My Wish as a Star Wars and Indiana Jones fan. George Lucas please stop destroying Star Wars and Indiana Jones. Anyone else feel the same way? — Page 2

Vaderisnothayden said:

Indiana Jones got more than just wires erased. There's that cgi shot added to Raiders. I wish he'd just leave it the fuck alone.

Which made its debut in an HD broadcast of all places!

Actually, in all these years I still haven't seen a breakdown of the erasures for the dvd release. All I've ever read was that they got rid of the reflection in the snake pit and erased something that was visible in the "bowling ball" shot. I've google searched it once or twice and come up with nothing. Maybe I'm just not using the right words. Does anyone know where I can find screenshot comparisons?

I think there's a screen compare somewhere on these very forums, but I'll be darned if I can remember where.  You might try using search (although you'll have to use the right search term given the limited capabilities of the search function).

TV's Frink said:

Vaderisnothayden said:

I don't get the big fuss about Graffiti.

I guess you've never had your house tagged.

Grrr. ;)

And talking about American Graffiti, has anybody here seen the bloody awful sequel? One of the good things about the original is it ended with this simple statement of tragedy, the deaths of Milner and Toad. That ending added a lot of depth to the film, which was sorely needed. The sequel turns Toad's missing-in-action into a silly joke, treats the Vietnam war as one big laugh, and turns Milner into a date-rape-type groper so you end up not giving a damn that he's killed. Meanwhile, the two characters who are republicans have to turn into sixties anti-police demonstrators, because while being a groper seems to be forgivable in the film's eyes, beng a republican is just not acceptable. Cliched politics abound and the film's idea of humor lacks anything resembling intelligence. Harrison Ford is good in his tiny cameo but they didn't even do the decent thing and credit him. Lucas didn't direct or write this travesty, so I guess he can't be blamed for everything. Or maybe he can, because he edited the screenplay and the film and let all the bullshit pass. I guess it's the first case of Lucas going back and screwing up his stories. But American Graffiti was never so good in the first place, so I guess this time it was no great tragedy, though the sequel makes the orignal look good by comparison. The sequel really makes a laughing stock of the story.

I thought More American Graffiti was very inventive in its use of split screens. I have never seen that done in a feature film at that point. It was a very intriguing experiment in form. The film itself wasn't great, but I thought it had some interesting elements in it that at least made it worth watching.

As for the film, it was made by Universal. They were going to make it with or without Lucas, so he reluctantly signed on to try to steer it somewhere. The problem is that the original was such a masterpiece the way it ended that nothing could be added without being superfluous. Toad's Vietnam storyline is sort of neat in itself, though--it's basically Lucas' version of Apocalypse Now. 16mm with a sort of comic-book like satire.

Wasn't he kinda swimming in DePalma's wake there with the split screens? (like in Sisters and Carrie)? More American Graffiti is an interesting movie. Without Dreyfuss it's like it has no rudder, but maybe that was the idea. The style is cool but the actual 4 stories are kind of boring. The pattern of Lucas' "producer projects" (the ones without Spielberg that is) is starting to emerge, like with Willow, Ewok movies, Young Indiana Jones, Radioland and now even this Clone Wars cartoon to take neat visuals and an interesting setting and characters to tell these really really generic stories.

Depends on whether you consider morphing CGI. It's a computer-generated image but only in the sense that digital compositing is as well. It's not really what comes to mind when people say CGI, IMO.

What's annoying is seeing so many movies, both new releases and catalog titles, being given such nice treatment on blu-ray while Lucas - a guy on Scorsese's film preservation board - keeps burying the original versions of his own material. I'm sure we'll see the original version of the OT nicely remastered for the blu-ray (if he can stamp out two-dvd9 sets for the '06 release, he can stamp out two-bd50 sets for the blu-ray), I've stopped worrying about that as it's an inevitably in my mind at this point, but it would really be nice to see the originals of Graffiti and THX nicely preserved on blu-ray. I wouldn't even care if the best existing prints aren't in great condition, just being able to watch them in hi-def would be a treat.

Oh, and I really hope that cgi shot from the Raiders HD broadcast doesn't end up on the blu-ray, but I'm not getting my hopes up because why would they have put it there if that's not what they were intending to eventually do? I guess if they know how much backlash there is against it they'll change their mind. Seriously, wtf was up with that? Whose idea was it, Lucas or Spielberg? Guess we'll never know.

Toad's Vietnam story was an insult to what people went through in Vietnam and what happened there, turning a serious issue into a lot of cheap comedy. And Toad's missing-in-action thing in the first film was clearly meant to be a serious recognition of how people one knew died out there in Vietnam, but the sequel turned it into a silly joke, thus robbing the original film of profundity and making a joke of the deaths of people in Vietnam. All because the people making the film didn't have the guts to kill off the character, I guess. At least they didn't retcon Milner's death out of existence, but they did just as bad by turning him into arsehole.

As for split screen stuff and form the story was told in, that adds nothing of value worth noting. Innovative form is useless without a good story, emotional depth or real content. The original film was overly sweetened and didn't ring fully true, but at least it had a certain degree of emotional depth. The sequel was just shallow dumb comedy.

Vaderisnothayden said:

As for split screen stuff and form the story was told in, that adds nothing of value worth noting. Innovative form is useless without a good story, emotional depth or real content. The original film was overly sweetened and didn't ring fully true, but at least it had a certain degree of emotional depth. The sequel was just shallow dumb comedy.

Well, form in itself creates emotional or intellectual response. It's an interesting way of telling a story. That's what experimental and avant-garde cinema is about, it's not about identifiable characters and a 3-act narrative structured by Syd Fields, sometimes experiment in form is its own exercise. But personally, I found the performances and characters to be decent; mediocre maybe, but nothing terrible. I always thought this film was unfairly reviled. It's not great but it has a lot going for it. It's certainly a one-of-a-kind film. You are right about Toad though, they didn't have the guts to kill him off, which I thought was a total cop-out.

That's a good point about DePalma--he had used split screens before, but not like in MAG. It might be where Lucas got the idea from though, but then split screen use like in MAG had been seen in some of the 1960s avant-garde shorts, you can even see Lucas trying to experiment with fracturing form in this way in THX 1138 in some of the beginning montage.

The only film to replicate close to MAG that I've seen in a feature is maybe the 2003 Incredible Hulk, where it attempted to literalize comic book panels. But even then, my memory is that MAG did it much more extremely, especially with the parallel/simultaneous storylines.