MrInsaneA said:
Has anyone considered removing Grievous COMPLETELY from Revenge of the Sith?
This would be the biggest improvement to any of the PT films, including scrubbing Jar Jar Binks. Greivous is the weakest and lamest character in the entire PT and the light saber duel between him and Obi Wan just reeks of the heavy hand of Speilberg's influence.
With a great deal of input from Marcia, Kurtz, and McQuarrie, Lucas got lucky in 1977. A stand-alone film that works because it's stand-alone. As soon as Lucas started trying to write more story, he ruined the story. The"adventure and "haphazardness," disappeared when Lucas shrunk the universe. Particularly the haphazardness of it all.
I agree entirely with this poster. The original is the one and only and everything since is fan-fiction. Some of it is quite inspired and a lot of it is just awful - including 4 out of six of the of the films made for the cinema.
The displays don't need to be technology moving forward. Maybe technology moving forward is NOT needing the displays to show all of the data in years after the PT. It would make sense for the rebels to have equipment with displays because their equipment is cobbled together from whatever they can get. Some of the displays are excellent, the Ozzel scene really needs it's display toned down if one is going to always be part of the scene as the display interferes with what you are supposed to be watching, this is not an improvement. The displays don't need to be symmetrical. Maybe when the view screen fires up there could be a lot of display superimposed and it quickly wipes to the margins of the screen to enable Darth Vader to see clearly who he is addressing creating a sense that when you turn it on it defaults to one setting and when you are communicating with other people it clears itself up so the parties involved are able to clearly see each other.
I'm pretty meticulous about back ups. I have two 2xTB drives that are live for various work projects and storage. Each is backed up to an identical 2xTB drive once a week give or take based on what I'm working on. The back up drives are idle, not plugged into anything. Surges are not an issue. I've got everything on here, video files, all my family photos, all of my music, a lifetime of collecting music, my family projects like archiving my father's history in the Armed Air Forces in WW2 and his time as a POW (I still have about a foot of letters and documents to scan for that one!), wargame files (anyone on here know who Avalon Hill, SPI, Steve Jackson, et al are?). All this stuff is too important to me to lose because a squirrel chewed through a power line & where I live we lose our power about once a week in summer. There's some sort of junction or transformer about 1/4 a city block from us and we can literally hear it go right before we lose all power in our house.
I'd like to think this is all some elaborate April Fool's joke, whether or not it is someone out there can learn something from the conversation. Back your stuff up and do it in a way that minimizes your opportunity of a "holy bats*** what the hell just happened!?!?!!" incident.
The blogger over at Lost Turntable posted this and the ROTJ one a couple months back. His d/l's tend to be pretty durable. IIRC someone posted in the comments a path to the TESB set so if you really want to go nuts there's a path to all three.
Just watched the clip, which is the first time I have ever seen it. Amazing that even in 1986 they can make a trench run that doesn't have a skip between the matte and the model but never fix it in the movies.
There is on YouTube a transfer of the Raiders of the Lost Ark reel. I know it is YouTube quality but if you're just curious how the cut to a 400' reel was handled it is there for the seeing. Some guy has about 40-50 old Ken Films, etc. copied and posted. The quality leaves a lot to be desired but having owned a lot of these in the 70's and early 80's it was a nice stroll down memory lane watching these. Funny, I don't remember my versions of Star Wars being cropped as severely as the ones that are posted are.
Look for the YouTube poster GhostHost1969, just checked his set and Jaws is there - lists it as the long version and the time tracker on the video says 30:48.
There's a few of these I would like to d/l but I am not finding anything anywhere. I tried that Jloader thinger over on fanedit.org but it didn't do anything (I tried something that I figured would be popularly seeded, too (the new Star Wars Renascent edit). Any help? I'l looking for the ADM versions of Elf, Love Actually, Halloween and the Austin Powers trilogy.
#1 for me is Wim Wenders ''Until the End of the World.'' I have the 5 hour director's cut on dvd which for me was a film holy grail. Coincidentally, it was reported in the news yesterday that scientists are learning how to tape record (so to speak) dreams and the images shown were dead ringers for how Wim imagined it in act III of this movie in 1991!
#2 Robert Altmann's ''Short Cuts'' - I generally like all things Altmann but the kicker with this movie is that most of the characters are genuinely unlikable people and by the end of the show you care about what happens to each one of them.
#3 Kristof Kieslowski's ''Three Colours'' trilogy (I consider franchises's one thing, sorry PT haters). This trilogy should be required viewing for anyone interested in film.
#4 Network. Brilliant movie making by adults for adults.
#5 SW franchise. I'm an old sentimental fool.
#6 Wings of Desire - cinema as poetry, the last few minutes seem to me too long and tacked on, almost a cinematic speed bump.
#7 The Elephant Man - bests my love for Blue Velvet, damn near the closest that cinema comes to poetry. This movie grabs me by the shirt and holds on tight every time I watch it.
#8 A Christmas Story - ditto sentimental foolishness. Nearly every line, shot composition, etc is pitch perfect in this, I'd be hard pressed to change much about it.
#9 High Fidelity - you'd think if someone made a biopic you'd get royalties but it doesn't always work that way.
#10 Back to the Future trilogy - my feelings on the first one are much the same as A Christmas Story, a damn near perfect film.
I bought ''Race For Your Life'' on VHS a few years back and ripped it straight to avi. It's the last good theatrical Peanuts film IMHO. I went to the theatre to see it in '77 and was blown away by a trailer that was played for some movie called 'Star Wars.' Wonder what ever became of that movie.
I had a massive library of laser disks, many of which still haven't come out on dvd, also worked for a few years in a store that sold them. A couple years back I bought a dvd player/recorder and started to burn copies to DVD+R (which I have since converted to high quality DIVX files). The player/recorder had a 90 day guarantee and it died literally on day 91 with about 10 LD's left to convert, which I still have. The only exception is the Director's Cut of Peter Weir's "Dead Poets Society.'' I foolishly parted with that thinking that if it was out on LD that it would surely come out on DVD.
To the poster asking if the picture quality was better, basically a laser disk had more lines of vertical and horizontal resolution being presented than tape did. Some folks even used line doublers to try to make the picture even better. Anyhow, horizontal resolution was over 400 lines LD and just over 200 VHS. Earlier disks are subject to something lovingly called laser rot, the two aluminum disks were glued together and the glue essentially eats its way out from the inside, destroying the data that the laser reads. Only had one disk out of many fall prey to this, a copy of a Julian Temple long form music video for the UK band ABC called ''Mantrap.''
I wouldn't sink a ton of money into laser disk, if you weren't there when it was in it's heyday it's essentially no more than a fetish product like collecting 8 track tapes or super-8 mm digests of movies.
The space slug is probably one of the worst scenes in the original trilogy.
TESB would be a better movie without it though you lose some character/story development on the Han & Leia arc if you cut it and all of the attendant scenes wholesale.
I'm a fan of the added breath stuff. Lived in Wisconsin my whole life and trust me, you don't see your breath all of the time when you're outside in cold weather. Nice touch of realism but it also strikes me as something you could slowly drive yourself nuts doing.
muddyknees2000 said:
Ripplin said:
Didn't realize it was a Rinzler book. That means top quality! Could even help ESB:R somehow if the final designs are in it.
Yep, I'll be scanning anything Ady wants or needs and sending it off to him when mine arrives in the mail
EDIT: some of the sample pages released online even show Vader's meditation chamber....and parts of the wall, but not the whole shape of the room, at least not on the page that I saw....it might be on another page that they haven't shown yet (not sure how far back this goes, but there was some discussion on the shape of that particular room)
That dead horse was beaten so badly the flies won't even go near it. Please give that topic a rest.
I tired to do something very similar a loooong time ago with the Super 8 mm digests that were released in the 1970's and early 1980's. I only had eps IV and V to work with and when all three movies came out on VHS I thought, well, I can now chuck these or.....
There are a lot of little things that may be moved around and some things work better than others. The source material is what it is and imho I think that the audience has to suspend a lot of what they already know to try to enjoy a project like this.
The scenes on Hoth could be used to represent the northernmost/southernmost latitudes of the fourth moon of Yavin (i.e. there could be a walker assault on the rebel base concurrent to the battle with the Death Star....or is that something you're trying to get away from?).
In interviews with Lucas he talked about an early cut with the Biggs scenes and said that his reason for deleting them was that he preferred the presentation being:
The audience meets the robots & Leia.
Robots take you to Luke
The robots & Luke takes you to Ben
The robots, Luke & Ben take you to Han & Chewie
The robots, Luke, Ben, Han & Chewie take you back to Leia
He also felt (if I recall reading correctly) that having Luke in the beginning was adding too many characters to keep track of.
Personally, I would love to see them restore the scenes and re-integrate them. I think it is Building Star Wars that restores them in sequence (or maybe Behind the Magic). I don't think that the audience would have a hard time keeping track of who is who - Robert Altmann has made a career out of movies featuring ensemble casts (MASH, Nashville, Short Cuts, The Player, Gosford Park....heck, a bad Altmann movie is better than most of the dreck that comes out every week these days).
One of the great things for me being a 12 year old watching the original movie was that the robots talked and they didn't subtitle it. Chewie talks and they didn't subtitle it. The jawas talked and they didn't subtitle it. But the audience understood what they were saying. Treat the audience like they are smart and they will rise to the occasion.
The main weakness of the prequel trilogy is that they are all foreground and no background. I love the Adigitalman edits of 1, 2 & 3 that do nothing more than add the deleted scenes back in. Anyone else notice that a lot of the deleted scenes are mostly exposition, backstory and character development? I watched 4 & 5 as a kid and was riveted to every scene, whether there was a shoot out or Ben was telling Luke about his dad. Then again, my pet theory about part of the appeal of the first movie at the time was that there was a generation of kids from the explosion in the divorce rate in the 70's and these kids didn't know their dads like other ones did and when Luke said, tell me about my father, these kids in the audience knew where he was coming from. I don't think that part of the movie was intended, but it was certainly fortuitous timing.
Geez what a long time to be beating a dead horse.
I come here to read about what is happening with Adywan's work on TESB:R & I would rather see no new posts for days on end than this mush.
Do any of you have a life? I don't mean that offensively, but reading through a lot of pages of people obsessing about a stair or a smile or a blob.....wow.
Walk away from the computers for a while guys, stop and smell the flowers.
Captain Antilles said:
If everyone is so concerned about restoring the mention of Luke's full name, it might be worth trying to contact this guy. He does amazing impressions, and Palpatine is one of his specialties. There are a bunch of clips of him doing Palpatine impressions... here are just a couple of them:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z-i4NjNSeY
(Right around 2:37)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNwb1T_Xlfo&feature=channel
(At 1:59)
i dunno i think joe lieberman does the best palpy impression going.
and i don't think that he's even trying (shhhh.....)
Jaitea said:
If you listen to JW's scores at the time of SW....like Jaws, CE3K, Superman, Raiders & ESB....they all have a similar feel,....interchangeable
J
They all sound like variations on the wedding march to me.
adywan said:
Give me the old '80's camerawork any day over this modern crap.
(bad edit, still learning how quotes work on this forum, ady's stuff ends above)
Thanks for the sentiment. The 1970's style has a lot to offer.
It is ironic that Lucas and Speilberg both cut their teeth in the 70's when there were some really spectacular movies made and they are jointly responsible for ushering in some of the worst aspects of modern movies. Fact is that today movies are not made for adults.
Jewish family, too. No PC nonsense here.
Lemonstein said:
That first pic also reminds me of something else, a face. The "hat" kinda makes it look Jewish,
Please explain that comment. I'd like to think that you were referring to a yamaluke, but even if you are the comment is pretty inappropriate.
3D is a gimmick, not a product.
It is to cinema what Gatorade is to a glass of fresh squeezed orange juice.
Gee, I always just watched and thought, there's the rebel fleet out in space, they got chased out of their base and where the heck are they going to go from there? At the end of IV they had a base at least, and had taken out the Death Star. I didn't think, that's not even their galaxy (how would anyone even know this watching the movies without an external agent telling them that?), that's a star forming, I just thought, they're in space....
All of the movies move from light to darkness but some of the other ones have some light that returns at the very end (throne room in Ep IV) but this one is elevator that only goes down. No resolution to Han being captured, Luke had his hand chopped off and Vader is his dad. See ya' in a few years. I think the end should stay dark-ish. If you want to make this something forming you could find a way to make it look ominous. I look forward to seeing how you portray it regardless.
The way I cut it the film works as Marty's parents look differnet(-ish) so for her to look somewhat different, too, doesn't really stand out. Then off to the future and folks look different then, too (including the way that they handled the absence of Crispin Glover returning for the sequel). Folks looking different just adds a bit to the time travel aspect....you mess with time and things, people included, don't look exactly the same.
I also did a chronological order version of this. My source was the old laser disks and I did it a loooooong time ago before folks were doing stuff on computers with professional editing tools and TB hard drives.
Sat down with the movies first and made a list of disk/side/time for each cut and then tweaked it from there. Spent hours with a VCR and the LD player going from disk to disk etc. I had no problems with transitions from movie # 2 -3.
My take was film 1 opens, pretty much as you see it. When the car goes to the future I cut to when Marty comes back at the end of the show, taking it through his changed family. When Doc comes back with the car we go to the future. When they come back to the changed 1985 and head back to the past, that's where the fun began. It took hours but I managed to get together all the 1950's stuff from 1 & 2. BttF 2 ends and segues nicely into 3 which you have to watch to get the full deal.
I still have it, a probably 15 year old videotape, recorded on EP setting to get all three movies on one tape. Watched a bunch of times with my friends. I have no intention of even trying it on a computer, got a baby on the way and real life will not allow me the indulgence of a project like this.
After BttF I did the same integration with Krystof Kieslowski's Three Colours Trilogy, probably the most obscure fanedit you'll ever see on these forums. Cut together Blue, White and Red the same way using LD and VHS and I loved it. Loaned it to a friend and it didn't track well on his VCR so he thought the tape was junk and threw it away....without asking if I minded.
You know, if a hard drive crashes there is some hope of recovering something but when this happens, you're just SOL.