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.