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MagnoliaFan Edits: Ep I "Balance Of The Force", and Ep II "The Clone War" (Released)

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Hey OT loyalists.

I am in Australia and am looking for a copy of MagnoliaFan’s “Balance of the Force” and “The Clone War”?

Can anyone help?

 

Mod Edit: Information about the two MagnoliaFan Edits can be found half way down the first post of this thread, by Rikter:-

Star Wars - The Edits and DVDr releases thread
 

Cover art and disc art can be found on Page 33 of this thread - with more in the Case Covers, Disc Labels, and Fan Art forum.

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Until Rikter uploads them as torrents I'd say us Aussies will have to wait.

RATLSNAKE
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Or you could try here:-

Rikter's SW Stuff...

and scroll down until you find what you are seeking...

A little patience goes a long way on this old-school Rebel base. If you are having issues finding what you are looking for, these will be of some help…

Welcome to the OriginalTrilogy.com | Introduce yourself in here | Useful info within : About : Help : Site Rules : Fan Project Rules : Announcements
‘How do I do this?’ on the OriginalTrilogy.com - includes info on how to ask for a fan project and how to search for projects and threads on OT•com.

A Project Index for Star Wars Preservations (Harmy’s Despecialized & 4K77/80/83 etc) : A Project Index for Star Wars Fan Edits (adywan & Hal 9000 etc)

Take your time to look around this site before posting… Do NOT just lazily make yet another ‘link request’ post - or a new thread asking for projects.

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Yeah I know Rikter and other US people have copies, Magnoliafan has offered to send me some copies but I thought I would just see if any Aussie's have a copy.
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You may as well just pay Magnoliafan for his efforts.
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I'm as frustrated with the prequels as the next guy, and have heard nothing but great reviews of the "MagnoliaFan Edits." I know I'm a pretty new face around here, but is there any way I could obtain them? I'm not really sure about the logistics of everything either, so if someone (MagnoliaFan?) could PM me about it I would be VERY interesed.

Thanks in advance.
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Originally posted by: MagnoliaFan
Actually, I don't charge for it...
Nothing to cover postage/time/cost of blanks/etc?

-also, MF... do you think it would be possible to make T3 into a half-decent film and remove all the story errors from it?
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Originally posted by: DanielB

-also, MF... do you think it would be possible to make T3 into a half-decent film and remove all the story errors from it?


I'm actually attempting this very thing right now.

I just bought cheap versions of the materials I need to incorporate and subjected myself to a recent drunken viewing of T3 to prep a paper-edit list.

I talk more about it over at the Corona Terminator board.

As I say there I don't think there's much that can save that film but it will certainly be a challenge to try.

Once I have ripped the necessary scenes/SFX/score I was going to forward a copy of the edited version along with the raw materials on DVDr to MF to see what he can do if he's interested.

Sorry for the tangential off topicness of this post.
"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." - Goering.

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." - Goebbels.

"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." - Orwell.
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you're a brave man for attempting to salvage anything worthy from T3, Regicidal, my fisrt edit would be cutting the dialogue that explains Sarah Connor's death from cancer, what a lame way to explain her absence!
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Originally posted by: buddy-x-wing
you're a brave man for attempting to salvage anything worthy from T3, Regicidal, my first edit would be cutting the dialogue that explains Sarah Connor's death from cancer, what a lame way to explain her absence!


Yeah that's definitely a curly one.

That section requires, for me at least, the omission of all references to the death by cancer and scattering of ashes in Mexico etcetera.

However then you have a logic gap (not the only one in the pic so it wouldn't be lonely) as to why go to the mausoleum in the first place?

If I was any good in photoshop I might change the name of the coffin to Enrique Salceda as a reference to the arms store in T2. At the very least there are multiple dates that need to be 'shopped.
"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." - Goering.

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." - Goebbels.

"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." - Orwell.
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If I was to watch it again I could tell you what else needs to be done...

Take out the poofter-night-club completely, who cares where he gets his clothes from? It was interesting the first 2 times, and a bar/nightclub has already been done in T2. Arnie telling John he killed him... heck you're right most of the stuff Arnie rants on about needs to go. And ditch the hydrogen fuel-cells, really I like a bit of mystery as to how the technology works that's more artistic. You could leave in Silberman just so that he runs away from Arnie and never show him talking to the woman. All of the stuff you've said is defiantly good. You may as well wait until T4 comes out and then just cut together a single movie from them both. "This guy weighs a ton!" - uh yeah, sure a fire-fighter would say that ... cut it.
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Originally posted by: DanielB

Take out the night-club completely, who cares where he gets his clothes from? It was interesting the first 2 times, and a bar/nightclub has already been done in T2.


That's interesting, I had done a paper edit of that scene just to tighten it up and bring the tone down to an acceptable approximation of 'serious'.

However your suggestion has some merit, hmmm... just leave it out in its entirety. The Terminator does just mysteriously show up the next time we see him anyway so the plot (such as it is) would not be affected greatly.

I was trying to just turn it into the best version of itself that it could be and no more. It'd be very tempting to throw the whole thing out and start again but the software for that has yet to reach my desktop. Side note: I believe the time is coming, by the end of the decade I'd say, when anyone with patience, skill and computing power will be able to create 'better that VG CG cutscene quality' for whatever they want on their home desktop set.

T3 is NOT the film I expected, nor wanted, and it is NOT the film I would have make given all that came before. Mostow was in an unenviable position and was not the man for the job. T2 needed no sequel but if we were to have seen one I'd have taken us inside Cyberdyne Systems labs in SACNORAD as SKYNET became selfaware. It would have been cool to see how these governmental types dealt with the reality of the doomsayer Connor's prophecy fulfilled.

Anyway back on topic I look forward to seeing the MF edits BOTF and TCW when they arrive in the mail. Until then I have a question related to my side note, who else here thinks it will be possible to create photorealistc digital actor Prequel remakes, or films in any style, on their home systems (whatever they may be by then) by decade's end? Or am I way out?
"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." - Goering.

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." - Goebbels.

"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." - Orwell.
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I considered a re-edit of T3, but there was little in the way of deleted scenes on the dvd, despite the fact that much was cut to shorten the film and speed up the pace. If the additional deleted scenes were made available, I would certainly consider it.

And to answer your question concerning the possibility to create photorealistc digital actors by the decades end...
We may be closer than you think...

http://twitter.com/TheMagnoliaFan

http://www.youtube.com/user/magnoliafan78

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Originally posted by: MagnoliaFan
I considered a re-edit of T3, but there was little in the way of deleted scenes on the dvd, despite the fact that much was cut to shorten the film and speed up the pace. If the additional deleted scenes were made available, I would certainly consider it.

When I get what I need I'll forward to you the scenes I'm going to try to integrate. I'm sure you'll do a better job than I can, and your 'take' on the film will definitely be different.

And to answer your question concerning the possibility to create photorealistc digital actors by the decades end...
We may be closer than you think...


On our desktop Macs and the like?

Cool. A whole new world of 'garage' filmmaking awaits.
"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." - Goering.

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." - Goebbels.

"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." - Orwell.
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I hear ya magnolia. I am sending Rikter the 3 disc Canadian release Brotherhood along with all the deleted scene stuff, which you were going to get anyway, I'll just have him get that to you too. Dune would be interesting, especially considering how much footage there is out there, with the 3+ hr cut and the children of dune, etc. The matrix, yes, it pains me how they steadily fell apart, but damn if there isn't some bad ass footage. They have a box set coming out this christmas that will have 50 extra minutes to reloaded and reloaded and revolutions was done at the same time, so they would make 1 good movie if edited done and the fluff was chopped...the quality is there to edit too, with superbits to work from. Lastly, you didn't mention AI, to me this one screams edit me. Kubrick original movie script was very dark a la clockwork orange, eyes wide shut, full metal jacket, etc. Spielberg pulled a Lucas and butchered it into ET candy crap of feel goodness. There are many times AI is poignant and brilliant (Kubrick) and many times it is overblown nonsense (Spielberg) like OMG, the Alien Ending, rrrgh. Oh well. For recent movies I robot could be less silly, b/c when its serious (asimov) its pretty good. I did love Bourne Supremacy & Manchurian Candidate this summer, no editing needed. As for trilogies done right I love the LOTR, extended cuts. Oh yeah, and lastly, one of the scariest movies I have ever seen, dark and twisted...Jacob's Ladder, the deleted scenes of 20 minutes are awesome...that'd be a cool edit too, that movie was ahead of its time and missed by many.
16 years I wait and this is what I get???
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Originally posted by: Obi-wonton
There are many times AI is poignant and brilliant (Kubrick) and many times it is overblown nonsense (Spielberg) like OMG, the Alien Ending, rrrgh. Oh well.
I personally think A.I. is brilliant and perfect as is. And the ending actually is Kubrick's. Spielberg left the ending pretty much intact and had to work more on the Gigalo Joe stuff which Kubrick hadn't really worked on. Kubrick originally conceived it as a fairy tale. It's essentially a sci-fi remake of Pinocchio. While Kubrick and Brian Aldiss, who wrote the original short story "Supertoys Last All Summer Long," were working on the script together in the 80s, Aldiss didn't like where Kubrick was going with the Blue Fairy and the fairy tale feel and he was taken off the project. Aldiss later published two follow up short stories which tell where he wanted the film to go.

SPOILERS AHEAD

I think the ending's brilliant. I guess it may appear a bit syrupy and sweet but if you look harder, it's pretty disturbing. First of all, humanity has pretty much destroyed themselves. Then you get into the Monica and David relationship. The love they feel for one another isn't real. How can it be? The love David knows is artificial programming and Monica is just a vision created from his memories. They have a disturbingly perfect day and the last shot of the film is David sleeping next to a corpse where he essentially dies. People call this happy?! Also, they weren't aliens. They were advanced Mechas. The film is told as a fairy tale from their point of view. They think David holds the key to their existence because he's their last link to humans, who they see as their creators.
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Thank God I'm not alone in thinking A.I was a really great movie that was just misunderstood at the time of release, Not quite a Speilberg film yet not quite a Kubrick film either it was a film that's really hard to pin down exactly what it is, I really liked the idea of a futuristic take on the Pinnochio story, and despite it's fairytale elements, it was way too dark in it's themes to be your usual Speilberg kids flick, I always thought this film would develop a cult following given enough time, similar to the way that Bladerunner was an underrated movie for years, before it developed a following.
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Basically, whether it was his idea or not it rings more of ET or Close Encounters than 2001 or Clockwork Orange and if you dispute that, you have no idea of who or what Kubrick was. There was very few feel good, touching moments in his movies like Spielberg's. His movie are dark, awkward, disturbing and brilliant. And if there was a feel good moment it is to make it more twisted later a la Jack Nicholson writing his book in the Shining seeming sweet..."ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKE JACK A DULL BOY." We all know how upbeat and happy that ends, or how Eyes Wide Shut ends, or how Full Metal Jacket ends, or how A Clockwork Orange ends, etc. Be real. I like the movie, but it smacks of two vastly different styles and therefor gives the movie no real flow and feeling bloated at times.


I found an article on Senses Of Cinema that says this...


A.I.'s naysayers sometimes admitted an almost androidal sangfroid, to the point of saying they just couldn't feel for David (Haley Joel Osment) because he's a robot, albeit an advanced model designed to love parents who've lost children in a near-future plague. Alas, the critical resistance is real. But they are not. Could they get away with that sort of dull literal-mindedness writing about any other art-form but movies? For starters, seeing David as merely mechanical and finally unworthy of emotional investment denies the basis of representational art and metaphor. This dumbfounding objection offends the essence of storytelling. Should a child detach from Pinocchio's fate because he is, after all, just wood? Isn't E.T. at best a believable fantasy, at worst a teardrop-proof rubber puppet? A modest proposal: David's most obvious meaning is Man. He's an avatar of human experience, yearning, and will to perfect himself before his Creator. With A.I. Spielberg tells the oldest newest story: Man's search for meaning.

By far the most common critical obfuscation, to avoid engaging the film on its own terms, involved the pitting of Kubrick against Spielberg, specifically suggesting that their ideas irreconcilably clash. That would be a legitimate approach if only they knew what they were talking about – that is, if A.I. weren't entirely, unmistakably Spielbergian, if not the summation of his art. Spielberg, the ecumenical, theistic humanist and modestly wise optimist (one humorist found the two perfect words, “elfin and rabbinic”) favours the more “open” cinematic style characteristic of Jean Renoir. That means appreciating such glorious moments as a mother and son looking upon each other with exquisite devotion not for a strictly circumscribed narrative meaning but for a certain, more ineffable beauty and emotion, the way audiences once generously engaged movies with the aesthetic qualities of How Green Was My Valley (John Ford, 1941) – and favorably compared its then old-fashioned tableaux vivants to the contemporary “closed” Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941). Here Spielberg uses his passion and great gift to syncretise story elements that certainly don't clash on the screen and only seem dissonant in the abstract – as if one entered with Kubrick's unmade movie already firmly in one's mind. It's not terribly important that the movie explores notions and images which intrigued Kubrick, the agnostic misanthrope who gravitated to the deterministic style of Fritz Lang. Kubrick and Spielberg would have formed completely unique creatures from the same clay. There's more to the authentic style of real artists than superficial treatment of plot points. Note that Kubrick stayed interested in A.I. for 20 years – but not so interested that he actually made the film. In the end he wanted Spielberg to direct it, too.

With Spielberg's opening of A.I. we see why. And, in any case, likely Kubrickian elements remain: The tramways fellated by obscenely gaping mouths, for example, could be transporting riders to the milk bar of A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1970). In Spielberg's 1941 (1979) Slim Pickens is practically a movie-length homage to his character in Kubrick's Dr Strangelove (1963). What of it? Kubrick's movies are distinctly different from Spielberg's, works of a brilliant, cynical satirist whose artistic downfall was an unceasing irony. Displaced as animus against Spielberg, the vehement abreaction to A.I. begins the embalming of Kubrick, worshipped by critics who no longer have to sit through the movies they invariably dismissed as too long, too boring, too cerebral, too... Ironic, isn't it? “In irony man annihilates what he posits within one and the same act,” Sartre wrote on the subject of Bad Faith. “He leads us to believe in order not to be believed.” A Kubrick A.I. may have been above and beyond belief, perhaps ending in the ironic, frigid futility of faith, David frozen dead, like Jack at the end of The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980), for eternity.

Spielberg sees not an ending but a beginning in that image – the Blue Fairy/Our Lady icon ever smiling and welcoming, David's eyes open and fixed upon her for 2,000 years, a superhuman act of monk-like devotion, imperfect man's perfection of a prayer that outlives history. In Spielberg's intriguing coda, the alien (or unrecognisably evolved robot that provocatively resembles the Giacometti curves of the mecha manufacturer's logo icon), whom we discover to be narrating the story, says that man's unique spirit radiated across the universe, interpenetrating and binding all things, leading them to hope that humans were “the key.” So Love is the energy that can be created but not destroyed. And it is certainly not wasted upon David. But a scientist poses a “moral question” early on: What is the responsibility of the creator to love the creation? Even if a robot can love humans, can humans learn to love them back?
16 years I wait and this is what I get???
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Originally posted by: Obi-wonton

A.I.'s naysayers sometimes admitted an almost androidal sangfroid, to the point of saying they just couldn't feel for David (Haley Joel Osment) because he's a robot, albeit an advanced model designed to love parents who've lost children in a near-future plague. Alas, the critical resistance is real. But they are not. Could they get away with that sort of dull literal-mindedness writing about any other art-form but movies? For starters, seeing David as merely mechanical and finally unworthy of emotional investment denies the basis of representational art and metaphor. This dumbfounding objection offends the essence of storytelling. Should a child detach from Pinocchio's fate because he is, after all, just wood? Isn't E.T. at best a believable fantasy, at worst a teardrop-proof rubber puppet? A modest proposal: David's most obvious meaning is Man. He's an avatar of human experience, yearning, and will to perfect himself before his Creator. With A.I. Spielberg tells the oldest newest story: Man's search for meaning.


I used to be in this camp, and attributed my utter detachment from A.I. to the idea that it's hard to empathize with programmed or hard-wired emotions. But in essence, isn't a child's devotion to his or her parents hard-wired, in a sense? I totally agree with the first point made above, but I now realize that for me, everything rides on my inability to empathize with Osment's performance, specifically. Regardless of the details behind his character, I find him endlessly creepy and false as an actor. The difficulty in comparing David with Pinocchio or E.T. is that, despite the unreality of the latter two characters, their performances are infinitely more expressive and authentically 'human' than Osment's. If another child had played David, one who didn't strive so hard to be 'robotic', I would probably have been on board. Perhaps that's all Osment can do... has anyone seen Secondhand Lions? It's as if he's still playing David, only older, more awkward, and inexplicably stuck in the 1950's midwest.
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Not to veer back on topic or anything, but...

I just wanted to say that MagnoliaFan has done an outstanding job on these Prequel edits! I got them from Rikter a few weeks ago, and you have some talent sir. I didn't think anyone could turn Jar Jar into a viable character, but you have. Transforming Anakin from a "Yippee!, blow up the Trade Federation by accident" kid to a kid that had skills and did what he had to do to help was very well done too. You just made Episode I much more enjoyable to watch. Thanks.

One small question -- I was just curious about your decision to cut Yoda's line at the end from "no more, no less" to just "no less"...what was the impetus for that? Doesn't bother me at all, I was just curious....do you just like the thought that there could be more Sith Lords out there? Thanks again for all your awesome efforts.