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Post by Lightwolfer on May 28, 2005 19:02:36 GMT -5
I actually repect lucas as King Sell-Out. I mean, come on! He got rich playing off peoples fandoms and making some very good choices.
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Post by Randy13 on May 31, 2005 10:36:20 GMT -5
Randy, I love ya bro but you are starting to remind of the guy on the RTM buzz board that claimed Lucas raped his childhood. These campy movies have always been tied into huge cross marketing campaigns and have always capitalized on making a cheap buck on a wide array of strange merchandise. Lucas set the standard for movies like this to rack up the merchandising revenues for family films back in the late seventies. I still remember by 1977 R2 bop bag (inflatable punching bag). Still nothing is more horrific in my mind that that horrible french kiss Jar Jar sucker from episode I. ~SS~ All terrible creations. I remember owning a Darth Vader brass belt buckle, though, and thinking it was the finest item of clothing I would ever own. So far, I was right. I don't feel raped, but when one thinks of a movie as special, and is then forced to see it's mediocrity, one feels as though he has been made a fool of. Star Wars was always campy, yes, and there are always misgivings going as far back as return of the jedi, but man! You'd think with 25 years and the creative power of a billion fans, they'd come up with something a little better then what they've sold us. On a related note, I have now pinned all my childhood hopes and dreams on the upcoming 'Indiana Jones' movie. Kidding--I'm not as bad as I pretend to be, and have long since turned to moviemakers like Wes Anderson, Hayao Miyazaki, and Jan Svenkmayer. Nothing stays innocent forever.
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Post by Squishee Slinger on May 31, 2005 14:33:58 GMT -5
The main problem I saw with Sith was the fact they had too much movie and not enough time to tell it the way we wanted it. Battle scenes and character and story depth were sliced in order to get the movie under 3 hours. I knew this would be a problem after I watched AOTC. There just wasn't going to be enough time to convincing wrap up the story in a single movie. To my surprise they did pull off a descent movie in that regard, but maybe I've been pleasently surprised because I went in expecting nothing better than AOTC or TPM.
Well, to be honest all the films had a lot of cheese in them even Empire which a lot of people from our generation seem to watch to cast as a cinematic masterpiece these days. It really was just another popcorn movie too. Y'know with it's giant asteroid burrowing space slug, nerf hearders lines, lazer brain references, Star destroyer bridge officers doing Star Trek like evasive maneuvers and the like. I think the main reason I like the first few films more is nothing to do with the acting which has always been spotty, the dialog which has always been corny, the pacing which many times has been frantic but the fact that you just just have more likeable heroes. It's hard to like characters who you know are going to go evil and slaughter millions or are being obliviously duped. Then there is also the lack of a good streetwise character like solo which seems to balance out the Jedi niavety and dogmatic rules.
The new ones just can't be as good as the originals to us because to much time has passed and to much fan expectation to stand up to as well. I felt Lucas had just waited too long when he announced he was going to make these in the mid-90s. Old school fans were very cold about the SE versions and I saw the handwriting on the wall. I mean when people had a cow about that God awful Yub Yub song being dropping in Jedi I knew Lucas would get flayed for doing anything that was boarderline cheesy in the new movies.
We worship the old campiness and warts and dislike all the new films similar imperfections. I definately think the prequels could have been better, but I'm an adult now and my tastes have gotten a bit more mature, but then again I still enjoyed them for some of the elements so I can't say I'm bitterly dissappointed either. I think I've just over romanticized the originals and tried to see these movies as kid's programs and I like them a lot more when I look at it in that manner.
I took the kids to see Madagascar this weekend and it bored me too tears. I'd love to have popped next door to watch Sith again than be lost in that entertainment black hole. I think there were maybe 3 funny things in the entire film and don't get me started on the acting, writing, script, directing and ect. on that turd.
I do see a lot of kids running around playing star wars in the neighborhood now and I haven't seen that since I was a kid so as much as we may think the movies failed in some major ways to live up to our 20 years of carbon frozen expectations. It looks like the kids enjoyed it and I can say that I'm happy about that.
~SS~
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Post by Lobsterman on May 31, 2005 18:20:41 GMT -5
Squishee, I couldn't agree more with your comment on too much story and not enough time. Having now watched all six episodes back to back, I see Lucas had something very (perhaps _too_) ambitious in mind.
I think I could have easily disliked Sith, had I spent the time to scrutinize the discontinuities with the original trilogy, the cloying, inelegant dialogue, or the almost cynical caprice with which a third new antagonist (designed solely for the marketing of toys) was introduced and dispatched. Yes, it, like its two predecessors, was tragically marred by Lucas’ seeming ineptitude in (or, if you like, utter disdain for) expressing complex concepts in a simple fashion through “writing” and “acting.” Again, he chose to mire what could have been a brilliantly simple story in what was, at best, a byzantine political discourse; at worst, a half-baked and hardly timely indictment of the current administration.
Yet I genuinely enjoyed the fact that Lucas had the guts (and I hope it was his plan all along), to create an opera on a Wagnerian scale. He created a story that refused to be post modern, stubbornly clinging to archetypes in the hope of becoming a parable more than pop culture. He opted for the trappings of theater in favor of minimalism, embracing spectacle and melodrama to reinforce its sweeping scope. Observed as a whole rather than six parts, it is a captivating story of failure and redemption. And as clumsy as some parts were, all are necessary to tell the story. Sith was clearly the strongest of the new trilogy because it was finally allowed to get to the meat of the story. I personally found it to be the most interesting because of the way it used Anakin’s fall from grace as a mirror for reevaluating all of my assumptions about Star Wars.
Up to this point, the entire series has been based on thinking in absolutes. There has been very little nuance to Star Wars; it's a morality play based on archetypes of presumed good and evil. With the exception of Han Solo (who preemptively struck against Greedo in the original cut of Ep IV, but was made over as a more respectable good guy in the rerelease with a "defensive" kill) everyone knows their place as a white hat or a black hat.
In Sith (along with the previous two, when taken together), Lucas turns that moral absolutism on its head, allowing characters he previously established as paragons to fall on their own swords, as it were. The very certainty in their role that gives the Jedi their authority is what unseats them. About halfway through Clones, Mace and Yoda discuss revealing to the Senate that the Jedi are losing their ability to use the force. They decide against it, ostensibly to prevent a panic, but one wonders if Palpatine’s assessment of their reluctance to relinquish their power wasn’t partly true. When Mace was ready to slay Palpatine, whatever his justification, he seemed slightly sinister and every bit as reluctant to give up his power as Palpatine described the Jedi. Obi-Wan derides Anakin for "thinking in absolutes," then contradicts himself not two sentences later when he categorically declares the Sith "evil." Whether it was inattentiveness or arrogance (Yoda suggested the latter in the second movie; Qui-Gon implied it as well, in the first), they seemed to have forgotten _why_ they were on the light side of the Force, and were toppled because of it. In whatever way Anakin was “fated” to fall, I think there’s a strong argument the Jedi failed to protect him, and, as a result, fell right along with him.
Another bit of cognitive dissonance that threw me off at first, but that I admire in retrospect was the Vader lab scene. When I first heard the “Where’s Padme” bit, I thought, “okay, that’s really goofy.” Upon later consideration, though, I realized I was thinking of Vader only in the terms I was used to – a calculating, emotionless machine. Combining the remaining humanity of Anakin with the unlikely voice of Vader, though, was much more unsettling than simply cutting it off and turning him instantly into a robot could have ever been. That cognitive dissonance was the key (for me anyway) to understanding that the Vader I've had in my head all this time was a completely different character - and, in turn, a completely different story - than the one Lucas intended.
There was recently an online comic (PVP Online) that suggested the early trilogy would have worked better if II had been I, III had been II, and the new III had been a "watch a newly suited-up Vader kicking everyone's asses" story. That would have dovetailed perfectly with our childhood conceptions of Vader, but would have been unfaithful to the story _Lucas_ was trying to tell. Vader was clumsy and weak in the suit. He could hardly stand in Ep III, and got his work done in IV through VI primarily through intimidation. His three real fights:
Ep IV - held his own against a crusty old Obi-Wan (who I contend could have whipped Vader again, had his intent not been to stall just long enough so the kids could get away, then reach immortality in the force)
Ep V - beat an immature Luke who had, what, a week of lightsaber training against a floating ball.
Ep VI - got smacked down by Luke with a few more months of training under his belt. Heck, halfway through the fight he had to _throw_ his lightsaber at Luke because he just didn't have that Jedi Jump left in him.
The _real_ apprentice Sidious wanted was the hearty and hale Anakin, not a quadruple amputee in an iron lung. He was looking for another apprentice from the moment Vader came off the table because he knew Vader could never again be the perfect Sith.
In the original trilogy, we all perceived Darth Vader as the ultimate evil; all-powerful and untouchable, but fairly one-dimensional. Ep III demonstrated the real price of his arrogance. Going to the dark side didn't just cost him his family and friends, but his inner strength and prowess as a warrior. He was completely humbled by the suit, not empowered by it -- and I think that made the story all the more interesting.
There are a lot of people who feel betrayed by Lucas, but I think a lot of that stems from the fact that they adopted the story as their own, reading what they needed into it until it became something unique in their own minds. Lucas had his own story to tell, regardless of what the rest of us thought it was _supposed_ to sound like. You can fault him for being a clumsy writer, but you can't fault him for not telling the story you wanted to hear.
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