Looks like Empire Strikes Back topped the box offices all over the place. Over here the theater was packed, you could see these kinds of crowds typically on premier nights. And strictly factually and objectively, it is overwhelmingly the best movie this year in the theaters. *cough* edit: Holy crap. Empire Strikes Back said to have been top 1 spot for 45 times in 40 years, while 8 Disney movies scratched together 22 times and "not benefitting from special re-releases" and "not returning to top". Nevermind actually just watching ye olde tremendous classic that has none of the today's commissaar enforced politics.
To be fair, even before Covid there really wasn't a whole lot on this years 'want' list. Only movies up and coming that look even remotely interesting being the live action Mulan, and the continuation of the Bill and Ted series. Maybe Hard Kill, because Bruce Willis but there's nothing interesting in there besides 'action movie'. Sonic was pretty great, Onward was great too, for what they are they're amazing, but otherwise there's been really nothing of note this year. A lot of big name films have been delayed or pushed back and some may not even see the screen in 2020 so there's no telling what -will- play later on, Black Widow will probably do pretty great assuming it plays in November as currently intended. Other potentials such as Dune, Wonder Woman, and Top Gun were on the list but are nowhere to be seen currently, who knows. Maybe 2021 will be the next great year in film
"This year" ? It almost feels like the well of good stuff is running out and despite pumps working around the clock at over capacity they struggle to pump out a whole barrel a year.
I'm not saying they're churning out a years worth of good stuff every year, but there has been at least a few noteworthy movies -most- years. Of course there's also plenty of films that simply aren't my schtick, they may or may not be noteworthy and I will probably never know unless someone else actively points them out to me.
This is true, I can feel it. I just can't remember it, I'm so fricking tired! :edit: Saw this today and it's hilarious!
That's... pretty freaking hilarious. Though I will say force healing has always been hinted at, my assumption was that it required a certain amount of emotional empathy that neither the Jedi, due to their training, or the Sith, due to their very angry nature, could easily achieve. It's tough to both suppress your emotional connections and connect emotionally with the thing you want to heal, and the Sith well, it's also tough to emotionally connect to anyone when you're seeing the world through a haze of rage and pain. So at one point force healing was probably a big deal, but science was more than able to deal with all but the most immediate medical concerns and so due to the risk of losing Jedi to the dark side from forced bi-polar disorders the Jedi council decided that it simply wasn't worth the risk to continue to train the technique.
Legends just says it requires meditation. Nothing about empathy (but I think only a few jedi during the republic could use it. probably do to some being more empathetic than most). I don't think it was really something that could be used while moving (like fighting) like most of the games have it, thus why it hasn't been in anything outside of the books. I think what they had in the sequel trilogy was a different skill altogether (even if they call it healing). What they had in the sequel trilogy is more like the reverse version of force drain. Just instead of taking life/force energy they were giving it. What they are calling force healing is contradicting what yoda said in episode 5 about how people are the biological entity and the luminous beings (or whatever). Force healing has always been purely on the biological level and never with the life energy level/life essence. aha. found what I was looking for. So what they call healing in the sequel trilogy already was in ability in the disney canon. Transfer Force. Goddamit Abrams. Research.
Even the parodies are hit and miss and contain their own flaws, for the most part it was spot on though at least for me. Also, I understand that a small indie studio like Disney is struggling financially to come up with the best they can and can't afford all those fact checkers and such to walk to the adjacent room where they are making Clone Wars and just ask them or even go visit the Wookiepedia. I mean when I have like 5000€ left and the whole game is a steaming mess that I'm trying to put together on a single monitor rig under our staircase at home, I certainly don't have too much time to spend asking questions. So it must be like that working for Disney.
To be perfectly fair, neither Rey nor Ben would have had any method by which to learn what the ability was called, or even what it was actually doing beyond what the force itself told them. Kenobi was the only Jedi present for said event, and even then they didn't exactly -name- the operation, they just did it. Anakin hardly had time to share such information before he passed on and Kenobi wasn't exactly teaching Luke advanced force techniques before he kicked it. Nobody seemed to be interested in sharing much after they died either, so odds are even if any of them actually had named the technique or recognized what it was, none of the people in the final trilogy had any access to that knowledge. From a outsiders perspective it looked like healing, though I don't recall anyone actually referring to it as 'force healing' Rey only summarized what it was she did. For my bit, I was only theorizing why it would be rare amongst the Jedi, not referencing anything specific. It stands to reason that healing another entity would require a sharing of feelings, and given the Jedi's antithesis to feelings it may be entirely possible that they simply destroyed the ability to heal amongst themselves without ever realizing the why of it. It's possible that they were able to emulate a method of healing through ritual, or that they simply used the force to emulate more traditional methods of healing without machines. The sharing of one's life force seems to come with it's own significant risk anyhow, Rey seems to be the only one able to do it and survive the process
Not that. Disney is calling it force healing. Or Abrams. I don't think the characters are the one calling it that. Forgot baby Yoda used force heal as well and it is not the same as what Rey and Ben did. Jesus. Disney is contradicting themselves.
Well, Disney didn't actually have anything to do with that episode from the Clone Wars, so it's not surprising. Also 'The Child' healing probably was force healing, who's to say it's going to look and act the same way between force users *shrug* as Han was fond of saying Ancient sorcery and hokey religions, hell who's to say every Jedi's force push is alike, it's invisible so it'd be really tough to make out the details, what if the reason some Jedi are 'more powerful' than others isn't just because the Force is strong, but because they just make use of it better? Hell, Yoda might not have even been a strong force wielder, but 900 years of experience could make even the most trivial of force connection devastating. On a completely random note, I really wish 'The Child' had been born during the Battle of Yavin. It would be far too amusing to just call BBY and ABY before and after baby Yoda. XD I may do it anyway, just because.
Midichlorians dude! Midichlorians and The Chosen One. You just show up for the F-35 strike squadron and from day one you just flat out humiliate the instructors and engineers who built the planes how little they know or understand as you pull away fuel regulators and such to make it go three times as fast, optimize the computers so that you now have superior agility and maneuvering to every other plane of the same type while painting it red to stand out better. I mean learning curve is for losers. Only those who can't need to practice. "There is no trying, there is only doing" - so you don't have to learn the start up sequence and checklist, you just do it. There is no trying. So yea, if only they'd accept that you're The Chosen One they could tell you to go take out the enemy leader and maybe assign a few wingmen that will get gunned down in first 3 seconds just to act as a contrast to how amazing you are. Because every minute of your screen time is about how awesome you were to begin with there is no time to spend showing how you picked it up and how you first struggled but then overcame those difficulties with training. That would only flatter some old cis-gender old patriarchy and further validate them when the whole point of the film is the emasculate and humiliate those characters. Sheesh, when will you learn!
I mean I agree with you in general, but I still love the idea of the Jedi. And to be fair, there -is- something to being able to cut the bleeding edge of a ship design, general practice includes safety thresholds and min/max ideals that aren't actually at the utter edge of tolerance but well inside to help mitigate the possibility of component failure. Sure if everything is perfect it should be able to make it to X, but what are the odds that -every- component is perfect. I mean look at Poe. Given the nature of the universe I'd probably give good odds to him being a latent force sensitive, but he's not a Jedi. His custom X-Wing -literally- flies circles around the standard model. Though I'm sure he did a bit more than just remove some safety restraints and manipulate the software. I mean, they never really discuss the modifications the Jedi do to their ships, they do however complain quite frequently about flying a ship that -isn't- theirs, which would lead one to believe that at least a little bit of modification is required in order to push those envelopes. All that being said though, the "There is no try, only do" is basically just Yoda's speech for quit focusing on the failure, when you fail you simply must continue on until you succeed. Or you give up. Those are the only two circumstances that matter. There are plenty of similar mantra in the real world, Yoda just gives it his dialectic flair. I mean, the force gives the characters some cheats when it comes to training, when they hit upon a potential realization those force ghosts who are interested can quite literally say 'yes, that, exactly that' skipping a lot of the uncertainty usually present when learning a new skill. The prophecy and the idea of 'The One' always struck me as something probably engineered by the enemy, anyway. It's a very Sith concept, focusing on a special individual, giving them a purpose that seems pure and just and means exactly the opposite of what the majority will assume. Would be most interesting to see the story of the origin of the prophecy XD
Yea, I was merely making fun of overstretching the Yoda's in situ advice given to a teenager who is convinced he should not even try because it will fail anyway. And I have absolutely zero issues with either Jedi or the non-sensitives just having those one in a million aces, fighters and whatnot. What I have a problem with is when you set out to emasculate the old loved characters because you don't even like the franchise to begin with or when you create characters that don't have any character growth or so. Even Poe had to grow to become what he was by the time of the movies: I've read a few biographs of aces and no one started out as an ace. In fact some were even shot down and almost thrown out of flight school before discovering their skills.
People have always existed who enjoy nothing as much as provoking others and trolling. It's one thing that they exist, they have every right to exist and they can troll eachother to their heart's content, I don't care. But when I do care is when you decide that your best business plan is to have such people in charge of your very, very - *very* - expensive franchise that other people would sell their hand to get to work with. Stupid is as stupid does. It's literally the opposite of how sales works. In sales I did actually pretty well by trying to find some way each and every last person could benefit from the product I was selling. Not wasting their or my time either, just asking them a couple of questions and then making a case for how nice it would be to buy the thing and when they'd tell me to piss off or say some profanities I'd just bow with my head chin towards chest and say "oh, I'm sorry you're having a bad day, all the best and take care". I mean it's not personal with people who don't know you. Literally one of them has a mother dying of cancer and another one lost a child, one is under horrible stress at work and one is losing his home. Gotta have some faith in people, people ain't evil. They may be lost but they're never truly evil. Except Palpatine, that guy was evil. Everyone else though - either having a bad day or just lost, fallen but deep down looking for a way out. And that was the whole point of the original Star Wars. Not that "oh yea there are these evil white dudes, man, if only we could torture them long enough before we kill them". No, it was about how even among the most evil appearances there can still be a complex character for whom everything went the wrong way in life and still despite all of that they still want to find a way out of the dark - not that it would undo all their crimes, no, that's not even the point but the point is that there's real value in saving someone's soul even if it was during the last 5 minutes before he died. Because it still counts! A lot! In fact it can make all the difference in the end.
and those bastards even stuck the young Anakin force ghost in the film instead of the more age appropriate one. Retcon how you want the only reason for this is because the actor was better known and -some- people might not recognize this guy as Anakin because he only appeared (without some serious injury makeup) for a few moments on screen after he died. Yet one more fuck you to the original film fans.
Yea we figured out who he was as teenagers when the internet amount to pretty much the Fifth Element's website, the white house org and Webcrawler search engine with it's ability to list all the 20 corporate sites that existed. Oh and that Happypuppy site, of course. Even then a bunch of dudes in their early teens without any resources and without proper grasp of the language could piece that puzzle together - the big mystery back then was "did they like release more obscure episodes I-III sometime and if so where can we find them? We went through the Video Rex video rental and couldn't find any and the shopkeeper had never heard of such films."
