“I… I’m no one” is so much better and in keeping with what the last two movies were pointing towards. I’m glad to hear that’s what the kiss-off line is now. It’s what it always should have been.
I can’t imagine having this reaction to what is the cinematic equivalent of vanilla ice-cream.
Vanilla can be a pretty subtle and interesting flavor profile if used with care in a pint of good gourmet stuff.
Or it can be half a bottle of imitation extract dumped into cereal milk and left in the freezer for 15 minutes.
And even then - okay, you don’t think Hux can be a real bad guy. That’s dumb on the part of the creative team to buy into that, but alright, I’ll roll with it.
Why do you then go and get RICHARD E. GRANT to play such a NOTHING of a character?
When Captain Canady made more impact in 2 minutes of screentime than RICHARD E. GRANT did? Come on.
Without a scene of that sort, sorry to say, Chewie getting the medal will never be in my edit. Probably the single scene that annoyed me the most, outside of Rey Palpatine stuff.
No doubt. They really did cut into the bone way too many times on this movie. So many necessary shots and sequences jettisoned for the sake of going faster, at the expense of any sense being made. Why would you keep these medal shots in if you’re not going to set up OR follow through on any of them properly? Why keep the blender-spun version of Mustafar if that version of the sequence is now completely unneccessary to understanding or even enjoying the scenes that follow? Why would you remove the shots that make the geography of the desert sequences make ANY sort of sense, and then render your Chewie fake death utterly comical because not only is everything happening so fast, now it’s happening in such a non-sequitur manner it might as well be a Looney Tunes cartoon. WHY DOES CHARLIE FROM LOST KEEP TALKING?
So many ideas, and they tried to put all of them in all at the same time and just broke a bunch of them off and shoved the jagged shards into the narrative wherever they could when they didn’t fit right.
My suspicion that the original version of the shot where her hand flops over had the medal in it.
Honestly sort of surprised they didn’t go full sentimentality and have the medal falling out of her hand and clattering to the floor, with the sound ringing over into the next cut of Kylo stopping short and turning around.
I think the trick to different versions of DOTF being cut in isn’t just making sure it’s an orchestral piece being used (whether that’s the LSO or another symphony’s recording) but selecting the right movements. You can evoke the feel of DOTF without going straight to the big horn parts or the huge choral parts. The string rhythms alone (with percussion hits) can do a lot, and are a lot easier to cut since you’re not having to worry about melody lines getting cut up.
Looks like he checked in and looked around at some stuff here last week, which was almost one year to the day from the last time he posted.
(I clicked his name on the first post of this thread)
Dude probably just doesn’t feel like talking? It’s definitely a weird time, to put it lightly.
Do we really have to wait until 2142 though? 😉
https://youtu.be/98ma7eoR0N4
Oh wow, I’d never seen that before. I had no idea what they began their broadcasts with but of course they played Star Wars first, haha. I knew that MTV started with Video Killed the Radio Star but I didn’t know there was a whole countdown and then a dedication to Asimov, and then STAR WARS as the beginning of the Sci-Fi Channel.
Such humble little beginnings for what would eventually become… whatever it is now, LOL! Thanks for posting that.
I think the problem with him just disappearing after he chucks the lightsaber is that the structure of the movie (and of storytelling we’re familiar with in general) would make his disappearance play as a mistake and not a subversion or open-ended variation on the story. People would simply think someone “forgot” to have him show back up.
Once redeemed, he’s got to do something while in that state. He doesn’t have to be in that state for a very long time, obviously, but he’s got to do something WHILE IN THAT STATE otherwise the story feels incomplete.
So far the best possible edit idea I’ve heard (which - again, suggests a lot of skill on the part of the person putting it together, like creating a Mustafar establishing shot showing Point A and Point B, from original pieces) is that Kylo comes back, joins in the fight with Rey, and everything plays out the same way it did before - except when Kylo heals Rey, she wakes up - and he’s completely gone already. We don’t see him again until later, where the wordless ending sequence becomes a crosscut between the two - Rey at the homestead, Kylo at Ahch-To in self-exile. She wanders around the homestead, he’s climbing up the island, etc. etc.
The idea of ending the movie (sans weird nosy old lady) with her looking at the twin suns, and him staring at his own set of them on Ahch To is a pretty solid one, I think. But it would necessitate someone finding footage of him walking around in nature or whatever, compositing him into Skellig-Michel footage, getting the right shots to match between the crosscuts… It’s a lot. Maybe you could take the footage from “Silence” or something like that - but then you have the problem of everyone knowing the end of this Star Wars movie is kitbashed together from a Scorsese film? Pluses and minuses either way.
Well it was a different time when they had less resources but they worked with what they had, I mean for a 300 million dollar picture made in 2019 they could have at least put more effort into this, especially for a series known for its climactic battles.
I get what you’re trying to say but the straight line you’re trying to draw from “having resources” to “making what you wanted to make” is almost never that straight. it’s a thing I see brought up in game reviews a lot too, the idea that misfiring creatively isn’t just that - a creative misfire - it’s evidence of “laziness” or “lack of effort”
Sometimes bad movies are bad due to lack of effort. But for as much as I dislike The Rise of Skywalker, and I very much dislike it - the crew on that movie weren’t being lazy at any point. That documentary on the blu-ray is nothing but people working as hard as they can, as fast as they can, to make the best movie they can.
They did not make that movie, unfortunately. They made a bad one. But most bad movies are made by well-intentioned people whose shortcomings on that project have nothing to do with their lack of effort. I don’t think them going through that footage and reworking it in THAT way to solve a problem they didn’t know they had until it was staring them in the face is a sign of laziness at all. It reads to me as the opposite.
So they used two takes of the same scene back to back.
I’m amazed
…and insulted.
Lucas/Chew/Hirsch did the same thing more than a few times in 1977, IIRC.
I don’t think it’s insulting really. It’s just editing. The whole thing is a trick. Some tricks are better than others.
That there’s a big Zapruder-like YouTube video “exposing” it seems odd, to me. “They’re trying to fool you, but we see through their attempts!” Of course they’re trying to fool you. They’re filmmakers.
That said, I don’t really like the sequence. But re-using shots isn’t why I dislike it.
One of the main reasons DVD took off had a lot to do with the easily observable visual leap from VHS. When the prices started dropping from “Laserdisc” enthusiast level down to the $200 range, electronics stores (hah, remember those!) were basically shoveling the things out the door by simply connecting a VCR and a DVD player to the same TV and pushing a button on a switcher.
DVD killed Laserdisc and VHS because it looked better than both formats, was cheap, and didn’t have any of the handling problems (getting up to flip the disc over, having to pay for an expensive disc-flipping player, worrying about rewinding and tape-eating).
That’s exactly what they are. The 4K remasters all got finished in 2012, because they’d anticipated the Phantom Menace 3D re-release to do way better than it did, and these remasters were basically done SPECIFICALLY to be 3D converted later to build on the success of TPM.
And then Phantom Menace disappointed (again) and that was basically it. Lucas sold the company a little over six months later.
From where I’m standing, there’s only one film in this trilogy that consciously undoes anything in TFA or otherwise, and it’s not TLJ.
Right? And what’s even more bizarre to me is how everyone who has spoken along these similar lines on the TROS production, whether it’s negative OR positive, seems to have this weird tone where they honestly believe there was a roadmap or a plan that probably should have been adhered to, when everyone absolutely knows there wasn’t, and further, if there was, why would anyone have cause to believe ANYONE ELSE KNEW ABOUT IT?
Because the people who made the first movie, made it literally never believing they’d come back to have a second bite at this apple. NOBODY making The Force Awakens had any illusions that they’d be back for part two or three. So for this creative team to come back and act like they had to “set things right” in any way just doesn’t make any sense at all. All the decisions you made on the first movie, you made under the full knowledge you’d have zero control over what came next. So why are you acting like you’re now burdened with getting things “back on track to how it should be” when there was never a “how it should be” back in 2015 when you finished your leg of the race?
And of course, the ultimate comedy is that their “well, we had to fix what was originally supposed to be” solutions basically UNDID EVERYTHING they did in the first movie. TLJ never contradicted TFA. But TROS sure as hell did. All over the place.
To add to Captain Solo’s thorough post: My personal memory of the time was that DVD had been around for awhile, but was considered a weird niche that had it’s own problems compared to Laserdisc, and the price of DVD players/discs, combined with those a/v problems made people wary of pushing all in on it. I distinctly remember, at the time, the DVD of Blade Runner: Director’s Cut, failing out in a head-to-head comparison with the Laserdisc version, so people early in the format’s life figured it was maybe a way to get people to pay more for lesser-quality home video product.
IIRC, it was basically The Matrix that unlocked DVD’s potential. That disc sold a LOT of players at the time, and it was only around 2000-2002 where DVD producers started really applying everything they learned from Criterion and other studio Special Edition sets. Stuff like the “Five Star” series from Fox and anamorphic encoding to make full use of the resolution available (plus gimmicks like animated menus and super-fluff “bonus features”) is what finally pushed DVD into the mainstream. That and the very low sell-through price for the tech - I remember DVD prices basically being at, or in many cases LESSER than VHS.
Rey’s vision feels absolutely perfect, better than the original for sure.
I agree with Hal that if there’s a way to use Luke for haunting purposes, perhaps the closeup of his face in his duel with Kylo, that would be ideal.
You could probably flash cut from Luke in close-up smirking at him, straight to the “Evil Luke” false-vision (since it’s the version Kylo legit believes in) to replace some of the Rey shots, and further you could shorten up the “touching hands” shot to jump cut to Luke screaming “NO” (edit: he screams STOP actually)
Heck, you could probably go straight from
Touching hands - Luke “NO” - Kylo (after Luke disappears) “NO”
bang-bang-bang quick cuts. Just long enough for viewers to recognize what the shots are, but not long enough for them to play out. I think that’s why the Rey vision works as well as it does, is the cuts are timed PERFECTLY to let viewers recognize what’s being referenced but they stop the second that synapse fires. That’s tough to do, and you nailed it Dom.
Vision of the future:
https://vimeo.com/406327520Visions of the past:
https://vimeo.com/406328685Please keep in my these are still rough.
Big thanks to snooker for the shot of the Falcon.
GOODNESS!
Genuine question: does the FOV of the shot indicate that Yavin IV would be visible from the Death Star? An observer watching from a third point in space (like the camera here) might be able to look on either side of the Yavin gas giant to see both objects, but they might not be able able to see each other nonetheless.
This is probably correct, especially considering how objects in space (especially in Star Wars) can be hard to judge w/r/t/ distance.
Looking at the tweet that .gif came from, apparently someone made the case in the responses, too
https://twitter.com/Nexahs/status/1247571888462848002
Eh. I don’t know. For me the most questionable thing in the shot is how the gas giant behind the X-Wings looks like it’s made of play-doh.
That is definitely a much more impressive demo than the Rogue One attempt from 2018. There were a couple times I actually said “oh wow” out loud 😃
But I think the difference is that the facial de-aging in The Irishman is (correct me if I’m wrong) begun with filmed capture of their actual on-set performances. So this video shows the VFX artist deepfaking faces on top of camera-captured real faces (albeit CGI-enhanced/de-aged ones), not full blown cgi-created facial movements. That could be why the mouths appear to move much more naturally in these deepfakes, because the mouths are actually moving naturally. If they were trying to layer a deepfake head over the top of a computer animated person, I’d bet the mouth movements would still look unnnatural because they’re trying to map legitimate human expressions captured by a camera to a fundamentally unnatural animated movement.
But I do think you’re right that what’s really preventing it from looking the way it was obviously intended to look by ILM is just time. In the space of a year deepfakes have gotten scary good, even moreso than they were when people first started getting scared by how good they were. Maybe in another year or two someone will know exactly how to deepfake Carrie Fisher into that footage flawlessly. Right now, I don’t think anyone’s there just yet. But it’ll probably happen, given enough time.
(although, considering how poorly her posthumous footage was used in Rise of Skywalker, and how not-good this Rogue One footage was, maybe everyone should take a whole lot of that time off from digitally de-aging and/or resurrecting Carrie Fisher, just on general principle)
agreed!
I like it just because it’s so weird and it makes Forest Whitaker’s weirdness even MORE over the top, but I don’t think it at all worked the way it was intended to.
But I do like it, despite that. Just saying “BOR GULLET!” is pretty fun.
whoops, I see what I did there. I don’t have a preference is what I meant. I misread your question. But I explained why I had no preference for either version later in the post anyway (and again up there).
Either way, at least I provided some distraction from your boredom, so there’s that! 😃
LOL, we don’t agree. You telling me we do is kind of weird. I know I don’t agree with you. And it’s fine that we don’t agree! I don’t have a preference between the two. I think they’re just broken in different ways. I don’t think the deepfake helps at all in any significant way.
This is normally where I’d say “let’s agree to disagree” but you obviously don’t want to do that, haha 😃
I don’t. It’s broken in a different way, but it’s still broken. The part that’s broken isn’t addressed by that guy’s fix from 2018, so everything around the part that’s broken is beside the point, for me.
Until someone can come up with a fix that makes her mouth move like a human being’s, it will remain a mistake that mars the final seconds of the film.
There are only two fixes to that scene that I would prefer
Deepfaking new faces over bad animation is lipstick on a pig, to me.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re starting to be choosy about letting people in. There’s been a lot more chippy and annoyed posts from some of their admins, and I can’t imagine that the big influx of people, most of whom are just kind of barging into threads and asking for stuff without having read (or donated) anything, is helping at all.