I Want It

When someone says they want pictures and home videos burned to DVDs, instead of uploading both assets to Cloud storage, and offer only "I want it [a DVD of the pictures and home videos]" as their reason why, it's a conversation killer. There's no point in continuing the discussion. How do you argue point-counterpoint when there is no point? Ben Shapiro;s article - No, 'Star Wars' Isn't Failing Because Of Hateful Trolls. It's Failing Because Kathleen Kennedy Has Done A Garbage Job. by Ben Shapiro - points this out when he writes about the legion of Star Wars fans that don't like what Kathleen Kennedy has done with the Star Wars franchise in recent years. He lays out his argument as follows:

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Kennedy had two choices upon being granted the helm of the Star Wars universe:

1. fast-forward fifty years, beyond the original characters, and reboot, losing the nostalgia of the original characters but gaining freshness;
2. recast the original characters and pick up where Return of the Jedi left off.

Instead, in fully risk averse fashion, she chose door leech off the nostalgia while introducing new characters a few years in the future.

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I like Ben Shapiro, as a political commentator because of the way he breaks down whatever he is talking about in a way that makes sense to me. I like passages like this:

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Calling your audience a bunch of deplorables didn’t work well for Hillary Clinton; it’s not going to work well for Disney, either.

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That said, my take on the whole "Star Wars Haters" crowd is that they are very similar to music fans by which I mean that if a band makes an album that sounds like their previous one - looking at you AC/DC - the band is written off as simply rewriting their previous album. If a band makes an album that sounds nothing like their previous one to the casual listener - looking at you Metallica - the band is written off as trying to be hip to the modern music scene. The fans that wrote off Metallica claim that they haven't sounded good since "And Justice for All" and that they stopped caring about Metallica when they "sold out" and released the "Black" album. Those same fans want an album that sounds like "Master of Puppets" but I suspect have also been the ones adoring "Spit Out the Bone" on "Hardwired to Self-Destruct" (their latest album) and that album's final track. They write off the opening track as a rehash of other Metallica fast-tempo tunes ("Battery" or "Damage Inc." come to mind) before going on to praise "Spit Out the Bone." Personally, I have no problem with "Spit Out the Bone" as a tune - it's fantastic and exciting and interesting. What gets me is that these same fans also would have no issue if Metallica played "Fade to Black," which is their ballad from their second album. Wait. If you want Metallica to be "heavy" like their first four albums, then why is it okay for the band to release "Fade to Black" on their second album but not "Nothing Else Matters" on their fifth album? I would argue those two tunes follow the same pattern of starting out slow before transitioning to the more aggressive ending, but I don't have a degree in music - just English.

The Metallica fans that have wrote off the band's recent tunes are the same as the Star Wars fans that have wrote off both the prequel trilogy as well as "The Force Awakens," "Rogue One," "The Last Jedi" and, most recently, "Solo: A Star Wars Story" as not being up to par of the original trilogy, but when you ask them about any of those movies they have wrote off, they claim ignorance and say, "I haven't seen any of them but I know about them." That's illogical and both Sheldon Cooper and Spock - two fictional characters that enjoy arguments based upon logic, not emotion, would love.

There's also this article - Can 'Star Wars' Survive Kathleen Kennedy's Critically Acclaimed Box Office Hits? - but I am using this post to talk about the Shapiro article because "I want it."