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Ace_Spade (9444)
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A way to fix it? (SPOILERS)
Really great right up until it's infuriatingly bad (SPOILERS)
Unsettling and Insightful
Zara - Season 14
Remington Steele?
The poster is a pun
Loved this show (SPOILERS)
Shifting Tone Gives Diminishing Returns
I miss IMDb
Hans Christian Anderson
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Thank you for saying so.
It's an underrated movie, for sure. The golf scene had me laughing pretty hard. I think it got bad reviews because it's not very surprising. You expect some romantic triangles, some little hangups and misunderstandings that lead to gentle comedy, and that's what you get. It's not biting enough to bring the politics to the fore, and critics probably went, "We've seen this a million times." They also would probably hit Hackman for phoning it in (he didn't) and Romano for just doing his schlubby guy from TV (so what?)
As to the women, I felt like maybe all of them weren't used optimally, but Marcia Gay Harden gets some good stuff to do and Christine Baranski is really funny. Tierney is underused, though; she's a really funny actress and has to just be a pretty generic "leading man's girlfriend" here.
If I were to hit the movie, it would certainly be on originality. It's not bringing any surprises in the set-up or execution, really - plot-wise, anyway; gags notwithstanding. That doesn't make it a bad film, but it does hold it back from being superlative.
I feel like 20 years is a long time, even in a long-lived species. I'm thinking about trees here, but rot can set in and decay/death of a tree can go from healthy to tumbling much faster than two decades. So, I think we can see that something that lives for centuries can absolutely deteriorate within a few years.
Yoda going from flip-kicking to dead in 20 years is far from impossible, especially if we consider the psychological weight put on him. I've heard stories of people being hale and healthy for decades, then retiring, and kicking it far earlier than expected, medically-speaking, or spouses dying within months or weeks of one another. If a person (even an alien person) gets ground down (as living in exile while the galaxy goes to pot could do) for a couple decades, we could expect their physical health to deteriorate.
But there's more! When I first watched Empire, I assumed Yoda was from Dagobah, but is he native the planet? If not, it seems unlikely that living in that noxious swamp for all that time could be awesome for his health. It's certainly plausible that his condition was worsened by living in a hostile environment.
As to a plot hole, it's a failing within a narrative's established "rules", but since we don't have biological information about Yoda's species, nor what he's been breathing in, etc., etc., I don't think there's a contradiction here. Nothing states this is unlikely. As I said, long-lived organisms can die off in twenty years for sure, especially if we assume that Yoda's species' lifespan is not greater than 900 years (ish), we can also imagine that a deterioration could set in to take him from healthy to unhealthy fairly quickly.
It's less of a plot hole for me because we don't see him as particularly spry in Empire. He's cheeky and mischievous (at least, as a ruse) but he doesn't keep that up forever and he doesn't seem physically impressive. He does hobble around on his cane moreso than in the Prequels. So, for establishing his age, I think it works. For me, that eliminates any potential plot hole.
Finally, and this is a minor point, if there is a plot hole, it isn't with Empire, which came out more than a decade prior to Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. If there is a plot hole, it lies with Episodes II and III, not V.
Fair enough, that does seem to be running around on this thread.
For what it's worth, I think confining either sex to specific roles or jobs is silly - particularly on-screen where we enjoy suspension of disbelief so 90lbs of River can beat the snot out of a bar's worth of ne'er-do-wells in Serenity. Unless it's historical. It'd be hard to take Saving Private Ryan seriously if they'd dropped Tom Sizemore to get another Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan flick.
Bottom line: nobody's sex should prohibit them from jobs, least of all in films of imagination.
I think most people - men and women - just want to see shows that are well-written. When we see shows that are poorly-written, we switch them off and rip on them; it's a good laugh. But the reason why we see vitriol aimed at shows like the Acolyte is because they are not so much well-written or poorly-written as they are written to serve a political message. Audiences know that we're being fed propaganda, not a TV series.
Now, I'm not going to directly comment on the Acolyte; I haven't watched it, and so that wouldn't be fair. But this seems to be what people are responding to. If that perception is correct or incorrect, I don't know, but the way Disney has sold their incarnation of Star Wars has been on "diversity first," and so fans are just making that assumption whether or not it's true. When something comes out that has bad writing (or that is perceived to have it) fans get mad.
This is a roundabout way of answering your question. But, basically, the TL;DR is that audiences don't want women doing any one thing. What we want is to feel that we're watching a story.
And back to the non-TL;DR... This is the difference between the best-written episodes of shows like Dr. Who or Star Trek and the worst ones. The messaging about comity between peoples in Balance of Terror doesn't feel like it's being rammed down our throats, it feels like a natural extension of the story. When Rose encounters the Dalek for the first time and finds the Doctor's hatred of the Dalek repugnant, we see this through her eyes and take in messages about hatred and racism without feeling lectured. But when showrunners and producers and executives go on interviews and say, "We don't like white men and we didn't make this show for them," then those white men who do watch the show are going in feeling belittled and spat upon, so if it doesn't follow up with some top-tier writing, they go, "This is woke garbage," and then come on here and complain. This shouldn't be surprising.
It's not a plot hole. That term is overused, and this isn't a place for it.
As for the why, we see him hobble around - albeit with a spritely attitude - in The Empire Strikes Back, so we know he's not in peak physical condition. But if Yoda's species lives between 900 and 1,000 years, or between 900 and 950 or whatever, he's on borrowed time. It'd be like asking, "How come a human was fine at 72 and then sick and dying at 73?" A lot can happen in one year - which I think is about the time between Empire and Return of the Jedi (I'm not sure about that). But the bottom line is that, yeah, Yoda might have just run out of time or been sick or something.
Personally, I think it was Luke's ascension. Yoda was running on fumes, holding out on Dagobah with meditation and hope that one day he would live to see the Empire fall. Once he trained Luke and knew of his moral victory at Cloud City (Luke would rather die than turn to the Dark Side) he knew that he had accomplished all he could. He stopped holding on and finally let go.
I've come to think he shouldn't have been fighting at all. He should have always been above and beyond the concept of war, and he should have been fighting with other methods. If he had to engage in direct combat, it should have been with the Force alone. Ditch the baby lightsabre.
I really despised the character. It felt like what they were going for was to give Archer a version of himself (he finds her annoying in the same way his co-workers are annoyed by Archer, but she is also super-competent) to kinda give him a taste of his own medicine, but if that was the goal then they removed all of what makes Archer work as a character.
They also toyed around with some alcoholism for Zara, but they didn't really go into it. It felt like they were flailing around for flaws that didn't contradict the impossibly perfect character they crafted for the first two episodes of the final season.
The core problem, I think, is that Zara feels like she was invented by the writers to be "just the awesomest," which is why we get Pam and Ray fawning over her for two episodes while Zara gets the last word in *every* battle of wits, *every* contest of skill, and *every* step of the story/plot/plan.
As I finished the final season, I did enjoy it more and more, but Zara was always a bummer. I found most of her lines - especially her "comedy" - to be forced, obnoxious, and eye-rollingly bad. Even during great episodes, any time Zara "contributed," it would kill the momentum that had to then be pulled back up. And you're right: the flaw they try to give her feels tacked on and poorly integrated, so it doesn't really feel like it's there or has consequences.
They should have left her out entirely. I firmly believe that almost every episode would be improved by diminishing or removing Zara entirely.
The only time she was close to watchable was when she developed an inexplicable respect for Krieger, and even then, the fact that this impossibly perfect person doesn't notice that Krieger is INSANE strained suspension of disbelief.
Agreed. I was really enjoying it as a decent (not brilliant, but solid) thriller up until that time. The twist not only makes several events previous to the reveal seem impossible (imagine the coordination needed to pull it off - not to mention how they managed to make the cops go along with it!) but it also lowers the stakes of the action. It takes the film's conflict from a redline-level panic to a particularly toxic college frat house. It doesn't work, I don't think it was set up properly, and the double-twist right before the end is almost offensively predictable.
It was a very, very disappointing end to what was a neat movie.
I think I mostly agree with the idea that storytelling should include everybody. After all, everybody has a story to tell, so no immutable characteristic should prevent somebody from coming to play. But, frankly, I don't think diversity itself is what anybody is complaining about.
In Star Wars, Leia tells the boys that they're doing a rubbish job of rescuing her before blasting her own way out of the detention area. It's a great play on "rescue the damsel." In Empire Strikes Back, Billy Dee Williams plays the cool, sexy Lando Calrissian because who else could?
The thing that people are objecting to is the perceived replacement of merit-based systems of hiring and firing with identity politics. Some people mistake objects to "woke" as objections to diversity, but that's not what has most people rolling their eyes. It's not "We hired such-and-such a person to be the showrunner/writer/director because they're awesome!" it's, "We hired this person *because* they're black/gay/a woman." If you tell people that the reason somebody was hired was because of their immutable characteristics, that creates the perception that they were not hired because of talent.
This is typically belied by the person in question. The three leads in the Sequel Trilogy are all good actors. They didn't let us down with bad performances, and it doesn't seem like they were hired because they were hispanic, black, and a woman. Most people don't complain about them, anyway, they complain about the writing, and the writing is bad. All the writing was done by white men, by the way - or at least the bulk of it. And even then, these are generally talented people. Executive meddling with no thought given to the actual story is the problem.
That's why we dislike Kennedy's handling of Star Wars. It's not because she's a woman, it's not because non-white actors are used. It's because diversity seems to be the only goal of the executives.
The fallout is that, because of this, fans are now suspicious whenever we see diversity because we can't help but think, "Why was that person hired?" It's the inevitable psychological trap that comes along with programs like DEI and Affirmative Action.
But when it's merited, nobody complains. Pedro Pascal is "diverse." Any objections to his performance as the Mandalorian? The vast majority of people agree that he rocked that part. The "OG" Mandalorian character, Boba Fett, and his father Jango are portrayed by Maoris. Anybody whine about that? Nope? I wonder why not... Rogue 1 is perceived as being one of the better entries in the Disney Star Wars era. Its cast is filled with women and minorities in lead roles. Did it catch flak for this? No, it didn't. (I didn't personally like the film, but again, it was bland writing leading to characters I didn't care about, not the performances or actors chosen).
So, when Kathleen Kennedy and Leslye Headland and other people say, "All of this hate is wrong and diversity is great," they're not wrong, but they're not actually talking about the problem that fans have a problem with. Some fans make racist, sexist, or other bigoted remarks, but the vast, vast majority of complaints aren't about race, sex, or other immutable characteristics; it's about Disney execs repeatedly telling us, "Our main priority is DEI," and us believing them.
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