Star Wars Discussion

www.orientaltrading.com/star-wars-episode-vii-favor-pack-a2-13736981.fltr?categoryId=550204

Oriental Trading is still trying to get rid of *Episode VII* merchandise.

Even though it's party favors, it's still bizarre to see something hanging on that long.

Likely trying to get rid of old stock to make room for new stuff. I got a bunch of Frozen toys in early November on sale for my kid's Christmas. They were making room for all the Frozen 2 toys coming in wit the movie coming out. Fortunately my Frozen obsessed Toddler doesn't know the difference as long as it has Elsa. So she's getting a lot of toys for cheap.

Lucas works best when as an ideas man and does best when he has limited involvement. The best SW are Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, where he was only partially involved and they were mainly done by other people. The ones where he had the most control were the Prequels and are considered the worst of the series.

If they are letting Lucas had a crack at it, they are really scraping the bottom of the barrel.

I can already hear the Kennedy supporters screaming, as this makes it official the film was a dud.

The Last Jedi is "culture war" territory, with a person's liking or not liking the film being taken as as a signal for where one stands on a whole host of largely unrelated socio-political issues.

As a consequence, anyone who was critical of TLJ for *any* reason, including questions about the fighting styles and military tactics, was branded as a "hater" and even a "bigot".

This is official admission that the film had structural flaws that are legitimate topics for criticism.

And where did they say this? Are these the same 'toxic' fans who drove Daisy Ridley and Kelly Marie Tran off social media? You know, the ones who were SO toxic they drove them off those platforms several weeks before their films actually screened?

The issue about that fight scene was how the production was to lazy to come up with an actual choreographed fight scene, ended up with a moment where Ray should have been knifed in the back. Then just CGI'ed the second knife out of the shot because they figured the audience was too stupid and/or had too short an attention span to recall that the bad guys, a second earlier, had all been duel welding weapons.
The entire fight sequence is filled with moments where the bad guys start an attack, pause for the actor to recall what they should be doing and react, then continue. Heck I think there is even one moment where one of the bad guys pauses mid swing to allow Ray to get into posision to avoid bisection. It is literally style over substance, or logic or having put in any actual work on the damn film.
Compare to both the original trilogy and the prequels, where the actors tended to train for weeks to do the fight scenes themselves and those fights had a logical flow to them. Where the abilities of the actors was limited they found ways around this that didn't involve having to change the internal universe or treating the audience as being inattentive idiots.
David Prouse didn't do the Vader fight scenes in Empire or, I think, Return of the Jedi as the helmet restricted vision. They felt it was safer there to use an actual swordsman. Christopher Lee didn't do most of the fight scenes in Revenge of the Sith, and I assume Attack of the Clones, because he was in his 80's and also had problems holding the sabre. Ian McDirmid also did his own fight scenes, even though he admitted to not having any skill, training or experience with sword fighting, in Revenge of the Sith. He is even praised by the production for doing so in the films commentary track; It probably also explains why the Palpatine fights were shorter and closer in shots compared to the Obi-Wan/Anakin fights which had longer cuts and wider frames.
Yoda apparently did his own fight scenes.

And oh by the way, there's evidence to suggest that at least with Kelly Marie Tran, what pushed her to leave social media was her misunderstanding a contractual obligation requiring utmost secrecy about a project; apparently, she may have believed that even having her accounts active was a liability at the time.



Just look at most of your bigger American professional wrestling organizations, and even some of your better international organizations.

If they can trust their talent to deliver a proper match, then only "you'll do this, this, and this" is needed. For example, Jesse Ventura wrote in his autobiography that before his very first match as a wrestler, his opponent, a veteran named Rick Atlas (IIRC), told him that Ventura was to wrestle his best match. If Atlas thought Ventura had what it took to be a star, he'd let Ventura throw him over the top rope (in that promotion, throwing someone over the top rope would disqualify the person doing the throwing). If not, Atlas would deliver two kicks to the head, and Ventura would take a dive.

If, however, they can't quite trust their talent, or the fight is just that important, then they'll employ varying amounts of choreography, up to and including plotting it out start to finish like in the fight scene of an action film.


So for TLJ to be so loose with the fight choreography in such a big-budget, high-profile number is alarming. It gives the impression that the people behind the scenes either didn't understand its importance or didn't care.

For me, it's *always* been about the poor choreography as far as that sequence goes.

General consensus I've seen among everyone who knows how to fight with swords is that they went for "rule of cool" to such an extreme degree that there was no plausible way for Kylo and Rei to win that battle in real life.

well, considering the closest lightsaber battle in the entire star wars galaxy to real was the one between Darth Vader and Ben; I'd say "rule of cool" is completely consistent with the franchise.