Posted on 12/23/2017 9:01:54 AM PST by EdnaMode
As always, the Christmas season is all-but drowning in new movies, a fact amplified even more by the now-standard pre-Christmas monster (Star Wars, The Hobbit, etc.) that now kicks the year-end blitz into high gear. There has been a lot of talk about whether merely being one of the biggest movies of all time is good enough for The Last Jedi, but we should note that at least part of the comparative downturn for the eighth Star Wars episode is due to a deluge of kid-friendly competition this time out.
[snip]
Paramount/Viacom Inc.’s Downsizing debuted on Friday in wide release, trying its best to be the adult movie of choice amid a crowd of kid-friendly crowdpleasers. But that’s a tough place to be when A) a lot of adults are seeing the kid stuff, B) the reviews aren’t exactly off-the-charts and C) there is a lot of high quality adult-skewing fare in some level of wide release. As such, with mixed reviews, brutal competition and most of the publicity concerning Matt Damon’s foot-in-mouth commentary about Hollywood’s legacy of sexual harassment, the Alexander Payne comedy earned just $2 million on Friday.
At a glance, that sets the movie up for a miserable $5 million Fri-Sun/$7m Fri-Mon debut weekend. Barring a possible Oscar nomination for Hong Chau, there is little reason to expect this $68m-budgeted fantasy, which for the record I liked just fine, to stay in theaters beyond the MLK holiday. This is another critical blow to both Paramount and Matt Damon and a poor end to another miserable year for the Viacom-owned studio. For their sake, I really hope that Mission: Impossible 6 is at least as good as Rogue Nation or Ghost Protocol…
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
A classic for sure. Love the mission briefing, too. Thanks for sharing this one.
“What’s the matter, Augie-ben-Daugie? Did you suddenly feel a great disturbance in the force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced?”
“Naw, just a little headache.”
Cracks me up every time.
I’m not sure who you heard that from but it’s not true. If they had simply recycled the plots from the original trilogy it would be a huge improvement over the mess they made with the current movie.
Now I’m not a hard core star wars fan. I liked the first one released in ‘77 (I was 9 so I didn’t understand the political message) the 2nd was ok and the third was pretty bad. The prequels were horrible. The first in the new trilogy was ok...ok enough for me to take a shot on this current release, and boy does it suck, in pretty much every objective measure. Huge inexplicable plot holes, bad pacing, bad dialogue, numerous side plots that didn’t advance the story line, humor that simply wasn’t funny, sub-par fight scenes (which is saying something for a star wars movie where they typically suck), and complete mis-characterization of established characters. Acting was decent, and the space battles were pretty good, if you can ignore the lack of sci in the sci-fi. From an admitted non-star wars geek I though it was pretty bad.
The star wars geeks I know are thinking more along the lines of “Travesty” and “Abomination”. The most telling comment I’ve heard from a critic (aimed at the director Rian Johnson) was “Have you ever watched a Star Wars movie?!”. Come to think of it, it’s a pretty good question. Almost any fan could have done a better job on the plot. Maybe Rian hates Star wars and wants to kill it? That would make sense.
Rogue One was the best star wars movie released in the last 30 years, and that is not good a good sign for the franchise.
Gwendoline Christie isn’t a lesbian nor is Brianne of Tarth in Game of Thrones.
I saw a pic of him and sorry, I'm not buying it. I think she's using him for a beard or she is fighting nature. I've known several lesbians like that.
I'll bet you ten bucks she's really a lesbo.
The vast majority of TR reviews are whiners. As for intelligence what kind of person watches a movie just to hate it? Life’s not either or, there are splody movies, and plotty movies. Star Wars movies are basically Roger Corman exploitation flicks, B movies with an A budget. they always have been, they always will be.
If they don’t understand that the middle movie in a trilogy is the the “lost hope” section then they do not understand Campbell. And Johnson went deeper into the Samurai movie roots of SW than Lucas ever thought to.
I’ve seen it twice, it’s a really good SW.
Running away and hiding is the Jedi tradition. It’s what Kenobi and Yoda both did. Under basically the same circumstances (screwed up and almost got the Jedi wiped out, go hide and contemplate your mistakes).
Fisher had filmed all her stuff, they decided to not rewrite. Maybe a good idea, maybe not. I kind of prefer a SW universe with Leia alive.
There have never been coherent rules to time, speed or distance in SF. As JMS put it when asked how faster Babylon 5 hyperspace is “ships travel at the speed of plot”. As for folks getting away there was a lot of throwaway talk of cloaking in the movie. Apparently little ships hide good.
You always gotta watch SW with a few grains of salt. It is after a SF franchise featuring space wizards that have what ever power works good here. Just gotta role with it.
love the “ships travel at the speed of the plot” line.
:)
The IMDB audience reviews are also consistent in their panning of this movie. The movie, while visually stunning (except for the garbage Yoda) is a plot hole filled mess.
You just described Star Wars. Space wizard. You either roll with it or you don’t. Meanwhile the fanboy culture has gotten obsessed with complaint, everything must always be the worst ever, because that’s how they “prove” they’re hardcore. Also keep in mind when it came out audiences hated Empire, now generally regarded as the best in the series. SW has hit that Dr Who cycle, the new incoming Doctor is always the worst ever, and the out going Doctor is always the best except for Baker. That’s the fanboy world, never listen to them.
You may be right in general but in this case where the director (and/or disney?), so got Star Wars wrong, it is simply unforgivable. To so simply dismiss the previous movie, rape Luke’s character and then think the audience is so dumb they will just accept Superman Leia is just laughable.
He didn’t get SW wrong. He got SW in a way that’s much closer to the original. He brought it back to the rag tag group with no chance, broke it away from Clan Skywalker and the family soap opera, brought it back to the Samurai movie roots.
You show exactly what I’m talking about. 2 years ago the fanbase were bitching that Force Awakens was just a remake, now they’re complaining he threw away Force Awakens. He didn’t rape Luke, he had Luke run the exact same path as Kenobi and Yoda (they screwed up, trusted the wrong guy, got the Jedi destroyed, and went into seclusion). Leia’s got the Skywalker Jedi blood, they’re ALL superheroes.
Only movie worth seeing this homie season is “Darkest Hour”!
Everything else is mindless pablum!
Your first mistake is thinking I care anything the franchise or are a hard core Star Wars fan. I find it very fascinating how polarizing this movie has become.
There about half who find it enjoyable for what it is and the other half who believe it is an abomination. Not much middle ground.
There are many elements in it however which are a joke. They defy physics and any real sense of reality. They break any possibility of suspension of belief and ruin the movie in my opinion.
Bad enough that he and buddy George Clooney’s film, “Suburbicon” failed in a spectacular way in October.
Now Damon's Christmas release, “Downsizing” is just as a big a failure as the other film. Opening on 2668 screens did a dismal $2,000,000 on Friday setting up a maybe $6,000,000 gross for the weekend. Talk about a career going down the Toilet.
See Matt this is what happens when you open your mouth on politics and piss off half your potential audience.
It’s been around 40 years and that’s the first I’ve seen it. Thanks for sharing.
You clearly care about the franchise, you’re posting about it. And you use the same language as the hard core fans. Walks like a duck, talks like a duck.
There are about half who find it enjoyable for what it is, and half that seek their pleasure through complaint. That’s life with the fanboy set.
Space wizards. If you’re worrying about physics in a movie with space wizards you’re barking up the wrong tree.
When Supreme Leader Snoke owned Kylo Ren for being a lame Darth Vader cosplayer, literally called his helmet ridiculous, and told him to take it off.
When Kylo Ren, fed up with the burden of giving the new series a Darth Vader of its very own, smashed his helmet to hell and left its shattered remains on the floor.
When Rey resolved the cliffhanger ending of The Force Awakens by handing Luke Skywalker his father’s long-lost blue lightsaber, and he responded by chucking it over his shoulder like a crumpled-up cheeseburger wrapper and walking away.
When Luke milked the four ruddy teats of the big gross elephant walrus thing, turned to the camera, and took a nice big gross swig of its blue-green milk, the grossest and most off-putting possible fan-service callback to the blue-green beverage Aunt Beru served with dinner back in the original Star Wars.
When Luke, explaining to Rey why the Jedi Order has to end for all time, all but looked directly at the screen and said, Because the stupid prequels revealed them to be the most worthless group of dumbass motherfuckers in the history of the universe, and since we must treat those awful movies as Star Wars canon, that forces us to repudiate the Jedi for all time.
When Luke described the Force to Rey entirely without mentioning sub-atomic particles.
When Kylo Ren chopped Snoke in half like halfway through the movie, foreclosing with extreme prejudice on The Force Awakens’s
suggestion that this trilogy would just run back the entire Luke-Vader-Palpatine dynamic from the original trilogy.
When the big reveal explaining Kylo Ren’s turn toward the Dark Side turned out to be that he woke up in the middle of the night to the sight of a crazy-eyed Luke Skywalker about to murder him in his sleep.
When Luke, with scorn dripping off every word, derisively referred to the lightsaber—probably Star Wars’ most iconic creation—as a “laser sword.”
When Kylo Ren, with like ten seconds of icily savage dialogue, revealed that Rey’s parents were nobody-ass losers, pissing on both George Lucas’s sole storytelling move and all The Force Awakens’s hints about Rey having a mysterious and auspicious background.
When Anakin Skywalker’s lightsaber snapped in half.
When Princess Leia and Admiral Holdo both rebuked Poe Dameron for his reliance on insanely costly and self-destructive long-shot suicide missions as a method for winning a war against a much larger and infinitely more powerful adversary.
When they restored the “stun” function to the blasters that everyone had forgotten about since stormtroopers used it on Princess Leia in the opening minutes of the first movie, even though it would have made everyone’s lives much easier throughout all the other movies.
When the movie’s Han Solo-ish Enigmatic Rogue character, DJ, revealed himself not to have a secret heart of gold, but a not-secret-at-all heart of callous self-interest, and he sold the good guys out to the bad guys because the bad guys could pay him more. When the long-shot suicide mission to retrieve a MacGuffin not only failed, but failed in such a way that it made things incalculably worse for the good guys and led directly to unknown numbers of faceless Resistance fighters dying meaningless deaths in the cold void of space.
When a smiling Ghost Yoda gleefully incinerated the holy chapel of the Jedi religion and (as far as Luke knew) all its sacred texts, and was all, Whatever man, it’s cool, just let the youths cook, it’s their turn.
When Ghost Yoda told Luke that his Jedi knowledge of the Force was not as useful to Rey as his crusty-old-fart knowledge of what it’s like to fuck up and fail a lot, implicitly shrugging off the original trilogy’s focus on the supreme importance of receiving proper Jedi training.
When Luke explicitly said, I am not just going to turn up with a lightsaber and face down the entire army of bad guys, even though that’s exactly what Luke would have done in the original trilogy—like when he waltzed into Jabba the Hutt’s palace armed with nothing but an extremely half-cocked plan and a lightsaber in Return of the Jedi—and pretty much exactly what Leia asked Obi-Wan Kenobi to do in the hologram message that kicked off the plot of the original Star Wars.
When Luke then showed up with a lightsaber and stood alone against the entire army of bad guys anyway, and literally everyone watching the movie went, “He’s doing the shit! He’s facing down the entire army of bad guys!” and then, duh, of course that’s not what he was doing, he literally told you he wasn’t going to do that, because that would be foolish.
When what he was actually doing nevertheless turned out to be cooler and more satisfying than that anyway, and it was like, dang, actually you can tell a fresh and surprising story in this Star Wars universe after all, instead of just repeating previous stories over and over again forever.
The Broom Child, just some random-ass kid doing the Force to a broomstick and imagining it’s a lightsaber, which somehow works simultaneously as a giant finger in the eye to the series’ heretofore relentlessly inward-turning mythology and baits fan-nerds to own themselves by missing the point and speculating about who this kid’s secret parents might be.
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