zlacker

>>tortil+(OP)
Rotten tomatoes is actually very useful if you know the magic formula:

* If tomatometer & audience score are within 5% of each other, you can trust the ratings to give you a decent indiciation of movie quality.

* If tomatometer is more than 15%+ higher than audience score, it means it's an artsy fartsy movie that critics like and movies don't.

* If audience score is 15%+ higher than tomatometer, it's a fun movie even if it's not oscar worthy. (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/old_school is a perfect example)

>>ernest+d93
Okay, let's give that a whirl

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The Last Jedi

Tomatometer 91% Audience 41%: Artsy Fartsy

[Really?]

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The Greatest Showman

Tomatometer 56% Audience 86%: Fun, not oscar worthy

[Won Oscar for Best Original Song]

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EDIT: Truthfully, it was the release of these two films (both Dec 2017) that caused the Tomatormeter and I to part ways. Simply indefensible, IMO.

>>pauldd+8d3
I can't comment on "The Greatest Showman" since I haven't seen it, but on a certain level "The Last Jedi" was kind of artsy fartsy; Rian Johnson spent so much time on cinematography and color grading[0] that he ended up with a movie that was visually very striking, without any plot fundamentals that felt like a deep betrayal to the universe.

[0] Think space-walrus cliffs, or red-salt Hoth, or lightspeed kamikazee, or the Snoke throne room battle

>>eindir+ng3
FWIW I was a Star Wars nerd and read all the books and played the games (even the obscure ones—Yoda Stories rocked) and my Windows cursor was a lightsaber and 70% of my Christmas toys were Star Wars (the rest were Lego, and those two things didn’t yet have any overlap) and all that, until the prequels put me off it (and thank god, as really I’d had quite enough of that in my life)

So far as betrayal goes, from the perspective of someone with that background, TLJ and Rogue One are the only two Disney Star Wars films I’d save from a fire, and I’d give it a hard think before I bothered with Rogue One. Nothing about TLJ struck me as “a deep betrayal”, and on the contrary, it felt like a return to the franchise’s roots in a lot of ways, but with enough of a twist that it wasn’t just a mediocre lazily-plotted remake (cough).

>>hotnfr+Jp4
Interesting, everybody I ever talked to about this, Rogue one is considered to be by far the best movie of them all. Mature, dark stuff, no cheesy stupid stuff for small children, dicey characters, and of course epic hopeless battles.

I don't have some nostalgia emotions of going to cinemas in 80s, waiting in endless lines for tickets, watching it 30x in a row... its a nice scifi soap opera but not much more by today's standards. But its true I don't care about things like canon and entire SW universe, and neither do folks around me.

>>saiya-+RE4
Rogue One has immense promise, but only partly delivers.

It’d have been better if they leaned harder into ripping off other heist movies (ripping things off and slapping a Star Wars coat of paint on them is when Star Wars is at its best—weirdly few people who get to make Star Wars media understand that, but the people behind The Mandalorian clearly did)

We didn’t build quite enough rapport with our characters to make their deaths hit as hard as they should have. I think it was a combo writing and directing issue. Ripping off better heist films a bit more might have helped with this, too.

Sequencing and editing of some action sequences felt a bit flat. I think it’s easy for these everything’s-CG films to run into that, but its being a common problem doesn’t make it not a problem.

A couple scenes were just awful. Vader in a couple of his scenes, LOL. Could have been one of those pre- and early-YouTube Star Wars fan parodies. WTF. And I don’t even mean the one where he rages at the end.

It is one of just two that gave me any amount of some mysterious quality I think of as Star Wars Feels, and it did the best at that, even, but was dragged down too much in other areas. Coulda been excellent, ended up OK.