zombie84

Yes, that was me. I worked as the camera trainee and then later as a daily second assistant camera on the Hulk.

It's a total joke to say that movies got worse after the 20th century. The problem is when you think back to the 1970s or the 1990s, you only remember the good films, you forget about all the bad ones--and the simple truth is that almost every film released in both of those decades was either poor or mediocre. But where are these films? You've never seen them, or you forgot. If you look at a typical year on IMDB there are so many bad films that are either unseen or half-forgoten, but at the time they would have been filling the theatres. But then a decade later you back at the era with rose coloured glasses and go, "oh yeah the 70s, Godfather, Cimino, Lucas, Taxi Driver, man those were the days." But those represented less than 10% of the total studio output in the decade. Most of it was garbage. It's like that with any decade, although some are better than others.

Take a typical year like 1998. If you went to a theatre that year, this is what was filling up all the spaces and making all the money:

-Mercury Rising

-Firestorm

-Lost in Space

-Godzilla

-Spice World

-Hope Floats

-Hard Rain

-I Got the Hook Up

-Six Days Seven Nights

-Jane Austen's Mafia!

-Leathal Weapon 4

-Dance With Me

-Snake Eyes

-Rounders

-Holy Man

-Armageddon

-Urban Legend

-John Carpenters Vampires

-Practical Magic

-Home Fries

-I Still Know What You Did Last Summer

-Meet Joe Black

-The Waterboy

-Patch Adams

-Soldier

-You've Got Mail

-Stepmom

These movies are all taken from the weekly top 10 box office that year. These were among the most popular films of 1998; probably half of them you can't even remember anymore, although I think I have seen every single one of them. They're not all bad, but they're all pretty mundane in the long run. But when you think back to 1998 you don't remember these films, you remember: American History X, Saving Private Ryan, The Big Lebowski, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, The Truman Show, Thin Red Line, Life is Beautiful, Shakespear in Love, A Simple Plan, Rushmore, Pi, Dark City...sounds like a pretty good year for movies wasn't it? But those films represent only a small fraction of what was out there and what people were seeing. And when you look back at 2010: Black Swan, True Grit, 127 Hours, Social Network, Winter's Bones, The King's Speech, Inception, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, Toy Story 3. Goddamn, sounds like a pretty spectacular year for the movies, I'd say better than the "best" shortlist of 1998. Yet somehow the fact that there's grossout comedies, action blockbusters, chick flicks and other poor films is supposed to make it better than the year that saw Lost in Space, A Night at the Roxbur, Firestorm, Holy Man, Leathal Weapon 4, Spice World and Stepmom.

That was one thing I really liked about George Lucas's Blockbusting (the book) central premise: blockbusters didn't begin with Michael Bay, didn't begin with Jerry Bruckheimer and Top Gun, didn't begin with Star Wars or Jaws, but have been there throughout every single year the motion picture business has existed, and to think otherwise or that 1975, 1977 or 1997 represented some new "turning point" is to look back at the past with rose tinted glasses.

Worst film ever? Jesus, come on.

I thought Crystal Skull was a very fun film. I thought the last 30 minutes were too ridiculous and too disjointed, but the first hour is I think some of the best Indiana Jones stuff there is. The more I re-watch it the more I like. Again, poor ending and a disappointing last act, but overall a worthwhile addition to the series in my opinion. But then this is coming from a guy who holds Temple of Doom as his favourite.

Also, the acting coach in ROTS seems to have been mainly for Portman and Christensen. The focus was on developing the background of their new stage of relationship (married, baby, etc.) and also acting as a "rehearsal arbirtrar" to get more time to hone the performance. I think it shows tremendously. Their chemistry works better. They still have shitty dialogue, but their acting is better. Look at Clones, they are both awful in that film, and even though ROTS is not worth writing home about for performances (McGreggor and McDiarmid being the exceptions, as they were in the previous film), Portman and Christensen as a couple seem a lot more natural and a lot more convincing than the near-parody that is seen in the previous entry.

It's a Tim Hortons reference I think, but you have to be Canadian to get it.

They would have gone the same. Actually, they probably would have been worse, since most producer's aren't as good as McCallum and he actually did contribute more to the films in a subtle way than people give him credit.

Basically, the films would have been the same or worse because Lucas would have replaced McCallum with someone who was willing to do what Lucas wanted if McCallum wasn't doing so. That's what Lucas was looking for in a producer--someone to ensure his wishes were carried out faithfully. Sometimes, that's how producers work. McCallum was smart enough to realise this so he didn't push Lucas inappropriately, although he wasn't totally passive. For instance, he warned Lucas about Jar Jar and tried to dissuade him, but Lucas had made his mind up and McCallum realized that's how it would be. He also snuck in an acting coach for Episode III, which is probably why that film has the best performances of all, probably because he saw how embarassing bad Episode II finally turned out to be.

none said:

http://www.ceskapozice.cz/en/business/companies/star-wars-tv-series-may-shoot-prague

While McCallum produced the three Star Wars films made between 1999 and 2005, he said his favorite in the series was “The Empire Strikes Back,” made in 1980.

 Classic.

You know, I feel for McCallum. He's actually a really incredible, really hard-working producer, and he has good taste in films. His work on Singing Detective and Young Indy were great. I think he's stuck with Lucas because it's a comfy job that pays really, really well. But of course when he first hired, who wouldn't turn down producing a classic SW re-release and the prequels? It's very obvious that he knows how silly the prequels are, but who could have foreseen that in 1994 when he was hired? It's funny to think how McCallum's career could have gone if he had turned down the prequels.

Harmy said:

Darth Vader girl with tattoos is cool :-)

And what are the other two supposed to be? Sth from Star Trek?

 Aurra Sing and Zem Wessel, it looks like.

"Nuclear Wessels"... Sorry, I can't help but hear that whenever I type that name.

Director's only storyboard VFX scenes because they basically have to. Many directors don't storyboard their live action because it's not an intuitive way to work for them. You also cannot possible forsee every single cut--it's inevitable that you would want extra takes and coverage when you get to post production for ideas or realities that you didn't anticipate in pre-production; even when you storyboard live action you still have all the dailies from the coverage. But it's too cost-prohibited to make visual effects the same way you film live-action. Kubrick was helped in that a lot of the visual effects were in camera, and thus needed no expensive optical composites et cetera and could simply be re-lit and re-filmed, and also by the fact that he had tons of money at his disposal. It's a way I am sure every director wished he could work. The way CG is going now, this is actually starting to become a bit of reality--for instance the virtual camera device that filmmakers like James Cameron and Peter Jackson are using.

The same reason you don't just storyboard, shoot and then edit live action as it is in the boards, even though you can. Instead, Kubrick shot "coverage" of the VFX the way you do with live action, letting him cut together all these different takes and angles as he wished in the editing room. It's a more organic and less rigid way of doing it, but obviously many times more expensive.

Lucas has never gotten exercise though. His wife used to bug him about it when he was in his 30s--when he was skinny. Your metabolism changes when you get older and many people become a bit pudgy just through the natural course of things; diabetes doesn't help of course. I wouldn't presume to know Lucas' exercise schedule in any case.

xhonzi:

Nah... I didn't really mean that.  What I meant was: Name one other thing that's in the same ballpark as good as ESB that Kersh had ANYTHING to do with.  If he'd made 10 awesome movies, and then one stinker, then I would be dropping the "as good as your last" argument.  I was more making a "if he was able to wrest ESB from Lucas and actually make it a good movie, he should also have a deep history of other awesome work" but I've never seen it.

I would ask anyone who says this to name any other film they've seen of Kersh's other than Robocop 2 and Never Say Never Again (which is actually quite decent).

-Raid on Entebbe

-Flim Flam Man

-Return of a Man Called Horse

-Hoodlum Priest

-The Luck of Ginger Coffey

All terrific, terrific films. Kersh was a great director, but had one mainstream film that was taken out of his control (Eyes of Laura Mars) and chose one poor film that everybody saw (Robocop 2). His career after ESB was poor, I suppose, but one of the films was decent IMO so it's really only one true stinker with his name on it.

And yes, I think he would have made AOTC a great film. The actors look bored in George's versions because George is a boring director who doesn't know how to communicate or inspire his actors. They wouldn't be bored with Kersh and he might have even inspired them to invest in the film itself.

Bad news.

Robert Harris recently said words to the effect of, "I'm not worried about Lucas' crusade, because I know the films are preserved. No matter how much time goes by, when the go-ahead is issued to transfer the films it doesn't matter what state the negative is in." He was referring, I think, to the fact that there were 3-strip dupes.

But, I think in ILM:Into the Digital Realm it states that they used some of the 3-strip sources for ANH:SE, so now I don't know what to think. You could digitally re-sync one of the layers, as Harris said he had developed his own methodology for re-constructing 3-strip dupes. I think it's common for 3-strip dupes to have one layer or more out of sync because of shrinking and swelling that is common in old films. In 1995, maybe it was impossible to fix but hopefully now it is.

Risky business in any case...

Baronlando said:

Ah, interesting. He says the cyan strip was out of synch, so that's why the separations were no good.

 I can't see the video--do you have a quote from this section? This news would change the preservation game if it is correct.

Bingowings said:

But isn't that intended, in the first film efforts were made to make real people look computer generated and they weren't anywhere near as successful (even if by all reports I've read it's still the better film).

 I actually thought that the young Jeff Bridges was some kind of makeup or stock footage effect when I first saw the film. I was amazed to find out after the movie was over that he was entirely computer generated. It looked 100% lifelike to me. It's the first time I was ever tricked by a computer. The uncanny valley is becoming less and less relevant IMO.

I don't believe that Lucas "learned it" from Spielberg. But maybe, whereas Lucas would have resisted such slapstick on Raiders, he facilitated it more on TOD. Maybe. But I think the hammer-in-the-head moment is genuinely funny, and very Spielbergian. Willie Scott, on the other hand, is very Lucasian, and is basically part of the trajectory of the Lucasian comic sidekick Lucas adapted from Kurosawa beginning with Star Wars. R2D2+C3P0>Willie Scott>Brownies (Willow)>Jar Jar Binks.

Nonetheless, both men were on the same page. Spielberg had just finished Poltergeist and was about to go on to make Gremlins. He was in that headspace, that sort of "Tales From the Crypt", spooky-dark-gorey-yet-funny-and-mildly-goofy headspace, and that sums up TOD pretty well.

Lucas, on the other hand, says he was going through a divorce at the time, and that's why TOD is dark. But this is factually untrue. TOD was written in 1982 and by the time principle photography started in early 1983, George and Marcia were still married.

Has Steve Perry ever written anything really well? He's all over these franchise EU material, but all his stuff reads the way a fourteen-year-old would expect, although maybe he simply knows his audience in that regard.

Bingowings said:

SilverWook said:

The banquet scene still freaks me out more than anything else.

You'd think they would have a stand next to the Indy ride at Disneyland selling chilled monkey brains!

This is another aspect of the film I find repulsive (in the wrong way).

India has possibly the best cuisine on the planet and yet they have a running gag about how not only is the food of the evil palace court insanely disgusting but the poor villagers too.

There was the potential for a very clever gag (no pun intended) there.

Willie could turn her nose up at the villager's food but actually find it delicious and she could then sit down to a delicious looking banquet which has been drugged (in readiness for her sacrifice) and start to see snakes coming out cakes and eyeballs in the soup which weren't really there.

Nobody notices because they just think she is an hysterical American, she is trying to pretend not to care because of her earlier embarrassment in the village but it sets up that something odd is happening to the people at the palace.

It would turn a rather racist joke into a Lynchian nightmare.

 Actually, there was a scene which took place after the banquet. Indy says that he knows Indian cuisine and they would never serve what he saw there. This is his first tip off that something isn't right at the palace and he discusses this with the colonel. Shame it was cut, because as you mentioned, it comes off as overtly racist and ignorant. Having said that, the Indy films themselves are all pretty racist simply due to their colonial-era setting in which the capable white man must drop in and lead his arab/latino/asian helpers to safety/victory/triumph, as though they could never be capable of doing it themselves.

Personally, I love TOD. Not only is it one of my favourite films, I think it's the best of the Indy series. There's a great story in there, it's just not quite as complex as Raiders', but it shouldn't be, because the film wouldn't be as intense or scary if it had all the convoluted scene changes and characters that Raiders and Last Crusade had; that level of complexity worked for the other two, because they are similar in style, but the second film is apart. TOD is a horror film, and horror films are all about the psychological experience of watching them, and that's why the sheer "ride" aspect of the film, the intensity, whether in character (evil Indy), in storyline (human sacrifice), in mis-en-scene (all the bones and blood and fire) or in action sequences (mine cart, spike room, etc,) is a fundamental and integral part of how the film is constructed and how--and why--it works. There is simply no other film on the planet like TOD and it's because no filmmaker had the balls to go as intense as Spielberg went with the amount of money he had at his disposal.

He tries to pass it off to Lucas now, but I don't buy that for a second, Spielberg knew exactly what he was doing and he took that dark, spooky, gorey aspect of the film and ran with it. Maybe Lucas pushed it that direction in the first place, but Spielberg perfected it. He was into that kind of thing at the time--he had just finished Poltergeist, remember.

The gold room was coloured like that for the 2001 DC. It has now been thankfully returned to its original grading (although I will admit, I like the more exotic gold version from the original DC).

Matte paintings can be touched but they are flat, two dimensional objects that are designed to trick you into thinking they have depth, same as digital ones, so the fact that they physically exist is more of a technicality, and it becomes especially meaningless when the end result is that they are get photographed and turned into film, the same as everything else. The best old-fashioned matte paintings were very good, but 95% of the time they still look like matte paintings, and most typical examples are obviously not the cream of the crop and they really look like matte paintings. The foreground objects were composited optically too, and they always stood out, whereas digital comping has no edges and no mattes lines. I think theprequelsrule is romanticizing this a bit much.

The only difference between then and now is that they are used more often because they are cheaper to make digitally. In the old days you could afford five matte shots, today you could do eight. They usually looked fake back then, and today they still usually do.

Zhan's Thrawn trilogy is probably the only real classic of post-1990 EU. For me, it was the one series of novels that had the Star Wars feel, while also expanding on it. This guy got Star Wars. The characters behave as they should, while also being taken in new directions, the story seems like a logical extension of the films and is told in an interesting way, and there is a very human emotional core to the story. As a ten year old, I found it a bit boring in parts but I appreciate it a lot, lot more today.

Anchorhead, if you want to check out EU you have to start with the Thrawn trilogy. It created and defined the EU for a decade, and there's a reason why many people wished Lucas filmed these as the sequel trilogy. I don't want to oversell the books, because they have their flaws, but they are pretty darned good in my opinion. I would also pick up the graphic novel of Dark Empire. The earlier EU was always really good, probably because they could write unrestrained, they created the continuity that boxed in later writers, which is why now it is difficult to write captivating material. Lucas solved this with his Clon Wars cartoon by simply ignoring the EU, and in many cases contradicting it.

The Cameron quote came from an April 2011 interview for Entertainment Weekly website I think.

This link was so good, I had to post it to savestarwars.com.

Spielberg says Lucas won't "let sleeping dogs lie" and makes people unable to appreciate films in their own context. Cameron calls the SE a "disturbing" "revision of history." How many of Lucas' colleagues have to call him out on this until Lucas wakes up?

TV's Frink said:

Easterhay said:

zombie84 said:

No.

I knew you'd take issue with TFNers having a "type." He's not being accused of being okay with the SE or prequels, there are plenty people here who have those views, including to some degree myself. It's not that everyone there fits into said type, because I am a long-standing member there, just that there is a unique brand of Star Wars fan with particularities that is mainly found at that place. Having been posting there for over a decade, I've come to recognize this. CO was a long-standing member there too, I think like me all the way back into the 1990s, and he would be able to recognize someone from there when he met one.

The fact that this guy is (vaguely) familiar with my work in the past seems to indicate this, as my book was first discussed at that place.

 

Well, you see it's very dangerous to assume (and given you've written something which is chock-full of assumptions then you should know this above all others).  I actually found your "work" on the internet and contacted you directly (admittedly before I read it) to say thanks and that this was something I'd wanted to read for a long time.  I was expecting an informed essay on the films, something similar to The Magic Of Myth.  Boy was I surprised.  I didn't contact you since because, well, if you have nothing good to say, say nothing. 

Still, I'm very amused to read your above post.  It seems you have your head so far up your own arse you don't know truth from fiction.  Christ alone knows who you think I am but you just keep sweet-talking me, dumpling - you (like the rest of your ilk) are endless fun.

This has to be a joke.

 Jokes usually are humourous, but I guess there is some amusement to be found in just watching this guy go around provoking and picking fights with people.

For the record Easterhay, TFN stands for theforce.net, and if you aren't already registered there you might want to check it out as you may find likeminded people there, as long as you don't act as you have here and get in everyone's faces. Otherwise, you'll find yourself welcome nowhere.

I should also point out that people's problems here with you have absolutely nothing to do with your preferences and views, but your manner of conduct. There are many people here who regard the SE and PT favourable, to one degree or another--including myself. There are some who even disfavour the OT, like Anchorhead, who only likes the first film--and this person, who isn't that fond of the "masterpiece" ESB (gasp!), is one of the most respected members here. Know why? Because he doesn't go around provoking people and picking fights. And he offers insightful commentry--something you've not yet done. For all your accusations of the emptyness of my work, every single post of yours except two or three that I have seen have not actually been contributing to the discussion but have been personal disputes with various well-respected people here. I can't believe this is the way you behave in real life, because you'd have been pummelled a few times by now if it was. So please, get a clue and stop this self-martyring crap you espoused in your previous post.

One thing that bugs me about the extended podrace is that the new CG is noticeably subpar. It doesn't integrate that well and it doesn't look as real as the theatrical footage. The coruscant scene, on the other hand, looks great. I don't know what is up with that; I guess each shot depended on who was working on it. There is one part in the extended pod race where these mechanical floaty droids come out to pick up the scrap metal and the CG there looks as good as the theatrical film, but then most of the subsequent shots don't.