I’ve had my reserved seat ticket for a few weeks.
As is usually the case, I’ll have their bottomless popcorn and an a nice unoaked chardonnay. I’ll raise a glass during the crawl. Going alone so I can have a more cerebral re-connection to 1977. This has been a very long wait. Fingers crossed it will have been worth it.
He’s truly pathetic. Still trying to revise history. Telling us what he was really thinking back in 1976
He’s either a liar or an idiot. I prefer to think he’s a liar.
He’s a wealthy man with influence he can afford to be both dishonest and stupid.
Wait! I want to change my answer! 😉
He’s truly pathetic. Still trying to revise history. Telling us what he was really thinking back in 1976
He’s either a liar or an idiot. I prefer to think he’s a liar.
I agree. I believe he got where he is largely by accident (right place, right time, right people around him), but he sure as hell didn’t stay at that level by accident. He’s a businessman.
Go away, George.
Well, he did announce in that interview that he’s finally divorcing us! What a loveless marriage it has been for so long.
I don’t know your age, but Lucas has been burping that same tired bullshit for 30 years. He can’t let go and he can’t take the high road. He’s mentally ill.
He’s truly pathetic. Still trying to revise history. Telling us what he was really thinking back in 1976, what he always meant to do, blah, blah, blah, fucking, blah.
Go away, George.
Anyway, we’re getting off-topic. Maybe we should add this conversation to a new thread and continue the discussion there?
An excellent idea.
Those will be available one for each Sunday the first month the film is out.
I get the feeling that’s the beginning of the defection by Finn. Sort of an unauthorized prisoner transfer.
It’s getting a little warm in here. Everybody take a deep breath, and chill?
Calming down isn’t going to change the score. Jedi isn’t going to be better than Empire because I decide to take a five minute time out.
Perhaps you could give that time out a try anyway.
The Ewoks are an early example of the awkward racial profiling by proxy we would get in the prequels.
George’s main talent is evoking nostalgia.The problem being that those serials he was trying to evoke depicted some pretty awful racial stereotypes. The cowardly ‘Jap’, the noble savage, the money obsessed hooked nose Jew, the lazy black, the cannibal native.
The Tusken may fill the role of the Native American in a Western but he has the virtue of not having any of the physical tropes (no feathers, no war paint, no war song, no throwing axes, he gets a wigwam in the prequels but more of that later) so they work.
The Ewoks are beginning to be a bit too close to the hero eating natives of Tarzan to be comfortable. There is a serious debate going on now about the problems perceived by Slave Girl Leia and fat sultan Jabba but the Ewoks are more of a indicator of things to come for me than that.
In the PT we have the robot loving sneak attack slit-eyed Trade Federation, the money obsessed hooked nosed trader and Stepin Fetchit.
I don’t think George is trying to be offensive, his friends and family would hopefully not hang around such a man who would but I think he just doesn’t think like other people do and he increasingly distanced himself from people who might have steered him into more sophisticated ways of doing what he wanted.
I’ve always found it strange that more isn’t made about his offensive hardly-veiled racial stereotypes. I don’t know about his last two films, but Phantom is loaded with them. At times, it borders on SNL parody. Not in a funny way. JarJar is just plain insulting. He’s also a great indicator of just how out of touch Lucas really is.
Maybe I should make an Empire Strikes Back thread. People aren’t in debate about that film.
Well, Anchorhead is something of a '77 purist …
In spite of the new film looking like a proper restoration of the story I’ve been waiting on for over 30 years, I’m aware that I may be in for another disappointment. We’ll see next month.
I think the PT and ROTJ have the potential to be as good as ESB but that potential is squandered by the lack of grounding in the fantasy. The rebels in the first two films feel like real people. The threat of the Imperials feels tangible. Adding puppets and later CGI to the pro and antagonists makes both sides feel less realistic. The aliens are either depicted as plausible replacements for real world archetypes (the Tuskens represent the resistance of first peoples against colonists for example) or a background characters in the first two films. The exceptions (Chewie and Yoda) paved the way for aliens beings taking more of the centre stage but the technology used to depict them is less and less phyical and the effect is that they become increasingly divorced from physical reality.
The Sandpeople are depicted as physical beings with interesting details in their costumes that speak of a culture beyond what is said.
The Ewoks and Gungans could have filled a similar role but they look increasingly less physical and are played for laughs. Even the Jawas have a sinister edge to them and yet I felt genuinely sad for them when were slaughtered by Storm Troopers. One feels the beginning of that with the Ewoks but none of that at all with Gungans. Similarly the droids are physical in the first two films and treated as abused characters which we are supposed to care for. In ROTJ they become more puppetised and the subject of very strange jokes (the droid torture scene is really out of place compared to the torture scenes in ANH and ESB). They then become comic animated characters in the PT the battle droids lacking any menace and lacking any sense of sympathy.
Jedi is where the rot set in. The PT is just rotten.
Sir, that may be the best explain of exactly when, why, and how Lucas ruined the franchise. An excellent example of why Star Wars and Empire are one story and the last four are another film series entirely.
Well explained indeed.
I think we’ll stop it with Tobar’s quote from Lucas.
joefavs said:
He goes on to get himself all flustered about how much he hates being criticized and it’s really cringe-y. Completely aside from the franchise, I think it’ll probably good for his mental health to be out of the public eye.
His poor relationship with the fan base is all his own fault.
When a film maker changes a beloved scene of a beloved character, receives worldwide backlash over it, then decides to change it even further, and finally goes so far as to market & sell a T-shirt making fun of those very fans - he deserves all the vitriol the world can send his way.
I didn’t watch the video and the printed blurb that Jar Jar is his favorite only reinforces what I’ve always suspected. He’s a sore loser, control freak, and megalomaniac. Thank God he severed himself from the franchise. His constant lying and revision of history is mind boggling. Almost as much as the people who respect him.
I will never watch a video interview with him, nor will I waste one moment reading a single word he says. He might as well burp the alphabet.
He’s exhausting.
Why are we not complaining about this?
http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/11/9309335/see-the-star-wars-scenes-shared-between-the-two-trilogies
Have we lost our vitriol? A video supposedly showing the “like poetry, it rhymes” that could also just prove that “Lazy Lucas, was Lazy” is making the rounds, “proving” that the PT was “reverent” to the OT because the director only has so many ways he can shoot a medium/closeup scene.
I don’t think the vitriol is there the way it was ten years ago because there are so few fans who really care enough to try and bring credibility to the prequels. That’s not to say there isn’t a strong fan base for them, there is. TFN is proof of that. It just looks to me like they’re becoming much more of a singular focus sub-group. Similar to the way we have been for the past twenty-five years.
Videos and articles like the one linked above are waved off as nerd-based silliness more often than they would have been ten years ago. The franchise has been sold, new people are running it, writing the stories, and directing the films. With the focus being on restoring the franchise as opposed to taking it further down the rabbit hole (when Lucas ran\wrote\produced\cast\directed\edited), the climate surrounding the films seems to be a return to the GFFA.
All that rhyming bullshit Lucas burped out in interviews is comical. I’ll give him this; he took self-aggrandizement to a new level. For the record, I always thought you guys were goofing on him with the “like poetry, it rhymes” statement. I never realized he actually said it. Bonehead.
joefavs said:
Also, here’s the actual soundtrack art:
Nice! Very much a throwback to the soundtrack I absolutely wore out the summer of 1977. Played it daily. Wore out the gatefold cover as well while memorizing every spec of every photo going on the adventure on the days when I wasn’t back in the theaters going on the adventure. It’s the one thing from back then that has never left me . Listened to it just today in fact.
Interesting timing. I may watch 1977 Star Wars. Haven’t really decided yet. I don’t own nor have interest in anything else where the films are concerned. Haven’t watched it in nearly ten years. I’ve long since moved on from the contaminated franchise. I’m NPR/EU.
With that in mind, I just pulled this up to read today. I read it a couple of years ago and really enjoyed it. One of my very favorite parts of the Star Wars universe. I think there is a similarity in this story to part of the new film. Beyond that, I’ll reconnect with my old heroes when I see them on the screen again.
Variety confirms that the music in the second TV spot is indeed from the new Williams score! http://variety.com/2015/film/news/star-wars-the-force-awakens-footage-han-solo-gun-rey-lightsaber-1201639818/
I’m also seeing that one of the Entertainment Weekly articles confirmed a final running time of 135 minutes, but I’m not sure which one. Ten minutes longer than I’d like, but ten minutes shorter than the estimates I was seeing a month or so ago, so I guess I’m happy.
EDIT: Billie Lourd is in the war room shot, by the way:
I’ll admit to not following theory threads too closely, but is it possible she’s Leia’s daughter from the start of the film, presented as a regular character? Not every Star Wars character has to be some long lost, hidden, unknown, secret, O.M.G. reveal.
I’m getting a Splinter of the Minds Eye vibe from that image in Kylo vs The Good Guys in the forest.
Definately has a similar feel. Good catch.
Just got back from Spectre. TFA trailer ran. Looked awesome huge. Best theatrical Star Wars moment for me in over 35 years.
I assume they’re channeling this scene with Leia.
http://i1212.photobucket.com/albums/cc448/201050/image_6.jpeg
Darth Bizarro said:
After many years, I was finally able to convince…
I think that statement is by far the most telling of the whole deal. If someone needs years of convincing before they watch the films, they probably aren’t the best example of how someone will view Star Wars for the first time.
Prior reluctance has nothing to do with how a person will experience and accept the films. For example, I didn’t want to have anything to do with Star Wars until I was like 14. Then I somehow decided to give it a try. Since then OT are my favourite films.
Prior reluctance has a great deal to do with how someone will view the film, particularly if someone else had to spend time trying to convince them to even give the film a chance. Going in jaded or reluctant (for whatever reason), would almost certainly affect on how open they were to it.
Next time you want to take me to task over a difference of opinion, don’t edit my statement to fit your agenda. I’m not asking.
This is the rest of what I said with regard to first-time viewers;
It would be just as interesting to see how someone who heard about them and thought they sounded interesting would views the films and the story.
Before TPM was released, people said that it couldn’t possibly be worse than ROTJ.
I don’t remember a single article, interview, or discussion stating anything like that. Do you have any links?
I used to have every one-sheet made for the first two films and that Revenge teaser linked above, all displayed in chronological order, and all eventually lost in a flood (stOOpid water). For the longest, I thought the 1978 Style D for Star Wars was Struzan’s best work (nothing beats Jung’s original). All these years later I think his Revenge Of The Jedi has aged the best. Nice and simple, sets the mood. To me, one of his better pieces overall, from any film.
