Tag: movies

He’s out

And let’s face it, when it comes to original fans of Star Wars, who isn’t?

In just 10 days, “The Last Jedi” has brought in $365 million domestically. This is a huge amount of money. It sets some records no doubt.

But “The Force Awakens” took in $540 million in its first 10 days, two years ago. That’s almost $175 million difference. And that’s BIG.

Everyone has a theory. Schools weren’t completely out for Christmas. The wind was coming from the north. Odd days vs. even days.

But now that two weekends have passed, we can state the obvious: they killed off Luke Skywalker. I mean, come on. Happy, peppy Luke became a wizened old man on a mountain with no family, no love, no connections, no friends, no faith. Both he and Han Solo were essentially knocked off by Han and Leia’s son. I mean, WTF? None of it makes sense. It’s a bitter pill to swallow. Plus, Rey isn’t related to anyone, and Kylo mocks her for it. It’s a drag.

Now Mark Hamill is speaking out, saying he took direction from Rian Johnson but knew it was all wrong. He says. maybe it’s a cousin “Jake Skywalker” but certainly not the Luke he knew.

George Lucas must be furious. In two movies they killed off two of his three main characters. And who could have foreseen Carrie Fisher’s real life death? So now Leia will expire in Episode IX. Her son– and Han’s– is irredeemably evil. So that’s it.

This is why I wrote back at the beginning that I am done with “Star Wars.” If you’re from the generation that started with the series in 1977, the death of our heroes is not what we signed up for. So I am out, and I sense from the box office so are a lot of people. Big mistakes were made here.

Convergence kills. Convergence costs corporations VERY BIG money. I am seriously thinking of starting a corporate consultancy to help established companies avoid becoming converged by diagnosing convergence and treating it early.

To put it in perspective, TFA fell 28 percent from $38 million two years ago. TLJ fell 50 percent from $29 million today. So, TLJ is falling nearly twice as fast from a lower peak.

SJW convergence is corporate cancer.

The SJW perspective

I’m linking this The Last Jedi review by an SJW so everyone understands that SJWs really do get off on destroying what you love. They’re not stupid, they’re not clueless, they are literally unrestrained evil.

The Force doesn’t really care who you are. Nobody is the chosen one. Concepts like Destiny and Mysticism are hubris. Legends are problematic. The cycle of the empire vs the rebellion repeats in the first order vs the resistance and the ideologies of both sides are inherently flawed. It’s a machine. And the only way to be free is not to join. The past must be destroyed. The Jedi must end. We have to stop fighting what we hate and start saving what we love.

My favorite scene in the entire film is when Luke takes a torch to the Jedi Tree because he’s going to finally burn it all down. He’s going to burn the Jedi texts and end it. Then he hesitates. So Yoda appears as a force ghosts and does it for him. Yoda basically tells Luke to stop being so dramatic. Even in his attempt to hide from the past and close himself off from the Force, Luke is deifying the Jedi order. And Yoda tells him straight. None of this is really important. And then in a sublime moment commiserates with this former padawan by reminding him that when you’re a teacher, you’re agreeing to be the thing that your students move beyond. You get left behind, that’s part of the deal. Woof!

I mean, how great is that moment?

So yeah, when a movie takes the concepts that have been central to Star Wars and tears them down some people are going to react badly. I get that.

But God, how I loved it.

They don’t “miss opportunities.” They don’t “fail to understand.” They don’t “just not get it.” They genuinely live to shit on you, your values, your morals, your faith, your culture, and your children. They are purely destructive and there is no place in any civilized society for them.

And they know it, which is why they derive pleasure from tearing civilization down.

They are the rejected Muslim suitors throwing acid in the faces of the girls who rejected them. They are the gammas muttering spitefully about sexual proclivities of the pretty cheerleaders and ponytailed soccer players whom they will never attract. They are cowards insistent that not only are there no heroes, but that heroism is impossible.

This is all you really need to know about SJWs: “The only way to be free is not to join. The past must be destroyed.”

The negation of all that is beautiful, good, and true is the heart of the SJW.

The Lost Jedi

5-day revenues
TFA: $325,438,146
TLJ: $261,820,146
-19.6  percent

Day 5 revenue per screen
TFA: $9,038/screen
TLJ: $4,786/screen
-47.1 percent

Unexpectedly, both the average critic’s rating (92{8b465fcc1261600c3844715b0002d5b2f22fe6ddf2fd7bce983edf903d17ed70}) and the average audience rating (54{8b465fcc1261600c3844715b0002d5b2f22fe6ddf2fd7bce983edf903d17ed70}) on Rotten Tomatoes are falling as time goes on. At this rate of decline, the audience rating will be below 50{8b465fcc1261600c3844715b0002d5b2f22fe6ddf2fd7bce983edf903d17ed70} inside a week. To put into perspective what a bomb this movie is, it took The Force Awakens 18 days for its revenue/screen average to fall below the $4,786 figure hit by The Last Jedi on Day 5.

Other than the massive opening weekend, TLJ is performing much more like a Marvel movie than a Star Wars film, which is the first sign that its domestic box office might actually end up reaching less than HALF of TFA’s $936,662,225. In fact, if we simply add how TFA did after Day 18 to TLJ’s five-day total, that suggests it will bring in less than $450 milllion domestically, well short of the $750 million it was expected to make. Given the terrible reviews, it may not even hit $400 million.

TL;DR: SJW convergence is expensive.

UPDATE: the media is belatedly beginning to notice that TLJ is a failure by Star Wars standards, even though they can’t understand the reason for it.

Monday’s box office numbers turned up a new glitch in the numbers for “The Last Jedi.” Even the Disney experts must have been surprised. “Jedi” took home $21.5 million on Monday, an important night for adult filmgoers.

But two years ago, “The Force Awakens” reaped just over $40 million on its first Monday. It’s almost twice as much.

There’s a feeling that “Jedi” is soft at the box office. I don’t know why. It’s just as good if not better. And it has major plot developments for “Star Wars” fans.

So this afternoon’s report on Tuesday numbers will be scrutinized closely. “Force Awakens” did $37.3 million on its first Tuesday. Will “Jedi” compare favorably? Stay tuned…

No, no, it did not. Instead of comparing favorably on its first Tuesday (Day 5), TLJ compared very disfavorably, coming in 42 percent south of its predecessor at $20.3 million.

UPDATE: TLJ is rapidly approaching freefall territory.

Day 6: $16,900,000 (-65.6{8b465fcc1261600c3844715b0002d5b2f22fe6ddf2fd7bce983edf903d17ed70} from Day 6 TFA)
$3,993 per screen (-67{8b465fcc1261600c3844715b0002d5b2f22fe6ddf2fd7bce983edf903d17ed70} from Day 6 TFA)

Why can how be so?

The media finds it hard to grasp the obvious fact that people simply don’t believe them anymore:

The critics loved “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” — The Times’s Manohla Dargis raved about it, and she wasn’t alone. Rotten Tomatoes, aggregating critics’ reviews, rated the latest chapter in the saga 93 percent fresh. But fans? Not so much. At least if you go by Rotten Tomatoes, which says moviegoers posting on its site rated the film 56 percent fresh.

But wait! CinemaScore, which conducts exit polls at theaters (that is, it talks to actual, live human beings), says moviegoers gave “The Last Jedi” a solid A. And the box office was stratospheric: $450 million worldwide in one weekend, making it the second biggest opening ever.

What’s going on? There are several theories:

1) It’s straight-up trolling. Deadline.com pointed out that nothing prevents the same person from repeatedly logging onto Rotten Tomatoes and dragging down the audience score. (And one Facebook user claims to have done just that.)

2) The adventures of Rey and company (including the villainous Snoke) were genuinely disappointing. As the Hollywood Reporter noted, fans hoped that the writer-director Rian Johnson’s follow-up to “The Force Awakens” would explain, among other mysteries, who Rey’s parents are, and the answer (nobody special) wasn’t very satisfying.

3) It’s a function of how the internet has affected fandom. Vanity Fair argues that the web fosters the kind of scrutiny that few films can withstand.

On Facebook, we asked what you thought of the movie and what explains the divide between fans and critics. More than 800 responses suggested that perhaps the Rotten Tomatoes fan rating wasn’t so far off. A lot of you really did not like “The Last Jedi.”

The truth is that post-GamerGate, only idiots and SJWs pay any attention to what the critics, who are at best converged and at worst corrupted and in the direct pay of the content-producing corporations, say anymore. And in this particular case, the movie not only sucked, but betrayed multiple generations of fans.

UPDATE: After 4 days, TLJ is already underperforming TFA by $46.5 million and 19.2 percent. By comparison, Attack of the Clones outperformed The Phantom Menace by $25 million and 26.4 percent. That means that despite the massive numbers, in terms of expectations it is a box office bomb. If the fall-off picks up pace, and based on the media’s defensiveness I suspect it will, TLJ will take in less than two-thirds of what TFA did.

Star Wars is not science fiction

The Original Cyberpunk, who knows a thing or two about science fiction, explains:

Vox, my young friend, I should think that you of all people would appreciate the true genius of J. J. Abrams. If he’d chosen to go into music he would have been one of those guys who said “Screw actually learning to play an instrument” and parked himself in a recording studio with a drum machine, a sampler, two turntables and a microphone, and then spent his days churning out hit single after hit single by sampling, looping, and remixing earlier hit singles.

Instead, he chose to go into film-making, where he is doing exactly the same thing: compositing together commercially successful movies by lifting scenes, bits of business, and entire set pieces from earlier successful movies. He is the first fully realized hip-hop filmmaker.

I should think you of all people would appreciate that.

By the way, here’s my review: 

Saw this movie, we did. Long, it is. Impossible to write a substantive review without including spoilers, it may be. Nonetheless, try I will.

In the interests of full disclosure, though, I must lead off this review by pointing out that I contributed not one but two essays to David Brin’s Star Wars on Trial, the first arguing in favor of the original Star Wars trilogy as a watershed moment in cinematic history and the second absolutely slagging the prequel trilogy as childish tripe. So I come into this review with a long history as both a consumer and critic of Star Wars entertainment products, and I will put my greatest heresy on the table right now:

Star Wars is not science fiction.

Sure, it looks like science fiction. It sounds like science fiction. And based on that guy in the wookiee costume who was ahead of us in the concession line, it even smells like science fiction, or at least like the third day of a furry fandom convention.

But Star Wars is not science fiction. It’s a long-winded heroic magical fantasy saga that happens to take place in a world cluttered up with lots of sci-fi props and set dressings. If considered as science fiction, there is not one thing in the entire Star Wars universe that bears close scrutiny, because if you think about it at all seriously, the seams split and all the nonsense comes pouring out.

Read the rest of it there. It is… informative. As for J.J. Abrams, I appreciate that he is good at what he does. I just don’t like what he does. That stupid “mystery box” formula of his is the sure sign of a storytelling charlatan.

Supreme and superior

I wonder to whomever they might be referring?

The “User Reviews” sections of Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic and The Internet Movie Database – all of which let users leave scored reviews regardless of credentials or official status on the web – are uniformly on the more mixed side as the film enters its second day of release, marking the widest disparity between critic and “audience” scores for a Star Wars movie in Tomatoes’ history in particular. Granted, the film has proven more divisive among many fans than the previous installment, with unexpected character turns and further cementing of the push for a younger, more diverse cast of new generation heroes – but this level of disparity has raised eyebrows.

Accusations of such activity are currently being leveled on social media by culture-commentators like activist Peter Coffin, who compared the proliferation of anonymous reviews name-checking the same set of points repeatedly (references to “forced diversity” and “SJWs” abound) to more explicitly politically-motivated “brigading” attacks from earlier in the year related to elections and social movements. The deeper recesses of Reddit and 4chan are indeed littered with threads in which enraged “ex”-fans organize campaigns in an attempt to control the narrative and create a situation wherein the idea of the new Star Wars Trilogy as “poorly received” can overtake the reality of its reception in the public discourse.

The term “Sad Puppies” has been raised, a reference to a collective of right-wing fiction writers who gained fame by manipulating the Hugo Awards several years back, along with the GamerGate and ComicsGate social-media movements. Some point to the aforementioned politically-tinged reviews as evidence of motive, while others allege that some of the brigading has been conducted by fans of Justice League seeking revenge on the critical press for its negative reviews. Also posited is that this comes from anti-corporate activists who see the recent acquisition of 20th Century Fox by Disney as the rise of a dangerous monopoly.

Let’s see: Sad Puppies. GamerGate. ComicsGate. Now, who do we know was involved in all of those things…. The sad thing is that I now officially make for a better Dark Lord than anything in the current Disney SJWStar Wars mythos.

Man, they are NOT going to know what hit them when Alt★Hero comes out.

Moviegate: a review of THE LAST JEDI

Considering what the Star Wars movies cost to make, one almost wonders if Disney simply paid them all off. What other reason is there for them so thoroughly tongue-polishing what the fans are increasingly observing is a stinking SJW monstrosity:

This film is horrifically boring, disrespectful to its source material, painfully pedantic to hollow philosophy, and without any discernible heart for what makes Star Wars special. The flippant way the characters are handled distracts from the experience all the way to the end of the film. The humor is out of place and falls flat (George Lucas’ prequel fart jokes were funnier).

I’m pretty sure the director was urinating on the fan base with that Leia scene (yes, you know the one) and the ‘out of range’ in a vacuum farce. Johnson completely disrespects everything Abrams built in Force Awakens, destroying great characters and interesting questions. Mark Hamil gives a stellar performance even as Johnson tanks the character into tit-suckling, Skype-kamikazi yogi. Yoda’s awkward appearance gives us Johnson’s patricidal philosophy that rejects the filial piety that infused earlier Star Wars source material, which is the same philosophy he gives Kylo Ren’s character: we only have our identity insofar as we progress beyond our predecessors. As Yoda torches the Jedi sacred texts, so Rian throws the Star Wars series into this bonfire of a catastrophe.

Finally, a word about the critics. The universal critical acclaim for this movie is utter malpractice. There is no galaxy in which the pacing of this movie is acceptable, even if you agree with Johnson’s subversive strategy (I get it critics, you go to a lot of movies and you are tired of Joseph Campbell’s archetypes). The movie slowly meanders from empty motivation to empty motivation before giving us an empty hologram that disappears. You failed to assess this. Additionally, even though you may resent the Star Wars fandom for its enthusiasm and tradition, you should have the intellectual imagination to note that fans of the source material would be put off by what Johnson has done. I don’t know if it’s the big party, the media ownership reach, or the sub-par education the opulent years if the US gave us, but something force-skyped the brains of our critics to turn them off when reviewing this film.

I have to admit it, I am enjoying this. I despise all things SJW, but I particularly despise the SJW-corruptions of things I used to love. I intensely dislike things that disrespect their source material, and Disneyfication is now a byword for that contemptible form of disrespect.

Note that even when we published Corrosion as a parody of The Corroding Empire, what we published was a significant improvement on the original. To the extent that one can even use that term for anything that McRapey wrote.

It should be the last Jedi

Cataline reviews THE LAST JEDI:

This one sucked, don’t see it.

I could end my review there but I suppose you want a little bit more than that.

I intend to deliver many, many spoilers in this review because the producers of this heap of shit have gone to some lengths to destroy a favorite of my childhood.  I can’t believe I’m fucking saying this but, “George Lucas, all is forgiven!  Come back to us, I beg you!”

This was a cavalcade of boring, cliched awfulness in every way available to it.  I’m not saying that because I’m a contrarian Alt Right asshole.  I’m saying that because every word of that is true.

A couple of days ago a commenter Shitlord Numéro Uno said…

Wait, so you think the force awakens is a good movie? Holy dear God.

Compared to this, it absolutely is.  This is the first of the fully SJW Converged Star Wars movies.  Force Awakens just tried to score some Diversity Points here and there. But Last Jedi positively panders to the SJWs.  From the Body Positive Asian Chick.  The lectures on social inequality on Rich People Planet.  To Benicio del Toro’s monologue that was heavy on nihilist equivocation   This movie turned around, bent over for the SJWs and announced that Star Wars was open for business.  Upside this surrender to all things SJW, guaranteed that critics would prostitute themselves and give it positive reviews.  And they did but we’ll get to that at the end of this article.

The Last Jedi will make money but I would be shocked if it doesn’t kill the franchise in the end.  The fanbois are over-committed to Star Wars and will try  to convince themselves at it doesn’t suck. Now the SJW fanbois will have to pretend that it was really important that Star Wars hands out boring ass lectures for the price of admission but for the rest, the backlash over Last Jedi will make the one over Force Awakens look like a case of very mild buyers remorse.

The writing is incredibly weak.  The tone is inconsistent.  It’s boring as hell for the most part and all of the mysteries set up in the last movie got swept under the carpet.

Lets take a look at it, shall we?

I can’t say that I’m even remotely surprised. Disney ruins everything; was there really any doubt that they could manage to ruin Star Wars in an even more thoroughly professional sense than George Lucas’s amateurism ever permitted?

Critics: 93{9a996019c711e78922037ddc236e8e30d6b42c40f34cfa785ada7e9abef6c172}, Audience: 57{9a996019c711e78922037ddc236e8e30d6b42c40f34cfa785ada7e9abef6c172}.

Yeah, you know what that means.

We’ve been here before

What a surprise! The initial word of mouth for the new Star Wars film is spectacular! Again!

The Force is strong with this one.

The first reviews are in for Star Wars: The Last Jedi — and everybody is blown away.
The world premiere of the eighth chapter in the Skywalker saga, directed by Rian Johnson, took place in Hollywood on Saturday night.

‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi is everything. Intense, funny, emotional, exciting. It’s jam-packed with absolutely jaw dropping moments and I loved it so, so much. I’m still shaking,’ wrote Gizmodo’s Germain Lussier.

‘I can’t believe The Last Jedi exists. @rianjohnson is a madman and I love him for it. He takes Star Wars to the edge and throws it over. What a crazy, awesome movie. We’ll be talking about this one for a long, long time.’

Sure we will. Having been a Star Wars fanatic turned hater by The Phantom Menace, I have not seen a Star Wars movie since. But I do take sadistic pleasure in the observing the usual process of a new release in the series.

  1. OMG! It’s the BEST since EMPIRE!
  2. Okay, maybe we got a little carried away. But it’s still really good!
  3. Well, I mean, it’s all right.
  4. Actually, there are a lot of things that don’t make any sense.
  5. And are pretty lame, come to think of it.
  6. This movie sucks.
  7. Now, what was the second one called? No, the second of the new ones, not the prequels.
The fact that SJWs are hell-bent on talking up Mary Suewalker and the ambiguously gay interracial duo only exacerbates this phenomenon.

The LA Times Jen Yamato claimed: ‘StarWars: The Last Jedi is so beautifully human, populist, funny, and surprising. I cried when one POC heroine got her moment because films like these leave their mark on entire generations — and representation matters.’

You don’t say…. All that being said, I would genuinely enjoy it if they follow the color-by-numbers approach so closely that Luke cuts off Mary Suewalker’s hand before he reveals that he was the sperm donor for the interracial lesbian couple who were murdered by racist Nazi stormtroopers, leaving her an orphan.

Naming the names

People have been demanding that Milo name names. Well, he is going to do just that:

Dangerous Books, a division of MILO, Inc., has announced that it will publish DESPICABLE, a tell-all expose on how it became more dangerous in Hollywood to be a Republican than a child molester.

DESPICABLE paints a horrific picture of the abuses of men, women and children at the hands of some of the richest and most powerful people in America.

The book is authored by award-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author, Milo Yiannopoulos. It will be released on May 1, 2018.

Harnessing an exclusive network of high-profile sources, DESPICABLE takes readers on a journey into the sordid, sexually abusive, hypocritical world of Hollywood and the connected worlds of music, the media and Democrat politics. The book will share first-person accounts of abuse of actors, musicians and other friends in the author’s address book who will, in DESPICABLE, name their abusers. DESPICABLE is the true story of Hollywood that only Milo could tell, taking aim not just at Hollywood’s abusers, but at the women who protected them.

I look forward to seeing all of the people attacking Milo over this issue apologize to him. Surely they will do so, right? Surely they weren’t merely looking for an excuse to attack Milo and those who continued to stand by him when the media launched its attack, right?

And now it should be clear why the sexual harassers and worse in the media have been in non-stop attack mode. Congratulations to Milo and Team Milo for the launch of their new site, Dangerous, today.