I read through all of Jim Raynor’s “Red Letter M*dia’s Episode I Review: An Exercise In Fanboy Stupidity” last night (it didn’t take that long). Here are some of my thoughts on the essay.
1) I haven’t seen the videos that inspired the Raynor essay and I don’t care to, but it seems to me that based on what Bryan Young wrote about the TPM video and what was in the essay, a lot of the filmmaker’s criticisms are opinion presented as fact and are the sort of nitpicking you could apply to any movie to make it look bad. Granted, what I’m looking at is biased on one end but I also can’t help but think that the videos don’t so much as “destroy” the movies as they give people who already dislike them further justification for their stance. As both Young and Raynor point out, the filmmaker more than one time either misunderstands what’s going on or flat out gets facts and details wrong.
2) Raynor’s piece is entirely about refuting the video’s arguments. There’s an interesting part where he talks about Padmé and her character arc, but if you’re expecting an essay that argues TPM’s merits, that’s not what this is about.
3) Raynor is at his most effective when he uses humor to question the logic of the video’s arguments. I particularly liked the “comic strips” of scenes of the film to advance his points.
4) He’s not so effective when he spends a lot of time on name-calling. It’s not an internet post where emotion can take over the keyboards, it’s an essay he spent a year writing.
5) He also has a tendency to assert his opinions as fact, assuming everybody or almost everybody agrees with his own criticisms of the film, i.e. “(f)ew people will disagree with the idea that Anakin wasn’t handled as well as he could have been.”
Still, it’s one of the few times I’ve seen where a fan has gotten off the couch to give this kind of support to any of the prequels.
Tags: PT Activism, TPM
January 16, 2011 at 7:36 pm |
I managed to read through the essay today myself, and while I didn’t have your exact reactions to it, I suppose I can more or less agree with them even while still thinking “well, at least it’s ‘getting off the couch…’” I might have let my immediate reaction that Jim Raynor’s not a “prequel appreciator” the way we are downplay my reactions a little; at least, I did think “why did Obi-Way ‘have’ to have more emphasis? Was it a matter of him being a character who carries through into the old movies, or was it a matter of him being the most like a twentysomething fan?”
In any case, the description of the videos he was refuting (and I understand your comment about how something more than a point-by-point refutation could have been appreciated) left me with a feeling that they weren’t asking if George Lucas might have had some assumptions about how other people would put the pieces together, they were being deliberately dense. However, I did have the ambiguous feeling that, given how *everything* has been hurled at TPM over the years, some people may have thought the videos stepped over the “obvious” targets and offered a focused argument…
January 17, 2011 at 11:18 am |
That Raynor apparently isn’t as enthusiastic about these movies as we are is in itself quite interesting. Maybe even those who are moderately fans/moderately critical of the prequels are as tired of the attacks on them as we are.
January 17, 2011 at 12:54 pm |
Yeah, it’s an interesting point…he isn’t really all that big a fan of the prequels, but he nonetheless felt the need to rebut the Red Letter Media “review.”
I’ve been known to defend someone or something I don’t particularly like, if I feel that someone or something is being unfairly attacked, so I can understand his motives.
And the Red Letter Media thingie really is over-the-top. Those who’ve watched it say it’s “not that bad” and “makes some worthwhile assertions.” Maybe, but that’s kind of beside the point. The point is that the loser — er, person — who made it was so filled with hatred toward a movie that he felt compelled to release a lengthy dis of it, a DECADE after it came out. No one (but us) looked askance at that basic fact, and it was enthusiastically embraced by the online community as a masterpiece, and the “final word” on TPM.
(I’ve said this before, but it’s odd that the bashers, who claim to be so confident that TPM is “universally reviled” and the people who like it number exactly ten or some other small number, seem so…I don’t know, SCARED of any positive discussion of it that they feel compelled to rush to the scene and crush said discussion immediately. Why bother, if TPM is really “universally reviled” and the people who like it number so few?)
Anyway…a piece like the Red Letter Media thingie all but begs for analysis, to see if its points were even honest, not just “fair.” So this retort, even if it’s less than ideal in its methodology, is long overdue. At least this guy recognized the geekiness of what he’s doing: writing a lengthy reply to a lengthy dis of a decade-old (actually, almost twelve-year-old) movie.
January 17, 2011 at 5:12 pm |
I think Jonathan L. Bowen took it bit further. He’d be a good spokesperson. I can’t help but think if we took the time to do a rebuttal video it would be a catch 22. We’d be no better than this a**hole Red Letter. But at the same time, I think we should set the record strait. Again we need Mr. Bowen and his fantastic fact based books. The question is how? How can we do that without stooping to the bashers level?