Babu Frik was the most entertaining part of the film.
And then Threepio.
And then Palpatine.
“Hey-heyyyyyyyyyyyyy”
Nobody said there aren’t thousands of people who want to buy it. I’m one of those thousands.
But thousands isn’t enough. And it’s not hundreds of thousands, either. Bootleggers aren’t making “Big profits.” Just plain ol’ profits. Kind of. Probably not any more notable than any other bootlegger anywhere is making by burning torrents to blu and throwing that up on eBay. It’s not a lucrative hustle.
The demand seems high because we’re us, and we’re the ones making the demand, and we’ve been making it for 20 years. But we’re obviously not a priority to Lucasfilm. It’s why our preservations are left alone. It’s not because we’re secretive, or careful, or because we only upload to the most private of trackers, or anything like that. They’re left alone because we’re not competition, because our numbers aren’t enough to give very much consideration to.
We’ll know when an OOT is finally getting officially released because that’s when everyone’s fan-project is going to get shut down. Until then we’re a niche of a niche that isn’t worth bothering with.
Which is fine because with 4K, D+, and Despecialized, we dont’ really need to bother with them, either. The only thing an official release can get us now is corporate validation and that doesn’t really matter much, if at all.
Either way: These dumb rumors aren’t signs of anything but the rumor mill still working the way it always has. Nothing we’re hearing has anything to do with whether or not Disney and Lucasfilm decide to make the OOT available as a bonus feature for anything in the near future. That decision, if/when it’s made, will be made for reasons that have nothing to do with “appeasement” or money. Hopefully it’ll get made, but to continue believing there’s a way that “The fans” can make this happen doesn’t seem prudent, to me.
The fans have shown they’re better off making what they want to see themselves.
The current rumors aren’t true, they’re sourced to a known bullshitter and being further spread by a farmer of clicks.
Disney isn’t looking to appease an “angry fanbase” because the fanbase they’re worried about (which is exponentially larger than the group of people who hawk YouTube and Reddit comments sections) isn’t angry at all.
Mike Verta’s restoration is vaporware. It will never come out. It was never going to come out. Lucasfilm was never going to buy his restoration for release.
An OOT release, if it happens, will be a bonus feature on either Disney-Plus (most likely), or on a future box-set run at very limited numbers (less likely), numbers too small to be seen as any significant measure of “appeasement,” and it won’t be prompted by some desire to “appease” fans, since it’s been 20 years of them knowing there’s a segment of the fanbase who actively desires this, and it didn’t matter. And in the meantime, that segment of the fanbase has only continued to shrink.
The tweet linked to in this thread from last week specifically said “tweet me your questions” or to send them to his website.
I don’t think it’s a pointless distraction at all.
But I do think once you start shifting the weight of what it’s trying to do from WHAT it’s saying, to HOW it’s saying it, you free yourself up to allowing that sort of confusion of purpose and muddy storytelling.
If your structure is no longer supporting the weight of your story, you need to change the structure accordingly. The Joseph Campbell stuff was meaningful and helpful in helping Lucas tell the “do the right thing” story. But once it became a story about BEING “Joseph Campbell Stuff,” it got waylaid.
But to clarify: I don’t think its mythological underpinnings are pointless at all - but I do think choosing to look at Star Wars solely as a myth that is mythologizing it’s own mythmaking (which is increasingly what Lucas did, in service to shifting the story’s aim from “Do the right thing” to “Forgive your dad, he loves you.”) is what inevitably leads to Star Wars being disappointing and lost.
It needs to be about more than itself. It can reference itself, it can nod to itself, and it can perpetuate its own mythmaking. But it can’t be ABOUT those things alone. Those things have to be in service to what it IS about.
I’m not sure if there’s actually a place that collects or charts Lookup Tables for color correction like a library (although that’d be a very nice resource, come to think of it)
I will say that, in general, looking at preservation projects centered around the prequels, and specificaly those that are using 35mm film scans/prints as a basis, the biggest takeaway I’ve gotten simply from looking at them is that the TPM and AOTC were not as vibrant or saturated as the versions we’ve gotten very used to on home video, ever since the DVD days. They’re a little more contrasty and desaturated, and the color palettes are way more neutral.
Essentially - the prequels need to be turned down a couple clicks, if you get the metaphor there. The volume on the eye-candy was turned up really high and it’s just sort of stayed that way, but looking at film scans and trailers of TPM and AOTC, part of what made those presentations seem as filmic as they did was because the movies didn’t really look that loud all the time.
Structures are only as important as the weight they can bear and the ideas they can house. “following classic mythological structures” shouldn’t really be a measuring stick for whether Star Wars movies are quality or not, especially if the only real reason those structures are being (loosely, raggedly) adhered to is due to that aforementioned self-referentialism.
W/R/T Lucas, time and again we’ve seen that the man gets distracted by the grandiosity of his OWN imagination and mythmaking, and one of those first distractions was Moyer and co. creating a cottage industry over the examining mythological underpinning of Star Wars. Once that happened, the sharp focus on the streamlined storytelling engine that was Star Wars (an engine that was used to fuel a story whose main point really was “do the right thing and fight tyranny no matter what.”) began to blur and turn in on itself. And then he started retconning it into a family-centered soap opera that became, more or less, a story about forgiving your dad for being a real dick to everyone. And to patch over all the weird dips, gaps, and holes introduced into the piecemeal’d story as he went from the simplicity of 1977 to “the end” of 2005, he came to increasingly rely on self-referencing and explicitly pointing out to everyone the structure of what he was doing, in an effort to shore up just how flimsy and far-afield from what made Star Wars work everything had become.
it really feels like Disney wanted BOTH a total 100% blank slate franchise
Again - this isn’t the case.
To add to Dom’s correct reading of “doing the right thing,” I’d say Star Wars is about “doing the right thing” specifically in an effort to prevent fascism/totalitarianism/tyranny
That aspect is one of the only aspects that is consistent across all episodes. It’s not just doing the right thing - it’s doing the right thing to make things better for everyone, not just yourself.
The quality of the films pretty clearly rises and falls on how muddled and diluted those two (really, just two sides of the same) key throughline(s) are in whatever individual chapter you’re watching. When it doesn’t stick to those main dramatic engines, and instead chooses to pursue various retcons, shifts in focus, direct reactions to vocal fandom, or worst, indulges in acts of self-referentialism as a replacement for storyline progression - that’s when it falters and trends towards disappointment.
He’ll talk about it the same way he talks about Into Darkness or Super 8, probably. If he talks about it.
He might talk about it like he talks about his unmade Superman trilogy.
JJ doesn’t do extended cuts, never has. Asking him about it would just lead to a rambling and very political answer about the artistic vision or whatever.
His silence on the film isn’t odd, either. It didn’t do what anyone involved really wanted it to do, and so he’s just going to stay quiet until his next thing, where he’ll HAVE to talk about it as part of that thing’s press tour.
But it’s a callback to a callback, and it was kind of a minor miracle that first callback even worked in the first place. By all rights, it shouldn’t have (and wasn’t supposed to!) I do think the fact Homestead in the proper key as the music it’s surrounded by in TFA helps. But this usage of it isn’t very appropriate thematically or tonally. Or even musically - it’s discordant.
it plays as “fan-edity” in a way your edits never are, Hal.
Burning homestead is the best musical choice for the added ghosts, as heard in most of jonh’s mockups, so that’s what I’m gonna go with.
Really? There isn’t a different version of The Force Theme that fits there, or could be made to fit there by trimming down a few micro-moments of lingering on each ghost in its intro? Burning Homestead, beside the fact it’ll be the second needle-drop re-use of it at a key Rey moment - which is probably enough to pull people out of the sequence all by itself - is in the wrong key for that transition, making the blends both in and out (that is unless you’re planning on keeping the Death Star cue as well, which really doesn’t work) really rough.
At the Lucasfilm purchase, someone at Disney (Maybe Iger?) likely wanted a completely blank franchise to start over with. In the planning stages, however, they were convinced they shouldn’t risk rebooting everything
That’s definitely not how it went 😃
I feel like the light speed skipping cuts away to quickly. It needs to linger on the trail the Falcon leaves for a second or two before wiping.
I think the music editing is more the problem - the actual timing of the shot and the wipe (the wipe should probably be more pronounced with a visible, more prominently blurred edge transitioning between the two scenes - maybe use the bottom of the leaf as the top edge of that wipe) is spot-on. Hanging on the “hyperspace trails” for a second or two is just wasted time. The only thing that makes the edit there feel “fast” is knowing that the music is being faded out too quickly - if you watch it without music, the beats hit just right. If that last horn blast was allowed to ring out in full, and maybe even reverb its way a second or two into the next scene, it’d join a lot better.
I can’t believe that petition even has as many signatures as it does. The actual text of it reads like parody. I have a hard time believing it’s not a joke that people are simply taking seriously because at this point, with the Snyder Cut being made real, it’s hard to tell what’s fantasy or parody and what’s an actual plea from a completely around-the-bend fandom.
Satire’s dead, so anything goes right now.
My point is that the movie feels like it’s rushing through itself enough as it is. I don’t think that making it go FASTER is the way to resolve the pacing issues.
shorter isn’t the same as faster. The movie as it stands feels like it’s rushing because it’s constantly stopping to address a bunch of unnecessary shit all the time
Streamlining the narrative might make it shorter, but also might make it way more coherent, focused, and intentional, as opposed to jumbled, scattered, and distracted by every “HEY COOL IDEA THIS IS A COOL IDEA LETS PUT IT IN NO MATTER WHAT” moment it can think of.
I’m mainly advocating that runtime shouldn’t be a target anyone’s aiming at. Let it be the length that it is when the best version of it seems to have been arrived at - and you can’t really get a feel for what that is until you try a bunch of ideas out and see how they flow in the larger context.
If you stop yourself from making cuts for not much more reason than “Well now it’s too short” (as if “too short” really means anything in a context where there aren’t tickets being sold or timeslots being filled) I don’t know if that’s a good enough reason in and of itself.
I’m not sure the way to improve this movie is to make it shorter
Why not?
This sentiment has been brought up in multiple justifications for leaving in scenes that don’t really work and aspects of the film that are broken, and it seems to point to the idea that a movie being short disqualifies it from being good? Or “better” in this specific instance.
It’s like there’s an arbitrary notion that the goodness of the movie somehow counts less if the movie is only 90+ minutes long. I don’t understand why - if through proper pacing and clever editing, which is usually only ascertained by actually trying ideas out and seeing how they work in the larger context of the edit - the only way to make the movie better seems to involve keeping all the broken bits that are already there and that we know don’t really work very well, and then adding even MORE broken bits to it and trying to tape them all back together, for the sake of not much more than being able to say “well, it’s not too short, at least.”
What are the targets that are most important to aim at and hit when it comes to making a better version of this film? Is overall run-time really one of those targets?
It’s not like Star Wars stops being “Star Wars” because it’s not over 2 hours long. Being a fan-editor is tough enough as it is considering all the things that have to be compromised before you can even start. Why add even more unnecessary complications and roadblocks to making the best thing you can?
I still don’t think there’s a romance implied on her part going towards him. I think he feels like a romantic attachment is something he can use (and enjoy should his ploy to flip her actually work), but I have never, in all my rewatches of The Last Jedi, seen it coming from her direction, towards him. I’m not denying there aren’t charged moments, scenes, and an undercurrent making itself felt. But I’m also saying that aspect was placed in the narrative for a very specific purpose, and that purpose came to its logical conclusion at the end of the movie when she rejected him outright.
Basically: He put it out there, sure. And she said “I don’t like you like that. I don’t like you at all.”
The throne room is a complicated, dramatically satisfying, amazing back and forth. But she’s not there to get a boyfriend. She’s there to win a war. He’s there to turn her so he can use her to fulfill his power fantasy. That’s the dynamic. It’s laid fully bare by the end what it really was, and said as plainly as possible in the text and the subtext by the end of the movie.
Reylo started as run-of-the-mill fun fanfiction and ended up becoming - basically - a political wedge issue within fandom circles. It grew to encompass symbolic aspects far beyond the story it sprang from, and came to represent larger fandom concerns (and legitimate injustices within those circles), and honestly was like a giant vortex of personal projection, fueled largely by substitution of symbolic meaning for actual meaning.
Within The Last Jedi itself, though? “Reylo” was basically feinted at and then shut down in its final two reels. And it was shut down BY Rey. Decisively, too.
If there was another planet it was possibly orbiting, that planet still would have been clearly visible by that point. You’d have seen the planet before you ever saw the “small moon”
And Han would have known if there was a moon or not because he looked at the charts before he jumped there. Plus any moon that WAS orbiting would have been destroyed when the planet blew up.
It just seemed funny to me that today was the first time I ever thought “hey, wait, of course it’s not a moon, there’s literally NOTHING FOR IT TO ORBIT out there.”
Thing that only just now occurred to me:
Why would anyone on the Millennium Falcon be surprised that the Death Star wasn’t a moon? Moons orbit planets. There are no planets around. Alderaan never even had a moon to begin with.
The cut implies a passage of time but visually it’s a pretty jarring cut. It doesn’t imply so much as it just jumps the suns ahead a couple minutes. I think the fix works fine as-is, but I was thinking about that jump and wondering how it could be made a little smoother and that’s when it occurred to me you can actually smooth out the “passage of time” aspect by repurposing the footage of the ghosts while removing the old woman entirely, plus providing an opportunity to “close the book” on the Skywalker Saga by actually irising out on the twins.
Also I think you could use one of the concert suite versions of Luke & Leia to build to the end credits in that case, too.
You are correct that it’s a binary SUNRISE either way. Force of habit has me referring to it the other way around.
While I’m already talking about “fixing” fixes that everyone’s already happy with:
the fixed ending has always sort of bugged me in that with a single cut the sunset goes from two suns stacked on top of each other (to mimick BB-8 in the frame, I’m sure) to the two sons separated (where the original intent is to have Rey and BB-8 silhouetted against them).
But I think there’s a way to fix that problem that gets rid of that jump cut, and also gets rid of the weird back-and-forth with the anonymous woman who shows up out of nowhere and prompts the “what’s your name” thing, while still using the Luke & Leia force ghosts.
HOW ABOUT THIS:
Rey buries the sabers, ignites her own, and gets up.
Instead of cutting to the old woman, cut to the shot of BB-8 against the sunset, with Rey’s feet walking left to right.
then cut to the empty desert, with the sounds of the falcon going through liftoff prep in the background, as Luke & Leia’s ghosts slowly fade in
Cut to the binary sunset, only now the silhouettes are barely-translucent ghostly shapes of Luke & Leia’s backs as they watch the Falcon leave the planet. Iris out
OR:
Cut to the empty desert, with the sounds of the falcon going through liftoff prep in the background, as Luke & Leia’s ghosts slowly fade in
Cut to the binary sunset shot with the Falcon leaving the planet
Cut to the close-up of Luke & Leia smiling, hold on it, and then Iris Out
but after copyright expiration
I’m not at all convinced this is ever going to happen, and currently have no reason to believe it ever will.
I mean, I’d love if Leia & Ben were in that lineup, and I think from a storytelling perspective (in the dramatic scenario where they’re both passed on in that moment, that is) it’s absolutely the right call, but I also understand how much extra work that is, especially considering how satisfied everyone is with how it looks now, both compositionally and technically.
But boy it would be nice if Rey’s master was actually behind Rey as she finally defeats Palpatine. Moving Ben’s sacrifice & resurrection of Rey is a smart idea not only for the reasons you just laid out, but because it makes this heroic culmination of the “be with me” set-up at the beginning that much stronger, with Ben AND Leia actually being with her (along with Luke, Obi-Wan, Yoda, and Anakin) when she destroys the Sith once and for all.
(I guess compositionally if you’re adding both Ben AND Leia you still get the symmetry the shot currently has - it’d just be 3 on each side instead of 2)
As it stands, it’s a bit of a dramatic failing that when Rey destroys the sith and achieves her ultimate victory, the two people closest to her at the time aren’t anywhere nearby, either spiritually or physically.
I really do like the idea of Ben healing Rey and disappearing (sans kiss) before she gets up and takes out Palpatine. There’s a couple problems with it though.
it takes too long. The cuts probably need to happen a lot quicker considering whatever’s happening is presumably happening in front of him. Cuts and framing can stretch out the reality of a sequence quite well and suspend disbelief in a LOT of ways (most horror movies simply wouldn’t function AT ALL if that kind of trickery weren’t available and automatically accepted by most audiences) but the length of time her resurrection takes really pushes it.
Even if you manage to cut down the resurrection length so that it could plausibly happen in front of Palpatine while he’s reveling in adulation and transformation (maybe cutting back and forth between the resurrection and the transformation to show he’s pre-occupied and doesn’t notice what’s happening would help - and would make trimming the length of the resurrection more feasible) once Ben (and Leia) disappear, you almost HAVE to then include both of them in the ghosts behind Rey. That’s a lot of work for a scene everyone seems to be very happy with, not just in the creating ghostly images, but in having to re-time and cut down the screentime the other ghosts currently have now.