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I meant specifically in the effects department. But the film itself, I absolutely agree.
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Posted: |
Jun 4, 2012 - 2:41 PM
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By: |
KubrickFan
(Member)
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We routinely skewer dragon53's entertainment news flashes with gleeful disgust, so I don't see why Saint George of Lucas can't be similarly commented upon.
Joe E summed it up well, and he's right.
I don't always agree with George - hell, I routinely disagree with myself on a lot of things I once did - but the hysterical levels upon which people dislike George Lucas is somewhere between impossible and embarrassing.
By a wide, wide margin - fans have been far worse to Star Wars than anything George Lucas may or may not have done with special editions or prequels or whatever. Star Wars wouldn't need things like the world's stupidest canon in the history of science fiction for why A-Wings appear in the Ewoks cartoon if fans weren't going around complaining about a simple mistake in the first place. The guy (see: people who are acting EXACTLY like Warlock's last post) saying 'look at this specifc error I found, therefore this story doesn't count!' is exactly the reason both fans and creators go back and retcon things in the first place.
Because people seemingly care about the Ewoks cartoon. (?!)
People that complain about how Lucas "raped" something (let me tell you, I will judge you and properly hang you verbally and morally for using such a disgusting term to bolster your indignation over a movie) are by and large the people who are having arguments over what the lightsabre colors mean, if Han Solo could win a fist fight with Count Dooku or want to know how many weapons Boba Fett has on his armor.
These people - and I make no bones about it - are assholes. The Star Wars community has created a fandom of people who are willing to burn down everything to prove their own petty ideas correctly and I cannot take to that kind of mentality.
PS: I do not hate JSWalsh. Come to think of it, I don't think I have any feelings on the matter?
Actually, I have never ever see anyone use that line against Lucas. The only ones who keep bringing that up are against people calling Lucas out. Of course it's a deplorable line.
Personally, I think Lucas has the right to do what he wants with his movies. But, and this is the important part for me, I do not think he has the right to bury the versions that won Oscars, made the big box office bucks, and became the cultural icons they are today. I disagree with Lucas on every single change he made, but that's not the issue. Not allowing him to give us the vision he wants (or wants at the moment, since he's been contradictory quite a bit), would also mean not allowing Ridley Scott to give us the version of Blade Runner he wants, and I do like the Final Cut of that movie. Just an example, but you get my drift.
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Posted: |
Feb 26, 2014 - 7:29 AM
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By: |
Jim Phelps
(Member)
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The one decent point made in this documentary is that Lucas publicly spoke out against the colorization of movies but then went ahead and did what he spoke out against:
"My name is George Lucas. I am a writer, director, and producer of motion pictures and Chairman of the Board of Lucasfilm Ltd., a multi-faceted entertainment corporation.
I am not here today as a writer-director, or as a producer, or as the chairman of a corporation. I’ve come as a citizen of what I believe to be a great society that is in need of a moral anchor to help define and protect its intellectual and cultural heritage. It is not being protected.
The destruction of our film heritage, which is the focus of concern today, is only the tip of the iceberg. American law does not protect our painters, sculptors, recording artists, authors, or filmmakers from having their lifework distorted, and their reputation ruined. If something is not done now to clearly state the moral rights of artists, current and future technologies will alter, mutilate, and destroy for future generations the subtle human truths and highest human feeling that talented individuals within our society have created.
A copyright is held in trust by its owner until it ultimately reverts to public domain. American works of art belong to the American public; they are part of our cultural history.
People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians, and if the laws of the United States continue to condone this behavior, history will surely classify us as a barbaric society. The preservation of our cultural heritage may not seem to be as politically sensitive an issue as “when life begins” or “when it should be appropriately terminated,” but it is important because it goes to the heart of what sets mankind apart. Creative expression is at the core of our humanness. Art is a distinctly human endeavor. We must have respect for it if we are to have any respect for the human race."
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Seems as though Lucas was merely stating what the (rational) opponents of his trilogy changes have said.
Something else in the film that is addressed but not fully discussed is *why* Lucas is chained to Star Wars and why he hasn't gone on to do those arty, independent films he has mentioned over the years. I liked Francis Coppola's comment on how the billions of Dollars generated by Star Wars' success doesn't even come to one tenths of the artist Coppola believes Lucas to be.
All said, it really is a shame that George Lucas hasn't emerged as the truly great cinematic visionary (that is, outside of Star Wars) many of us believe him to be.
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the eyes either too close together or too far apart or too small or too large, the awkwardness while delivering all that nerd rhetoric, the patchy facial hair, the extreme obesity, and the recurring thought of "No wonder these people are considered outcasts and freaks" one gets whenever these people come into view.*
Unless you believe what you see on TV, that's actually how the majority of human beings look.
Also, a long time contributor of a forum dedicated to a very particularly geeky subculture bashing geeks and nerds really is a very black pot calling a kettle black...
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Jim, is that really you in the trailer, or was JSWalsh joking in his May 2012 post?
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Posted: |
Mar 26, 2014 - 9:33 AM
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By: |
Joe E.
(Member)
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So why hasn't Lucas produced/directed/written those abstract art films he talked about?
One of the fans in the documentary said that if George Lucas wants to fix his old films, why not do that to Howard the Duck?
It looks to me like he's changed his mind, which all of us do. A bigger question is why nobody seems ever to have noticed that he did produce a bunch of abstract art films, or at least movies far removed from the traditional blockbusters for which he's known, back in the '80s - mostly after ostensibly finishing the first Star Wars trilogy and while taking a longer-than-usual period between Indiana Jones movies, though there were also some mixed in in their timeframes (as well as a handful of more commercial movies, or at least attempts at commercial movies). In that decade he executive produced Twice Upon a Time, Latino, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, Tucker: The Man and His Dream, Powaqqatsi, and others (including Body Heat, uncredited), as well as Labyrinth and Howard the Duck (both of which at least attempted to be commercial movies, true, even though they weren't commercially successful, but then again they also weren't simply more Star Wars or Indy movies), in addition to making Willow - his most SW-like non-SW and non-IJ project in this period.
Given all of that, and given also that his next Indy project after the third movie wasn't simply a fourth movie along the same lines but instead the tonally, stylistically very different The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, it seems to me that he's repeatedly tried, time and time again, to branch out beyond the sort of stuff for which he's known - and time and time again, whether the result was good or bad, it didn't do well. He even kept at it after all that, capping off more than decade of blockbuster-franchise-funded arthouse and experimentalism with Radioland Murders, a movie he'd had percolating since the early '70s, and it flopped as well.
The last thing he had his name on as writer, director and/or producer that found any commercial success and wasn't Star Wars or Indiana Jones was American Graffiti, way back in 1973; from then until at least the mid-'90s, he frequently produced other (non-SW, non-IJ) works, some of them overtly commercial in aim and some of them not, and pretty much every single one of them (save The Land Before Time) was a commercial failure, even though many or most of them were critically well-regarded. And even when sticking to his successful franchises, if he did something really experimental and daring and different with them from what he'd done with the previous entries (More American Graffiti, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles), those more experimental and daring franchise entries flopped at the box office or languished in the ratings just like his non-franchise works. Meanwhile, new Star Wars productions (movies or TV) and the fourth Indy movie have all been enormously successful, even when drawing heavy criticism. Perhaps he just realized at some point in the last decade that he was just plain tired of working on the abstract art-house movies that everyone said they were waiting for him to do, but that nobody bothered to see once he did them. Nowadays, whenever his work gets discussed someone inevitably says they're waiting for him to do those abstract art-house movies he used to say he wanted to get back to. I wonder how many of the people who say that went to see any of his others.
Regarding Howard the Duck specifically, I know you were joking, but here's a serious answer anyway. In the first place, the things most people would consider the movie's serious flaws aren't really things that could be fixed with digital tweaks and such, with the possible exception of the physical appearance of Howard himself - they're mostly things like the script, that would need to have been reworked before the movie was shot. Moreover, it's not his to alter, and never has been - it was a Lucasfilm production, but unlike the Star Wars and Indy movies, Willow, and so on, it was not one they actually owned; it's based on an old Marvel Comics character, while the movie itself belongs to Universal. Disney now owns both Lucasfilm and Marvel (including the Howard the Duck character, which it once sued Marvel over), but Universal still owns the Howard the Duck movie, and it's probably not going anywhere anytime soon.
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