly, who cares? These idiots care, idiots who inject feminism and gender and race into every stupid fucking thing and just can’t let anything go.

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Here are the offensive monopoly pieces in question as you can see, not a vagina between them, what a travesty.
So the characters from left to right are; Return of the Jedi Luke Skywalker, Finn, Kylo Ren and Darth Vader.
The theme of the board game was heroes vs villains so you have two heroes vs two villains, now this to me is the first point of contention. Anyone who watched force awakens knows there was only one villain because no one counts Ron Weasley’s older brother, Captain Phasma who has like three lines and Darth Golem. They would never make good pieces to go alongside Kylo, who would want to play as Emperor Snoke? He’s not this hugely fleshed out character and he just spends the entire movie sitting down looking menacing.
The thing I think a lot of the internet’s pearl clutchers overlook is the fact that if Finn was substituted for Rey I think the shitstorm would have been equal if not worse, with Black lives matter taking a shit on Hasbro’s lawn and wiping their asses with Chewbaccas face.
Really you’re between a rock and a hard place in terms of representation, and star wars has always been poked at by race baiters and other idiots for having a white character voiced by a black man because that’s racist… for reasons.
But “hold on” say the shrill masses of the internet, “Why don’t they just have Rey and Finn?” Well yeah that would solve all the problems except the two villains required, you can’t just have Vader next to Kylo when Vader is dead in that movie, so you’d have to replace him with Phasma or Snoke.
Bare in mind this monopoly set would have been mass produced months before the movie was even in cinemas so they have no idea how well the movie will do let alone how well characters like Phasma and Snoke will track. In my opinion this is Hasbro trying to straddle two markets to insure themselves against another possible star wars flop. They decided to include Luke and Vader so as to ensure the set would sell even if the movie didn’t because Vader and Luke will always sell you can always bank on the original trilogy making money.It would have been a total gamble not including those original characters.

The other argument I hear is “Why don’t they just make more pieces?” yeah well why don’t they include a dye cast model of the bar scene in mos eisley or a life size model of the yoda training scene in the dagoba swamps? Because it would cost too much fucking money. Every company has a projection for how much money they want to make and how much they’re willing to spend and obviously four pewter figures was the maximum amount they wanted to mass produce per set because four players is the optimal amount for one game of monopoly.
And again if they included Rey who would be her adversary? There’s still only one villain in the force awakens, you can’t just have two Kylo Rens that’s dumb.
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Another ‘controversy’ from kneejerk morons on the internet was over this Millenium Falcon toy because again it doesn’t have the vagina having wonder aboard.
“SEXISM” MUH-SOGGY-KNEES!!!”

Is it though? Notice anything else missing from this piece, ahem, Han fucking Solo perhaps??
Yeah Rey and Han aren’t included because this was made long before the movies came out and probably released before or at the same time as the film and those character’s aren’t included to prevent spoilers for the movie itself. So it’s not that Finn is more important because he’s male because the fucking robot is included but Han is nowhere to be found.
But the bottom line is toys like this are aimed at boys, no matter how ‘progressive’ you are you have to realise not all toys are aimed at every type of child.
Toy companies make money by appealing to a particular demographic and they do this by product testing and market projections. And despite this wave of progressive feminist thought, little boys still like playing with action figures and space ships more than little girls and probably wouldn’t play with a female action figure.
I mean there’s probably the odd one or two male childrem that will play with a female doll and a girl that might like a space ship over a barbie but toy companies don’t make toys for the minority of kids, they make them for lowest common denominator because that’s how you make money.
In conclusion this is just another example of idiots on the internet with dumb agendas trying to push them by ignoring the all the facts and twisting every non-issue into a way that somehow oppresses them for some contrived reason, nothing to see here people, move along.

Thanks as always go to Florian for doing the art on the strip, if you want to see more strips and more of Florian’s messed up art, head to the Jeffrey Dahmer and Greg comic page for more fucked up un-pc humour.

Cheers!

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Star Wars the force just needs ten more minutes

It’s s been like a week since I saw the latest star wars movie and of course I thought this would be perfect timing to do an informal review when I’ve pretty much forgotten most of the movie and everyone and their great aunt has reviewed it already and moved on to talking about the patriarchal oppression of monopoly sets.

It’s just been awhile since I’ve done an off the top of the head kind of blog and I wanted to see if I could still spit free style nonsense.

Ok my first impression from the trailers was mixed, it looked cool, like a back to form sort of cool. But the way the trailers were shot was a little too in my face in regards to the race and the genders of the main characters. It looked a little needy to me, maybe that’s just because of the year we had in regards to all this social justice nonsense polluting everything but it seemed a little like it was pandering to that demographic of self congratulatory modern day yuppies.
It’s not something I thought was that relevant when I watched the movie, there was no hammy speech made by Rey or Finn on the necessity of diversity or women in the rebel (Sorry ‘resistance’) work force. But it seemed like JJ felt like he needed to apologize for slave Leia and Darth Vader turning out to be white by pushing a woman and minority character to the forefront for a much needed pat on the back from the diversity police as a way of saying ‘Thanks for not including anymore white men’. As I say I didn’t think it too relevant at the start but apologetics seemed to become a more relevant overall theme as it went on.

I don’t really feel like going into great detail about the main characters just yet because I feel like they’re characters that will grow with the new series. But in a nutshell there’s Finn an ex storm trooper turned shit talker, an ex scavenger turned super Jedi Mary sue Rey and an Ex member of Hanson turned emo sith Cadet Kylo Ren.

I didn’t really have much of an issue with them and in fact I rather liked them despite their characters being a little stale, I thought Finn needed more dialogue, I liked his arc, I just don’t think the story was big enough to make room for him and Rey and Kylo and everyone else. I felt like he got sidelined a little.
Rey is probably the most annoying character and I’ve already heard people describe her as a Mary sue and she is kind of a Mary sue. She’s basically good at everything and never fails at anything, and spoilers she like out jedis Obi Wan without any training whatsoever and beat a sith captain who was probably trained since birth by Luke Skywalker himself without ever having picked up a lightsaber before. It really pissed me off because it just begs belief, it swerved a little too far into ridiculousness.

But I don’t feel that annoyed because I think all these characters are growing and their arcs will get deeper and more interesting in the later films (fuck I sound like an apologist).

Ok ok I saved my favourite until last; yeah predictably my favourite character was Kylo Ren. I can’t really put my finger on it, but at the start he’s sort of the generic Vader copy but then when he takes off his mask he takes on a depth of character of his own that I think really pays off throughout the movie.

I think Driver’s performance was perfect, I know people are calling him this emo fag or whatever and I even compared him a little to Haden Christenson’s shockingly bad portrayal of Anakin Skywalker myself. But I just can’t put my finger on it, Driver brings a level of intensity and angst that really sells it and it’s almost like he succeeds at what Christenson was aiming for and just missed the mark of. That troubled dark man child with a sword in his hand and I think it really worked, he didn’t induce cringes, he really sizzled and was sort of creepy and likeable at the same time.
This was the difference between him and the heroes, we’re used to Star Wars being a little cringey and especially after the shockingly bad prequels but he wasn’t the least bit cringe worthy, he really nailed it and I can’t wait to see how his character develops later into the trilogy. He’s one of these characters that makes me sad that all heroes have to win in the end and life is just so two dimensional like that, and skewed so that reality has to bend to the will of good always winning.

Another thing that is so different and sets this film apart from all the others is the action. The action is something never before seen in star wars, we’re used to this heavily choreographed amazing acrobatic lightsaber duels. We don’t get any of that; it’s all gritty balls to the wall lightsaber street fights almost. Untrained amateurs hacking away at each other with deadly glow sticks. I sound pissed, but I think it was a lot less flowery and way more intense. It looked less like a dance and more like an actual fight.

Now the crux of the matter with this movie is that the internet is split between singing its praises just for not being the prequels and hipsters saying it’s the emperor’s new clothes. And as it usually is the case, the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Yeah it was hardly the most original film ever, the formula is pretty much a recreation of a new hope but I don’t really begrudge that, history repeating itself is a common (maybe lazy) theme in lots of movies. And it wasn’t the most spectacular movie, it wasn’t perfect but neither was new hope or any of the star wars movies. But bottom-line I enjoyed it.

There was never a moment I was bored or just cringing so hard I couldn’t open my eyes like the prequels.
But that I think is the biggest problem with this film, its ‘safe’.

Say what you will about the prequels but they took risks, they fell flat on their face but that’s taking risks for you.
The Force Awakens is paint by numbers star wars movie but what it lacks in originality it makes up for with a higher calibre of acting and compelling characters and action.
But to go back to what I was saying about this being an apology. That’s what I feel was going on here, a solid movie piggybacking on the original trilogy that didn’t stray into prequel territory. No matter what people say about the originality, we wanted a star wars movie and that’s what we got.
I’m being honest with you when I say, I really wanted to be a total hipster douche and shit on this movie to protect the honour of the original trilogy but I can’t. It’s a solid, very entertaining film with fresh new characters that will grow with us as an audience.

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