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watched "the last jedi" tonight as part of a current project to watch all of the recent popular properties so that i can actually write on them with authority. feel physically soul sick.
it was not a movie. it was a pile of star wars product meant to resemble a movie.
it had no shape, no structure. it was simply stuff upon stuff and noise upon noise.
a plague upon contemporary stories, or story-like objects like this, is the reliance upon audiences to bring their own ability to care about the characters to the table. if a character is beloved, or of some demographic, or you're writing fanfic & using established characters.
and not just characters. almost all narrative effects seem to be designed to happen solely in the mind of the audience. it doesn't have a score, it reminds you of a score. it doesn't earn emotion, it points where emotion should happen.
it gives these movies a religious quality. you don't respond to the reality of the object, you respond to the idea of the object. you invent it in your head on faith. you use it as source material of something else--a youtube video, a story.
and it's the complete divorcing of material from effect that makes these things not art. makes them "content." manipulating material to create effects is essentially the definition of art, and without that, it can't be.
it's not even bad art. it is in an entirely other category. it's simply a void.
it's tony makarios clutching a piece of dried fish in place of his daemon, only people aren't looking on in horror
i've said things like this before, but i've never seen a movie that embodied it so completely...though i'm sure there are more to come
