A scary thing happened on the way to the Movie Forums - Horrorcrammers

I submit the entire gambling-planet/shoehorned-in-classism-statement portion of the movie which was at least as egregious as the Jar-Jar/Gungan-underwater-city segment of Phantom Menace and is, by sheer volume, worse than "Costner's sacrifice". Which was pretty bad.

Oh, you're right, as awful as LJ is, it doesn't hold a candle to RoS.

I would certainly include Bride Of Frankenstein (possibly even edging out EDII from the historical perspective) and Friday The 13th Part 2.

To chime in on the dispute between TLJ and TROS, I’ll say just this: I’ll take dumb fun over dumb dour and pretension any day.

Now I must love it. Damn your eyes.


Which is which? (I never saw ROS).

I didn't hate The Last Jedi. But mostly because I felt that it wanted exactly this from me, and I refuse to listen to its whimpering appeals for my attention.

Bride made the list, probably top 5. And Dracula, Prince of Darkness for my Hammer entry. And I'm pretty sure I squeezed Curse of the Cat People on there. But my exclusion of the bigger franchises was on principle. The one exception was Halloween III, which obviously isn't a Michael Myers movie.

Dream Warriors is clearly the best of the Elm Street movies.


Like, clearly.

I suspect ROS is the "fun" one, but I'd say the comparison is more between indigestion and explosive diarrhea. Obviously the former is preferable, but you'll be hitting the pepto in either case.

Which was which? It was all terrible. But I guess I would say that I didn't consider either film fun. At all.

Quality over quantity, I say. The casino thingy was just annoying and useless (via the prompt plot development), but it wasn't offensive to the core mythos of the brand. No, I think a closer analogy might be with the whole "let the Jedis die" thing, a rejection of the moral commitment of the light/dark dichotomy, a relativism that's more offensively useless to fans of the original trilogy. Another would be the prequels' 'mitochondria' crap that also subverts a key ideal of the force as an egalitarian benevolence.


And yet still, neither of these things bothered me as much as Snyder's shtyewpid perversion of the Kents' stoicism, best illustrated by the Ford/Thaxter portrayal in the superior '78 version. The elder Kents represented charity, responsibility and the humble ideal that the most powerful are obligated to the most self-sacrifice. (Suck on that, Ayn.) These new boomer Kents are just asseatingholes who instill fear, distrust, selfishness and sheer stupidity, as if Snyder was presciently predicting the populist sewage to come. This "you don't owe the world anything" morality of Superman is a much more profound insult to everything the mythic character represents, and obviously could only have been conceived by a fan of Atlas Shrugged. It's the most pitiful portrait of Superman that could have been brought to the screen. And this crystalizes in one peak moment of incredulous and insufferable idiocy everything that's ludicrous, ignorant and inane about the whole project. I only wish that a WB executive had the fortitude to do this to Snyder himself.





Also, my condolences to all those IHOP diners that Cavill was simply too pretty to save.

TROS is dumb fun as it saw fit to be an adventure macguffin flick where the protagonists generally like each other and are enjoyable to watch adventuring. TLJ decided to make everything dour and stupid, with all the joy sucked out of every character and moment due to an intended importance that the film is nowhere near smart enough to pull off.

Star Wars by and large is a dumb franchise. You can embrace the dumb or you can try to elevate the dumb. TLJ horribly failed to do the latter.

I would be as surprised by you loving it as Crummy not thinking Malignant is Wan’s best film.

I don't really see how Last Jedi is any dumber than Abrams' films, however habitually JJ is prone to embracing the dumb. The whole trilogy was a failure. But I do remember when Force Awakens came out, a common refrain for its defenders was to point out that the original trilogy wasn't very good either, which is also a pretty dumb way to rationalize its mediocrity. Unfortunately, a whole lot of people like the original trilogy though. Kinda like the marketing of Abrams' Star Trek, as the Star Trek for people who don't like Star Trek. It only clarifies that Abrams doesn't understand what makes these francises so enduringly endearing.

The problem is that TLJ is at least as dumb as Abram’s films but attempts a smattering of deeper and complex themes that it absolutely falls on its face trying to implement, and sacrifices the aforementioned fun in doing so.

But I don't think Abrams' films are fun either

But camera move fast, things go boom and talented people REACT!!! What’s no fun?

I guess my friends and I didn't see it the same as you. We are in pretty much unanimous agreement that it is easily the worst Star Wars film ever made and we also felt it was one of the worst if not the worst big-budget film we've seen in ages if not ever.
That's consensus and we didn't see it together.
I left Cats early to go see RoS and I just said, "I left Cats for this?!"

That kinda reaction strikes me as that of failed expectations more than an accurate approximation of the film’s quality. I’m guilty of it too, as I hated Prometheus with a fiery passion for so thoroughly failing to measure up to what I expected from Ridley Scott’s return to the franchise.

I just can’t see by any discernible metric that TROS is worse than any of the prequels. The Last Jedi is more debatable but I feel like TROS, for all it’s narrative jank, is still a structurally and thematically sturdier film, though Johnson is clearly a better technical craftsman than Abrams.

I think TROS falls firmly in the middle of the Star Wars pack, just below Rogue One, TFA and Solo.

CATS, however, is a cinematic masterpiece that belongs in a double feature with SHOWGIRLS, so you did choose poorly leaving a showing of it.