#but i think a sequel film could have felt more polished and put together rather than the kinda messy vibe of the series idkkkkk

[dangerliesbeforeyou]

the league of gentlemen are cowards for not having herr lipp (or any of the other characters tbf) flirt w/ reece or mark whilst they were wearing those suits in the film honestly lol...

[theycallmejessicarabbbit]

What does Star Wars mean to me?

May the fourth be with you! On this holiday we Star Wars fans have made, I wanted to take the time to look at the Star Wars universe and what it means to me. Let's start at the very beginning....

When I was 5, in 2001, I asked my mother for a new movie. She decided that if I was old enough to read and enjoy Harry Potter, I was old enough to learn about this story from a long time ago in a galaxy far far away.So one weekend, we sat down together and watched all the movies that had been released, starting with the original trilogy and as more came out we watched them.

I fell in love with the idea of the Jedi and the Force. I watched a boy from a desert planet destroy the Death Star, become a Jedi, bring back the balance to the Force, lose hope, give in to the fear of the darkness for a split second and cause the rise of the darkness once more and then help the new generation to bring back the balance.

I met a princess with a sharp tongue who could take care of herself. Who took charge of a situation when the men couldn't. "Well somebody's got to save our skins" she said. I watched this princess become a Warrior and later a General of the Resistance. This princess/general was a role model of mine. I gained aspects of my personality from her. She taught me that women can be strong and can do what the men can do, sometimes even better.

I met a big walking carpet who has the biggest heart and gives the best hugs. I met a smuggler with cocky attitude and watched him turn into a war hero. I watched a princess and a smuggler fall in love. "I love you. I know" will get me right in the feels every. single. time I watch these films.

I will never forget the shock of learning that Darth Vader was Luke's father. And the feeling of losing that battle against the Empire because you can't will them all. Sometimes the hero loses.. this is something these films taught me. We saw this almost happen again in The Rise of Skywalker but finally people had hope again and came to the resistance's aid. Ordinary people from the galaxy came to the rescue!!

I watched Anakin Skywalker go from a slave boy to a Jedi Knight and then fall to the darkness and become Darth Vader. After the shock of "I am your father", this descent was even more heartbreaking to watch.

I will say that I did NOT initially enjoy the prequels. The story was a but too slow, and politically nuanced for me and it was almost too polished and shiny looking with CGI. Especially compared to the easy to understand, lived in feel of the original story. As an adult, I appreciate these movies more.

I fell in love with the character and heart possessed by Obi-Wan Kenobi, a true Jedi Master. Someone who was patient and kind and always had a plan.

I met Padme Amidala, Queen of Naboo. A strong female character like her daughter Leia would be. She didn't need to be saved most of the time because she was capable. Watching the galaxy gain more female characters has been my favorite part of watching these films and growing with them.

At this point, we all thought they were done. There hadn't been a new film in years and then Lucasfilm was acquired by Disney and we all started scratching our heads wondering what might be coming next.

Then in 2015, The Force Awakens was released. 20 year old me went to the theatre to see this movie opening night, excited to go back to that galaxy far far away. And I was pleasantly surprised. I was heartbroken at the death of Han Solo, especially since it was at the hands of his own son. I connected to Rey as a character and have loved watching her grow over the past 5 years.

Rey's character arc was the highlight of the sequels for me. Not the relationship between her and Kylo. But her discovery of herself and her place in the galaxy. Her discovery that she was a Palpatine, descended from the darkest being we as an audience has ever met. But she chose to use the light side of the Force. She was adopted by the Skywalker twins and chose to uphold that legacy. I personally think that was the biggest slap to Palpatine's face right there. HIS GRANDDAUGHTER would rather be a Skywalker than knowledge her connection to him. The choices she made and events she experienced felt like Star Wars to me. Her putting the lightsabers into the sands of Tattooine was a fitting end to a story that started 42 years prior.

But really what Star Wars is, is a story about hope. A story about becoming the best version of yourself. That anybody can overcome where they came from and become who they want to be.

So what I ask of you as the fandom is don't put people down for their favorites. Don't tell them they aren't a "real fan" just because they can't quote the Jedi code or because they don't know every little fact about Star Wars. Don't put people down for preferring the sequels, or the prequels. If they are new to the fandom or have been here for a long time. Let's all just be one with the force and enjoy Star Wars for the way it makes us feel and how it brings us together.

Also... I personally am very excited for the new film the Taika Waititi will be directing and co-writing. I can't wait to watch this galaxy grow even more!

Happy May the Fourth! And May the Force be with you, always

[theofficialcunt]

Hurricane Adore - Chapter 1

[lapinchatain]

Anonymous sequel chapter 10

Jacob found himself standing on a beach. A golden full moon above his head cast its gold-silver light all over the surface of the sea, a city shimmering in the distance, muffled sound of wind and broken fragments of meandering conversations in the air, as if in a Dadaist film. He could feel his heart pumping hard in his chest, like a trapped bird. He wanted to shout out the name of his sister and father loud, but couldn’t make any sound no matter how hard he tried. How old he was? This question suddenly struck him. Would there be anyone looking for a twelve years old child lost on a beach between reality and illusion?

“Jacob!”

Someone was calling his name. Startled, he suddenly saw Evie lying on the beach staring at him, her semi-transparent white cotton dress drenched by the seawater, a hollow look on her face, like a corpse. His heart twitched violently, reaching his hand out trying to touch her-

“Jacob!”

His jerked and finally woke up. It was strange enough to fall asleep on such a short trip from London to Crawley, probably because he’s been staying up too much as of late. A cousin of Aleck came to visit him from Leeds, drinking and chatting with them in their apartment until two or three o’clock in the morning these days. He used to go to classes without even getting changed after a night-long revelry back in university, but now he too had to succumb to time’s ruthless passage like everyone else. What was that Father used to say? “Time takes its toll on all of us.” Or once all the years started coming they were just never going to stop. Time never stopped, only people did. Just like Father himself.

“Are you alright? We’ll arrive in ten minutes.”

Evie was sitting in front of him in the train, a worried look on her face. He knew he must be looking terrible right now. She held a novel of Édouard Louis in her hands, a carefully prepared chicken breast integral sandwich on the desk (“Forget about your ham sandwich”, she told him laconically the day before departure, “Too much sodium.”). Usually Jacob wouldn’t see her as his sister. They were as much close as distant, a bizarre relationship difficult to be categorized by a single word or concept (or “social construct”, as Evie would say. Yeah, she was the more cultured twin). Only when they visited their father’s grave together on his anniversaries or on Christmas would he notice the fact that Evie was indeed his sister.

They treated their father’s anniversaries with much solemnity in the first years following his death. Not that they’d talk openly about Father, but were rather concentrated on all the details of the event to an exaggerating and over-stressing degree, especially Evie. Like the species and color of the flowers, who’d buy the train tickets, whether to arrive in the morning or afternoon, in which restaurant to have dinner with George, who would cook what dishes, where to have afternoon tea, who’d do the cleaning at the house, probably not so much for anything else as for diverting their attention. The house was kept empty after Father passed away, George occasionally taking care of the garden, probably out of the pity that such a sophisticated little treasure would fall into disrepair due to neglect and oblivion. They never talked about what to do with the house.

“Maybe I could use a good sleep,” Jacob murmured, grabbing the bottle of water on the desk and taking a large swig. Evie nodded, a hardly perceivable slight movement, lowering her head again and resuming her reading. Right, only in moments like this when there was a tacit understanding and a homely familiarity between them did he feel like they were indeed family.  He turned his head to watch the fast-passing scene outside the window, realizing that strangely the memories didn’t just spring to his mind as expected. But they would never die either, just locked down in a dark and deep corner of his heart.

“White Carnation and Hydrangea, how lovely, isn’t it? Lilies are beautiful too. Simple and classic, don’t you think?”

The tone of the lady at the flower shop was gentle and brisk, as if she was recommending flowers for a wedding and not for a death anniversary. Jacob stood by the door and saw Evie talking to her with a smile on her face. What were they talking about? The weather? Jacob didn’t feel like acting normal in these circumstances. Evie pushed the door and stepped outside, a bouquet of white lilies in her hands, nodding at him.

“Are you ready?”

“As if I was about to lose my virginity,” He mumbled and shrugged his shoulders on seeing the look on Evie’s face, “Can’t even take a joke.” Actually his first time took place under a rather chaotic, awkward and utterly unromantic circumstance, the morning after a night-long home party that got out of hand when he woke up on the sofa and found Janet next to him awake as well (though barely conscious, given how much drug they had taken the night before) unlike everyone else in the room, who seemed to have collectively fallen into a vegetative coma instead of simply being asleep. Jacob often wondered why nobody he knew actually died of overdose. She was probably one or two years older than the boys, never seen without her bright red finger nail polish, heavy eye make-up and fish-net stocking, always taking desperate drags on her cigarettes at the door the city’s notorious nightclubs, a mature and mysterious grown-up woman in the eyes of the fourteen years old that they were, who could get them alcohol and cigarettes from students of senior years, though she was barely sixteen years old at the time, with a non-existent father and a mother who lived on wages from several jobs that left her neither the time nor the interest to care for her in any way. Jacob couldn’t help but to wonder where she might be and what she might be doing now. Dead, probably. It seemed to him that all the people he knew before had suddenly disappeared from the surface of the planet in the last few years. “Just like everyone ends up sleeping with everyone else, everyone ends up losing contact with everyone else, eventually.” Pearl Attaway said once, leaned against the headboard and shrugging her shoulders, lighting up a cigarette in her room in a nonchalant manner.  She was the key account manager of their supplier, senior to him by over a decade, an extremely elegant, sophisticated and uncanny woman who apparently enjoyed twisting people around her little finger. She would probably have stolen the contact list of their clients from his computer if he didn’t caught her in the act in time. “You’ve been lucky this time,” Jacob’s boss told him with a scowl on his face before telling him to get out of his office. Her champagne was excellent though. Her apartment in London had a nice decor as well, as suspicious as herself. That’s right, all the girlfriends in middle school, Maxwell Roth back in university, and Pearl Attaway. Everyone eventually lost contact with everyone else.

But he knew where he could go back to.

“Do you want to have tea later at L’obrador? I want some carrot cake.”

Evie said suddenly. He lifted his head, as if surprised to find her there standing next to him. He wanted to hug her, hold her hands, tell her how much he loved her, how afraid he was that she’d leave him like everyone else (actively or passively, no one could do anything about it anyway, not that he cared), and how much he wanted her to always be by his side, though she’d probably frown and tell him to stop his sentimental nonsense with her usual impatient and tetchy air.

He nodded, his mouth dry.

“Let’s go.”

***

Evie took a deep breath and took out a little brown bottle from her bag, spraying a bit of coconut perfume on her bed, its familiar, sweet and soothing fragrance starting to fill her room. Father used to keep her room tidy and clean after she left home for university, as if she had never left, and now, she had to come back for a weekend and clean the whole house every several months to make it feel less bleak and solitary. She wasn’t sure if it was a futile attempt at preserving the long-gone past.

“I’ll cook tonight,” Jacob said to her in an unexpected way when they were having tea. They had been to their parents’ grave earlier this afternoon, a ritual completed in a strange kind of silence and precipitation, as they both felt it necessary to maintain the formality of a proper ritual, but couldn’t help sensing how hollow it was. Evie suddenly took Jacob’s hand when they walked out of the green grassy graveyard’s gate, and he seemed to be somehow moved by this gesture, tightening his fingers on hers.

“No lasagna, thanks. A salad would do.”

“Roasted turkey? With nuts and seeds?”

“Yes.”

“Ok,” Jacob paused for a moment. “George said we can have lunch tomorrow.”

They drove to the hypermarket and Jacob got some tools to fix the faucet in the bathroom in a hardware store on the way, their minds wandering on their own in a slightly awkward and distant silence. Evie tried to get Father out of her mind, dismissing any idea that started with “what if…” immediately, as if she could get scalded by it.

“Are you alright?”

Jacob finally turned his head around to look at her in front of a red light. He looked somehow tired, maybe that’s why he fell asleep on the train back home.

“Henry has offered to come to visit Father with me.” She said after some hesitation.

“But?”

“I told him it’s personal.”

The green light was on. Jacob started the car, without saying a word.

Evie stood up slowly, putting the bottle of her coconut perfume on the night stand table. She took a look at her watch, it was already one o’clock in the morning. She got changed into her white cotton dress and matching long cardigan, bare foot, catching a glimpse of her reflection in the mirror as she passed by, her face pale, hair disheveled, like a ghost of her younger self. She turned off the light and closed the door gently, walked up to Jacob’s room on the other side of the doorway and knocked his door.

“Can I come in?”

No reply. A few seconds later, the door swung open. Jacob seemed to have just got up from his bed, standing behind the door in his T-shirt and shorts, watching her silently, half-submerged in the darkness of his room with only some dim light from the window in the background. She didn’t say anything, just walked over to him and held him tightly, his familiar scent filling her mind. He held her back immediately in response, as if he’d been expecting this moment.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

He murmured to her ear. Evie shook her head and let go of him, heading directly towards his bed and getting under the covers, curling herself up. He followed her and got into bed as well, holding her in his arms and letting her put her head against the crook of his neck. She let out a long sigh at the touch of the reassuring warmth of his body.

“You know, I’ve been thinking about one thing.” Jacob said after a long silence. “How do you face the death? I mean in the hospital.” Strange, it seemed that he had never asked that question to Father, Evie thought.

“It was hard at the beginning. But got better once you learned the trick.”

“What trick?”

“To see people as statistic figures.”

Jacob laughed, but Evie knew it wasn’t because he found it funny.

“So I’m not the only one surviving in a soulless system.” Evie used to say sardonically that business school graduates were just a bunch of soulless opportunists, and he’d counter that everybody was selling their soul, just in different ways. “Including doctors?” Evie retorted sharply. “Especially the doctors.” Jacob said firmly, uncharacteristically condemnatory.

“Do you remember the double layer bed at Grandmother’s home?” Jacob said suddenly. After they moved in with Father, they shared the same bedroom until fourteen years old, a fact laughed at by all of Jacob’s friends at the time. “Gross, you sleep in the same room as your sister!” They would say. Evie had never commented on that matter.

“Don’t be such a cliché, bringing up the past on every anniversary.”

“Don’t be so defensive.”

“I’m not.”

“That’s what I’m talking about.”

His arms tightened on her body.

“New fragrance?”

“I’ve been buying the same perfume of the same brand in the past ten years, Jacob.”

“Ok, it smells good. Take the compliment.”

“Or you can stop changing the subject.”

Jacob let out a short laugh, she could feel his warm breath by her ear. “I asked you if you want to talk about it.”

“Never mind.”

They fell into silence. Evie could hear his heartbeat in his chest, firm, powerful and steady. Would he become a statistic figure one day as well? Her brother, who held her hand tightly in the dark doorway of the night, who waited for her after school in the crowds at the gate every day, following her onto the bus like a little dog and falling asleep on her shoulder on their way back home, his long glossy brown eyelashes fluttering like little butterflies, who listened to techno music all the time in middle school, who would intertwine his fingers with hers and kiss her watery eye corners in the bed, whose eyes were like gleaming green lakewater under the sunshine and a shimmering light chestnut in the dark, who would narrow his eyes slightly when he laughed, who’d do anything to make her laugh when she felt down but anything to annoy her in her normal mood, who always wore the same old Snoopy dog T-shirt when coming out of the bathroom, her brother who loved orange juice and The Terminators, who hated coffee and the blazer of their high school uniform. Her brother, who would turn into decaying bones under six feet one day, a name and two dates on the gravestone, like their long-gone father lost in the nothingness and oblivion. “Eram quod es, eris quod sum”, “As you are now, so once was I, as I am now, so you must be”, Evie had taken Latin in middle shool and she had always remembered this aphorism. She was suddenly clutched by a mad urge to cry, though apparently it had nothing to do with Father anymore. Jacob seemed to have sensed her mood, pressing a gentle kiss on her forehead. His hug was warm and familiar, like a lighthouse in the endless waves of darkness, casting a gentle and lonely light across the bottomless abyss of the ocean.

He didn’t let go of her for the whole night.

[focalwriterworks]

ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY

The path to new Star Wars stories has been carved and cut and whether you like this first one or not—the first live action Star Wars product to arrive outside of the Skywalker saga (and by product let’s call it Star Wars product B, C, or D to the original main series A)—it's a success for Disney. And though it’s different, let’s say it has a pleasant Star Wars veneer, it still works competitively well in the new episodic, binge watching digital TV and theater world we live in.

The Story: A band of Alliance Rebels—think French and British underground rebels fighting the Nazis in WWII—know the power and destruction of the Empire’s latest weapon called the Death Star. They must at all costs steal the digital blueprints of the planet-destroying spaceship in order to stop the tyranny of an army in possession of such a fearsome device. We do indeed see the Death Star’s strength in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977) for which that film acts as a sequel, sort of, to this prequel. Central to the rebel endeavor is Jyn Erso, played by Felicity Jones, whose father Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen) is one of the weapon’s creators.

The Goods: For the Disney business model, and for Star Wars fans, the film is a huge plus. There is already, and there will continue to be, endless products and programming as the Mouse that bought Luscasfilm for $4 billion in 2012 will be story-mining details of previous films and characters from those films for decades to come.  And this will be for all demographics and age groups regardless of whether those products are critically received or not.  Which brings us to this semi-inaugural film—not animated like Star Wars Rebels, the Lego Star Wars films or Star Wars: The Clone Wars—but linked in terms of the Rebels’ fight, in a space war, with the Empire just like all of the films and ancillary TV and game commodities before it.

Most diehard fanatics who were there in 1977 won't feel the same however, for Rogue One, as a younger crowd might but that's why rolling these new items out every few years is important—it’s a scientific, mathematic equation that Disney’s quantitative assessment analysts have forecasted accurately—that they will continue to reach out and appeal to a new generation at every turn.  But it’s important to point out, spoiler free, that they didn't ruin Star Wars. Disney and Rogue One director Gareth Edwards didn’t harm the Star Wars legacy or universe in any way, and that’s very important to know going into Rogue One.

The genius of all this is that it’s probably impossible to do so because the originals, Episode IV, V, and VI sort of exist in this historic vacuum.  Yes, in Rogue One they use props, tools, machines, wardrobe and uniforms from previous films—from the 1977 original, specifically—and used one of an infinite amount of moments from Star Wars lore for the Rogue One story but the rest as a whole is mostly a digression like you might see in a midseason episode of The Walking Dead, or Game of Thrones. That’s to say it’s not a massively impressive “episode” (like season five episode eight of Game of Thrones, Wildlings vs. Walkers) that makes you drool for more, or want to tell people about it the next day at work, even wanting to talk about it with people who don’t watch. Rather that Rogue One is more like one of those sort of book-to-TV adapted filler episodes with 70% talking and character development, and 30% action. Which still gives us the goods to keep us watching until next week though not as hair raising.

Though Rogue One is not as aesthetically pleasing or paced as well as Edwards’ other films, Monsters (2010) and Godzilla (2014), and I can’t believe I’m saying a Godzilla film is better than a Star Wars film, Rogue One is still well put together in terms of the story and plot territory it covers and the actual war battle sequences that ensue. The best parts of Rogue One are the actual “star wars” dog fights between the Rebel X-Wing fighters and the Empire’s TIE fighters, and blaster-laden land battles in exotic locations, which are extremely well done. And then there’s Darth Vader. Vader makes an appearance in the film, not a spoiler here because you see him in the trailers, but let's just say his appearance in the film and the lead-up to Episode IV is worth the cost of admission.

The Flaws: Edwards knows Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick well.  He is a student of great cinema, and you can see that in his other work.  Most of the awesome, wide vistas and images of great breadth we see in the trailers for Rogue One—very similar to use of great spatial dimensions on screen in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and found in John Ford films—are missing from Rogue One’s finished presentation and seem to be only found in production stills used in marketing and advertising.  In that respect the ads sell a completely different, expansive, wide screen creative work that is opposite of the quick, short, almost TV-like one we see in Rogue One.  

It is a well done cover of a Star Wars original, certainly not part of their flagship class A line.  To think they may have purposefully set out to make a Star Wars film, for the big screen, that doesn’t try as hard to be better than the rest is disappointing. Like purposefully not using certain John Williams created Star Wars score cues to amplify emotional moments as heard in the A films. Instead there is a completely new though familiar sounding accompaniment to keep the films separate, while visually keeping it all in the family, which defeats the purpose really. Especially when Rogue One needs that familiar Star Wars theme to help when solid character development fails.

In reality Rogue One is no different then something you might see in an NBC Heroes episode circa 2006, or Agents of Shield, or something from the early 2000's on the Syfy channel, like Battlestar Galactica from 2004. That is to say polished, action oriented with long sequences of dialogue for budget purposes. And while several “shows” from the ‘60’s, ‘70’s and ‘80’s paved the way for Netflix, Prime, HBO, Hulu and their bread and butter serial TV, Heroes and Galactica stand out as the kind of new kid on the block products these streaming channels gunned for. Rogue One could be a part of that category. Even though it’s not TV it certainly feels like it. Not necessarily a bad thing. It’s just not of the Class A Star Wars echelon we’re familiar with when we go to the theater.

Here’s what watching Rogue One felt like to me: since I mentioned Battlestar Galactica, if you saw the original Star Wars film in 1977, in a theater, and then a year or so later saw Battlestar Galactica, the movie, in the theater, you would understand what it feels like to see Rogue One. Sure they’re different, absolutely. And how can you compare anything to the original Star Wars. George Lucas sued the producers of Battlestar Galactica for certain technical similarities to Star Wars: A New Hope, and John Dykstra who was a special effects supervisor on A New Hope also worked on Battlestar Galactica. Regardless, one felt like the greatest space adventure ever while the other felt like the TV pilot space war surrogate that it was. And that’s sort of what we’re talking about here. Coming from a huge Star Wars fan.

Again, I can’t say enough of how much I appreciate and applaud what Disney and Lucasfilm have done. But it doesn’t mean there aren’t flaws. The major error for me in Rogue One (as if I haven’t been critical enough) is the very limited but highly visible use of computer graphics to create two well known Star Wars characters. It's great CG animation, don’t get me wrong, but it's also noticeable as such. So when the rest of the film looks incredibly real, in terms of old school model making and matte paintings, and shooting on location, when none of the characters are animated and along comes a cartoon you really know and feel it and it removes you quickly from the film. Not quite Jar Jar Binks distraction, but along those lines. More like in Tron: Legacy (2010) when Jeff Bridges' computer likeness appeared.

When George Lucas did this with the prequels, Episodes I, II and III, he interweaved an equal amount of human actors with computer generated ones and the finished product while at first was hard to swallow soon turned into a crafty, acceptable balance we learned to live with through those three films. Like watching a foreign film with subtitles, or a Shakespearean British drama, it takes a good fifteen to twenty minutes to get into it and assimilate the presentation. Whereas here when suddenly after an hour of solid human interaction we get an artificial actor well it just feels out of the norm. There’s not enough of it seasoned throughout the film to allow us to get comfortable with it. Sort of cool, yes. But it fails the movie in its disruption. Especially when compared to nostalgic, organic realism of 2015’s Episode VII, Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

The Call: Spend the ten. Regardless of my personal petty criticisms, as a long-time Star Wars fan, Rogue One has some hot action adventure sequences—though not as many as talking ones—and an appearance by the one and only Darth Vader (voiced once again, thankfully, by the great James Earl Jones). Kudos to Disney and Kathleen Kennedy, head of Lucasfilm, for successfully planning, executing and inaugurating the Star Wars Story line for Star Wars where we are sure to see a Star Wars story for everyone. And on every device.

Running time is 2 hours and 14 minutes. Rated PG-13 for extended sequences of sci-fi violence and action.      

By Jon Lamoreaux