Bingowings

There are only two aspects of the romance that don't work, the words and the pictures :-D

Once again a redub as well as an edit would push it further but we'd still have to look at Hayden's face.

The SE Sarlacc looks like something Giger would throw in the bin for being too out there.

(ON BE THE SWISS ACCENT) : "A lady's front bottom with teeth, with a trouser-snake tongue with a beak? Nah... " 

Talk about gilding the willy :-D

shanerjedi said:

Bingowings said:

Fair enough but still I can't help but wonder what a Star Wars prequel trilogy written by Tom Stoppard (to Lucas' outline) would have been like.

Well, the opera scene might be a clue.

 Definitely, he would have made all those council/senate scenes less stuffy and the romance much more believable, he is one of my favorite writers.

Fair enough but still I can't help but wonder what a Star Wars prequel trilogy written by Tom Stoppard (to Lucas' outline) would have been like.

Fisher was also rumored to have worked on dialogue.

It might give definition to the pit by mapping in a scaled down rocky structure (like a miniature version of meteor craters like this one in Arizona : ).

Darth Venal said:

Bingowings said:

Christopher Lee appeared to give an uncharacteristically flat performance and he is theatrically trained, worked a lot on radio and has worked well on other green screen heavy films.

Maybe he gave a good performance that was massaged to death in the editing or not very well photographed (we don't have all the footage so it's impossible to tell).

Well, he only really has one scene where he's talking with another actor at length, when Obi Wan is strung up. The rest of his scenes are either against CG characters or just odd lines with no real structure in the middle of action scenes. I think his class still shows out in the scene with McGregor. Other than that, he doesn't really register much because his character is totally undeveloped. In the Lord of the Rings movies, he does at least act with real actors in all his scenes, and pretty good ones at that.

 

There were more scenes with Dooku, some of which have never seen the light of day and even a good performance can be made to look flat by bad camera work and sloppy editing. I would really love to see all the footage most of the actors are really talented and some are used to acting with minimal or no scenery. Lee's story readings (no scenery, no other actors) are also often brilliant so I find it hard to believe that green screenery is entirely to blame.

Christopher Lee appeared to give an uncharacteristically flat performance and he is theatrically trained, worked a lot on radio and has worked well on other green screen heavy films.

Maybe he gave a good performance that was massaged to death in the editing or not very well photographed (we don't have all the footage so it's impossible to tell).

There is a lot of Kirk which is Shatner and Pine still managed to get those aspects by trying to play Kirk. His body language is very much like Shatner even though he isn't trying to emulate him because so much of the character was defined by the orginator of the role (shame about the film being so-so).

McGregor resembles Sir Alec's performance more in ROTS because he seems to be playing Obi-Wan more (a character created and largely defined by how he was portrayed in ANH).

The rest of the time he seems to be reading his lines while doing mental arithmetic only stopping to smile or frown on cue (the same with Neeson, Portman and just about everyone).

Jake and Hayden played themselves (not their characters) very well and I didn't like either of them.

Yes and no, Lucas came up with the basic story for all the films (even though he pinched them from all over the place) he later gave them to other writers to do later draughts eg, Leigh Brackett for ESB (but he largely ditched everything she did still giving her the screenwriting credit). He never hid the fact that other people worked on the screenplays for the OT, in fact he possibly took less credit than he could legitimately claim.

With the PT he took much of the credit/blame for the screenplays when many hidden hands also worked on them.

If anything it's the PT that have hidden or ghost writers, Carrie Fisher and Tom Stoppard apparently contributed to the PT.

The scriptwriting credits for the OT if anything point the opposite way giving him less credit than he could claim (though he didn't write the novelisation credited to him that was Alan Dean Foster).

I've been thinking about the prophecy regarding the chosen one.

I know this is seen as unpopular to some people but I think it's one of the elements that don't work because of it's execution.

I loved the way that the television adaptation of I Claudius uses the Delphic prophecy to bookend the series and I also like the idea of assuming that a prophecy points one way when it may point in the opposite direction.

A scene where we see an ancient recording of the prophecy being played before the council and some of the council like Dooku and Qui-Gon reading portents in events like the invasion of Naboo could sell the idea better and sow the seeds of doubt that Palpatine would later exploit.

Timstuff did a great job on Jar-Jar recently.

It takes a special talent to deliver some of the dialogue that Lucas comes up with in an engaging and believable fashion.

At no point do I stop believing in the characters in ANH and ESB and a lot of that came from very good casting (Lucas himself has admitted to not really being an actors director).

Even in ROTJ most of the time the original cast and Ian McDiarmid manage to pull it off even without help from the directors (Marquand and Lucas by most accounts).

By the PT even the most talented actors (besides Ian who only drops the ball when the Halloween mask is put on) seem a bit lost and Hayden and Jake (playing the most important character in the PT) don't seem to have a clue what they are doing.

Redubs could help as so much is conveyed with the voice.

I was surprised by how good Anton Yelchin was in Terminator 4 (especially seeing how awful he was in Star Trek) I really believed he could grow up to be the same character Michael Biehn played in the first film.

Nico Cortez also did an amazing job as young Bill Adama in Razor.

McGregor argued that it would be pointless to try and do an impression of Sir Alec because people don't sound the same when they are young, while that is true there is still a signature in the voice that never changes and if he was trying to attempt that it failed.

He should have played the role straight without worrying about what Sir Alec did or he should have bitten the bullet and given the voice more of a Sir Alec inflection.

Sitting on the fence resulted in a very stilted performance that doesn't really pick up until he forgets about trying in ROTS.

The other daft move (or is it Darthed) was giving Anakin an American accent when he clearly hasn't got one in ROTJ.

Accents can drift completely over time (just listen to Rick McCallum) but there has to be a key for that drift (talking to a lot of people with the same accent and needing to fit in usually causes it).

If that was going to happen it would have happened by the time we saw Anakin in AOTC (being with Obi-Wan most of the time he would probably drift towards his accent which would fit in with Seb Shaw).

As Vader, Anakin doesn't have to alter his voice, the machinery does that for him, nor would he feel the need to impress people with the way he spoke (the way he choked did that).

I can't imagine his voice changing under the mask or him faking it for his last words to Luke.

I think Lucas gave Anakin an American accent to appeal more to the American market as it makes very little sense in terms of retroactive character development (almost a case of the writer becoming the character).

There were some comments earlier about Angel's Rancor redux looking like The Force Unleashed's, I did a quick scribble to see what that would really look like :

A bit OTT and possibly impossible without doing the model from scratch but interesting (rather like that bull thing in AOTC).

Love the extended views of the barge, it sells the scene better placing it in a less restrictive environment.

Not bad, he looks enough like him to get the idea across and he is a fun actor who could have given the role the necessary coldness.

Nobody seems to care that Ewan doesn't look or even sound exactly like a younger Sir Alec.

If they were serious about putting Tarkin in the prequels they should of written a role for him and hired someone like Nighy who could have played him without OTT make-up.

George famously wanted it to be a guy in a suit but the tests looked pretty awful :

I think it would be better if he just did the same trick Ben did (point at them and they pretend he isn't there).

Force choking is only a Jedi skill in the EU.

Shouldn't this all be in Aurebesh?

Ric if it was doing your job there would be arrows pointing to "Trees" , "Road", "Building".

I need to get my eyes tested because I read Kim Newman for a minute (I didn't think he was much of a Star Wars fan).

Thanks Jay, everthing seems to be falling into place nicely (not that we aren't grateful for the reality of you at the forge and anvil hammering it all into shape).

Darth Venal said:

 What are the most obvious differences, Bingo?

The colour, the weathering, the amount of detail, the lighting.

The number of open slats (ok so they can go up and down but it would sell the model shots more if some of those textures and details could be tweaked).

They obviously lack sufficient weight (the bouncing abandoned skiff has a very fake feel).

It feels like everyone teleported off before it blew up too.

I wonder how much of the barge and skiff model detail could be replaced by sampling the location set?

They clearly do not match up and often (especially around the time of the explosion) both are static or with very slight movement.

Erikstormtrooper said:

I think Tarkin should have been in the PT more. Regardless of the quality of the makeup, it would have bridged the trilogies better. Does anyone complain about Obi-Wan's character because he didn't look enough like Alec Guiness?

Tarkin could have saved Anakin from the lava. Or been a close adviser to Palpatine. Tarkin's a cold calculating bastard, and they could have had a lot of fun getting him in the PT.

I'm not sure about Tarkin, the way I see it The Clone Wars (which killed billions) could be seen by the reactionary element of the military as the fault of the Jedi and flaky democracy.

I always thought that people like Tarkin were legitimately concerned with restoring and maintaining order, they just went around it in a tyrannical and undemocratic way.

Proof that the ends do not always justify the means.

Palpatine is truly evil but Tarkin came across to me as someone who would enforce peace in a ruthless fashion.