SECCASAURUS

All That Jazz (1979) dir. Bob Fosse

All That Jazz (1979) dir. Bob Fosse

All That Jazz | Bob Fosse (1979)

Canto Bight celebrates Palpatine’s defeat. The war continues and the rich get richer. Another critical TRoS comic.

— Forbes ranks The Last Jedi as the best Star Wars movie in their rating, Dec 25, 2019

my head hurts i want to stop liking star wars thanks

IT’S SHOWTIME!

Or it will be December 24, 2019 when “John Mulaney & The Sack Lunch Bunch” premiers on Netflix. Now that we did a remake of the opening of “All That Jazz” I think I am officially out of wishes and also...out of ideas, baby!

Be well Tumblr. You deserve it.

J

rey staring at the twin suns on tatooine: 

(Tweet source)

This needs to be heard so I'm bringing it onto Tumblr.

Kelly Marie Tran is a wonderful actor and person who does not deserve the hate she received and the subsequent minimisation of her role. I loved Rose Tico in TLJ and was extremely upset to see how small of a role she played in ROS.

It’s true, and it’s extremely ugly to see Disney giving the impression of caving to the people who abused her. 

#i love you

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker has a Ben Solo problem

Who is Ben Solo? In the Star Wars sequel trilogy, we meet him in a mask, under an assumed identity. He calls himself Kylo Ren, but he’s really the child of Han Solo and Leia Organa. A Prince of Alderaan, the son of war heroes, the nephew of Jedi master Luke Skywalker. But who is he? And what does he want? The films tease his interiority–as well as his past–but in the end, his journey is frustratingly vague, to the detriment of the saga, his family, and himself.

In The Rise of Skywalker, Kylo Ren transforms back to Ben after an encounter with his dead father, Han Solo, whom he killed in The Force Awakens. In both The Last Jedi and Skywalker, Kylo wrestles with this heinous act; it cleaved his soul in two, sending him on a meaningless and chaotic path. Snoke senses his conflict, as does Rey, but it isn’t fully reconciled until the final film. The memory of Han is what motivates Ben toward one final good dead: helping Rey defeat Palpatine, and sacrificing his life to save hers.

This exchange of life and death might feel like a deserving end for a character who assassinated his classmates at Luke’s Jedi academy and who initiated genocide on an entire star system. A person capable of such evil deeds doesn’t deserve a second chance at life, some would say. One good act doesn’t erase a lifetime of evil. Except… Ben Solo did none of those things. Canon paints an entirely different version of the character. Someone deserving of more compassion than his film version may permit.

In a new Marvel comic from writer Charles Soule, The Rise of Kylo Ren, we learn that Ben Solo did not, in fact kill his fellow students. After Luke sensed darkness in his nephew and was momentarily tempted to kill him, the temple burst into flames by some unseen force. In the panels of the comic, we see a horrified Ben Solo stare into the flames. “I didn’t want this,” he says through tears. A few surviving students assume Ben killed Luke and the others, and he flees in a state of guilt, off to Snoke, who cradles the scared and confused boy in his arms. This goes hand-in-hand with exposition Leia delivers in The Force Awakens: that Snoke groomed her son and turned him dark.

But that doesn’t forgive his involvement in something like Starkiller Base, a planet-destroying device used to eradicate Hosnian Prime and with it the New Republic senate. But again, canon contradicts what the films imply. In the script and novelization for The Force Awakens, we learn that Kylo Ren had no real involvement with Starkiller Base, and is in fact horrified when Snoke and Hux decide to use it. He doesn’t stop the attack, so he’s still tangentially complicit, but he wasn’t involved the way the movie leads us to believe.

This trend continues into The Rise of Skywalker. The film opens with Kylo slaughtering a troupe on a planet the visual dictionary confirms to be Mustafar, the home base of Darth Vader. The dictionary also confirms the people he’s killing aren’t harmless civilians, but Vader loyalists–a.k.a. bad guys. Wouldn’t that be an important detail to include in a film that, just a few hours later, redeems this character? Kylo Ren still did horrible things, there’s no denying that. But relegating anecdotes that make him more multifaceted to ancillary material feels at odds with what the movie tries to communicate later on.[...]

It’s hard to really figure out what happened in the Solo/Skywalker household to make Ben so angry. It’s assumed in canon novels that Han and Leia were largely absent from Ben’s life in his childhood. Leia sent him to train with Luke when he was just a boy, a move that possibly triggered a feeling of worthlessness. Is this when Snoke swooped in? Or rather, as we learn in The Rise of Skywalker, is this when Palpatine enacted his long con against the Skywalkers? By sensing Ben’s sadness and manipulating it?

Probably. But those implications are messy. Palpatine’s great failure in the original trilogy was underestimating familial love. But in The Rise of Skywalker, that familial love is channeled in strange ways. Leia’s final move is to reach out to her son and save him, but we later learn that she always knew he’d fall–in fact, it’s why she quit her Jedi training before Ben was even born. We get the sense that, in a way, she was afraid of him before he even existed. And yet, she sensed that Rey was a Palpatine and trained her anyway, because she knew she was good. But Ben was capable of goodness, too. So why didn’t she try to help him?

And why, in the end, does Leia wait to cross over after Ben’s sacrificial act, then appear to Rey as a Force ghost without him? The garbled writing makes it feel like Luke and Leia simply traded in their love for Ben for Rey–and it makes them look worse in the process.

In the end, Ben Solo dies saving Rey–an act of monumental love for the only person who ever really believed in him. At least, that’s how he feels about her. It’s clear our original trilogy heroes believed in his capacity for good, since all three died in service of his redemption–at least from a story perspective. But Ben’s death feels like a strange way of paying tribute to Han, Luke, and Leia. They all die so Ben can do a good thing and die, too. Is death really the only path to betterment in Star Wars?

Full article

rip to people who love their interests a normal amount but i’m different, intense, and annoying :)

This guy gets it.

“…The Rise of Skywalker, the most soulless entry of the Disney era of Star Wars and perhaps the new prime example of how this age of filmmaking has brutally jettisoned vision and surprise for slavish devotion to IP and what a bunch of executives think you, the stupid public, want to see. This is two and a half hours of nonstop stuff, incessant exposition that flits through scenes designed to micro-target every possible fan-service desire at the expense of coherence or meaning. It actively unravels The Last Jedi’s bold revisions and thematic questions, cooing into the audience’s ear that everything will be as they want again, like massaging a pill down a dog’s throat. 

Every piece of dialogue introduces a new fetch-quest task, but it also bluntly affirms the most basic fan wants, from making sure the new trio is almost never apart to upholding the Manichean moral schism that TLJ so compellingly collapsed. That the film goes out of its way to sideline and omit Kelly Marie Tran, the only person to receive nastier online treatment than Rian Johnson, sends the ultimate message: if you scream loudly enough, the producers will listen, even if you are screaming racial and misogynistic slurs. After Johnson’s delicate direction and inventive production design, we fall back to Abrams, who definitively exposes himself as a fraud, a man who thinks a close-up of a wide-eyed face can make him the next Spielberg but who has such a shoddy grasp of how to communicate through a camera that one is left with a lesser notion of these characters and what makes them meaningful than we had after two films.”

Commentary from a non-Reylo friend:

“It’s almost embarrassing that they spent three movies trying to break Han Solo into two characters with Finn and Poe. And in less than 10 minutes Adam Driver effortlessly becomes the new Han Solo of this entire trilogy by ACTUALLY being Han. By being a bit of a dork and by being a lot of a cynic but also all at once being endlessly, hopelessly devoted to one woman he admires more than anyone in the world.”

in only five minutes, ben solo showed more sass, bravery, charisma and the stubbornness of his father than any of the one dimensional good lads that the writers tried so hard to pass as the ‘new han solo’