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Pete McCutchen's avatar

Episodes 7,8, and 9 make the prequel trilogy look like The Godfather. That’s what people don’t like.

If I were your wife, I would divorce you. I hate people interrupting my viewing. Or talking when I am watching.

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Deadpan Troglodytes's avatar

I love this. Other crimes against the audience:

- Characters doing shit completely incongruent with their established personalities.

- Characters that don't have personalities in the first place because they're merely plot vehicles (these two do not apply to abstract films).

- Scenes that deliver only exposition. Every fucking scene should have an idea beyond exposition, if not twenty! Entertain us, tell us something about the environment, set up a joke, show off a cool camera filter, mislead us, whatever. Just make use of the second-most-fundamental unit of cinematic grammar.

- Bad lighting, though I'm happy to report this is rarely a problem anymore. I've become obsessed with lighting: movie crews mostly crush this nowadays, and so do most television crews. Last night I was watching American Psycho and marveling at the way that the cinematographer and lighting team often created three distinctive regions of light on each actor's faces in a way that amplified their expressions, looked beautiful, and appeared natural (or if not natural, at least well-suited for the scene).

To give you some idea of where I'm coming from, a few movies I consider perfect: "Raising Arizona", "Alien", "Kill Bill", "Chungking Express" and "The Teacher's Lounge".

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