Ironik

As you're watching those movies, you can actually see the sections that scream "video game level!" can't you? Pod race, the arena fight, the space battle, the giant poundy whatsits with molten metal....

And the shameless stealing of other people's work. I mean, "Commander Cody" homage is moderately amusing if you're 50 and recall the 1940s "Commando Cody" serials they ran on Sunday morning TV after Flash Gordon (or the band from the 70s), but you can't tell me Naboo isn't Dinotopia.





Ugh, not to mention the subtle racist things. I was not surprised people were upset with those films, especially Phantom Menace.

Devious. Sent you a note.

Anyone quoting Rotten Tomatoes has an immediately invalid argument.

Whoever runs RT cooks the books, as it were, massaging the fresh factor to come out the way they want it to. The most egregious example of that was Superman Returns. It had a solid "fresh" rating, but if you actually read the reviews you'd see they clearly should have been given the "rotten" icon. After that happened I looked at a couple other movies and the same pattern turned up.

I'm not sure which message you object to in Wall-E (Love conquers all? Be true to yourself?) but it's nowhere near as soul-crushingly horrible as Up, one of the most depressing movies ever made. Or Finding Nemo, which starts off with a mass murder and never recovers... not the least reason because of the lamest humor in any Pixar movie.

I just looked up the reviews for Cars 2 and it's pretty clear you're misremembering. Many of the major reviewers gave it a thumb's up. Roger Ebert, LA Times, Rolling Stone, Boston Globe, Hollywood Reporter, San Francisco Chronicle, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, Variety -- all positive reviews. NY Times, WSJ, Village Voice, Time and the NY Post didn't like it. Not the raves Cars had, but I find those raves to be utterly inexplicable.

I only dipped a toe into the EU then ran away -- because of terribleness -- but I think they'd have to find stories that take place decades after Return of the Jedi since there's no way to pull off anything else if they're to use the same actors.

I do agree that putting Master Skywalker front-and-center would be the best idea, since you know Hamill has already called Disney and offered to sign up. Personally, I'd use him sparingly, the way Obi-Wan was used in the original: the big gun you pull out for major plot twists.

I read that Newsarama article offering advice and they had some good points there, too. I disagree about the "no more C3PO" thing, though, because they're really reacting to bad writing than an inherently bad character. I'm not a fan of Threepio, but it's not like the craptacular characters created for the prequels, not a single one of which is as interesting as any from the the good trilogy. Qui-Gon comes closest, but he's really just Kenobi II.

To quote Darth Vader, "Nooooo!"

Hate ESB.

Just a point of clarification: Lucas never had an over-arching plan for 9 movies. He had some nebulous ideas for a larger universe and backstory, but there wasn't any plan for a "trilogy of trilogies" with Star Wars as the middle part of the story. That's myth-making that came about after the movie's success.

When I saw Empire Strikes Back on opening day it was clear to me that Lucas was just making this stuff up as he went along, because half of the characters make bizarre turns that completely change who they were in the first movie. Lucas' long-time producer Gary Kurtz -- who had been in on the Star Wars universe since the 1975 rough drafts -- later confirmed that originally there were no plans to make 9 movies. No long story-arc, no detailed story, nothing. The big announcement at the time was that Lucas was going to make ELEVEN sequels. Not prequels, but sequels. (This was based on the comment that simply by taking the profits from Star Wars they could make those movies before running out of money, even if they all flopped. Personally, I think Lucas was making a Citizen Kane joke. If you've seen Kane, you know what I mean.)

I watched Cars 2 flying back from Africa (it's a 26-hour trip, ran out of stuff to do) and I liked it a lot more than Cars. And this from the guy who dislikes Larry the Cable Guy's routine. Of course, I hated Cars, so I'm damning it with faint praise.

Also, it made a ****-ton of money. Earning $560 million on a $200 million budget (with a reported $320 million in merch) doesn't make it a loser. Even the worst-performing Pixar movie is a money-printing machine.

Tortured (ha ha) metaphors aside, many of us *have* talked about NCSoft's similar behavior in the past and even complained directly to them about it.

No.

**** NCSoft.

I know! I totally hate that! People falling for the truth! Morons!

I've actually been saying that a vote for Romney is a vote for Mad Max, but zombies work just as well.