I have been consistently hopeful about The Force Awakens - a weird case where putting a universe in the hands of a soulless corporation rather than the creator actually seems like an improvement to me - but yeah that teaser helps.
Buffista Movies 7: Brides for 7 Samurai
A place to talk about movies--old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
Just having so much of the original cast present is a huge good sign, as they were able to spin gold out of George Lucas' awful dialog previously.
I saw IT FOLLOWS tonight. Damn good creepy horror movie, and one that has a lot of fun with the you-have-sex=you die cliche.
I have no desire to see the new Star Wars movie. I resent the way J.J. Abrams totally trrashed the new Star Trek franchise with the Wrath of Khan rewrite. His deliberate misportrayal of Kirk and whitewashing of Khan just makes me want to strangle him. If he liked Star Wars so much better, he should have turned down the Star Trek franchise.
In addition to what SailAweigh said, I feel that Abrams' ability to tell a story is so bad that he either has some sort of cognitive defect, or outright contempt for his audience. (I've felt this way going all the way back to Alias).
So I might see The Force Awakens, but I will go in with extremely low expectations. It will be a very pretty simulacrum of a Star Wars picture.
If I went, I would just wait for the big red ball to show up. Maybe it will be the source of the midichlorians, whatever that was meant to be.
I said in someone's FB re: Khan that it's not that he whitewashed him (RM was an ethnic minority, but not a racial one, seeing as both his parents were from Spain, and he was in brownface for the TOS episode) so much as that he used him period.
As good as WoK was, Space Seed is an appalling episode, filled with all sorts of problematic crap, and Khan in it is epically rapey and gross.
I think one of the reasons they even considered using RM was because of his accent. I remember reading somewhere about how bitter he was that the accent held him back from a number of good roles. For Khan, it kind of helped that he had one so that the audience was better able to buy into the role; it fulfilled some kind of expectation of the "other." At that period of time in Hollywood, I wouldn't be surprised if that was their main consideration.
The prequels for the Star Wars movies burned out any lingering enthusiasm I had for the franchise as a whole, and Pete feels the same but even more so. So we'll go see The Force Awakens if we hear/read good things about it, but it isn't an automatic "must see in theatre!" movie for us right now.
The prequels for the Star Wars movies burned out any lingering enthusiasm I had for the franchise as a whole
There is no WORD big enough to articulate how much word I have for this.
Someone will have to give this one a gold-plated review before I can be bothered, nostalgia be damned.