3D STAR WARS for the masses...has ARRIVED! — Page 17

CO said:

From what I have read that 3D/HDTV's are not selling well, and I honestly think it is a fad in theaters right now and will be an afterthought in 5-10 years.

I don't blame the movie studios for trying to increase revenue anyway they can, because they are essentially a business that looks at its bottom line.  But this is masking a larger problem in the industry that movies overall just aren't as good as they were 10-20 years ago and they have to try anything get people in the theaters.

 

I hope 3D stays a fad.

Second, I think Hollywood has entered an irreversible decline and American cinema is dead. It's like all the good movies ended with the 20th century and they studio heads focused on making shlock. Film has become an obsolete medium like drama because no one knows how to make a film anymore. Look at the imdb bottom 100. Most of those films were made less than 10 years ago! Even in the late 90s there used to be a classic film released in the multiplex every week; now it every other year that we see film that can even barely compare with the older classics. The film business sinks to a shockingly low nadir every 30 minutes. There is no point in going on anymore. It will be a matter of time that your local multiplex will be stuffed with so much bullshit that we will start comparing Michael Bay to Orson Welles.

generalfrevious said:

I think Hollywood has entered an irreversible decline and American cinema is dead. It's like all the good movies ended with the 20th century and they studio heads focused on making shlock. Film has become an obsolete medium like drama because no one knows how to make a film anymore. Look at the imdb bottom 100. Most of those films were made less than 10 years ago! Even in the late 90s there used to be a classic film released in the multiplex every week; now it every other year that we see film that can even barely compare with the older classics. The film business sinks to a shockingly low nadir every 30 minutes. There is no point in going on anymore. It will be a matter of time that your local multiplex will be stuffed with so much bullshit that we will start comparing Michael Bay to Orson Welles.

 I used to feel this way (maybe not quite so strongly), but I've really started to re-evaluate my stance.  First off, all the lowest rated movies are fairly new b/c the largest chunk of internet users who do stuff like rate movies on imdb are probably teens who've never seen or don't remember older crap movies.  Sure the old classics get remembered, because they're GOOD.  Not many people go "hey, have you ever seen [insert obscure old movie that sucks but not enough to be "so bad it's good" ala Plan 9]?  It's terrible & I wish I never wasted my time! You should watch it!"

And if you go back & pick a particular year & look at what was released,you'll see it was a lot like now where you'll see a few good or maybe an occasional great movie along with a lot of shlock you've never heard of b/c it wasn't any good.  Sure, every once in a while you'll get a year like 1939 where an unheard of number of classics all came out in a row, but that's a rare exception.

But we still get good movies out of Hollywood.  I know not everyone agrees, but I'd argue pretty much anything Chris Nolan has done is great.  The King's Speech was fantastic.  The most recent Narnia movie, Voyage of the Dawn Treader was really enjoyable & felt a great deal like a classic Harryhausen Sinbad movie.  And the most recent X-men is fantastic.

I still like old movies & I love "old Hollywood" from the 30's through the 50's.  Those films do have a certain charm & charisma that's not been recaptured.  But I'd argue a lot of that has to do with the times &, well, times change.  The studio system that existed back then couldn't function forever & eventually collapsed under its own weight, allowing people like Spielberg & Lucas to make the films we all grew up with....  So it's not all bad...

The one thing I think old Hollywood had that we could but don't is the actors.  There were SO many great actors & actresses back then & I really don't think there are as many today.  Maybe it's just because when we think of great old actors, we think of several decades worth...  Seriously, get people to start naming great actors & actresses & they'll start naming a lot of people, but those people will often span the 30's through the 50's or even 60's...  It's not really fair to compare that to just the current crop, or even the crop from the last 10 or 15 years....

So all I'm trying to say is, I don't think Hollywood sucks SO MUCH MORE now than it did back in the "glory days".  It's just our perception of it.

The way I see it from this corner of the world, is Hollywood has declined because (don't take it personal here) the north-americans have culturally declined. Ofc, speaking in a general way

 When you have someone to compare (culturally), you've got to tell out the deep differences you got with those ones you are being compared with. When you're lonely in the cultural run, you just don't have to prove you're better than the other, 'cause there's no other. Pretty much the same thing that happens when you have no competition in the market.... you're not forced to make good products since you're the only offer. Now immagine this in a even bigger sphere, the cultural one.

That's a point where the cold war was useful. American culture (and capitalism btw) had to show its best image to the world, as well as the soviets did (or intended to). And what's more, they had to convince people that their respective sides were the "good" ones, so the culture in some way manifested that. From 1990 to 2008 (before the 2008 crisis), with only one global superpower, everything's more "light" haven't you noticed? (music, cinema, fictional literature, society, the union's struggles were quieter and even the perspective on life, love, etc.) As if there was nothing to discuss anymore.

I just can't believe from here how is it that a cheesy, repeated to death in sitcoms story such as the hangover gets more press than the king's speech had (at least that's what north-american TV channels show here) when there was a time you used to make many excellent movies every year.

Ofc there still are excellent (I really mean excellent) american movies (and about TV series, well you're the fricking kings of it), like someone said up here Chris Nolan's movies are very good. The guy even managed to make of a comic (Batman TDK) a deep enough story about moral values, instead the plain good vs bad guy.

Another thing that I see is that hollywood has developed an excesive taste for war or fight, rarely seen years before. And in war movies things often are presented in a very light way, while in a good drama you actually get to make that catharsis with the characters or the situation. And that makes a movie or play good, we know it from Aristotle.

From the commercials or movie trailers that reach these shores, it's like everything that's thought to be good is instantely adectivized as "epic". But epic is stupid, epic feels like nothing, unless there's a good quote of drama in it. Unless you see and feel they're fighting for something you yourself would fight for; not for a country nor a flag, but for a moral value.  Again, good epic movies are the ones that have deep stories, and since today "deep" is a weird word in storytelling... Even the PT suffers from this.

I think that Thirteen Days for instance is a deeper, and more epic movie from a certain point of view, than Troy. And it's far from being an actual superproduction.

Another epic movie that worked in part because it had a deep story? The Lord of The Rings. When was it written? 1953.

Besides there's always a lot of militarist people that are so in favor of killing people or invading just because "my country's better than yours" or the classic "we're the freedom" that if you expose in a screen that phrase of Tolkien:

"It was Sam's first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man's name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace-all in a flash of thought which was quickly driven from his mind"

Well, some people wouldn't agree with that, some others would see the flaw of their own simple, lineal thoughts on that paragraph and would reject  the whole movie, arguing that it's "not entertaining" while inside they don't like it because loosing the "general", the "national" sense of war to a more particular, human, sense of war (involving every fallen personal story, interests and name, etc) would just be too hard.

Even Lucas could have used this perspective. Showing Anakin as a "great warrior", a great general of the clone wars, just to show it as Yoda said, was don't make one great

By the time they get to JEDI it'll be 2017. You would think the technology will be pretty different by then. If you think the saga is an ill-fitting mishmash of 70s/80s/90s/00s now, wait till it's 70s/80s/90s/00s/early3D/latter3D/+2017 CGI.

SilverWook said:

Mithrandir said:

 

The way I see it from this corner of the world, is Hollywood has declined because (don't take it personal here) the north-americans have culturally declined. Ofc, speaking in a general way

 When you have someone to compare (culturally), you've got to tell out the deep differences you got with those ones you are being compared with. When you're lonely in the cultural run, you just don't have to prove you're better than the other, 'cause there's no other. Pretty much the same thing that happens when you have no competition in the market.... you're not forced to make good products since you're the only offer. Now immagine this in a even bigger sphere, the cultural one.

That's a point where the cold war was useful. American culture (and capitalism btw) had to show its best image to the world, as well as the soviets did (or intended to). And what's more, they had to convince people that their respective sides were the "good" ones, so the culture in some way manifested that. From 1990 to 2008 (before the 2008 crisis), with only one global superpower, everything's more "light" haven't you noticed? (music, cinema, fictional literature, society, the union's struggles were quieter and even the perspective on life, love, etc.) As if there was nothing to discuss anymore.

I just can't believe from here how is it that a cheesy, repeated to death in sitcoms story such as the hangover gets more press than the king's speech had (at least that's what north-american TV channels show here) when there was a time you used to make many excellent movies every year.

Ofc there still are excellent (I really mean excellent) american movies (and about TV series, well you're the fricking kings of it), like someone said up here Chris Nolan's movies are very good. The guy even managed to make of a comic (Batman TDK) a deep enough story about moral values, instead the plain good vs bad guy.

Another thing that I see is that hollywood has developed an excesive taste for war or fight, rarely seen years before. And in war movies things often are presented in a very light way, while in a good drama you actually get to make that catharsis with the characters or the situation. And that makes a movie or play good, we know it from Aristotle.

 

From the commercials or movie trailers that reach these shores, it's like everything that's thought to be good is instantely adectivized as "epic". But epic is stupid, epic feels like nothing, unless there's a good quote of drama in it. Unless you see and feel they're fighting for something you yourself would fight for; not for a country nor a flag, but for a moral value.  Again, good epic movies are the ones that have deep stories, and since today "deep" is a weird word in storytelling... Even the PT suffers from this.

I think that Thirteen Days for instance is a deeper, and more epic movie from a certain point of view, than Troy. And it's far from being an actual superproduction.

Another epic movie that worked in part because it had a deep story? The Lord of The Rings. When was it written? 1953.

Besides there's always a lot of militarist people that are so in favor of killing people or invading just because "my country's better than yours" or the classic "we're the freedom" that if you expose in a screen that phrase of Tolkien:

"It was Sam's first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man's name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace-all in a flash of thought which was quickly driven from his mind"

Well, some people wouldn't agree with that, some others would see the flaw of their own simple, lineal thoughts on that paragraph and would reject  the whole movie, arguing that it's "not entertaining" while inside they don't like it because loosing the "general", the "national" sense of war to a more particular, human, sense of war (involving every fallen personal story, interests and name, etc) would just be too hard.

Even Lucas could have used this perspective. Showing Anakin as a "great warrior", a great general of the clone wars, just to show it as Yoda said, was don't make one great

 

In the U.S., The King's Speech was impossible to escape hearing about, especially at Oscar time.

Plenty of movies showing the dark underbelly of the American dream were made during the Cold War. Whether they were shown overseas I have no idea.

Hollywood's decline has been pinned down to everything from the end of the studios system in the 50's, the popularity of television, to blaming Spielberg and Lucas for inventing the blockbuster. ;)

I said I was speaking in a general way. Cinema is both an art and a cultural industry. I was speaking about the industrial side, never said there hasn't ever been any Woody Allen or Michael Moore here or there...

"Plenty of movies showing the dark underbelly of the american dream were made during the Cold War."

 This is still what I said; putting aside what the cultural industry was making; the situation of the Cold War per se made you think, or reflect about values, economy, etc, just because you had to "choose" a side. And that was reflected in some movies that showed the pros or cons of the western culture.

What I mean is, it doesn't matter whether the movies showed the dark underbelly of the american society or the best of american society. The fact is that some movies brought to consideration some aspects of society that today aren't so often questioned.

Before 1990 it was:

"USA does it like this. URSS does it like that. Why does USA do it like this, or why does URSS do it like that? We better? They better? Why? How?".

(It doesn't matter what personal answers you had to those questions, but I think everybody questioned that at least once during the Cold War. Just like padmé in EPIII (?)) 

The 90's and early 2000's it was:

"We all do it like this. No questions."

So it was rather weird to see a strong critic to society during those days; since western culture proved to be better than the other option; thus we all believed the dream everything was perfect. And stopped questioning (culturally) whether we were right or wrong; and that's the kind of lightness I see in cinema (as a cultural massive industry).

The lack of depth in characters in most of movies about good vs. evil

He dosen't care. He has enough money that a studio-destroying fiasco wouldn't hurt him in the slightest bit.

Plus, you had Michael Cimino that pushed studios away from more artistic endeavors and made them more reliant on profit.

It's a shame that we won't have any films 20 years from now that can compare with New Hollywood greats like Scorsese and Coppola.

Wait, Jar-Jar stepped in poo?

Fascinating, I've never heard of this before.  Especially not here in this thread.  Please do go on.

EDIT: Going back through this thread made me sad, seeing such fine, long lost posters as vfp, Sluggo, JediTray...

*sniff*

It's a total joke to say that movies got worse after the 20th century. The problem is when you think back to the 1970s or the 1990s, you only remember the good films, you forget about all the bad ones--and the simple truth is that almost every film released in both of those decades was either poor or mediocre. But where are these films? You've never seen them, or you forgot. If you look at a typical year on IMDB there are so many bad films that are either unseen or half-forgoten, but at the time they would have been filling the theatres. But then a decade later you back at the era with rose coloured glasses and go, "oh yeah the 70s, Godfather, Cimino, Lucas, Taxi Driver, man those were the days." But those represented less than 10% of the total studio output in the decade. Most of it was garbage. It's like that with any decade, although some are better than others.

Take a typical year like 1998. If you went to a theatre that year, this is what was filling up all the spaces and making all the money:

-Mercury Rising

-Firestorm

-Lost in Space

-Godzilla

-Spice World

-Hope Floats

-Hard Rain

-I Got the Hook Up

-Six Days Seven Nights

-Jane Austen's Mafia!

-Leathal Weapon 4

-Dance With Me

-Snake Eyes

-Rounders

-Holy Man

-Armageddon

-Urban Legend

-John Carpenters Vampires

-Practical Magic

-Home Fries

-I Still Know What You Did Last Summer

-Meet Joe Black

-The Waterboy

-Patch Adams

-Soldier

-You've Got Mail

-Stepmom

These movies are all taken from the weekly top 10 box office that year. These were among the most popular films of 1998; probably half of them you can't even remember anymore, although I think I have seen every single one of them. They're not all bad, but they're all pretty mundane in the long run. But when you think back to 1998 you don't remember these films, you remember: American History X, Saving Private Ryan, The Big Lebowski, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, The Truman Show, Thin Red Line, Life is Beautiful, Shakespear in Love, A Simple Plan, Rushmore, Pi, Dark City...sounds like a pretty good year for movies wasn't it? But those films represent only a small fraction of what was out there and what people were seeing. And when you look back at 2010: Black Swan, True Grit, 127 Hours, Social Network, Winter's Bones, The King's Speech, Inception, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, Toy Story 3. Goddamn, sounds like a pretty spectacular year for the movies, I'd say better than the "best" shortlist of 1998. Yet somehow the fact that there's grossout comedies, action blockbusters, chick flicks and other poor films is supposed to make it better than the year that saw Lost in Space, A Night at the Roxbur, Firestorm, Holy Man, Leathal Weapon 4, Spice World and Stepmom.

That was one thing I really liked about George Lucas's Blockbusting (the book) central premise: blockbusters didn't begin with Michael Bay, didn't begin with Jerry Bruckheimer and Top Gun, didn't begin with Star Wars or Jaws, but have been there throughout every single year the motion picture business has existed, and to think otherwise or that 1975, 1977 or 1997 represented some new "turning point" is to look back at the past with rose tinted glasses.

http://www.bleedingcool.com/2011/08/12/scoop-star-wars-phantom-menace-3d-is-done-signed-off-by-lucas/

I’ve just had a quick chat with Matt Bristowe, Head of Production at stereo house Prime Focus after the “big” 3D debate at Empire Big Screen. He’s confirmed for me that all work is complete on the 3D version of Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace.

As well you know, the film is hitting cinemas next February. To hear Prime Focus talk about the film, they certainly seem to have done a lot of hard work on this one, considering the artistic implications of another dimension carefully

via: clubjade.net

Seems early, but maybe because it's done now, that would give them time to run off film prints as well?

Has anyone pointed this article out?

http://www.tgdaily.com/games-and-entertainment-brief/56618-massive-star-wars-3d-remakes-may-be-cut-short

Rick McCallum says the rest are a no-go if the theatrical TPM re-issuing isn't a success. WHAT? I mean you have to think; they're relying on the most critically panned of the Star Wars franchise to bring in audiences... It shouldn't be a surprise if people don't want to see that one again.

On a side note, the article mentions that Cameron is converting Titanic to 3D.

The Aluminum Falcon said:

On a side note, the article mentions that Cameron is converting Titanic to 3D.

Aparently fox have been in Belfast's Waterfront Hall, spec-ing distances from projection booth etc, word is thats where the world premiere is.

J