[the_af]

> but on a certain level "The Last Jedi" was kind of artsy fartsy

While I agree with your criticisms of The Last Jedi, I don't think you can under any circumstances consider this movie "artsy fartsy".

The Last Jedi is the anti-artsy fartsy movie, otherwise the term loses all meaning. It doesn't mean "bad", and an artsy-fartsy movie can be good. Focusing on just the technical or glossy aspects doesn't make a movie artsy, it just makes it bad.

[yyyk]

TLJ is super-ultra (about 99%) artsy fartsy, just the Euroartrash type which most non-critics aren't familiar with. This type is utterly obsessed with controlling, subverting and deconstructing expectations, so everything needs to be the opposite of what the movie-goer is supposed to expect. Except that too is a kind of convention, so a Euroartrash movie going long enough will eventually subvert itself. It's basically a 'sophisticated' type of trolling.

Critics love these movies, because first they see lots of movies, and something doing different, even if the different doesn't really have anything behind it, is refreshing. Also, since there isn't really any plan, you can read everything behind it, which allows you to write whatever you want very easily.

Especially for the SW universe which is getting stale, and the sequel trilogy was stale from the beginning. Euroartrash allows the illusion of a new path. An illusion, since if the movie went the way some critics imagined it, a certain character had to make the other choice at the end. But you wouldn't subvert the viewer if they had.

Viewers don't like them anywhere as much - turns out trying to confuse the viewer for the sake of it doesn't make for a good experience - and it's a bad fit for a movie universe. They really picked the wrong directors for that trilogy.

[the_af]

> TLJ is super-ultra (about 99%) artsy fartsy, just the Euroartrash type which most non-critics aren't familiar with

Hard disagree. First, I'm familiar with many kinds of European cinema, and second, by no means is anything Star Wars artsy-fartsy, or "Euroartrash" or whatever silly made up category.

It can be bad cinema, but that's unrelated. Star Wars is, and will always be, about entertainment first; not a single Star Wars movie or TV show escapes this fact. Not a lot artsy about it.

Subverting (some) expectations has nothing to do with being artsy. And it's not like the new trilogy was particularly gutsy either; it just wasn't very good.

We agree on one essential thing though: my main criticism of Star Wars is that it's mostly played out, with very little left to say (with some honorable exceptions). Time to give this corpse of a movie universe a rest, instead of keep milking the cash cow.

[yyyk]

I guess you have a different criteria for 'arsty'. For me, the sensibility matters more than the experimentalism some of these movies have. Some other guy below mentions a Ryan Johnson interview where he says 'subverting expectations' was a main focus (I wasn't aware of this, it just was my first impression). That's typical for post-Deconstruction European filmmaking. It was bringing this sensibility (a poor fit for Star Wars) which makes it 'artsy' here.

In fairness, I knew the moment JJ Abrams got the role that the sequel trilogy was doomed. It's a lot more his fault than Johnson's, and a lot of the criticisms TLJ got were a consequence of the previous movie. If SW was to modernize, it needed to find new grounds, and JJ could never do it.

I was never a big fan, but I still regret to inform everyone that Disney is going to Zombify the franchise and milk the Zombie cow forever. This video is the future of Star Wars:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zY9z7IP-1Q

(Yes, it's about the Simpsons, but all Zombie TV looks the same at the limit)

[bbor]

“Artsy fartsy” ~= “more concerned with art than entertainment” ~= “more concerned with making a movie pretty than fitting fans expectations”

So IMO we should cut the person some slack :). I don’t agree that it’s that way because ultimately that’s a movie by Disney not a movie by Rian Johnson, but it’s weird to say that technical aspects are somehow not related to art

[the_af]

Nothing Star Wars or Disney, good or bad, is more concerned with art than entertainment. It might be bad, it might be a miss, but they surely aim for entertaining.

It's of course a continuum -- few movies exist squarely in either the "artsy" or "entertaining" ends of the spectrum -- but it's a safe bet Star Wars is closer to the entertaining/spectacle end.

The problem with calling a Star Wars movie "arty fartsy" is that it twists the meaning of this term to mean "a movie I don't like", which I'd rather people did not do.

[adammarples]

You're missing a 4th rule, if the audience score is far, far below the critics score, near zero, it means the movie is "woke"