That botox doesn't make her look 68....sure seems like retirement age...
I’ll bring the cup cakes.
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Kathleen Kennedy
- Thread starter Disneyland68
- Start date
Sirwalterraleigh
Premium Member
“It’s not the years, sweetheart...it’s the mileage”
The prequels were, in truth, warmly received by the public as a whole, warts and all, much like the original trilogy. I distinctly remember the massive lines for the films back in the day and the thunderous applause at the end of each one. And their RT scores were no lower than 70, even The Phantom Menace was, until the 2012 3D rerelease. Then society as a whole was basically gaslit into believing there was hate from the beginning, even the cast members now have memories of something that never happened.
It was that way with the prequels, and the same is true of the Disney era. The public as a whole have accepted these films and series with open arms and enjoy them with ease. I am proud to count myself among that number, ever since I first was introduced to it with the 1997 Special Editions of the original trilogy.
Sirwalterraleigh
Premium Member
..ehhh...not so much. I remember being at ground zero and it didn’t play quite that way. There was a lot of visceral hatred in the early 2000s and that was before social media and smartphones and tablets and YouTube.
those movies made money...no doubt. But George was absolutely roasted by a large amount of the Star Wars fanbase. Anyone that says it was 5 guys in moms basement is lying to everyone including themselves.
that response is responsible for half of TFA’s box office..:
“Disney will fix what George screwed up”. That was the subliminal undertone. Even the skeptic in my mirror believed that.
the DT is much worse in the important categories.
I was there at the time. I SAW the absolute love radiating out for these films from the fans, the deafening applause of the standing ovation...for Attack of the Clones. How they were exiting the theater absolute ecstatic and pleased.
It was always only a vocal minority that bashed these films for any reason other than "Jar-Jar is annoying", and this minority got to rewrite history when the hatchet job of "The People vs. George Lucas" came out, then when the 3D rerelease happened. The hate didn't truly arrive until then.
It was always only a vocal minority that bashed these films for any reason other than "Jar-Jar is annoying", and this minority got to rewrite history when the hatchet job of "The People vs. George Lucas" came out, then when the 3D rerelease happened. The hate didn't truly arrive until then.
lazyboy97o
Well-Known Member
The oldest archive of the Rotten Tomatoes page for The Phantom Menance says otherwise.
Sirwalterraleigh
Premium Member
I won’t dispute you... I just think that the staying power of Star Wars is the phenomenon. That’s what set it apart.
I know kids grew up with those toys...since toys were still a thing then...
but those movies didn’t have the stay. Not nearly to the legacy level. Different times and place is a big part of that - for sure.
i can remember being amused by the lightsaber fighting in attack of the clones...
And then being amused the next day thinking about how badly written/acted that movie was...
i’ll bet the ranch that was a very common reaction.
That movie was awful...completely ridiculous in every way. By far the worst one.
Even for sci-fi.
there is a video...I’ll try to find it...of Rick McCallum and some of the LFL bigwigs in the kitchen at Skywalker ranch talking just a screening. If I recall...it was just after the basic “final cut” was done with effects...maybe a week before release?
if anyone wants to understand the prequels...which then ending up being a problem Disney near repeated almost the same...you need to see this clip.
Sharon&Susan
Well-Known Member
Sirwalterraleigh
Premium Member
This is probably the biggest myth in Hollywood history. “5 guys in moms basement”
those dudes didn’t have the power.
those movies are bad...or at least inferior in most ways to the expectation. There are a lot of factors into the reception and the legacy...it’s complicated. But it’s not a myth as to what was made and what happened.
disney had something similar happen. It’s explained away as “not a thing...just angry people”...but when you have a 35% drop followed by 19% box office drop in modern, throw away Hollywood...that isn’t nothing.
episode 1 was the most anticipated movie of all time. No argument. Episode 9 should have been but wasn’t even in the ballpark.
we can all have varying opinions...but they should take into account as many details as they can.
angry fanboy is an excuse...the product is much worse.
Sharon&Susan
Well-Known Member
Are you implying that Ahmed Best somehow misremembered receiving death threats, because of a movie that most people have never heard of?
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I said BESIDES Jar-Jar. Natalie Portman says she remembers hate leveled at her, but it never happened at the time.
Sharon&Susan
Well-Known Member
So basically everyone except for Ahmed Best somehow misremembered 13 years of their lives because of a movie that no one saw and reviews of a 3D conversion that somehow made everyone hate the prequels for 5 years until the Last Jedi despite everyone thinking until then they were literal masterpieces?
lazyboy97o
Well-Known Member
You left out the Internet Archive being hacked to change Rotten Tomatoes scores.
Sirwalterraleigh
Premium Member
natalie Portman...around the time she won the Oscar for that ballet movie...gave interviews thanking mike Nichols (for casting her in closer) - for “giving her a chance”.
she was a piriah in Hollywood after wooden George got done with her.
Of course Hayden Christiansen’s issues were out there as well.
anyone beating down daisy Ridley or John boyega’s door?? Adam driver is still more “the guy from girls”
you can’t screw up Star Wars...which is why Disney’s mistakes were more egregious. The prequels happened...messing up was far more avoidable. So they did a reboot and gave Harrison ford a big check...and then delve into what was basically very bad Star Trek or Netflix sci-fi (no offense to Star Trek...that never actively tried to get silly/dim witted)
these things happened. But unfortunately some won’t believe the backlash if it doesn’t involve some kind of armed demonstration with molotovs on the street.
“people still love Star Wars!”
seems like they tolerate it now...then forget it. Which is not what Star Wars was or the goal Disney had. So they have been quietly moving things around inside LFL...they just don’t have a presser on the front steps next to the yoda statue saying “my bad...we got cute and made the same mistakes...no more hairbun or pee jokes...”
"Anyone beating down Ridley and Boyega's door?" Ummmm...YES! She's done Murder on the Orient Express and Chaos Walking, was in the English dub for Studio Ghibli's Only Yesterday, and has plenty of projects in the pipeline. Just because many of them are indie doesn't make them not a big freaking deal. Same with Boyega, especially since his new shingle has a first-look deal with Netflix, even with the news of him pulling out of a movie due to family concerns. And need I remind you of his role in Katheryn Bigelow's Detroit?
"Adam Driver is seen as just the guy from Girls." Wow, are you way off base. Especially when he has meaty roles from Scorsese's Silence, The Report and the film Marriage Story to his CV, as well as an upcoming horror project, 65, exec. produced by Sam Raimi, and a passion project called Yankee Commandante in the pipeline. Not to mention being a successful and well-liked SNL host; he is truly seen is a real, serious actor.
"Natalie Portman was a liability in Hollywood because of wooden George. She thanked Mike Nichols for giving her a real career." Not even remotely true. Portman was already a well-established actress thanks to The Professional and her bit part in Michael Mann's Heat, and even while doing the prequels, she had Anywhere But Here, Where the Heart Is, Cold Mountain, Garden State and V for Vendetta on her resume. Black Swan didn't "give her a real career", Portman was a very bankable and popular star during this time, BECAUSE of the prequels.
My point regarding the RT scores is true, and it mostly applies to contemporaneous reviews, reviews from the original release. Look at the original six films again: if you take only the contemporaneous reviews from the time of release, no film has a score below 70, and each film stays in that area, no film going higher than 80. Even the original and Empire.
My point that the audiences have accepted each film warmly is also true. But accepting it warmly is not the same as thinking a film is a masterpiece. Far from it. But be honest with yourselves. No Star Wars film is a masterpiece, not even Empire. The problems everyone damns the prequels and the Disney films for having already existed in the original trilogy, just as visibly, just as much. The reason you refuse to see it that way is because you refuse to take off the rose-colored nostalgia glasses. The audiences have accepted each film as valid and belonging together, and actually LIKE, even LOVE, these films. It has always been this way, and it certainly was that way for the longest time.
The media has never said "it's just angry fanboys denouncing the films, a small minority." On the contrary, they INVENTED the narrative that "fan backlash is at a high," they created the storyline because they wanted clickbait and revenue, and they knew "fanbase is largely content" doesn't sell stories. They AMPLIFIED the whiny losers to be representative of the fanbase as a whole, to build a narrative that didn't exist. They built it up, time after time, year after year, and they succeeded in gaslighting the public to rewrite history. And many people easily accepted that at face value, their memories shifting and adapting with this narrative. Odds are that your memories have been corrupted in this manner, because of the media smear. It certainly happened to Natalie Portman, because she didn't personally receive hate and death threats, nor were fans truly angry with series, but the media narrative is now part of her memory, and Keira Knightley has completely forgotten being Padme's decoy on The Phantom Menace.
The media wasn't going to bat for The Last Jedi in terms of writing stories to defend it from the fanboy attacks; they enabled them and helped create the manufactroversy. Then they wanted, NEEDED, a sequel to that, so they were all set to attack Rise of Skywalker, just to create a story. They had an agenda in mind, to follow up from the story they'd crafted for The Last Jedi. Neither the "fan backlash" for The Last Jedi, nor the "media spurning" of Rise of Skywalker were authentic or organic. If you still take all this as gospel, then what about the backlash to Empire and the idea of Vader being Anakin, or about Lando as a character?
I know all of this because I read the stories and looked at them quite in detail, same with the contemporaneous reports of the original six films. It clearly shows that the narrative that is popular in the imagination is no more the truth than Mrs. O'Leary's cow starting the Great Chicago Fire.
Also, that footage of the Skywalker Ranch screening of The Phantom Menace is completely taken out of context. All that was happening there was concerns that the Podrace was too long and moving the sequence order between the droid transport battle, the Gungan/Droid battle and the lightsaber battle to go in a different way so it flowed better. No one is actually worried or thinking "this sucks", they're saying "we've almost got it, let's just trim it a bit and reshuffle some scenes," and George is clearly aware of this and saying, "yes, let's do that."
There is nothing "poorly written" about the films except the dialogue. The characterizations, plot and story beats are all on point, and the story wouldn't actually make sense done any other way. The fact that so many of you don't see either the parallel to the fall of Rome, to the various historical events George researched about and references, that the Senate scenes are neither pointless nor the equivalent of "galactic C-SPAN" (they're extremely short and to the point), and that the way these characters move, talk, think and act is consistent from movie to movie, scene to scene, is quite baffling. The fact that you all also can't sense subtext, context or read between the lines to know that Rise of Skywalker clearly drops the fact Palpatine is a clone of the original, shows a baffling lack of basic comprehension skills.
It just reminds me of all the things Kenneth Turan said when he bashed Titanic, getting everything BUT the point in his review, especially saying "this dialogue and story is so bad." It's bad because it's not meant to be clever, wordy or jadedly ironic and cynical, but is instead earnest and sincere in developing Jack and Rose's relationship and demonstrating how James Cameron isn't just a sci-fi director and writer. There's a difference between archetypes and tropes/stock characters, and Turan completely, disingenuously missed that point on purpose.
Listen, I like brainy, cerebral, arty movies as much as the next guy, I enjoy them thoroughly. But my tastes have always been quite meat and potatoes, and it doesn't take much to make me pleased with a movie. I have standards, very much so, and I prefer movies not being dumb, but I can enjoy a dumb movie if it's dumb in the right ways. And Star Wars is not suffering the way the Alien franchise did after the second film, with only Prometheus and Alien: Isolation being the bright spots amidst it all, or how Terminator suffered after T2 and before Dark Fate. (Yes, I like that movie very much and support it as canon, sue me!)
You want a movie that people liked "enough" at the time and turned on with a vengeance. Look at Die Another Day. That movie was the most commercially successful of Pierce Brosnan's reign as James Bond (and for a while, the biggest box office success of a Bond movie ever), and reviews by critics and fans were mixed to generally positive at the time...then a real and sweeping backlash took over, with it considered the worst in the series, even taking into consideration Moonraker. And those two movies are definite duds that sweep James Bond in ignominy, with the Timothy Dalton outings close behind. (Spectre isn't irredeemably terrible, but it's a definite downturn from Skyfall, and even if it was better, it was going to be a letdown anyways.)
Star Wars truly is evergreen and beloved. If there was a true fatigue setting in, The Mandalorian wouldn't have done so well, nor the wave of support for the additional streaming projects, like the Ahsoka series, wouldn't have emerged. Oh, and the person responsible for giving Dave Filoni his fancy new title? None other than Kathleen Kennedy, the devil incarnate herself.
"Adam Driver is seen as just the guy from Girls." Wow, are you way off base. Especially when he has meaty roles from Scorsese's Silence, The Report and the film Marriage Story to his CV, as well as an upcoming horror project, 65, exec. produced by Sam Raimi, and a passion project called Yankee Commandante in the pipeline. Not to mention being a successful and well-liked SNL host; he is truly seen is a real, serious actor.
"Natalie Portman was a liability in Hollywood because of wooden George. She thanked Mike Nichols for giving her a real career." Not even remotely true. Portman was already a well-established actress thanks to The Professional and her bit part in Michael Mann's Heat, and even while doing the prequels, she had Anywhere But Here, Where the Heart Is, Cold Mountain, Garden State and V for Vendetta on her resume. Black Swan didn't "give her a real career", Portman was a very bankable and popular star during this time, BECAUSE of the prequels.
My point regarding the RT scores is true, and it mostly applies to contemporaneous reviews, reviews from the original release. Look at the original six films again: if you take only the contemporaneous reviews from the time of release, no film has a score below 70, and each film stays in that area, no film going higher than 80. Even the original and Empire.
My point that the audiences have accepted each film warmly is also true. But accepting it warmly is not the same as thinking a film is a masterpiece. Far from it. But be honest with yourselves. No Star Wars film is a masterpiece, not even Empire. The problems everyone damns the prequels and the Disney films for having already existed in the original trilogy, just as visibly, just as much. The reason you refuse to see it that way is because you refuse to take off the rose-colored nostalgia glasses. The audiences have accepted each film as valid and belonging together, and actually LIKE, even LOVE, these films. It has always been this way, and it certainly was that way for the longest time.
The media has never said "it's just angry fanboys denouncing the films, a small minority." On the contrary, they INVENTED the narrative that "fan backlash is at a high," they created the storyline because they wanted clickbait and revenue, and they knew "fanbase is largely content" doesn't sell stories. They AMPLIFIED the whiny losers to be representative of the fanbase as a whole, to build a narrative that didn't exist. They built it up, time after time, year after year, and they succeeded in gaslighting the public to rewrite history. And many people easily accepted that at face value, their memories shifting and adapting with this narrative. Odds are that your memories have been corrupted in this manner, because of the media smear. It certainly happened to Natalie Portman, because she didn't personally receive hate and death threats, nor were fans truly angry with series, but the media narrative is now part of her memory, and Keira Knightley has completely forgotten being Padme's decoy on The Phantom Menace.
The media wasn't going to bat for The Last Jedi in terms of writing stories to defend it from the fanboy attacks; they enabled them and helped create the manufactroversy. Then they wanted, NEEDED, a sequel to that, so they were all set to attack Rise of Skywalker, just to create a story. They had an agenda in mind, to follow up from the story they'd crafted for The Last Jedi. Neither the "fan backlash" for The Last Jedi, nor the "media spurning" of Rise of Skywalker were authentic or organic. If you still take all this as gospel, then what about the backlash to Empire and the idea of Vader being Anakin, or about Lando as a character?
I know all of this because I read the stories and looked at them quite in detail, same with the contemporaneous reports of the original six films. It clearly shows that the narrative that is popular in the imagination is no more the truth than Mrs. O'Leary's cow starting the Great Chicago Fire.
Also, that footage of the Skywalker Ranch screening of The Phantom Menace is completely taken out of context. All that was happening there was concerns that the Podrace was too long and moving the sequence order between the droid transport battle, the Gungan/Droid battle and the lightsaber battle to go in a different way so it flowed better. No one is actually worried or thinking "this sucks", they're saying "we've almost got it, let's just trim it a bit and reshuffle some scenes," and George is clearly aware of this and saying, "yes, let's do that."
There is nothing "poorly written" about the films except the dialogue. The characterizations, plot and story beats are all on point, and the story wouldn't actually make sense done any other way. The fact that so many of you don't see either the parallel to the fall of Rome, to the various historical events George researched about and references, that the Senate scenes are neither pointless nor the equivalent of "galactic C-SPAN" (they're extremely short and to the point), and that the way these characters move, talk, think and act is consistent from movie to movie, scene to scene, is quite baffling. The fact that you all also can't sense subtext, context or read between the lines to know that Rise of Skywalker clearly drops the fact Palpatine is a clone of the original, shows a baffling lack of basic comprehension skills.
It just reminds me of all the things Kenneth Turan said when he bashed Titanic, getting everything BUT the point in his review, especially saying "this dialogue and story is so bad." It's bad because it's not meant to be clever, wordy or jadedly ironic and cynical, but is instead earnest and sincere in developing Jack and Rose's relationship and demonstrating how James Cameron isn't just a sci-fi director and writer. There's a difference between archetypes and tropes/stock characters, and Turan completely, disingenuously missed that point on purpose.
Listen, I like brainy, cerebral, arty movies as much as the next guy, I enjoy them thoroughly. But my tastes have always been quite meat and potatoes, and it doesn't take much to make me pleased with a movie. I have standards, very much so, and I prefer movies not being dumb, but I can enjoy a dumb movie if it's dumb in the right ways. And Star Wars is not suffering the way the Alien franchise did after the second film, with only Prometheus and Alien: Isolation being the bright spots amidst it all, or how Terminator suffered after T2 and before Dark Fate. (Yes, I like that movie very much and support it as canon, sue me!)
You want a movie that people liked "enough" at the time and turned on with a vengeance. Look at Die Another Day. That movie was the most commercially successful of Pierce Brosnan's reign as James Bond (and for a while, the biggest box office success of a Bond movie ever), and reviews by critics and fans were mixed to generally positive at the time...then a real and sweeping backlash took over, with it considered the worst in the series, even taking into consideration Moonraker. And those two movies are definite duds that sweep James Bond in ignominy, with the Timothy Dalton outings close behind. (Spectre isn't irredeemably terrible, but it's a definite downturn from Skyfall, and even if it was better, it was going to be a letdown anyways.)
Star Wars truly is evergreen and beloved. If there was a true fatigue setting in, The Mandalorian wouldn't have done so well, nor the wave of support for the additional streaming projects, like the Ahsoka series, wouldn't have emerged. Oh, and the person responsible for giving Dave Filoni his fancy new title? None other than Kathleen Kennedy, the devil incarnate herself.
RandySavage
Well-Known Member
I think we can all agree that as bad and damaging as the prequel trilogy is, the sequel trilogy is much worse.
sedati
Well-Known Member
I'll assume this kind of post is a joke (when can we ever all agree) but I don't think the prequels are bad at all though I have issues with them. I don't think they sequels are worse, though I have issues with them. I also have issues with the origianl trilogy. What's important is those issues are different film to film and there isn't any film that doesn't also have parts that I consider to be the very best of Star Wars.
mikejs78
Premium Member
I don't.
Sirwalterraleigh
Premium Member
I saw it…she got a solid minute (out of 43). Was not interviewed or on screen at all.
…keep at it
…keep at it