How come nobody stopped George Lucas from creating the bad films he created? — Page 2

Thanks for quoting it for me, Frink.  Saved me a little work.

Ghostbusters said:

Screw you guys I thought it was funny. I thought the "creative adjective" would be more amusing than "bad".

Now you guys are probably going to go on and on and on about me being a troll.

Save your breath.

I really want to know though how such awful things like the "I love you dialog" in ROTS got to screen? Or how Anakin's motivation to the dark side was not questioned by anyone? Did anybody object anything to George Lucas in the prequels?

If I dare say so, I found his transition to the dark side probably the most interesting thing about the series - a pity it was executed to sloppily.

The guy was obsessed with saving his beloved - which is completely relatable - and had fantasized about being some awesome uber superman all his life, while being annoyed at everyone else for "holding him back", or mistrusting / disrespecting him.

The dude sure had some issues, and as soon as the appropriate circumstances, he grabbed the chance and willingly convinced himself that the Jedi were trying to take over (his sensation before that they didn't trust him, and took questionable political steps) to justify his actions to himself.

Basically, he accepts everything that looks like it could save his wife, denying rational arguments against its authenticity, and simultaneously using this "necessity" as an excuse to follow his ambitions at the same time, further lying to himself to dismiss everything that speaks against him going down that path.

Circumstances aside, that's how real people behave - applying wilful ignorance, biases and logical fallacies out of laziness, or to justify their actions and further their goals.

Christensen's acting even manages to convey this in the second half of the movie - not only do I much prefer him as an angry ham to the woodenness and awkwardness he had offered priorly, he actually looks and sounds like he's lying to himself and trying to hard to believe his own BS himself. Although he also looks stoned during those scenes. 

However, the prequels:

- didn't establish his concern for his mother (plus that they left here there withuot any reason) before getting his dreams all of a sudden, and after the awkward scene where he rants at Padme, again fails to establish any change in character; also didn't establish concern for Padme until he got his dreams.

The dreams were plot devices in both cases and introduced too abruptly - the wooden acting by the protagonist didn't help.

- didn't establish him as a ticking time bomb who could quickly commit a slaughter if "necessary" - or attempted to do so poorly, as killing a bunch of always chaotic evil monsters in vengeance still has a way to go until reaching the "killing children you know personally after getting an order".

-didn't establish his friendship with Palpatine enough, doing nothing more than giving them one scene together per movie, and having him defend Palpatine in one piece of background dialogue while an evil assassin robot hovers towards a window.

Thus, his readiness to choose Palpatine over Sam Jackson, his resentment towards having to spy on his "friend" resulting in a distrust of and disdain towards the Jedi order, and his willingness to accept Palpatine's lies feeding these sentiments and ambitions to rule an Empire, doesn't end up being believable.

-made the transition way too abrupt, and Anakin's jump over the moral horizon way too sudden and easy.

The plot holes (like Anakin cutting off Windu's arm instead of deflecting the lightsaber - although maybe that was his subconscious, too? doubtfully so; order 66 and the whole clone thing, of course) didn't help.

Like, Anakin might've believed that the Jedi made up an excuse to remove the chancellor from office, but the fact that they had been actively looking for the awful, evil Sith Lord all this time, against "you're not sure of their intentions"? Or did he think the Jedi already knew he was, and had planned this step for a long time?

Why did he believe they were also trying to TAKE OVER THE SENATE?

All of this could've been justified in a much more thorough, and thought-out character study. The way it ended up, it looked like the writer just didn't bother, and we're left to impose "interesting psychological analyses" on the cliff notes of the script, complete with obvious, expository dialog and lazy acting, all the while these elements in the actual movie look more like plot holes and bad characterization than anything else.

I wonder about the "I wish I could wish a wish to wish my feelings away" or whatever it was in AOTC. English is not my first language and it sounded wrong from the first time I heard it. It looks like probably no one read the script.

TV's Frink said:

Ghostbusters said:

Screw you guys I thought it was funny. I thought the "creative adjective" would be more amusing than "bad".

Yes, child molestation is hilarious.

http://www.myspace.com/video/vid/2025597588

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wu9q4sM1vmc

Diego said:

I wonder about the "I wish I could wish a wish to wish my feelings away" or whatever it was in AOTC. English is not my first language and it sounded wrong from the first time I heard it. It looks like probably no one read the script.

I love how, in German, it's translated as "ich wünschte, ich könnte meine gefühle einfach wegwischen", "weg-wischen" meaning "wipe away / off".

When I first heard the English version, I first just chuckled at how, in English, both "wünschen" (=wish) and "wischen" just happened to be the same word and it sounded funny this way - then I looked up, and was shocked to find out that "wish away", indeed, can't mean "wipe off"... but literally... WISH away... like in some fairytale of whatever.

They... he.. REALLY wrote that line into the script!!

twooffour said:

TV's Frink said:

Ghostbusters said:

Screw you guys I thought it was funny. I thought the "creative adjective" would be more amusing than "bad".

Yes, child molestation is hilarious.

 

http://www.myspace.com/video/vid/2025597588

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wu9q4sM1vmc

Yes, Louis CK is hilarious.

It also makes Anakin sound even more of a jerk.

Anakin : "I'm really, really obsessed by you Padme, it's so inconvenient and humiliatingly frustrating. I wish I could stop myself as much as you want me to the shut up about it."

Padme : "Now you put like that, I'm beginning to feel the same way. Lucky we aren't about to face near certain death after you have just confessed to killing helpless children otherwise I'd be all over you like a rash"

ANAKIN AND PADME LAUGH.

Padme : "So how's your mom?"

"Now you put like that, I'm beginning to feel the same way. Lucky we aren't about to face certain execution for which I've already thought up an escape plan without saying anything, otherwise I'd be all over you like a rash"

Fixed. :D

One thing that surprised me about the prequels was how bad Ian McDiarmid performance was in in AOTC. I remember the first time I saw him in that I was like, that's it, what happened to the snaky performance he had in TPM? So much character of him in that movie compared to AOTC. He just seemed to be standing around stiff saying a few lines. In ROTS he was better, but still was missing something.

I don't care what people say about Liam Neison, I thought he did a great job in the TPM and comes off as one of the few people to pull off a believable and convincing performance in the prequels.

In my opinion, Episodes II & III, suffered a loss in quality in both performance, dialogue and direction compared to Episode I. Not that Ep. I was that great to begin with though. Maybe it was the exagerated use of blue screen.

Ghostbusters said:

One thing that surprised me about the prequels was how bad Ian McDiarmid performance was in in AOTC. I remember the first time I saw him in that I was like, that's it, what happened to the snaky performance he had in TPM? So much character of him in that movie compared to AOTC. He just seemed to be standing around stiff saying a few lines. In ROTS he was better, but still was missing something.

I don't care what people say about Liam Neison, I thought he did a great job in the TPM and comes off as one of the few people to pull off a believable and convincing performance in the prequels.

Interesting observation - in TPM, he seemed to play the role of a snaky, greedy politician trying to conceal his ulterior motives.

A role that made sense in the context of the movie, maybe, but considering the unreveal that he's actually Sidious, the fact that he couldn't "act" well enough in real life to conceal his obvious personal excitement at being elected. And then of course his "oooh, and of course I promise I'm going to help you with that crisis of yours" face when Padme looks unimpressed and almost disapproving.

In AOTC, whenever he expressed something, you could feel the phoniness in his face and voice, obviously but subtly. Which was nice.

I'd say his performance there was on par with Christopher Lee's. Not a complete monotone cardboard cutout, and "convincing" and somewhat charismatic in their own way, but not remarkably alive and memorable, either.

Diego said:

In my opinion, Episodes II & III, suffered a loss in quality in both performance, dialogue and direction compared to Episode I. Not that Ep. I was that great to begin with though. Maybe it was the exagerated use of blue screen.

Idunnoman.

Padme wasn't COMPLETELY monotone in those two movies, as she was in I, McGregor was kinda alive and sarcastic and pretty much the same (a nice, even if terribly understated performance by him overall), other than that, um... who else made it into the sequels anyway?

CGI Yoda was obviously leaps above that silly puppet from I (and even more expressive than the puppet from the OT, although the performance itself was too kitschy and over-expressive, like "look, I'm smart and think a lot", and the voice acting too much of an annoying cartoon saying clichéd lines in backwards grammer), and Sam Jackson had exactly two memorable moments in I and III:

In I he kinda looked gloomily at Yoda, in III, his angry face at Palpatine. Also, at one point in I, he inexplicably gives off that glare of threat from Jackie Brown, where he tells Melanie to go answer the phone :DD

Everything else looked like he was on sometiens during shooting.

I might add that since all three prequals made well in excess of half a billion dollars in world wide box office, a lot of people made a lot of money off these bad films.

skyjedi2005 said:

Anchorhead said:

Besides -  the "Lucas has completely destroyed the future of cinema as we know it" threads are best left to a professional..... 

Peter Biskind in Easy Riders, Raging bulls accuses Lucas and Spielberg of just that destroying the future of cinema by making it about the blockbuster and special effects and not cinema but really just crap kiddie fare.

I always wonder what those people saying "now it's all about SFX and kiddie fare" thought of the 1950's giant bug films, or the endless stream of B-westerns, sword-and-sandals movies, or Poverty Row adventure serials turned out in the Golden Age of cinema.

Other than being really really good, how is "Jaws" somehow fundamentally different from "Beast from 10000 Fathoms" that Spielberg somehow deserves 'blame'?

Was the crime making genre cinema good enough that lots of people wanted to see it?

A lot of expensive disasters that nobody liked were made post-77 and were very financially damaging. I'm still trying to figure out how they can blame Lucas and Spielberg for all those directors who were awesome in 1972 but got completely coked up and misguided by 1980.

skyjedi2005 said:

Baronlando said:

A lot of expensive disasters that nobody liked were made post-77 and were very financially damaging. I'm still trying to figure out how they can blame Lucas and Spielberg for all those directors who were awesome in 1972 but got completely coked up and misguided by 1980.

That certainly explains the horrible film 1941, but somehow Blues Brothers became a classic.

Somehow?  SOMEHOW???????

It became a classic because it is classic.

You are now dead to me. ;-)

^Frink is now Warb's sock????

1941 isn't that bad, it's much more funny and visually interesting than Forrest Gump or Meet The Fockers.

TV's Frink said:

twooffour said:

TV's Frink said:

Ghostbusters said:

Screw you guys I thought it was funny. I thought the "creative adjective" would be more amusing than "bad".

Yes, child molestation is hilarious.

 

http://www.myspace.com/video/vid/2025597588

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wu9q4sM1vmc

Yes, Louis CK is hilarious.

And George Carlin is right.

Hi!