
How Being Named the 'Best New Restaurant in America' Hurt My Business - prostoalex
https://munchies.vice.com/articles/how-being-named-the-best-new-restaurant-in-america-hurt-my-business
======
hluska
You know, at the risk of heaping on the negativity, I read their Yelp ratings
and while some are excellent, others are genuinely a sign of a restaurant in
crisis.

Consider the gentleman from New Zealand who made reservations via an email to
the owner five weeks in advance, spent the afternoon walking around downtown
LA to avoid rush hour traffic, and then showed up only to be told that they
were closed for a wine tasting. Or, there was the reviewer who got the point
of the restaurant, but still found the flavours rather difficult. Or heck,
consider the endless comments about how poor the service was.

I take a couple of things away from this:

\- No matter how interesting your product is, you still need to please your
customers.

\- When you're emotionally invested in something, it is tempting to set aside
criticism as being gratuitously negative. But, sometimes your critics are your
best advisers.

~~~
moron4hire
I've generally been growing to the idea that I want to hear all criticism
towards my projects, whether it's good or bad, whether it's constructive or
not. People suck at communicating, but when they leave criticism, there is
always a reason somewhere at the core. It's the old saying that it is apathy,
not hate, that is the opposite of love.

So when people are heaping hate on one of my projects, I am now starting to
think of it as a failure of messaging on my behalf. If someone says something
like "don't reinvent the wheel", it's because I've failed to explain my
constraints that prevent me from using existing systems. Maybe one of those
constraints is "I don't like that particular system". But whatever it is, it
probably needs to be explained if someone is bitching about it.

I might rather people hated my projects than completely ignored them. Getting
ignored sucks a lot. Receiving hate tells me people were actually excited by
the idea and I was on to something, but that I didn't do something right. I
can't figure anything out from getting ignored. It's just blowing in the
breeze at that point.

~~~
rbritton
I tend to be in the same boat, but I feel there's an important caveat: the
person providing the criticism needs to be reachable if the criticism itself
lacks substance. A complaint just for the sake of venting does no good.

Take, for example, a recent review on my iPad app:

    
    
        As a creative professional I can tell you that this is junk. Today I had an important meeting and this app acted up to the point the client laughed hard for how bad it was. Stay away!
    

There is nothing specific in there that I can use to improve the experience.
Not one user in thousands of daily active users on this version has reported
anything I could possibly assume might be what the reviewer is talking about.
Further, because it's on the iOS App Store, it's impossible for me to reach
the person.

~~~
Vexs
That's one of the best parts of the google play store; the developer can
directly respond to a review. It's pretty handy, and to me, as a user, it says
the app is actively being worked on.

------
Gorbzel
HN is usually pretty good about calling out founders who blame everyone but
themselves for failings. This is exactly that, just in a restaurant context.

The problem is that Ari thought that Alma's humble origins mattered to people
coming in for a good meal such that they would somehow obscure some pretty big
problems with the restaurant. I can't imagine ever excusing a product's flaws
simply because the founder had difficulty raising capital, and no other
restaurant has these deluded expectations.

In this case, the founder didn't listen to his customers — instead, he chose
to rest on his MVP laurels and never move beyond. We appreciate that you were
able to open the place on $50k, but now that you're more well known, could you
possibly stop ripping people off with Eastern European wine that didn't pair
with any of your tasting menu? I understand that your approach required an "us
vs the world" mentality, but perhaps you could improve service that was spotty
bordering on rude. When your customers dislike the tasting menu because it
lacks many standout flavors beyond the snacks that initially made you famous,
it's advisable to step up your dishes, not simply change to an ala carte menu
and start blaming the Yelpers.

From what I can tell, he raised his own funds to start Alma. Before that, he
was fired from an internship at a James Beard award winning restaurant, worked
unpaid at a community garden and few other places until he just up and left.
The article notes that he's never appeared on any of the cooking shows or
anything, and that he was about to have to start working in someone else's
place before the permanent real estate "opened up" in Downtown LA (which makes
no sense if you've been to the neighborhood).

Point being, it's easy to sound blasé about giving a fuck what other people
think of your cooking, but it masks the fact that this guy has never had to
answer to anyone about some very obvious flaws in his cooking and business
skills. Instead, blame your customers and their "shit talking."

Good riddance.

~~~
downandout
_> could you possibly stop ripping people off with Eastern European wine that
didn't pair with any of your tasting menu?.....Good riddance_

Perhaps it's my disdain for wine snobs or anyone else that takes ridiculous
things seriously, but I find your comment extremely distasteful - especially
the quoted part. Unless he is actively misrepresenting the origin or brand of
the wine, he isn't "ripping people off". He simply made a menu choice that you
vehemently disagree with. If the negative Yelp reviews are similar to your
rant here, he absolutely has a point in blaming the positive articles about
the restaurant for bringing in the wrong kind of clientele with outlandish
expectations and a penchant for publicly deriding others' lifework.

~~~
gyardley
Eh, there are wines that go better with certain dishes than others. If you
order a wine on your own and it doesn't go with the food, it's your own damn
fault, but on a tasting menu with wine pairings it's 100% understood by the
customers that the sommelier has spent some time identifying and selecting
good matches for each course.

I can't tell from the grandparent comment whether he's grousing about a bad
choice he made personally or some botched tasting menu pairings - but if he
got the tasting menu with the wine pairings and the wine didn't match, then
yeah, he absolutely got ripped off. Expecting two things the restaurant
recommends together to actually go well together isn't an 'outlandish
expectation' at all.

~~~
downandout
Taste is, by its very definition, subjective. A mismatch between the taste of
this commenter's apparently very sensitive palette and that of the menu
designer does not qualify as a "rip-off".

~~~
hueving
By that logic, nobody should ever leave a bad review because the food was
disgusting.

~~~
downandout
Any statement, taken to its (il)logical extreme, can be made to seem
ridiculous. But no one has accused the food here of being "disgusting". In
this case, OP said that he didn't like a wine pairing, and ended his comment
with "good riddance". In other words, he was happy to see the livelihood of
another human being destroyed because he was unhappy with the specific part of
Europe that the wine he was served came from. The Internet exacerbates
sociopathic tendencies, and there is no finer example of that than this.

~~~
stormbrew
Can we please have some perspective here? The business owner's livelihood was
not "destroyed". His business failed. That is a risk every business owner
takes when they start a business, and even that failure generally leaves them
more equipped for their next effort. The article even explicitly talks about
what he's doing next, which will almost certainly do well by him. He's going
to be fine, and the OP of this thread has done and can do nothing to prevent
that.

This kind of extreme overreaction to criticisms of people who have incredibly
opportunities ahead of them no matter what they did wrong or failed at is just
silly.

~~~
downandout
Bad Yelp ratings routinely destroy businesses (which usually function as the
livelihood of the owner(s)). When OP said "good riddance," he was saying that
he was happy to see the demise of this restaurant because he disliked the part
of Europe his wine was from. IMO, _that_ is the kind of "extreme overreaction"
you are referring to.

~~~
ufmace
I'm gonna go with stormbrew on this one. You say "destroy business" and
destroy livelihood as if this guy is going to be kicked out on the streets
because his business didn't work out. Give me a break - yeah, it's sad for him
that his business failed, but I'm sure he'll find another upper-middle class
job soon. Being a special snowflake founder doesn't excuse him from being
criticized about running a fine-dining establishment badly.

We would all do better to break out of this 1950s idea that losing a job or
closing a business is cataclysmically bad. It's disappointing for the
founders, but everyone involved will most likely find something else just as
good very soon.

~~~
Mikeb85
Please, restaurant jobs are blue collar, working class jobs. Even operating a
restaurant is long, hard labour. Most restaurant owner/operators I know work
12 hour days, 6-7 days per week, and if they were to go bankrupt, certainly
wouldn't be able to just jump to the next project...

Capital doesn't simply line up for restaurateurs because there is no big exit.
The most you can hope for is to make a profit by the time your lease runs out,
and maybe pay yourself a salary.

~~~
stormbrew
I don't think anyone is arguing it's easy to run a restaurant, or even to
start one. That's not the point. The point is that someone having a business
that's failing, or losing their job for that matter, has not had their
"livelihood destroyed". They have had one tool in maintaining their livelihood
removed, it does not mean they have no more.

And while capital does not (and really should not) line up easily for
restaurateurs, I would still argue that someone who can raise capital once has
a well above average chance of being able to raise it twice, regardless of the
risk of the venture. This also assumes the only choice a business owner has
when their business fails is to start another.

------
7wQFnQvA
I think a lot of the commentators here are missing his point. Namely, that he
started Alma because he loved cooking, and that before being named the "Best
New Restaurant in America," he enjoyed cooking for other people, but
afterwards all the wannabe critics ruined his experience. So negative Yelp
reviews aren't helpful if he didn't plan on becoming a world-famous
restauranteur, but just wanted to run a small, local restaurant. In other
words, in a world where Alma never won this accolade, he, his early customers,
and all the negative Yelp reviewers would all have been happier (because they
wouldn't have known or cared about Alma being overrated).

------
crdb
Seems like an expensive lawsuit was an issue:

June 2015: "If you add another $18,000 a month in legal fees ... we just can't
absorb it on our own."

October 2015: "We're still working with the other party to wrap up the
lawsuit. But to maintain the restaurant at this point it would just continue
to put us in a substantial amount of debt. [...] as small business owners, we
won't be able to afford a trial, and we really can’t even afford to go through
the proceedings leading up to a trail. The realization was that the only way
to bring this all to a close is to dissolve the business and move on"

[http://www.grubstreet.com/2015/10/alma-closing-
interview.htm...](http://www.grubstreet.com/2015/10/alma-closing-
interview.html), [http://www.grubstreet.com/2015/06/alma-crowd-
funding.html](http://www.grubstreet.com/2015/06/alma-crowd-funding.html)

~~~
dmatthewson
Thanks, those articles are helpful in understanding the real issues.

This next article gives the other side of the story regarding the lawsuit.

[http://www.buzzfeed.com/arianelange/alma-
lawsuit](http://www.buzzfeed.com/arianelange/alma-lawsuit)

[http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/sites/default/files/custom/...](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/sites/default/files/custom/Documents/ESQ/Almacomplaint.pdf)

~~~
crdb
Thanks for these! Very interesting:

"... they offered to set up a payment plan to reimburse _the money he had
spent_ on the restaurant."

Which goes to show - it's a bad idea to do anything before terms have been put
down on paper! It is quite amazing when you first start doing business by
yourself (as a contractor, entrepreneur, or even chef it seems) how often
people "go back on their word".

What happens is that both sides have a different idea of the deal, probably
picking on whatever hints were in the conversation to interpret them in the
most favorable light possible; and in some cases, it's just a case of one side
last-minute-changing the deal because they feel the situation has progressed
to give them more leverage.

In this case, the disagreement could easily have been avoided if they had
typed up a term sheet and preferably some kind of legally enforceable
shareholder's agreement BEFORE the payments were made.

Now begins the PR battle as both sides will try and influence public opinion
to protect their reputation.

------
pinkrooftop
I ate there before it was named best restaurant in America. It was ok a bit
pretentious with tasting style food and bare interior. I tried to go back
months later with a date and the answering machine said they don't take phone
calls during dinner service (but they were only opened for dinner) and just
hung up. Went to another place downtown instead and drove by Alma, it was
empty

------
percept
And they continue to beat up on the guy in the comments: "You represent
everything that is wrong with the food industry in Los Angeles."

Can you imagine that? Who is he, Stalin? (I'm giving Hitler the day off.)

~~~
zzalpha
There's a reason south park riffed on this in the latest season.

Everyone thinks their opinion is important because the internet has made it
easy for people to broadcast their complaints to the world (and yes, I realize
I'm literally doing this _right now_ ). Review sites like Yelp exacerbate this
by making everyone think they're a damn food critic.

Throw in a heavy dose of entitlement and its a recipe for disaster.

~~~
csydas
Well, it's more than that, I think - it's kind of why you never hear comedians
lead off with "Here's a really funny joke", and it's because everyone takes
stuff like that as a challenge.

I haven't seen the negative reviews, but I read the article declaring Alma
best new restaurant, and the article is focused a lot on the humble origins
and surprisingly very little on the food. The author talks a bit on how some
of the pairings were surprising, but more so because the author wasn't
expecting it to be this good.

I'd like to see some of the actual negative reviews, but if that's the article
that brought people in, it's not hard to imagine how some might take the
declaration of "best new restaurant" as a challenge instead of as a claim.

------
Alex3917
Why not just write that on the menu? One of the best (and highest rated)
restaurants near me often features a rant at the bottom of the menu from the
owner, either about politics or the economics of the business or just
complaining about the customers being douchebags. It's a little quirky, but it
doesn't seem to hurt business any, and at least helps the customers understand
his perspective on things.

------
tptacek
I started Matasano with two partners, both from NYC, one of whom had taken a
break from software security to go to culinary school.

What I heard from them is that stuff like this is also part of the restaurant
culture of different cities. The rap on NYC and LA is that they have
competitive, take-down cultures (NYC more so than LA).

~~~
Animats
_" The rap on NYC and LA is that they have competitive, take-down cultures
(NYC more so than LA)."_

That's why they're better in the arts. In NYC, they tell you if you suck. In
LA, they don't call you back if you suck. In SF nobody says anything and you
can suck forever. Go to little theater or art openings and this is quite
obvious.

~~~
tptacek
Neither Chicago nor San Francisco have takedown restaurant cultures, and both
have relatively spectacular restaurant scenes.

Some of this gets to what you're looking for from a restaurant. If you're
looking at food as an art form, and only want to spend time getting exposure
to the very best of it, NYC may indeed be a better filter for you. If what you
want is a Great Neighborhood Restaurant, which is perhaps Great in ways that
make it distinctive regionally or even nationally, I think Chicago is a better
bet than LA.

~~~
istorical
I think you could almost describe this in the context of only positive-
reinforcement cultures vs positive-reinforcement and negative-reinforcement
cultures. Both approaches seem to work well in the long-term, but the city
which also has negative-reinforcement might have 'failures' more often, which
could be seen as a positive from the POV of looking at the health of the whole
system, but on the other hand could be seen as needlessly cruel to
individuals.

~~~
tptacek
But it's also a question of whether you want the culture to optimize for peak
artistic quality, or whether you want the median restaurant to be really good.
There are some kinds of food for which the NYC median is higher than everyone
else's, but for a lot of it, I wonder whether the Chicago median is better
even when the NYC maximum is better.

------
Mikeb85
Restaurants are hard enough without being compared to restaurants that opened
with $10 million and 50+ staff...

$50k means you're a neighborhood restaurant, most dive bars and sandwich shops
cost more to open...

~~~
spotman
This is one of the most important points in the comments here.

In LA opening a restaurant with only 50k is irresponsible mathematically. I
say this having taken restaurant management courses with the goal of one day
opening one myself.

It is true that restaurants are one of the most difficult businesses to start.
It takes time to find your groove, and 50k no matter what neighborhood your in
is not a lot of time. Most people in this situation would start with a food
truck or save more.

------
logn
People go to restaurants for lots of different reasons. That's what a 5-star
rating system doesn't capture. I think simply rating "I am/not likely to eat
there again" would be more appropriate. A site could aggregate enough of that
data to find users with similar tastes to you. I.e., Yelp should be more like
Pandora and less like Rolling Stone.

I don't know anything about this particular restaurant but it seems like he's
accidentally targeting the wrong audience. Wine pairing menus, fancy plating,
an article in Vice, Kickstarter... none of these things strike me as targeting
his desired customer, which is someone with modest expectations and expecting
just dinner, not an event to review.

~~~
ajmurmann
This actually is a huge pet peeve of mine. It's most obvious with extendingl
extremely specific needs like vegetarians for example. It drives me nuts when
I read yelp reviews that rate a restaurant low because they don't offer good
vegetarian alternatives. It is obviously an issue, but it should be trivial
for yelp to exclude that recite from the rating that they show to non-
vegetarians. Less obvious examples that are a related but different issues are
reviews by people who clearly don't know what they are talking about. Looking
at reviews of high end Spanish restaurants in the Basque country, I really
don't care about reviews that start out with "This was my first visit to a
restaurant with a Michelin star...". I'm not trying to be snobby, but I'd much
rather have the review by someone who had been to a ton of then in the same
area weighed much higher.

Edit: I wonder if there is a great opportunity for some disruption here. Well
be tough do to overcome yelps moat. I would love to work on this!

------
kazinator
People assume that you pulled some sort of strings or gamed the "system" to be
named "best new restaurant"; they don't know you're an accidental victim of
overrating.

(If that _were_ the case, some of the negativity would be justified.)

------
jdavis703
Starting a business is really hard, these people experienced just one of a
near-infinite and surprising way that new companies fail. The good news is
that should they try a new concept that is more community-oriented they'll
have more leverage with investors and potential partners since they can
clearly show they have potential.

------
j45
Interesting that they were remarkable when they opened, but when the
mainstream media made it remarkable, it was no longer remarkable to a
different set of people who were looking for more than what the space was.

This reminds me a little of Clay Shirky's article A Group is it's own worst
enemy.

Not faulting in the restaurant owners (all businesses have growing pains), it
raises thoughts about branding and how much "this is how we do it here" is as
much about the holes in the walls at the restaurant as it is the food, and how
that story was known and told.

Was the restaurant's message about who it was clearly known, before outside
reviewers came in and interpreted their story and told their story for them?
For me, a restaurant bootstrapped on so little money is remarkable and worthy
of support, but it might not be for everyone.

Some things aren't meant to appeal to everyone and still be successful.

Link to essay:
[http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enem...](http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enemy.html)

------
everyone
Restuarants are a very risky business. I'd lump them in with other
entertainment ventures like quitting your job to go write a novel or whatnot.
You get to follow your dream but are not likely to be financially secure. Its
a pity society works like that, rewarding pointless work (like corporate
lawyers, middle manager and HR people (no offence intended)), and seemingly
punishing people who pursue their calling. I'm planning to do that myself (to
make computer games) but I will arrange it so I dont have to make any money
doing it and can still survive (I have almost saved enough money to buy a two
bed apartment, I'll rent the 2nd room and live off that + my expenses will be
extremely low as I wont have to pay any rent myself as I'll own the place)

------
cushychicken
Another possible explanation, as an alternative for all the "failing to scale"
scorn shovelers who rushed to post: he started this restaurant, and then had
it blow up in popularity before he had the chance to shake out all the bugs.

~~~
Mikeb85
Not to mention, you can't 'scale' a small restaurant. You have a limited
amount of space, and sometimes it's just not possible to progress beyond a
certain point. Sometimes a neighborhood restaurant just needs to stay that
way, it can't become a 'destination' restaurant because it simply doesn't have
the logistics to manage.

------
robbiemitchell
Public restaurant reviews are simply not helpful. There are better ways to
solve discovery for consumers, and it's uniformly terrible for venues.
Enabling private feedback to the GM/owner would be better.

------
somberi
From a recent article in Vanity Fair about how some chefs are surrendering
their Michelin stars, as they pigeonhole the chefs.

[http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/09/top-chefs-
michelin...](http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/09/top-chefs-michelin-
stars)

I do feel bad that they had to shutdown, but I suspect the same thing that
hurt them (the accolades) also helped them to land a gig in The Standard. I
consider this a success for a young chef, even if it arrived via a perceived
failure.

------
pbreit
I have a tough time ginning up a whole to of sympathy here. Most people in
business would kill for such attention. Not being able to figure out what to
do with it seems like a comparatively small problem.

------
cant_kant
"A year ago, a former friend and advisor who sought to partner with our
business sued us. The charges alleged in the suit are serious, including fraud
and unjust enrichment. For the past year, Alma has been hit hard with legal
fees required to manage and defend the business against this suit."
[https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/save-alma-
restaurant#/](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/save-alma-restaurant#/)

------
yarou
Honestly, it just seems like they were a mediocre restaurant.

Whether or not Yelp and publicity helped or harmed them is debatable, but that
doesn't change the fact that their restaurant wasn't anything spectacular to
write home about.

There are many instances where a genuinely good product or service receives
negative publicity (remember the original iPad anyone?), but is still a
genuinely innovative product or service.

It just seems like they weren't able to deliver an exceptional restaurant
experience.

------
jondubois
When you get that much media attention and you still fail, there are no
excuses. It means mistakes were made and expectations were not met. I don't
think it's the media attention which killed the restaurant. Getting people's
attention requires luck, keeping people's attention requires skill.

------
deeteecee
fair enough. good points are made, people are brutally indifferent and you
just wanted a kind of "secret" identity for your restaurant. yelp reviews
didn't treat you the right way.

yet, most of what i read irks me because of its raging, venting way. oh well,
its not like i haven't written similar things because of bad experiences.

best of luck to this guy.

------
g8gggu89
This is why, despite loving all kinds of different foods, I hesitate to call
myself a 'foodie.'

------
gonyea
Here's a great rule of thumb: don't write bad reviews. If a place sucked, oh
well. People have bad days. Stop acting like a wannabe gourmet and shitting
all over people.

I'll only consider a bad review if you give me food poisoning. Cooking your
food thoroughly isn't hard.

... Or if your service personally lost me real money. Then it's a legit
"beware."

------
golergka
> Who is he, Stalin? (I'm giving Hitler the day off.)

On a completely unrelated note, I'm so glad that western public opinion views
this guys on the same level of evil.

If only russian public opinion was like that.

~~~
dang
We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10767524](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10767524)
and marked it off-topic.

~~~
golergka
It certainly is off-topic. But I didn't know that off-topic discussion, that
goes as off-topic as a polite conversation between real people often can, is
discouraged by HN.

------
belleandsebasti
"Exposure killed my restaurant so I'm writing about it to get exposure for my
new restaurant."

------
zappo2938
It is so easy to criticize food. This is not different than writing or
cinematography. This is the same attack against George Lucas. The Phantom
Menance wasn't written for 34 year olds who act like children playing pretend
in costumes, its target audience is 7 year olds. And, the movie is about
growing up, leaving the protection of the protective mother (although gender
roles have changed so now this includes the protective father) and join the
adults.

There are probably a lot of people on HN in academia who after publishing
popular papers or gained some fame find themselves with targets on their back
for criticism.

Anyone dealing with the pressure of criticism should read a very small book
that contains 10 letters written by Rainer Maria Rilke to an aspiring poet who
went to the same German military school he went to called Letters to a Young
Poet. [1]

It starts with:

"I cannot discuss your verses; for any attempt at criticism would be foreign
to me. Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they
always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings."

I did cook professionally for 17 years. I understand what this chef feels.
However, I have learned to not care about what anybody feels or says about my
dishes. I do not cook for other people. I cook for myself, because I enjoy the
process, intensity, and experience of cooking and the food I make is what I
would want to eat. Most of the time I find what I want to eat is also what
other people want to eat and in the cases it is not they can move along to
next restaurant because I don't care what they think.

[1]
[http://www.carrothers.com/rilke1.htm](http://www.carrothers.com/rilke1.htm)

~~~
aaronbrethorst
The Phantom Menace is objectively a bad film. You want a good film that
teaches this to seven year olds? Try Finding Nemo.

The Phantom Menace features offensive racial stereotypes, terrible dialog, A
poorly-executed subplot about a trade dispute, and characters that I
personally could not and cannot identify with.

Is it fair to speculate that you were born in 1992, making you the 7 year old
you refer to above? Search your feelings, zappo2938, you know this is a bad
movie!

~~~
striking
It's also a historic piece of cinematography with a world that feels vast and
immersive to its fans.

(I'm not one, but I am empathetic enough to imagine how they feel.)

Objectively it's not perfect, but every movie means something different to
everyone and registers on a different level with each person.

So you're free to criticize it and rate it based on how well or poorly it
portrays the things you think it stands for.

But other people have opinions too. And unless you're a filmmaker worth a damn
yourself, your opinion doesn't count for anything.

~~~
zappo2938
Star Wars is for children and always have been. If a bunch of adults complain
that the films don't speak to them, there is something very wrong with their
state of maturity.

I wasn't passing judgement on the films whether they were good or bad. I was
pointing out like the chef, after Lucas gained popularity, people started to
attack him and his films with harsh criticism. Maybe the criticism of the chef
is legitimate, maybe is earlier stuff was better than his latter stuff -- I
don't know. My point is that criticism is an inevitable part of creativity and
people can't make works of art to satisfy criticism because they will crush
under the pressure. If the motivation for this chef is the applause, feeling
accepted, and getting accolades, he is going to have a nervous breakdown.

This chef, George Lucas, Mark Zuckerberg, and before him Bill Gates can't
catch a break from the shit talkers. I'm not passing judgement. But if you
base your self esteem on prestige be prepared to have people tear that
prestige and your self esteem away with it.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
> _Star Wars is for children and always have been._

That's objectively false, though. Star Wars marketing quite clearly targets
both children and adults; much more so than, say, Pixar films, which are
marketed solely at children despite arguably being more mature (in the
"thoughtful and intelligent" sense, not the "sex and violence" sense) than
Star Wars.

You're actually trying to say that adults who like Star Wars are childish, and
you're welcome to your opinion. But if you choose to back up your opinion with
facts, you need to pick facts that are true. There are many exclusively kid-
targeted properties that attract sneering attention from adult fans (mostly TV
cartoons, in my experience), but Star Wars doesn't fit.

~~~
zappo2938
I absolutely enjoy Pixar and Star Wars films, along with many Dr. Seuss books
which have messages not only directed towards children but also their parents
reading it to their children on subjects like nuclear nonproliferation, anti-
Semitism, dictatorial leadership, environmentalism, and in the case of Horton
Hatches and Egg, not being a dead beat parent. I considered Star Wars just
entertainment until my early 20s when I read Joseph Campbell which made me
very conscious of what George Lucas and Disney were doing including the
message of self sacrifice for a person's community, family, and friends. This
means that George Lucas and everything from Disney [1] thoroughly rejects the
libertarian philosophy of Ayn Rand using a language of myth and symbolism
which according to Campbell connects deeply with children. That is Han Solo's
character arc; he didn't care about anyone but himself when we first met him,
maybe a little for Chewbacca, until he met the princess. She was the first
person he put above his own self interests and the investment paid off when
she put herself in harms way to rescue him. It's for children, the toys which
children use to foster their imaginations are for children, the dress up
customs for Halloween are for children, and Campbell explains that the
particular myth of Star Wars is the coming of age story of a boy who leaves
the safety of his mother to join the men.[2] Most people are heavily
influenced by these stories. It's pseudo science but we understand what is
going on with children who have nightmares of the Beast from Beauty and the
Beast or Darth Vader. As for adults who play pretend and dress up in customs
for play, they really miss the point of coming of age in the stories.

[1]
[http://www.thewritersjourney.com/hero's_journey.htm#Memo](http://www.thewritersjourney.com/hero's_journey.htm#Memo)

[2] [http://billmoyers.com/content/ep-3-joseph-campbell-and-
the-p...](http://billmoyers.com/content/ep-3-joseph-campbell-and-the-power-of-
myth-the-first-storytellers-audio/)

~~~
icebraining
I think the problem is that you're talking past the critics you claim are
missing the point. The usual criticism of SW isn't about the main storyline
(particularly of the first trilogy, which you summarized here), as the people
who find that plot thin and uninteresting were never SW fans in the first
place.

By the way, I was 10 when the Phatom Menace came out, and I can tell you that
I found it very disappointing. For a film supposedly targeted at children, it
has a lot of scenes involving politics, both at the Senate and at the Jedi
Council. And no, Jar Jar wasn't funny, not even then.

~~~
zappo2938
Too bad you felt that way. All the little kids in my life at the time it was
released completely loved it and were obsessed with it the way I was with the
first three.

At no point did I say the movie was good or bad, only that it was for children
and most of the children I know loved it. So I think it was on target.

My original comment was about handling criticism. I think that George Lucas
will continue to make movies not caring about what people think about them.
I'll let him speak for himself on the subject. [1]

[1] [https://thescene.com/watch/vanityfair/george-lucas-on-why-
he...](https://thescene.com/watch/vanityfair/george-lucas-on-why-he-s-done-
directing-star-wars-movies)

