"That's because George Lucas is a useless hack! Where are my PIZZA ROLLS!!"
Posted on 09/28/2013 11:23:27 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
If you haven't seen it, a design company in Portland has created a video called 4 Rules to Make Star Wars Great Again. They've also set up a website and a petition which they are hoping 1 million people will sign.
(VIDEO-AT-LINK)
I like the video. It's very well produced and I'm sure the creators will get a lot of traffic. That said, I think you can boil all of these rules down to one underlying concept. The Star Wars universe was driven by a realistic sense of capitalist enterprise, specifically the idea of secondary and black markets that exist outside the Empire's control.
Without the underlying gradient of economic necessity almost none of the connections in the first 30 minutes of Star Wars would happen. Luke Skywalker lives on a moisture farm in the middle of nowhere. Early in Episode IV, Luke purchases two droids. Why? Because they are needed for work on the farm. Now what Luke wants to do is go to Toshi station to pick up some power converters, but he can't because he has to work and get the droids ready for work.
By the way, Luke's family buys the droids from the Jawas who are essentially junk collectors making a meager existence off whatever they can collect in the desert, fix up and resell. They are all capitalists trying to survive in a tough environment.
When he does have spare time, Luke spends it flying his beat up T-16 Skyhopper and his beat up X-34 Landspeeder. The reason his stuff is old is not because there is no new stuff in the Star Wars universe, it's old because Luke is broke. Used stuff that he rebuilds himself is all he can afford....
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
Parts of ROTJ I liked, such as Jabba and his lair. But even that got screwed up in the Special Edition. In the original their is a great scene where Jabba forces a green slave girl to dance, becomes displeased with her, and drops her into the Rancor Beast pit. The Slave Girl's dance is sexy and tense. In the Special Edition, much of the dance scene is replaced with special effects shots of, furry, cute, muppet-like creatures playing some jazz-riff version of the original slave dance music. It completely kills the tension of the original version and replaces it with silly comedy.
You're quite right about Super 8, although if you're arguing that ET is in some sense "superior" I'm afraid we must agree to disagree. ET is an awful, treacly excuse for a film.
As for Star Trek: That's not where that audience is. There has not been any "character development" in Star Trek since 1967.
Unlike most "creative" people in Hollywood, Abrams "gets" science fiction, and that is rare [in fact, I'm trying very hard to think of anyone else in that category except Ridley Scott.] He will do a better job with this franchise than George Lucas.
Smortfoan not so smort.
This why mankind MUST get off this PLANET.
Americans thought up the concept of freedom
because they lived on a frontier and thought
they could build a government that recognized
their inherent freedom, yet stayed small enough
not to interfere with their lives unfortunately
ALL GOVERNMENT is based on the repression of
someone’s rights, some give them up willingly,
some don’t.
We have lost the will to keep government small,
the supposed benefits of a growing government are
a sweet inducement but it ALWAYS comes at the price
of freedom and independence.
Civilization is antithetical to a free state.
Only when man is beyond the reach of civilization
can he be considered free.
It is why we must colonize the moon and Mars if
freedom and independence is to survive.
Tet68
I got my Wife the iPhone 5S last week (She’s been using Blackberries), and she’s discovering the joys of smortfoans and their speelcheckers.
;-)
You’ve received horribly mangled texts, I take it?
This is a kyo hydro.
It is gloriously bad with the spellchequer.
You just decribed "Firefly".
Sad to say that I agree with everything you’ve said, but you forgot bestiality.
I only know that as much as I enjoyed New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back , and Return of the Jedi (well to be honest part of Empire, and got so disguested with ROTJ that I was sick. Brother and Sister? Really? C’mon George, Jeez)! That I will not be giving Luca$h OR Disney ANY of my hard earned money this time.
Well, the Ewoks were an outgrowth of an original idea he had before the first movie was made to have a low-tech Wookiee planet fight the Empire. He said this was inspired by the guerrilla warfare in Vietnam (Lucas was set to direct Apocalypse Now at one point, so he probably had ideas for Vietnam-style battle scenes floating around in his head). The brief Wookiee battle seen in Revenge of the Sith brought some of that to life eventually, but the Wookiees were more high-tech, in keeping with the idea that Chewbacca could pilot the Millennium Falcon. Lucas had no budget for that kind of thing in the first movie so Chewbacca became the only Wookiee and he had to become high-tech to be a copilot for Han. For Return of the Jedi he resurrected the idea of a furry species fighting the Empire, but he said he didn’t use Wookiees because he wanted this species to be low-tech. Why they ended up as teddy bear-type characters, was almost certainly with an eye towards merchandising the characters. Although my understanding was the Ewok merchandise never sold as well as he hoped. I know that when I was a kid, we liked collecting the action figures, but at that age, as boys we were not particularly excited about buying larger fuzzy teddy bears.
I’m not ready to concede that he gets science-fiction. I haven’t really seen the evidence of that. I think his sci-fi films have been too derivative and mediocre, although competent to be sure. I think he at least showed improvement in doing action scenes with the newest Trek, which had a couple of impressive-looking sequences.
I agree that Ridley Scott gave us one of the best sci-fi efforts in recent years with Prometheus. I think James Cameron is still the absolute best at doing sci-fi action films.
I think Abrams could direct the film well if someone delivers him a great script. I’d just be afraid given his other works that it’ll lack originality, follow a formula from the previous movies and make too many references to them. That’s already a problem some of the Star Wars sequels have had (notably Return of the Jedi and Phantom Menace).
I would have rather seen outside-the-box thinking on choosing a director. Picking the director of Star Trek to do Star Wars is about as unimaginative and unrisky a choice as they could do. Lucas picked Empire and Jedi’s directors not because they had done sci-fi films before. And recently, we saw Kenneth Branagh picked to direct Thor, a very outside-the-box choice that was surprisingly successful.
Or you could dig deeper INSIDE the box and pick Joe Johnston, an old Star Wars effects guy who did a good job directing Captain America and Rocketeer (although not so great on Jurassic Park 3). If I had to pick, I’d rather go with Johnston’s more lighthearted, movie serial-like storytelling style than the unconvincing melodrama seen in the dialogue scenes between Spock and Kirk in the new Trek.
It also bugs me that Abrams reportedly basically had to be begged to sign on to Star Wars after turning the offer down originally. I’d rather have someone who was enthusiastic about getting the job.
Cameron is absolutely the worst filmmaker in the history of science fiction. From Terminator to Dances With Smurfs he has never had an original idea in his life. All of his sci-fi "triumphs" are boring, derivative, and overrated. Aliens isn't even a shadow of the original film, which is probably the greatest sci-fi horror movie of all time. Dark Angel is a retchingly awful mash-up of idiotic politics, sappy sentimentalism, Kung Fu reruns, and laughably naive "futurism." I wouldn't attend another one of his idiotic productions if the admission was paid.
Sorry. James Cameron? You have got to be kidding...
The one with the Emperor taking the collect call from Vader after the Death Star was blown up is beyond funny.
At the time, the Ewoks were created because even after all the money made the idea of them being Wookies was still too costly.
Notice that Yoda in Episode 3 (?) was with the Wookies.
But yeah, they sell better as teddy bears. And in the movie the word “Ewok” was never uttered.
The Dark Knight was not more or less a terrorism movie. It was 100% a terrorism movie. Nolan and his brother wrote most of the script and in an interview flat out said it was about our terror war and Batman was akin to Bush.
I liked both of his Star Trek movies. Good old fashioned Saturday afternoon on a rainy day sitting in a dark room movies.
Remember the one with the guy that got his arm severed by Obi Wan in the bar scene? A great skit about leaving work, as an architect, with a friend and didn’t want to.
Clever.
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