Cultural Cross Contamination

Cultural appropriation.  It’s great.  Of course, white people aren’t supposed to do it, but that’s because the people who rule the world are humorless cretins who don’t want us to have fun.

I love, however, seeing some other culture take something of ours and warping it almost past the point of recognition.  Especially if it’s Japan.  Back in the ’70s, they made a version of Spiderman (Supaidāman) in which our hero gets spider powers from an alien who’s been living in a cave for 400 years and also gives him a giant robot with which to fight rubber monsters.  It’s awful in the most fun way possible.

Then there’s Kairennosuke and the Three Shining Swords.  The Last Jedi adapted into Kabuki.  Got to be honest, the sight of anything Star Wars makes me cringe at this point, but it’s Kabuki so I had to see how insane it was.  Bad for being Worst Star Wars, fascinating for being bizarre Japanese stuff.  I couldn’t find a version with complete subtitles, however.

Unfortunately, this does show that the elites are right and cultural appropriation is bad–for non-Americans anyway.  Which is the exact opposite of how they want things to work.  We shouldn’t be exporting our trash to the rest of the world.

The Last Blasphemy

I’m glad I didn’t see this article prior to watching The Last Jedi because it might have tricked me into thinking that the movie wasn’t going to be absolute garbage.

Until The Last Jedi, Johnson had never overseen a picture with a budget above $30 million. But the director betrayed no sign of being overwhelmed. He is a gifted filmmaker whose previous movies, especially Brick (his 2005 debut) and Looper, are visually distinctive and intricately plotted, the assured work of a cinema-drunk U.S.C. film-school grad who, in preparation for Episode VIII, steeped himself in World War II movies like Henry King’s Twelve O’Clock High and “funky 60s samurai stuff” like Kihachi Okamoto’s Kill! and Hideo Gosha’s Three Outlaw Samurai.

Mentioning any of these three movies in the same paragraph as Johnson as if he took inspiration from them is blasphemy.  The Last Jedi is the opposite of any of them.  Action? Humor?  Characters?  Plot?  None of these things is comparable.  Lucas stole so beautifully for the original trilogy; Johnson seems to have watched these films and decided that he would do the absolute opposite of them.

We should take a lesson from this.  Do what Johnson did and watch movies like these. Then never watch anything else from Johnson as long as you live.

JJ Abrams Sucks

I couldn’t care less if Star Wars really counts as science fiction or not (Jeffro has that covered anyway) but Bruce Bethke has something else in his post which is even stupider:

But if you’re an adult, then it really comes down to just one question: either you really love the way J. J. Abrams makes new movies for the new generation by mashing up scenes, samples, and even entire set pieces lifted whole from movies you loved when you were young—only bigger, longer, and louder in the Abrams Remix—or you don’t. If you loved what Abrams did with the recent Star Trek reboot, or loved Star Wars: The Force Awakens, you will love this movie. If not—

Well, it’s still a fun ride and worth watching, but wait for the Blu-Ray. Your bladder will thank you.

No, it’s not worth watching and Abrams is an overrated hack. George Lucas was a mash up artist. He was a genius at before he got stupid and decided he was smart enough to do his own thing. Abrams is garbage. Almost everything he’s done is garbage. For Star Wars and Star Trek he simply took the universe he was supposed to work in, hacked recognizable pieces out of them, and sewed them back together in a drooling, shambling Frankenstein.

There is only one thing that Abrams has done that I actually like: Fringe. And Fringe is a horrifically flawed show which ended badly and the fourth season should have been erased from existence (and if they’d ended it right would have been). Someone I once knew, back when the show first came out, said it wasn’t worth watching because it was “just an X-Files rip off.” I thought she meant it was about FBI agents investigating paranormal stuff. Oh, no. That was before I’d seen X-Files. The pilot of Fringe is X-Files season 5, episode 18, “The Pine Bluff Variant.” It’s one thing to steal an idea or two. It’s another to take so much that the end product is instantly recognizable as its source matter.

As previously noted, I might be able to watch Yojimbo and instantly see a scene that Lucas took and turned into the cantina scene from A New Hope and I might see a similarity between C-3PO and R2-D2 and the peasants in The Hidden Fortress but the original trilogy was what a mash up is supposed to be: its own thing. Just as Yojimbo itself is its own thing but A Fist Full of Dollars is not. A Fist Full of Dollars, however, is an honest remake and a good movie. The Force Awakens isn’t. It tries to lie to you, to pretend be something new, but the seams show and the monster drools too much. The Last Jedi is even worse.

Star Wars: The Last Miscommunication

A spoiler free version: The Last Jedi is a pretty movie with a couple cool parts which otherwise completely and totally sucks.

And on to the spoilers: