I’m pretty sure it’s actually in space - Finn’s wearing some sort of breathing apparatus.
As if social media wasn’t already responsible for any number of huge social ills making a resurgence in the mainstream, now they’re the reason Pan & Scan is back, too.
Quite a few, actually.
DuracellEnergizer said:
It’s kinda difficult to get a satisfying experience watching SW '77 & TESB alone without a satisfying final chapter to conclude the story.
I don’t think it’s that hard at all, especially considering the sheer wealth of other options to entertain yourself at any given second.
For example, I get a very satisfying experience only watching a few Alien movies and not all of them. I own all the Bond films because they came in a box set one christmas but there’s nothing unsatisfying about only really having watched about 5 or 6 of them since I got it. Same with Godzilla movies, and Rocky movies, and X-Men movies, etc. Terminator movies, my goodness, there’s a great example. Star Trek, of course. Hell, I more or less stop at the third Harry Potter despite knowing there’s about 500 miles to go before the actual ending.
There’s nothing wrong with calling it a day on a film series (or TV show, or book quadrilogy or whatever) you don’t like anymore and effectively just… leaving it alone at the point it stopped working on a consistent basis, and moving onto almost anything else. This is why I don’t have any Hobbit movies, for example. I only have two Spider-Man movies (Spider-Man 2 and Into the Spider-Verse) in my collection. My Marvel films actually SEEN (or owned) account for less than 1/6th of the studios’ total output (if that - I’m not good at math). I know that The Walking Dead is still on the air but I know almost nothing about what’s been happening because after the 2nd season and whatever its cliffhanger was I decided I didn’t need to continue on, that it wasn’t going to get any better. Same with Game of Thrones (bailed out in Season 4) and The Dark Tower books (book 3, I think?). In fact it could be argued that checking out ANYTHING else once you’ve run into the same wall of dissatisfaction repeatedly is a much healthier use of time, instead of consistently going back to a thing you now mostly dislike in the hopes you’ll MAYBE like it again, the way you only have twice, in a time long, long ago.
Ultimately, it’s just movies. There’s a million more of them out there. Granted, not all of them have space wizards and lazer-swords. But at some point you have to wonder if its worth all the time and effort to keep hanging around a party when you don’t like the hosts, or the hors d’ouvres, or the DJ’s selections, or the beer in the fridge. There’s always another party.
Like the thing you like for what it is, not what it could be. And when it stops being the thing you like, you are under no responsibility to stick around anymore. You have no duty to support fiction that consistently isn’t speaking to you anymore. The thing you DID like will still be what it was, and you can come back to it whenever if you’re nostalgic for that specific feeling.
Thankfully, in this case, there are people making sure the exact version of the thing we do like is available to watch in HD. Which is a low-key miracle in multiple ways.
IIRC, there was a rumor several years ago that every last piece of film in Lucasfilm’s vaults were being scanned in and catalogued. Perhaps this 19SE is just the tip of the iceberg.
I definitely remember this rumor. IIRC, it came from a talk that someone at Fox was giving regarding their cooperation with Disney’s team post Lucasfilm sale? But that’s (I believe) how we found out about all the original elements and plates, etc. being kept and stored all this time.
The FILMS don’t have to be comparable at all, because box-office and quality are only tangentially related.
What IS comparable are branding, brand loyalty, brand awareness, marketing strengths, marketing strategies, nostalgia levels, and pop-cultural prestige.
The idea that this last Star Wars movie won’t crack a billion worldwide seems pretty far-fetched to me.
You act like something got taken away from him. He sold the company. He chose to do it. He didn’t want to do this anymore. Your definition of creative bankruptcy is, itself, bankrupt. Your idea of how movies get made doesn’t seem to be built out of anything other than behind-the-scenes documentaries on Star Wars - and even that ignored everything that doesn’t fit into a pre-established mythologized idea of Lucas The Creator. That’s why it sounds like you’re just using buzzwords for the sake of feeling self-righteous.
All that really matters is whether the movies are good at what they’re trying to do. That’s all that’s ever mattered from the audience POV. Everything else is just fantasy football for people who hate sports.
Nobody who ever became a fan of these movies in their youth did so because they knew a lick of ANYTHING about how the movies were made. Using behind-the-scenes myths as the basis for your dislike doesn’t make any sense. You weren’t behind-the-scenes at any point and it doesn’t really matter if you were. All that matters is whether the movie is good at doing what it wants to do. Star Wars does this sometimes. Other times it doesn’t.
But the notion that it needs to follow a single, “true” path to creation and any variations off that path matter just as much, if not more, than the final product? I don’t agree with that at all. I don’t work at Lucasfilm, or for Lucasfilm, so how they made it literally has nothing to do with me and my role in this - which is to do nothing more than simply watch a thing and hopefully like it.
Ryan-SWI said:
the ST is the only one creatively bankrupt, made by committee and without the involvement of the series’ creator.
These are basically just empty buzzwords. It’s not creatively bankrupt, ALL movies are made by committee, and George Lucas is still involved in the making of the films. Granted, he’s nowhere near AS involved as he used to be, that’s primarily because he sold the company years ago because he didn’t want to be involved anymore, partially because for about a decade straight most of his biggest “fans” couldn’t stop themselves from raking him over the coals the instant an opportunity presented itself and he decided there was no point in spending the last couple decades of his life eating shit.
None of these Star Wars movies are creatively bankrupt. Some are just better than others. Some are just plain bad. And some are very good even if they’re not the most original things ever released to theaters. Which is fine, because there’s plenty of originality at the theaters if you choose to seek it out, it just won’t very frequently come in the form of big-budget, corporate-distributed, heavily-marketed family films. Sometimes that does happen, yes. But not frequently. Usually, if what you really care about is originality, you’ve realized you might need to find that outside of a single mass-marketed franchise movie series. Or two.
The Rise of Skywalker, according to its spoilers, seems like it’s going to have elements of Return of the Jedi in it. Not very original, sure. But there’s also going to be some pretty weird stuff introduced, so there’s some originality there. It looks like a lot of people came together to help realize the vision that Abrams ultimately landed on for the final chapter in the saga. I guess you could call that a “committee.” I don’t know how that committee is any different than any of the other creative teams that came together to help George make Attack of the Clones (a movie distributed by a multinational corporation and paid for for thanks to a 3 billion dollar merchandising deal with Pepsi), but hey.
Will it work on an emotional level? Will it seem fun? Will it be exciting? Will it elicit the feelings it sets out to make you feel? These are pretty important questions to take into a theater with you.
(btw J.K. Rowling helped write Cursed Child)
YouTube is a hell of a drug
I’m confused by the HDR thing fairly frequently - I don’t have any 4K displays in my house, although I do have an HDR-capable TV, but only a few apps/games have tried to kick the HDR on (Fleabag on Amazon automatically shifted over to HDR for season 2, and I found it didn’t look as good, honestly. It might have just been that title wasn’t converted/applied well). I understand that there are separate tags/flags that are sent along with the picture info that tell the tv what color range and values to apply to the image, so my understanding (and this is the part where I want someone to please pick this apart and explain it to me, haha) is that when the stream is fast enough to make 4K HDR viable, it switches over from the SDR file to this 4K file. This 4K file is now basically as flat as possible because the HDR tags/flags need to be applied to it, and those tags will change on a scene to scene basis.
but the 1080p file that I’m getting when I watch any of the Star Wars movies - those files are sourced from the same 4K master. Is the primary difference that their color grading isn’t sent along as additional picture information, but baked into the file/stream itself?
And while HDR colors/contrast should have more pop, depth, and vibrancy, there should be a general similarity between what it was graded to look like at 2K/1080p, and what it looks like in 4K, right? Like you shouldn’t go from one to the other and have the other look markedly different in terms of color temperature and contrast levels beyond the basic advantages that the expanded range will provide?
When I bring up Attack of the Clones in 1080p, it doesn’t look the same as my blu-ray. When I bring up Star Wars, it DEFINITELY doesn’t look the same as my blu-ray. That’s how it’s supposed to be even at standard def, correct?
Hah. I was thinking the same thing when I saw that, but then again, IF he read these boards he wouldn’t have written that the Fox logo being used was the “new” one - it’s old now, and it’s been specifically modified on top of that.
Those are false rumors. It doesn’t have several endings, and 3/4ths of the film wasn’t reshot. I don’t know where you heard that, but they’re providing bunk information and are unreliable.
My dislike of one and apathy towards the other comes from the films internal consistency.
If you’re a first time viewer of ROTJ and it’s the first Star Wars movie you’ve seen ever then it’ll be really odd to see a brand new, never before seen, actor portraying… well you can’t even be sure if you have no prior knowledge to bass it off of. That is why the replacement of Sebastian Shaw is so much more reviled then the replacement of the Emperor.
This is another really good point - the change seems to depend on the idea that everyone who watches/rewatches the movies is going to watch them in episode order. But that’s not only very presumptious, but it doesn’t make sense for that to be the assumed default. Watching them in episode order basically breaks the whole saga and makes it duller and more confusing in general, because so much of what the PT even IS, is reverse-engineered from the OT. It’s constantly referencing stuff it assumes you know from having watched the OT already.
It’s a change made solely for the purpose of benefitting people who are watching it in a manner disadvantageous to getting the most out of the series. It ONLY works on rewatches, if it works at all - and it doesn’t.
The years it is not, honey. The mileage, it is.
It looks like a bootleg typeface you get free online.
Which is funny because I believe that’s EXACTLY what they did for the Clone Wars Season 7 trailer.
Mandalorian is “out there” in 4K HDR, so the drm has clearly been broken on day one, so I think for those of us who won’t get D+ until 2021 (and believe me, if I could get it now, I’d be the first in line), someone will put the new masters out as well.
I am honestly very surprised the entire 4K saga hasn’t been circulated yet. I’m wondering if the pirates in question simply don’t know there’s a difference and haven’t bothered (i.e. “we already did all this back in 2011 what’s the point”) or what.
edit: missed Ash’s post from upthread that explains exactly why, haha. Sorry Ash!
So far Lucasfilm is 0 for 2 at coming up with something “new” for the pre-titles. First it was that botched fanfare edit for the Lucasfilm logo, and now it’s… this very unnecessary thing.
I believe it’s new, yeah.
I also don’t know that I like it. Not the redesign, I guess I’m fine with that. I guess I just don’t see the need for the logo at all. I prefer just the Lucasfilm logo fading in and out.
It really sucks that most people either don’t see or don’t care about the difference between blu ray video quality and a lower bitrate stream. When I stream movies and I see blocking, it takes me right out.
Fewer physical releases also means we are at the mercy of the streaming services, only able to watch what they deem “popular enough” to carry.
The thing that gets me is the banding. UGH I hate banding so much. People must not see it, or think it’s a creative choice? I don’t get it. But sunrises shouldn’t come up on screen looking like an area rug, right?
For a second I thought maybe people would start to lobby hard for some real changes in compression and picture quality after it felt like the entire world got all pissed off at HBO for their terrible compression ruining that one dark episode of Game of Thrones. But that was dumb of me, haha.
You can look at that track record for yourself, really. The two don’t blend particularly well. Or at least they didn’t in his case. But he definitely made sure to implement technological changes in the making of movies that other creatives definitely put to good use, and that’s a very good thing.
I don’t know how you can give Lucas all the credit while also giving his collaborators all the credit, unless you’re going to suggest that all his collaborators credit actually belongs to him because he’s the one who chose to collaborate with them?
Historically, you can see Lucas’ abilities as a creator start to fade pretty fast around 1982, when his life started entering into serious upheaval, and his focus turned more to being a CEO than to a creative. It’s why Jedi (and Temple of Doom) seem as compromised as they are, and why the other films with his name attached to them (save for Willow - which didn’t really work) at that point had minimal (if any) involvement from him (Last Crusade, Labyrinth, Howard the Duck, Tucker, etc.)
Part of the reason the Prequels didn’t go the way he wanted them to is because he didn’t really want to write or direct them, and his headspace was completely shifted. He was trying to reverse-engineer a story from a set point, and tried aiming it at children/families without having spent too much time in that world, if any, in the intervening 15 years. Which is probably why we wound up watching a kids movie about bureaucratic malfeasance in 1999. It’s the perfect example of his two halves just smashing together and not really mixing.
THX 1138 was (and still is) a misunderstood satire of capitalism
American Graffiti was autobiography
Star Wars was nostalgia pastiche.
Those are his three. He executed those three ideas brilliantly, and the uniqueness of his voice rang out as strong as it could, and that voice has been echoing ever since. But he had one hell of a backing band behind him, too, and not everybody gets to be a belter for all their life. Or even most of it. Sometimes you shine as bright as you can for a short period of time, and no matter how talented or gifted you are, that’s all you get on your own, and you’d better learn to work with, rely on, and fit in with others if you hope to carry on that path. There’s nothing wrong with that, or with acknowledging that, either. I think it’s fair to say he did that.
I disagree in that “big picture” isn’t really a necessary ingredient. the OT didn’t really have one, either - part of the reason Lucas could blow up Empire the way he did is because he didn’t have any real big picture. He just made something up and stuck it at the end of his script and then had to try and figure out how that was going to work in Jedi. And then how he ended up having it work was ALSO something that didn’t have any big picture planning behind it. Same with the Prequels: The only real “big picture” was the status quo at the beginning of Star Wars. But the way he got to that status quo had no solid throughline at all, and that’s because he just made each story up as he went. Even the parts that he’d been telling us about for decades by that point weren’t the same when he finally got around to writing them.
Of course, those are semi-negative examples that sort of prove that a “big picture” might actually be necessary, but there are countless other examples of movies, film series, tv shows, books, etc. whose greatness is unquestioned, but whose creative paths were absolutely not mapped, or pre-ordained when they began. In fact MOST great stuff we all like and have copies of on our shelves wasn’t created that way. The idea of the “Big Picture” being a necessary element is mostly a myth, and it’s mostly a new one, created in response to TV fans reacting poorly to LOST and Battlestar Galactica. It’s less an actual recipe for making great art, and more like a security blanket for consumers so they can feel good about investing all their time and energy into following along with a story and feeling like they won’t be disappointed at the end. Since almost everything that causes someone to BECOME a fan was created without any serious “big picture” in place before it was started, the idea that the “big picture” is a thing that’s desperately needed doesn’t make any sense, unless you’re solely looking at it as an insurance policy.
Biggest problem with both changes (which I don’t think everyone consensus likes OR dislikes - but trying to find a consensus in Star Wars fandom is like trying to find a rose growing at the bottom of a sewage treatment plant)
McDiarmid replacing Revill: The makeup on McDiarmid isn’t very goooooood, and the dialog changes are just extraneous additions. Styrofoam peanuts.
Christensen replacing Shaw: It’s literally a headswap from a costume test. That’s bush league. Hayden isn’t even ACTING in the scene.
I am wondering if, much in the same way McDiarmid has replaced dialog in Rebels while working on TROS, they’re going to re-do Christensen’s appearance at the end of Jedi so that he’s actually ACTING in the scene? But I guess that’s really unlikely now that we’ve seen the 4K masters and that shot hasn’t been re-done at all.
Originality is vastly overrated as a key aspect of artistic strength. “Yeah, but it’s new” doesn’t carry a lot of weight when what’s new isn’t made well.
However - Lucas DID basically whip up Empire Strikes Back’s story/structure more or less all by himself once Brackett was gone. Kasdan contributed heavily, yes, but by the time he came on the bones of the thing were firmly in place. But on the other hand: The most famous twist of all time, probably, and the one that basically doomed Star Wars to forever be taken way more seriously than it ever really needed to, and trained its biggest fans to expect twists and turns and huge surprises in every chapter despite the fact it’s ALWAYS been a straightforward fairy-tale other than THAT ONE TIME… that twist was basically pulled out of his backside at the last second before shooting started. It wasn’t a deeply considered, thought-out idea. It was just a hand grenade tossed at the end of the story to create one hell of a cliffhanger for the next chapter.
It was also not really the newest of ideas, either. In fact it was, even by 1978, a pretty obvious staple of soap operas and pulp fiction.
I haven’t really gone through them myself. I think the DVD era more or less burnt me out on “extras” although I still find myself, out of habit, buying blu-rays based on how many bullet points are on the back.
But at some point it occurred to me that for all the weight I give “the extras” on any disc I ever bought, aside from a handful of very prominent examples, I almost never watched them more than once, and sometimes never watched them at all.
There’s a bunch of stuff on the 2011 blu-ray set for Star Wars I’ve never clicked on. That includes some of the deleted scenes.