Anchorhead

Vaderisnothayden said:

Not successfully demonstrated, not backed up with examples that prove the point. 

There are plenty of examples in this thread (and others) of people's reasons for feeling the way they do.  No need for me to quote them all.
And for the record, people's examples of what they dislike are not incorrect, myth, cliche', etc - they're people's examples of what they dislike.

People's opinions of a film - of anything - are not incorrect. If someone doesn't dig Eggs Benedict, they really don't dig it - it's not a myth or a cliche - it's a meal they don't care to eat.  Even if it's your favorite meal, it doesn't mean the people who don't like it are wrong.

You liking Return doesn't mean my reasons for disliking it are cliche - it means that in 1983 I didn't like the film. I've given you my reasons and I assure you, they are correct - they're actually the reasons I don't like it.  They're not final say on what the film is - they're my reasons for not liking it.

You're appreciation of the film doesn't render my dislike of it as incorrect. You can rest assured that no matter how many times you tell me my opinion is incorrect - it's not. I've disliked Return for 26 years. That dislike is genuine.

...the later two prequels (which you really should see before you make generalizations about the prequels).

Regarding my not having seen the last two prequels or the SEs - I always preface my limited comments on them with the statement that I haven't seen them and that I can only base my opinions on the one prequel I have seen.

Re your ewok picture, picking on one creature that appears only briefly and is a very minor part of the film does not work as an argument to condemn the whole film

It doesn't have to work as an argument to condemn the whole film - it only has to work as one of the reasons I dislike the film.

V - I find some of your comments and posts to be very interesting & insightful. My problem isn't with you or your defense, enjoyment, and feelings regarding Return.   My problem is you continually telling me that my thoughts & opinions are incorrect. They aren't.  With God as my witness - I honestly don't like Return. I was disappointed by it about 30 minutes into in 1983 and that has never changed, nor will it ever.

I notice from your tone that you are getting a tad pissed off with me.

Not at all.  However, if that ever does happen, you'll know immediately.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to pack.  I'm getting in about 300 miles of riding tomorrow and then I'm off to California for a week.

CO said:

Anchorhead said:

As much as you may not care to hear it or accept it, there are some people who genuinely disliked Return when they saw it in the theater, myself among them.  We felt every bit as let down by it as you do by the prequels.

Our thoughts aren't cliche, they aren't invented, nor is our view a myth. For a great many people, the story & style of Return fits better with the prequels than they do with the first two films. That's been clearly demonstrated here and backed up with examples - not tired cliches.

 The one thing I noticed is what a person age when ROTJ came out really determines how much you love or hate the film....

 

Anchorhead, I believe you are older then many of us here, so I can see a 16 or 19 year old walking into ROTJ thinking, "What the hell happened to the SW universe?"

I think that's a great point.  I was 21 when Return came out. The science fiction story I loved as a 15-year-old was now a children's story - and I had to say goodbye to it.

The Star Wars universe that was so mysterious and vast in 1977 had now become small, incestuous, and juvenile. I felt no emotional connection to it at all.

I had called in sick that day so I could go see it on opening day.  I distinctly remember thinking that I wished I had gone to work instead and just waited until that night.  I lost the price of my ticket and a full day's pay.

Vaderisnothayden said:

I think bashing ROTJ is a tired cliche...

 

a lot of inventing faults that weren't there...

 

It's a great film like the other two and I wish people would stop perpetuating the myth that it's the bad one in the trilogy.

As much as you may not care to hear it or accept it, there are some people who genuinely disliked Return when they saw it in the theater, myself among them.  We felt every bit as let down by it as you do by the prequels.

Our thoughts aren't cliche, they aren't invented, nor is our view a myth. For a great many people, the story & style of Return fits better with the prequels than they do with the first two films. That's been clearly demonstrated here and backed up with examples - not tired cliches.

I explained my thoughts here;

http://www.originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/How-would-you-have-done-ROTJ/post/370539/#TopicPost370539

Truthfully, when this came on the screen...

...it was all I could do to keep from walking out of the theater.

Nanner Split said:

I may have asked this before, but why do people like "Fight Club" so much? I watched it for the first time fairly recently and I thought it was some of the most pretentious tripe I've ever seen (middle-class white boy angst taken to the extreme, really).

I agree, NS.  I saw it a few years after it was released and its cult status is completely lost on me.

C3PX said:

Almost feels like ol' George felt so urked by fanedits that he decided to set about making Ep3 100% uneditable, saturating it with so much crap and awfulness that no amount of editing could remove anything like a significant amount of it.

You know, as much as I would like to believe that isn't the case - deep down I really do believe Lucas is that spiteful.  The non-anamorphic release of the originals reeks of him showing the fans who's boss.  It's very strange to see a director go to such great lengths battling his own fan base. Fascinating behavior - in a train wreck sort of way.

I watched Return about 12 years ago and I don't remember the Tarzan yell or either of the belches. Were those added in the SEs?

Vaderisnothayden said:

Examples of SE changes that in my opinion demonstrate a lack of understanding of how the films work:

I'm not normally one to try and second-guess a director's motives, particularly on films I don't like, or in the case of two I never even saw.  However, I think VINH has nailed what seems to be the underlying problem with the prequels & SEs. 

Lucas seems to have believed that the fans wanted pretty colors, comic relief, and slick CGI.  Those things were largely absent from Star Wars77 and the movie captured the attention of the world.  It moved people with it's characters & story.

I saw none of that in Phantom. It's not only possible Lucas didn't (and still doesn't) understand what he did correctly in 1977, it now seems like that is in fact exactly the case.  His going back and "reinventing" the originals supports the theory even further. Instead of making the second trilogy mirror what worked for the first trilogy - he altered the originals to match what didn't work for the second trilogy.

Huge M*A*S*H nerd here - since it first aired.  Followed it until the end and never missed an episode. I like all 11 years, but I most definitely prefer the years when Mr. Gelbart was involved. I also have the series on DVD and watch one or two episodes almost every day. Great way to unwind after work - glass of red and an hour at the 4077th.

Rest in peace, sir.  My world is richer because of you.

*edit*

By coincidence, two weeks ago I finalized plans with a friend of mine to hike out to the old M*A*S*H filming location in the Santa Monica Mountains next month.

Vaderisnothayden said:

Indy 4 is still much more Indy than the PT is Star Wars and and much better.

That's back to the checks & balances I was mentioning before, which were absent from the SE & Prequel processes.

For Kingdom - Lucas, Spielberg, & Ford forced each other into making a film that was true to the series. It wasn't as serious as Raiders, not as dark as Temple, not as comical as Crusade, but it looked & felt like the world of Indy because there were three people making sure it did - the same three people who had been involved in the other three films.

Spielberg said no when Lucas wanted it to lean more science fiction - Lucas said no when Spielberg wanted scenes like a ricochet bullet hitting someone's belt and causing their pants to fall down (honestly, that's the sort of bullshit from a Mel Brooks movie - lame).  Add in Ford as a third voice further honing the story and we got a film that fits with the others.

That creative process was completely absent from the Star Wars franchise the past twenty years and it really shows. The only prequel I saw (Phantom) stopped resembling Star Wars as soon as the crawl faded.

xhonzi said:

 ...if the SE's were the writing on the wall, RotJ was George walking up to the wall, checking it for writability and considering just what he might put on it.

Well put, sir.

As I sat in the theater in 1983, I knew Star Wars and I were parting ways.

Lucas said:

" I think it's the director's prerogative, not the studio's to go back and reinvent a movie."

That's an interesting quote considering he already had the master story for all twelve, nine, six movies back in the early 70s. 

Oh wait - he didn't.

I will say though, at least he's starting to open up about how dishonest he's been the past 30 years.

Vaderisnothayden said:

If Lucas had made prequel films that were true to the spirit of Star Wars, they'd be much better received. The prequel trilogy was always meant to be a bit different in tone, but the one he put out was a whole damn different galaxy away in tone and mentality and that should have been avoided (and could easily have been avoided). A bit more effort to fit in with the story of the originals would have been no harm either.....

So no, it was in no way inevitable that the prequels be awful movies the way they were. That was something that took effort.

I've only seen one of the prequels and none of the SEs, so I have a very limited knowledge of the subject matter.  That said - I'm with VINH on this one. Lucas answers to no one.  The prequels are a textbook example of what happens when there isn't a system of creative checks & balances.

Vaderisnothayden, addressing ESF's Lucas quote, said:

Chilling quote, isn't it? To me, it's like a fucking declaration of war against fans of the originals.

He does seem to have a great deal of anger and spite for the very people that made him the billionaire he is.  It's not just lip service either - he acts on it. He's like a child who takes his toys and goes home if the other kids won't play the way he wants to.

Strange.

Vaderisnothayden said:

I've already made it very clear that I'm not talking about that kind of sending a message. I spelled it out repeatedly in three posts.

Got it.

Also note, getting offended by a supposed work of art being turned into a preachy political pamphlet is not about whether you're offended by the message itself, it's about being offended by that being done to a would-be work of art with any sort of message.

I wasn't speaking of you directly, by the way.  I'll edit my post accordingly.

Preaching is not what art is about.

That's the artists' choice to make.  It's our choice whether to listen or not.

For the record, I agree with your position on being preached to through art.  I don't dig it either. In fact, I find an artist's assumption that I'll sit captive, without the ability to respond, to be insulting. It's for that very reason that I did not go see District 9. I also stopped watching Family Guy for that same reason (although I was never really a big fan anyway).  An occasional dig, fine.  Bully pulpit, absolutely not - regardless of my stance on the issue. I have no interest in one-sided conversations.

Also, just so I'm clear about this - I don't have strong feelings one way or another for Tolkien or his work.  He was certainly free to classify his work however he wanted to. He knew for sure.  The truth is, however, that nearly all of it has been a stand in for early 20th Century England - whether it was his intent of not - because it lends itself to it very well.

Personally, I find his work tedious to read. Everything has a new and unnecessarily complex or vaguely familiar name.  It's like reading an Ikea catalog - it's not a lamp, it's a Vorkning. 

When I was a kid, The Hobbit & Lord Of The Rings were The books to read.  You just Had To.  An early indicator of my distaste for being bullied or pressured - I didn't read them until many years later.

C3PX said:

I could be way off here, but I have never had any problem believing that Tolkien really did write Lord of the Rings allegory free (as he claims he did).

 

I believe the term he used to describe his work was applicable, as opposed to allegorical. He was certainly free to use whatever term he wanted, but they are very similar - in this case, a story being used to explain or demonstrate something that at first may appear unrelated.

I just don't see how it is even possible for a writer to delude himself out of truly understanding what he himself actually wrote about.

I don't think he was deluded about what he wrote at all.  I think he may not have wanted to appear as a political writer, so he chose to sometimes deny a connection. He said his work was more of a religious-based story about good vs evil - again, allegory or applicable.  He was a devout catholic and very outspoken on the evils of industrialization.  To think or state that those core beliefs aren't present - and at times a major theme -  seems like quite a stretch.

skyjedi2005 said:

books that have no topical allegory whatsoever....like Tolkien's lord of the rings.

Lord Of The Rings is one of the most famous pieces of allegorical fiction there is.

I've read before where Tolkien claimed to hate allegory - he was either deluded, or a hypocrite.  Lord Of The Rings is a thinly-veiled allegorical piece about how the industrial revolution destroyed bucolic England.  It's almost nothing but allegory.  Arguably, it's know as much for it's message as it is for it's story.

Funny that you brought it up here.  Star Wars is nothing more than Lord Of The Rings in space. Innocent farm boy, at the urging of his old man wizard friend, is drawn into fight against giant evil power threatening the simple life of the good people. Both have a sort of religious David & Goliath under current as well.

Vaderisnothayden said:

Art is not about sending messages.

Art is almost always about sending some type of message.  By it's very definition, art is visceral. It is a creator's way of expressing thoughts or emotions so that others might also experience or understand them.  You may not dig the message, and in fact a person may even be offended by it, but it's not an abuse of some higher, pure medium. 

Even the most base or serene paintings are the artists' way of saying something about whatever it was that inspired them.  Just because a piece isn't a Basquiat, that doesn't mean it's not sending a message.  The same goes for any form - sculpture, music, writing, film, etc.

Artists don't go to the trouble because they have nothing better to do that day.  They create because something moved them emotionally and they either want to share it, warn against it, or preserve it. Whatever their reasons, it's a message.

skyjedi2005 said:

Lucas ...... is the most successful film maker in the history of the medium.  He not only changed cinema forever and brought the technologies forward that are still advancing, but wrote the rules of the blockbuster

There's no denying that Lucas changed film. ILM is the gold standard.  No doubt, he created one of the most popular franchises of all time (Star Wars), as well as being on the team of another (Indiana Jones). Add American Graffiti to the list and Lucas becomes legendary.  However, I would have to give the title of most successful film maker in history to Spielberg.  As far as writing the rules of the summer blockbuster, I'd give that to Spielberg also.

bkev said:

Nope, I didn't even know that was part of a single program.

It's not a program, and you can still do it.  It's the tradition of sewing the Philmont patch onto the red Jac-Shirt.  If you've hicked over the ridge, you sew the patch in such a way that the bull's tail is over the shoulder seam.

Did you sew the bull's tail over your shoulder?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/movies/21stars.html

Interesting piece on the trend of supposedly sure-fire movies, with big time stars,  losing money.  There seems to be a myriad of theories on why this is.  Here are a few from the article;

"...allowed their fans to move on by working infrequently"

"...refusing to do certain types of publicity"

 "wearing their routine too thin"

"a plethora of entertainment options competes for time and attention"

"script concepts that fail to translate to the screen"

"poor release dates"

"awkward marketing"

I admit to not going as often as I used to myself, but for me it's been the offerings. It certainly isn't the scripts for me because I'm not even in the theater to find out.  More often than not, it's been the fact that it's a remake of a film that I didn't feel needed to be remade - either because the original was a classic that shouldn't be tampered with - or not enough time has passed to warrant an update.

Another reason for me is stars who I am tired of from their over exposure. I've never seen a single Seth Rogen\Jonah Hill\Justin Long\Michael Cera\Judd Apatow film - yet I feel like I can't escape the deluge of exposure to the films these fellows make - which all seem to be the same, sometimes two per year. Because of the extreme over-saturation of these fellows, I have no interest in seeing anything that any of them are involved in, ever. Enough already. I include Sandler and Ferrell in with those fellas also.  They're all one trick ponies.

In the interest of disclosure, I should point out that I'm not, and never have been, a fan of that type of buffoon humor.

My free time is spent riding motorcycles, not paying 10 bucks to see a shaky-cam remake or high school humor - I don't care who the star is. In fact, more often than not, I'd prefer it not be a "star".  The media over-saturation of their personal lives makes it all but impossible to believe they're the character.

Anymore these days, it takes seeing an old friend (Indiana Jones, James Bond), or something original (Doubt, Traitor) to pique my interest. Hollywood seems to have taken the easy road and I seem to have taken to not buying it.

You could also try putting the drive in a different machine and accessing the files.  if you can, then you can either move them to an external drive or just put the old drive into a reloaded machine as a second internal. 

I move my files to an external and reload my OS every couple of years anyway, just to keep things fresh.

*edit*

Sorry, didn't see that Ferris already suggested moving it to a different machine.

1. No
2. No
3. No
4. No
5. No
6. No
7. No
8. No
9. Weekly
10. No

I thought this was a very interesting article about the current state of the Summer Blockbuster, and in a sense the film industry as a whole. We were discussing this at work recently.  We also touched on it here, in Gaffer's G.I. Joe discussion.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/movies/09scot.html?8dpc

 This passage from the article really stood out to me;

...those reliable axioms about the taste and expectations of the mass movie audience are not so much laws of nature as artifacts of corporate strategy. And the lessons derived from them conveniently serve to strengthen a status quo that increasingly marginalizes risk, originality and intelligence.

 To me, reality television falls under this same umbrella strategy.  If the studios (film & TV) serve only crap - then that's what people will watch when they tune in or go the local theater.  The studios created the world they claim we want. The truth is, they seldom offer up alternatives. It's like the owner of a sea food restaurant claiming that his customers only want fish because that's what they always order.

To me, it doesn't feel as though there are any signs of this trend letting up.  We've had multiple discussions on this very board - a board where films are a major theme and the members span several generations - and it doesn't appear to me that being spoon-fed two hours of shiny objects and pretty colors is what movie-goers really want.  Yet, we continue to get it anyway.  No wonder so many people feel disenfranchised these days. We're losing our voice, while the studios continue to say they hear us.

bkev said:

Just lettin yall know that I'm going away for 2 weeks at Philmont, scout ranch in New Mexico.  Backpacking at least 66 miles, will return on the 19th.  Cya then dudes and dudettes!

Great stuff, kid.  I spent many summers in the 1970s at El Rancho Cima in the Texas hill country.  The Explorer post I was part of was big on Philmont.  Hope you really soaked it in, man. Those experiences last a lifetime.

Plus - The Tooth is about a thousand times more awesome than sitting behind a computer.