#star wars delete later kenobi spoilers maybe vaguely? does tumblr filtering catch mid-tag phrases these days>

[stephantom]

disclaimer: drunk unedited(mostly) star wars nostalgically defensive incoherence. like, super incoherent and unmeaningful.

watched Kenobi. was enchanted, happy, nostalgic, annoyed, frustrated, happy, left with a compulsive need to rewatch the phantom menace and die on the hill that it was a good movie, actually. husband has been saying “yeah maybe someday” for years now whenever i periodically mention that it might be worth rewatching with an open mind but when pressed is now actually refusing lol. it was a good movie actually and i will die on this hill. the backlash (and it was a backlash, not immediate consensus!*) says more about trend-following behavior at a turning point of culture and media in the early 2000s tahn it does about hte movie--it’s all about the birth of, and interaction between, things like franchise corporate machines as the biggest distributors of art, and the exploitation of (but also genuine indulgence in and engagement with) nostalgia (and/or fandom) on a grand scale and that as an ongoing force in collaborative ongoing art franchises, and big viral social media influencers with a cynical/resentful bent as the biggest disseminators of media/art criticism, etc, etc. The characters are good, the actors are good, the effects are good, the music is good, the story is good, even most of the editing is good. the weakest point to me is the dialogue/the script, in my memory, and some editing choices, but even all of that that seems forgivable. i read and enjoyed the novelization at age 13 and all the tie-in books for a reason--there’s a lot of good stuff in there, and so much of it just started with tpm. i’m about to rewatch, so maybe i’ll have a lot of strong caveats i’ll want to say after the rewatch about how, “ok, yes, it’s sort of a bad movie in some ways, sure, but maybe we were really too hard on it” idk. i’m just fired up right now lol.

*roger ebert gave it a positive review before the backlash set in!! (then again, i disagree with plenty of his reactions--he didn’t like my forever beloved original jumanji (1995), for example (although everything he said about it was true enough--he just had different feelings about it all than me as a child viewer then)) anyway uhhhh this has been an unhinged incoherent reactive burst of star wars/tpm love