By the way, great thread title, Wheelz. 
I know, right? I want more Star Wars movies, I just don’t want Lucas making them.
It looks like I’m the only one who agrees with Lucas. Star Wars is his creation, so he’s perfectly entitled to do what he wants with the series.
If children fight over a toy, you take the toy away from them. And if whiny fan-boys complain because new Star Wars stuff isn’t exactly how they’ve decided it should be, and call Lucas every name under the sun for “ruining” everything, then Lucas is quite right to take their new Star Wars stuff away from them.
The prequel movies were really bad, but danggit Lucas CREATED this universe.
It is as if people complained about the bad characterizations in LotR.
Oh… wait…
Of course he can do what he wants with it. Nobody said otherwise. Some people have said what he did with it (in the prequels) was of poor quality.
This is a really crappy analogy that also has the virtue of being patronizing. Lucas isn’t buying toys for his fans. He’s making movies for money. If you buy something from someone, you’re entitled to your opinion on how good it is. The maker of the product is also entitled to do what he wants to do in response to your (and everyone’s) criticism. But let’s not pretend Lucas stopped making Star Wars movies because the fans complained. He said over and over that he was done with them, has been doing other stuff for most of the last decade, and now it sounds like he’s trying to shame his own fans for having the nerve to criticize him. If fans take Lucas at his word, they should be celebrating that he’s not going make any more crappy Star Wars movies.
I don’t have a problem with the prequels, really. I mean, they’re bad, but whatever. They in no way mess with my enjoyment of the originals and I can just pretend they don’t exist. That’s what I do with the even numbered Indiana Jones movies and it works fine.
What makes Lucas a little bitch is that he took the originals and “improved” them, and then threw the original versions away. You can’t get them any more, he decided he’d rather just ignore them. I think that’s shitty. Just put the original versions of the good movies out there and I’ll stop bad mouthing you, George.
Lucas holds a fascinating place as being one of the best and worst things ever to happen to popcorn movies.
When I saw the movie Shattered Glass I was really surprised that Hayden Christensen can act. He’s no Olivier, but he gave a decent performance. Then I noticed, he usually delivers a capable performance; it was only as Annakin that he sucked. Then I saw some “behind the scenes” footage of Lucas directing him and basically saying “No… bigger! Really emote!” (i.e. ‘all ham, no nuance’) with him and with Natalie Portman and wondered how Ewan MacGregor was able to actually work in some not altogether bad scenes.
I really want to see the movie Red Tails because of the subject matter but I’m going to have to wait for word of mouth and it’s strictly because of George Lucas. I’m terrified of Cuba Gooding Jr. having an anthropomorphic bat on his plane wing or seeing them attack and destroy Berlin while Hitler insists on remaining for “Our moment of triumph!”, and not just because of what Lucas did to the prequel trilogy (which was to him what Mary Kelly was to Jack-the-Ripper- the one he got to spend all night with and really mess up without interruption) but because of what he did to history in Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and the “performances” he insists from on actors.
The other thing that irks me about Red Tails is Lucas going on in every interview about how groundbreaking this is and how the story of the Tuskegee Airmen has never been told before. Not only isn’t this the first Tuskegee Airmen movie, it’s not even Cuba Gooding, Jr.'s first Tuskegee Airmen movie; it’s just the first with a blockbuster sized budget and access to state-of-the-art special effects. I’m just hoping the special are used to buttress the story instead of used as the star of the show.
I do think a lot of the criticism of Lucas was too personal and extreme. I understand that the movies certainly deserved some criticism and so did the “re-imaginings” and thats all fair, but there have been certainly some very vicious attacks on Lucas.
At the same time, that’s part of being in entertainment, and he made plenty of money from the people who raked him over the coals for the prequels. And I doubt anybody tied him down and made him read all the stuff people said about him on the Internet.
You are right: I-III weren’t the worst.
That honor goes to VI.
And, combined with I is why I refuse to watch II or III, and will watch the original theatrical version on VHS (the one that shows that Leia is either REALLY happy to see Luke or it’s really really cold inside the Death Star).
It’s essentially the same criticism that the stars of the original movie had of Lucas, way back then – they said that his direction almost always was, “Faster! More intense!”
Lucas is a visionary…but I think he’s a poor director, and a poor scriptwriter. Unfortunately, in the Prequel Trilogy, he was able to “show off” those shortcomings in full.
I liked I-III. I like the story, the effects, the Buddhistic Jedis, the moralizing & blurring of good/evil, hell I even like JarJar. Return of the Jedi was painful to watch when I was a kid and it’s painful now–it’s garbage and forced and silly and Mark Hamill’s attempt at reconciling Jedi wisdom with Skywalker recklessness completely fails.
Admittedly, I was initially turned off by Christensen’s performance as Anakin because I felt he didn’t “get” the character. But after some thought I realized he had to do a character who had intelligence and natural talent way beyond that of his masters, and despite that was always held in an inferior position–as a fatherless slave, as a padawan, and finally as a non-master council member, all the while excelling technically, banging a hot senator, and becoming besties with the most powerful member of the Republic–for subtle reasons that were clear to everyone but him. On top of that, he misses his mommy. Playing Anakin as an Asperger’s Syndrome kid was really the only option. Now, Lucas may also be a wretched director, but the value of any work of art is in its ability to affect the audience.
Lucas wouldn’t be rich if his work was bad. Nobody made anyone watch his movies. And while Indy 4 has its share of :rolleyes: it was entertaining. And that’s all Star Wars is meant to be: entertainment. There’s plenty of Films out there that make critics happy and are technically inspired and well-acted. Lucas doesn’t make those.
I wouldn’t count on it. The trailer is horrible.
I wonder if George ever watched the Red Letter Media review of the prequels.
Lucas’ mistake is listening to the fanboys’ criticisms. There is no satisfying them. Listening to fanboys … that way lies madness.
I feel I must speak up for Hayden Christensen. I have no cite, maybe its been removed or something, but I swear I read an interview with him and he said he was specifically told to not show any emotion or personality whatsoever. To not ‘act’, to just be a Darth Vader puppet for George Lucas. He said his disappointing performance was not his fault, and I believe him.
Ebert gives it a mediocre 2 1/2 stars, basically saying all the emphasis is on the dogfights and action scenes and nowhere near enough on the Jim Crow climate that is what made the Tuskegee Airmen such a great story to begin with.
For those unfamiliar, the U.S. Army Air Corps did not officially forbid black soldiers to receive pilot training, they just made it next to impossible for them to get it. One way they did this was by requiring anybody interested in flight school had to have some college AND x hours (not sure of the exact number) of formal flight training. Sounds reasonable today perhaps, but consider that:
In Jim Crow Alabama, black schools ran through 6th grade and for 5 months of the year (as opposed to 7-8 months for white students)- the state did not provide text books, school buses, and the truant officers weren’t overly concerned if the kids didn’t show up (which many didn’t because their subsistence level parents kept them to work at home); if for some reason the black kids wanted to go to high school, there were about 3 black high schools in the state, and if it happened to be 60 miles from where you lived and you couldn’t afford to transport or board them, too bad so sad. The only black men who were able to get into college were those who were either extremely self-motivated or had parents who were very motivated OR from the black middle class (which did exist, but was very small) who could afford private schools for them.
So of all black men 25 and over, only 1.3% (source: 1940 census) had a college diploma. For that matter fewer than 6% of white men did, but at least they were better prepared to get into college and more had some college. In Alabama only 15% of the state’s residents 25 and over of all races had high school diplomas, and that was a figure roughly similar to many other rural states. However, there were many instances of the educational requirement being waived for exceptional white applicants, but few if any for black applicants. Then add previous professional flight training to educational requirements and the numbers plunged to well under 1% of black men.
What Tuskegee Institute did was use their university facilities to combat this by giving black men both the educational requirement AND the flight training prereqs to be allowed to join the U.S. Army Air Corps. There were many places that white kids could get this training- and as mentioned one or the other was frequently waived for them anyway- but Tuskegee was on a very very short list for black men to get both. (Surprisingly there were several black men who had flight training already [usually for crop dusting or short-range commercial pilot jobs] but who didn’t have the higher ed requirement.)
Anyway, the point is that what really stands out about the Tuskegee Airmen is how motivated they were and how hard they worked to fight/kill/die in the service of a society that practiced Apartheid (and not just in the south). It’s both an action movie AND a historical/sociological movie, but from all accounts it sounds like Lucas makes the split about 90/10. The HBO movie was probably more about 25 action/75 story; admittedly part of that was because it didn’t have anything near the Lucas budget (they used a lot of actual footage, some of it colorized, to help with costs, IIRC), but you’d think the ideal project would make great use of special effects BUT focus on the story.
Meesa no caren aboots da Episode 1.
But he wanted to go to Taashi station to pick up some power-converters!
Money isn’t the issue, he wants adoration, the kind he received from fans but ended the day he congealed his three gutter abortions.
If he’s not going to get the worship he deserves he’ll take his miraculous talent somewhere else. Then we’ll be sorry.