Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda

I’m SO bummed - my favorite restaurant in the whole world is closing, going bankrupt, because of a big-city con artist who clever swindled them over the course of a year.

Apparently this con has been going on in the bay area for some time, but some rural restaurants are not yet aware of it. It is likely this guy pulled this scam in the SF bay area, and had to move inland to repeat it as the scam became known. Here’s how it worked…

This guy applies for a job as a waiter. Over the course of the year he works day shifts. In the middle of the day, whenever business is light, he asks the owner if he can step out for a nap. They say sure, go ahead. He goes home, comes back an hour later, and continues working. He keeps track of this for a whole year. Apparently, the law says if you do two shifts in one day, the second shift is overtime and you can’t pay the worker tipped wage in that case. The owners just think they’re letting him take a break, but the law says if you go home and come back, it’s a new shift. So he builds up about 100K in “unpaid back pay”.

After a year of this, he tells the owners that his mother is sick and he has to quit. They throw a going-away party for him and they shake hands. Three days later, they get a letter from his lawyer demanding $160K back pay. It’s a small chinese restaurant, and they can’t afford it. So they will be closing up, declaring bankruptcy, and the owners may even lose their home.

Of all places, this was my very favorite restaurant in the whole world. And the owners were always so sweet, even to this a-hole. Some people are just BAD BAD BAD.

Marvin Minsky, AI pioneer.

I spent a lot of time trying this with PSB, and eventually gave up. Several forum members worked on a variety of avisynth scripts, but in the end the result never looked as good as the best single capture. I’m not saying it isn’t a good idea, it’s just that you need to have some really sophisticated software to align everything perfectly.

I think in theory it would be good if you had at least three versions, and could eliminate the most disparate of the three (frame by frame), averaging the remaining two. That way you could remove noise. Otherwise, by averaging all the takes, you’re essentially incorporating all the noise from all the takes.

It’s also a very different situation depending on if you’re working with video or film.

There IS a bathroom reference: Jar Jar stepped in doo doo.

What if they had included a Jabba bathroom reference?

4K and it’s not even scope??

I’ve done this before too, but WTH…
Here’s my current thinking:

1. SW
2. ESB
3. ROTJ
4. TFA
5. CPY
6. SWHS
   7-8. ROTS/AOTC

TV’s Frink said:
… ARGLEBARGLE

I just learned a new word today!

Regarding the Ranthars, now that Han is back to smuggling, I found it completely consistent that he might at times be smuggling something dangerous (like Alien, right?). It also makes sense that something like that could be used to their advantage and even save them. It’s actually more integrated into the plot than that eel in ESB, that served no purpose other than for the “ooo, look at that” effect.

Curious - why do people dislike the rathtars?

Actually, the scene WAS shown in one of the early documentaries (can’t remember which one). However, it wasn’t shown entirely from the camera’s angle - parts of it were shown from a side or back view. Having said that, I’m pretty sure I didn’t see that documentary until decades later.

moviefreakedmind said:
That’s very interesting about the Biggs scene being included. I had never heard that there were prints with that scene included.

I’m not saying that there are. I’m saying that I stubbornly refuse to accept that there aren’t.

“Fink” ???

I saw SW in the theater 5 times in 1977. And I was 17 - old enough to have a reasonably formed brain. The first 3 times were within the first month of release, in 35mm. The next 2 times were a couple of months later in another city, probably in 70mm. I remember being jarred by the differences between the two experiences. I believe that I saw Luke miss with the grappling hook, but am willing to concede it as a false memory. However, I have not given up (yet) on my having seen the Biggs dialog scene (in the hangar) during each of those first three showings. This is because I remember the entire dialog, including the portion removed for the SE, and I have yet to see what could be the source from which I alledgedly “inserted” this memory. I even remember getting angry when my purchased VHS tape didn’t include this scene, because it made me believe that lots of scenes could be missing and that I had purchased some sort of shortened version of the film.

I also was shocked to see Vader’s ship straighten out, because I remember us all assuming that Vader had died (the first three viewings were all with the same crowd). With his ship straightening out, it is obvious that he survived, and I doubt that all of us would miss that.

I acknowledge that I am probably wrong. Given all the research that has been done, I feel a bit like the crazy old looney clinging to a belief in tea leaves or something.

Oh, I don’t remember more than two "standby"s.

Comparing a laserdisk with Harmy’s isn’t fair - Harmy’s is based on the blu-ray. A more important comparison would be to side-by-side your laserdisk with the GOUT… or rather, with the best GOUT-based restorations.

ESB has several things that reduce its stature as a “great” standalone film. The dialog on Hoth is weak. The effects are sometimes gratuitous and border on cheesy (Cloud City, Obiwan force ghost), the Leia love triangle is sometimes strained. Many things happen that have little or nothing to do with the story (the asteroid creature, Luke getting lost in the snow). The whole movie is clearly an “installment”, without beginning or ending (not that movies necessarily need that, but movies of this genre generally do). Much of the film is claustrophobic and takes place in enclosed areas rather than in large expansive areas. In my opinion, the effects (with the exception of Yoda) don’t hold up as well as those in Star Wars.

What makes ESB great is: (1) Yoda, and (2) the two climactic scenes at the end (Han/Leia/carbonite, and the lightsabre battle). The rest of the movie is an exciting chase.

Disagree. While Empire might be the best Star Wars film, in my opinion the best FILM of the saga is Star Wars. That is, Empire is arguably the most defining and impactful piece in building the saga (the force, the family, the Yoda, the love story, the redemption, etc). But if each film were to be judged against the landscape of great films, in my opinion the only one that really stands on its own at a comparable level alongside the greats like Citizen Kane, Casablanca, etc., is Star Wars.

I never had trouble with Luke or anyone else being able to step into any old ship and be able to fly it. Consider that we (today) can pretty much drop into any car and drive it, even models we’ve never driven in before. It isn’t a stretch to imagine that in a much more technologically advanced culture, the user interface in flying ships will have been as standardized as is the case for our cars today. You’d learn to fly a ship the way we learn to drive cars. And some people are just better at doing the fancy stuff.

TavorX said:

Pardon my ignorance, but what’s CPY? Some alternate title of TPM in your mind that happens to be a joke flying over my head?

Creepy Puppet Yoda.

adywan said:
Luke’s piloting skills were never even mentioned by anyone else until the Special Editions, yet we were all fine with it before then.

His piloting skills were mentioned by Obiwan in his home: “I understand you’ve become quite a good pilot yourself…”

I really enjoyed the movie - unlike the prequels, it felt like Star Wars from beginning to end. And for all its flaws, I liked the characters SO much more than the characters in the prequels.

One thing that I don’t think anyone has yet mentioned, is that the lightsaber battles in TFA are a return to the OT style - less choreographed and more “gritty” than the comicbook-style sequences from the PT.

My ratings (after just one viewing of TFA, so subject to future modification):
10 SW
09 ESB
08 ROTJ
07 TFA
02 CPY
-1 ROTS
-1 AOTC

Sorry I disappeared for a while. Grades are due Jan 4, after which I can emerge from my coffin. Actually, I hope to finish them sooner than that.
Still have the one repair to do at the start of ROTP.

Sorry I’ve been out of the loop for a while. Semester just ended and my grades are due on Jan 4. I’ll thereafter be returning to the land of the living. Still have to check out bilditup1’s questions…

I just saw The Martian again - this time at a regular 3D showing. The reason I am posting a follow-up to my previous post, is that I want to state, for the record, a change that I noticed - an edit in the film. Now, I know this is a minor edit, but it’s the sort of thing that we argue about with respect to Star Wars (did Luke throw the grappling hook twice? Was the Biggs scene ever shown in theaters?). In Star Wars, we assume that 20 years of memory has filled in gaps that weren’t there, and wish we could go back in time to confirm one way or another what we really saw. So, I’m doing this NOW, less than a month after my first viewing (which was a special pre-screening), so that 20 years from now, there will be some evidence of this particular change in case people start arguing over it. So FWIW, here it is (SPOILER ALERT):

In the first showing, when the crew decides to blow out part of their ship in order to slow it down, one of the crew members mentions that doing so will reduce their living space on the return home. In the second showing, there was no such mention.

Those are both interesting comments - I’ll have to check out both of them.