Disco_Lobot

Fang Zei said:

Disco_Lobot said:

Fang Zei said:

This discussion of changing writers from one movie to the next kind of begs the question of whether VIII and IX will even vaguely resemble George’s outlines for VIII and IX or if Lucasfilm is totally and completely doing its own thing now.

I’m highly doubtful that there was ever much of an outline in the first place.

From what I remember, Lucas had a 50-page story outline for the entire ST and hired Michael Arndt to write the screenplay for VII. Abrams eventually rewrote the script himself, keeping certain elements from Arndt’s earlier draft. For example, we know that a female protagonist was always in the cards. One of the very earliest rumors following the Disney deal was that Matthew Vaughn would direct with Chloe Grace Moretz in the starring role.

The only major difference I remember hearing about was Abrams giving the original characters a bigger role in the story. I’m sure there were other differences, apparently enough for the “white slavers” comment from Lucas, but did TFA at least vaguely resemble his outline for VII or was it really that different?

George showing up at Celebration makes me wonder if TLJ isn’t going to get back to what he had in mind for the ST.

Supposedly Lucas is a big fan of Rogue One… that might have something to do with it.

joefavs said:

I haven’t seen it yet, but it sounds so batshit insane and it’s already got such an extreme reputation that I’m really legitimately curious. I’m sure I won’t want to watch it again, but if you sat me down tomorrow and had me choose between those three things, I’m going with Jupiter Ascending.

HA - well I will warn you that (if you ever watch it) that it’s not “fun bad”… it’s “bad bad”

Speaking of “fun bad”… one of the new Netflix MST3K episodes parodies the 1978 movie Star Crash. It’s probably the most hilariously bad Star Wars ripoff I have ever seen… and as a bonus stars David Hasselhoff.

joefavs said:

I’d rather watch the PT than, say, the Transformers movies. But I’d also rather watch Jupiter Ascending than the PT.

OMG… are you serious? Jupiter Ascending is one of the worst films I have ever seen.

I’d probably rather watch the Transformers movies than Juper Ascending

I ripped my own DVDs of them (using pretty high quality settings)… not sure if anything higher quality than that was ever released

Fang Zei said:

This discussion of changing writers from one movie to the next kind of begs the question of whether VIII and IX will even vaguely resemble George’s outlines for VIII and IX or if Lucasfilm is totally and completely doing its own thing now.

I’m highly doubtful that there was ever much of an outline in the first place.

The only thing that is actually illegal is distributing a fan edit. It’s perfectly legal to create a fan edit and watch it in your own home. It’s not even technically illegal to download anything copyrighted… only uploading.

In addition - it’s generally a civil matter and not a criminal one (the potential damages are very steep, but there’s no risk of jail time or criminal record… that generally would only happen if you were profiting from it).

All that being said; I wouldn’t use my real name and I would use a VPN for all torrent/upload/download activity. (not that I would know anything about that 😃)

The New Spiderman movie will almost certainly be better than the last two terribad ones. I still can’t believe they had a bad guy who basically looked like he was wearing a bad rubber lizard suit from an old Godzilla movie.

Thor 2 was pretty stupid… and it does look like Ragnarok will be better.

I liked Civil War quite a bit - was happy to see that after the (IMO) overrated Avengers 2

• Is the man in the high castle good? I’ve bene thinking about watching it.

Also - battlestar galatic (the reboot) is awesome.

Bloodline on Netflix is really good too.

Shameless is really good too.

Ed Norton’s Incredible Hulk - Still think it’s one of the best Marvel movies

PC Master Race

Thrawn’s Revenge mod for Forces of Corruption is the SHIZNIT

rodneyfaile said:

I’m actually replying to a signature I’ve seen a few times:

“I have to say that I felt George’s group of six films had more innovative visual imagination, and this film was more of a retrenchment to things you had seen before and characters you had seen before, and it took a few baby steps forward with new characters.” - James Cameron about Episode VI

…

“I start to see things I recognize. It’s being very respectful of first two films. Then all of the sudden, it just swerves. And now I’m going on a journey. I feel like the franchise has been reinvigorated, like this is a renaissance.”- James Cameron regarding Terminator Genisys

He should just get busy putting True Lies and The Abyss on blu-ray and leave the movie reviews to others.

I actually kind of liked the initial premise of Terminator Genisys (it was actually fairly clever)… but then it went off the rails and was absolutely terribad.

Unfortunately I see that in a lot of films these days. Someone comes up with an interesting premise, gets funding for a film and then never figures out anywhere to take their premise and actually turn it into a narrative

I’m still slightly annoyed to this day at how much better TPM looked in this trailer than it did when I finally saw it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6hOlI9cg4o

CHEWBAKAspelledwrong said:

Except that the SE color timing is supposedly part of Lucas’ original creative vision. Magenta Leia and all.

At least that’s something fans have been able to fix relatively easily.

At this point I’m just happy that most of the SE stuff that really bugs me (Jabba in ANH, Greedo Shooting and Vader’s NOOOOO in ROTJ) is easy to get rid of without losing much if any quality.

digitalfreaknyc said:

rodneyfaile said:

Then if Disney/Lucasfilm aren’t going after those actually selling the despecialized versions on ebay, they why not just host the free downloads right here on this site instead of hard to access torrent sites?

Torrent sites aren’t remotely hard to access.

In fact you can find torrents directly from google with a little basic google fu

The nicest thing I can say about Jurassic World is that it was definitely better than the other Jurassic Park sequels…although that’s probably the definition of damning with faint praise.

Honestly, some of the effects from the Jurassic Park are better than what we got in Jurassic World.

Jurassic World did actually start out with a good premise (park already up and running as a worldwide phenomenon)… and just having the dinosaurs escape and wreak havoc could have worked reasonably well… but we also got:

Genetic modified dinosaur - Stupid

Training Dinosaurs - really stupid

Guy wanting to use dinosaurs for military shit - incredibly stupid

They did a terrible job of handling Phasma… that’s for sure. The whole lowering the shield thing was stupid.

SilverWook said:

Alderaan said:

imperialscum said:

That is a stupid statement considering he made THX.

It’s just a weird, dumb movie.

When was the last time you even watched the theatrical version, if ever? A lot of people here (myself included) have put in lot of effort and money to restore it.

What - did Lucas change that one too?

DominicCobb said:

imperialscum said:

Chlorine said:

DominicCobb said:
When it came to ESB and ROTJ, obviously he had others write those scripts entirely.

I was under the impression that he wrote full scripts for both films, but had other writers do subsequent drafts.

For ESB he basically wrote the initial script, while Kasdan fixed the dialogue.

That’s not really true. Brackett wrote the initial script based on his story treatment (that they developed together). Much of what was in that script made it to the final film. And Kasdan did more than “fix the dialogue.”

I thought most of Brackett’s draft was thrown out? I know I read that somewhere

Chlorine said:

Alderaan said:
I do think the silliness in Return of the Jedi and the absolute juvenile presentation of the prequels are much more his M.O.

So how do you account for THX 1138 or his many student films that were addressing contemporary issues in a tactful (i.e. Ewok free) way?

That’s a good question. While I would agree that in retrospect you can clearly see that many of the issues that ended up plaguing the PT started in ROTJ it’s also true that not all of Lucas’s films had these issues.

Lucas did adopt his first child between TESB And ROTJ IIRC… maybe that had something to do with it?

One interesting thing - ANH and TESB are widely considered his two best SW films, and those are also the 2 that went well over budget. I personally think that there was more effort to get good takes in ANH and TESB… and those films (esp TESB) feel more perfectionist. As a fan I don’t care that they went over budget (but I do understand why Lucas and the people providing funding would care).

I’ve read reports that when he was making the PT Lucas wouldn’t do that many takes and instead would try to fix everything in post. Lucas is a great editor, but I think he leaned too heavily on trying to fix everything in post and as such we are left with scenes that leave me thinking “That’s the best take you could get?”

Lucas is obviously an extremely talented film-maker (and he was a genius when it came to tie-in marketing and monetizing his franchise… but that’s another topic).

He’s a fantastic producer, editor and is clearly a visionary when it comes to effects technology (visual and audio).

I actually think he’s a great high level creator of stories as well.

Where he ended up struggling was in the director’s chair later in his career as well as with script-writing.

I think the PT could have been really good if he had brought in other director(s) and had more help on the script and dialogue (IIRC there were issues with people who were members of the director’s guild working on it because they don’t put credits at the beginning of the film or something).

Yeah - there’s stuff in the PT that sucks, but I don’t hate Lucas for it… I think he tried; he just didn’t succeed as well as we would have liked him to.

The only thing I really get pissed at him about are some of the really stupid (and pointless) SE changes. Greedo/Han, Han stepping on Jabba’s tail, Vader no… etc. I could probably even live with some of the more annoying SE changes if he had just left out the character ruining ones.

The factory scene is worse than the Ewoks. It might even be worse than the romance scenes.

DrDre said:

rodneyfaile said:

DrDre said: The OOT bootleg market is non-existent.

That’s definitely not true.

Really? Type either Despecialized or Silver Screen Edition in Ebay, and you will find only two or three sellers attempting to sell Despecialized, and none trying to sell the Silver Screen Edition. If nobody is buying and or selling, there is no market (market = an actual or nominal place where forces of demand and supply operate, and where buyers and sellers interact).

There are bootlegs, which are shared through torrent sites, but that is another matter. Before the release of the OOT on DVD, there were literally dozens of sellers on Ebay (mostly from Asia, where pirating laws are lenient or absent) mostly attempting to sell bootleg copies of the OOT in varying quality.

I think there’s a pretty good argument to be made that the rise of torrent sites and the ease of obtaining pretty much anything for free on the internet is probably the thing that has killed the bootleg market. Why would I buy a bootlet on a physical medium when I can get a (likely superior) portable digital copy at no cost?

I was on BBSes as far back as the early 1990s, but movie sharing didn’t really become a thing until the early/mid-00s when people started getting fast enough broadband. Downloading a movie over a dial-up connection or even ISDN line was just too painfully slow to ever catch on.

doubleofive said:

Star Wars is no longer in the Top 10 Domestic Gross list.

Given inflation and population increases it’s incredibly amazing it stayed there as long as it did.

Then again it’s still at #2 on the adjusted list (and could be #1 depending on how much you buy those GWTW numbers)

TV’s Frink said:

The factory scene is much longer, has a flying R2D2, and C3PO making shitty joke after shitty joke. No way is it better than any Grievous scene.

Yeah - at least Grevious looks kind of cool. The factory scene is literally a like a level from Super Mario Brothers or MegaMan inserted into a movie.