Crossposting this from the Bond Thread because its what I think is wrong with all these attempts at Star Wars reboots.
(EDIT: EXPANDED to include Star Wars relevant suff.)
Someone complained a few pages back that there is no originality anymore.
A Celebrated Fashion designer complained 15 years ago that in his day (the 80s) his peers would find inspiration everywhere around them in the urban environment.
These days, he complained, the next generation are just 'biting' something that someone else has just 'bit' from someone else. And that, in itself, was a 'bite' from earlier designers who actually went looking for inspiration.
Mike Mignola, the creator of Hellboy, explained how he got alot of the outlandish shapes in his comics from spending ages sitting in his apartment sketching the streets and environment outside.
Julia Cameron, the author of the Artists Way, said that these days most artists desperately cast around for new ideas. They look for new and fresher content to inspire them.
She argues "Our problem is actually Too Much Content. We need to dis-connect, clear our minds."
There's already enough sources of inspiration in our imaginations.
All artists are thieves.
Its a question of whether they are good thieves or bad ones.
A case in point of a good thief is Michael Mann and Heat, his masterpiece.
He was working on that for decades. He wrote alot of the screenplay for 70's movie Straight Time with Dustin Hoffman in it. That was a great film and an adaptation of No Beast So Fierce by ex-con Edward Bunker who decades later worked as consultant on Heat.
In the book Bunker describes leaving prison after decades as being like a time traveller into a science fiction future, the language, the music, the customs of this vaguely recognisable world are all different. Crucially, he says this as his character descends into a pedestrian underpass.
In his later film Thief Jame Caan is almost a time traveller emerging from decades in prison and trying to negotiate a hostile world.
Mann describes how he wanted to describe the city as a system, as a series of tunnels and networks that the mind of his titular character is increasingly melded with.
The motif of car following roads under bridges and underpasses is frequent. The Thief is negotiating the alien system that is undermining him at every turn.
"If somebody asked me, 'What's "Thief" to you?': To me, it's a left-extensionalist critique of corporate capitalism. That's what "Thief" is. What is interesting is that no critics in the U.S. got that, no critics in the U.K. got it."
The evil man that the Thief is working for sourced him an infant, (his wife is barren) delivered to his door at midnight. then he takes away his patronage and threatens wife and newly adopted child "People'll be eating 'em for lunch tomorrow in their hamburgers and not know it."
An opaque system that chews you up (jail) and spits you out.
The opaque windows of the office buildings that the Thief scopes out. Just like the opaque glass canyons of downtown LA in Heat's climactic shoot out.
In the film are John Santucci (ex-Chicago thief) and Chuck Adamson (ex-Chicago cop) who told him the story of the real life Neil McAuley and their real life coffee meeting that Heat immortalised. Mann's grandfather had been a taxi driver in Chicago and had known alot of the high line thieves in Chicago.
Line in Heat screenplay, Jon Voight: (on Pacino's character Hanna) "he blew away Frankie Yonder in Chicago.. and he was a fucking maniac."
Mann spent years and years from when he was an arts student in Chicago bussing tables (diner scene in Thief/ Breedon short order cook in Heat) steeping himself in the world of the Underworld City and the story of Heat.
He directed a shit dry run of it in the 80's (LA Takedown).
He has never fully admitted to the influence of French Director Melville and his 1960s film "Un Flic" on his work but the borrowing is obvious. The blue filter, the abstract expressionist style, the symmetry of the cop and villain who share the same problems and existential angst and who are inexorably drawn to a final climactic confrontation a la Heat.
But most critics don't know where his real theft came from.
Thats a good thief. Shakespeare (No. 1 all time English bard) is the one poet in the English Language that one can't find his source lyrics for. You can find Milton's (No. 3 All time) source lyrics in some of Chaucer (No. 2). But Shakespeares lyrical influences are to an extent a mystery.
THAT is a good thief. Because no doubt he had many influences.
Mann's biggest influence was Kubrick.
"I wasn't really interested in cinema until I saw Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), alongside a set of films by F.W. Murnau and Georg Wilhelm Pabst for a college course. These were a revelation. I'd already seen some of the French New Wave and some Russian films, but the idea of directing, of shooting a film myself? Never. Prior to "Strangelove", it simply had not seemed possible that you could work in the mainstream film industry and make very ambitious films for a big mainstream audience. .. as a young man I found that intensity very exciting"
So sure.. we see the abstract expressionist style or Dr Strangelove and the basic plot of Kubrick's "the Killing" that he borrowed from.
But the real homage was to 2001. The ambient, constantly expanding soundtrack and the almost futuristic abstract world of the high line thieves in their hockey masks with their assault rifles elongated by the Big Screen, the radio masts and the data that Tom Noonan's character could just reach out and scoop up.
A tension between the sense of space and anomie in the movie, and the confined choices, limited options of the cast of ex-cons and the cops pursuing them in cat and mouse fashion.
THAT is a Thief.
Because Hollywood has lifted every aspect of Heat for the last two decades trying to bottle Lightning.
Every Ben Affleck Heist movie is a desperate attempt to create another Heat.
The last few Fast and the Furious movies have had so many obvious borrows from Heat.
When it came out it caused quite a stir amongst actors and film people.
People have often said that Mann would direct a great Bond movie.
And if you watch Skyfall the thieving is apparent.
Mendes said in press releases that he had to strip out all the architecture of a Bond Movie and 'imagine' something completely new and fresh before putting the Bond paraphernalia back in.
What a lying piece of shit.
The whole back from Turkey sequence:
Bond stares at a reflection of a TV screen (Manhunter/ Michael Mann) The camera follows M up the steps to her apartment (Manhunter). Bond goes to China and tails the guy on the Freeway (Pacino chases down De Niro on the Freeway in Heat) Takes the elevator which flies up away from the camera (iconic shot from Manhunter) Takes sniper shot whilst confused by different moving shadows and reflections (Pacino and De Niro LAX airport shootout) the list goes on..
What a dirty dirty fucking cheat.
If he'd have been a good thief I'd have forgiven him.
He would call it a homage but I just think that they have the access media in the palm of their hand and before they even set foot on the set they are writing their own pretentious reviews.
Whats interesting about it is that I haven't seen much of an original for the Scottish Estate scene which .. whilst being incredibly lavish.. felt like eating too many chocolates and bored the shit out of me.
Interesting because Villeneuve ripped off the Haze and Wind and use of red and made a far far better version in the Las Vegas scenes of Blade Runner 2049.
It goes to show what a genius Villeneuve is (and why Dune will show us what we missed out on), a direct successor to Mann (who is used up/ rejected by Hollywood and ancient by now) and by comparison what a hack Mendes is.
I'll give you another film: Gladiator.
That film set off creative shocks that Hollywood are still feeling.
Ridley Scott himself has failed to capture the same thing again.
But look at the "Theft" / "Homages".
If you watch the TV series "The Last Kingdom" you can see its influence/ borrowing in the "Dead Can Dance/Lisa Gerrard" ethnic soundtrack alongside sweeping camera shots and the frequent jump cuts in scenes to .. chickens, smith's forges, men sharpening weapons, daily life. All lifted stylistically from Gladiator.
In Tom Cruise's Oblivion movie ... when his character Jack Harper gets captured by "Scavengers" ... that is shot-for-shot the sequence where slavers capture Maximus in Gladiator. Shot-for-fucking-shot. How brilliant by the director Kosisnki! What a Homage!
In the (utterly shit in my view) Attack of the Clones Anakin and Padme end up in Very Familiar Gladiator Style Predicament, in a Freaking Colliseum of all places.
And then they walk out and the camera pans around at the baying crowds of Roma- sorry! Insectoid Aliens up in the rafters.
What the Fuck? Shot for Shot. And that movie had only just come out.
I did some research on it and it turns out that Lucas initially denied any 'influence' on his scene. If I'm right, he even tried to claim that it was filmed before Gladiator came out. Then it transpired that he had seen the rushes of Gladiator before filming the shot.
Too much content.
If you look at the buildup to the original Star Wars film Lucas was hungry, he was tortured, his inspirations were heterodox and all over the place and drawn from life.
(In the car driving thru the woods with a Radio DJ at night they hit something. "Oh.. I just hit a Wookie!" says the stoner DJ. "Whats a Wookie?" asks Lucas. "I dunno" says the DJ.)
All those seeds had to be fed, watered, turned over by alot of creatives (who realised the very original but very shitty version Lucas initially turned in) and composted until it was ready.
But what is the biggest hangover from Gladiator in the Star Wars Universe?
I never understood the rationale for Darth Emo, his unmasking, and his weird relationship with the Mary Sue bitch..
Look no further than Joaquin Phoenix's tortured, sinister, weirdly incestuous Emperor Commodus.
Hollywood has been desperate for Villains like Magua (Michael Mann again and Wes Studi from Heat) or Commodus.. they just cant be fucking bothered to take the time to dream them up.
So they just impose a cheap, knock off Joaquin Phoenix on Star Wars audiences and give themselves a pat on the back.
There is no new Art anymore because these fuckers are too scared and too lazy to create any.
Mendes and Abrams go on about this and that. They just look at some films that are 'trending' and copy them.
Contrast that with Mann who spent decades building up to Heat and experimenting successfully with everything, soundtrack, visuals, non-actors, filming in prisons, along the way.
Even when he obviously ripped off screenwriter Richard Price from the Wire fame and his Al Pacino film Sea of Love he did it well; no one complained.
If you were around the blizzard of PR for Mendes' film he actually wanted it treated as some kind of iconic movie. Javier Bardem is always good value but the script and some of the characters in that film were a joke.
Those media fuckers have forgotten the work required.
Richard Price wrote of the creator of Homicide and The Wire, journalist David Simon. "He 'hung out'. He was willing to go places and just 'hang out'. Wait for the story to make itself real" Thats commitment,
Hang out and wait for inspiration: it will come, faster than people think.
Sit around in their flats, turn off their wifi and phones. Sketch things outside their window for a few hours.
But they don't have the balls to even do that.. not if its easier to just rip off every film in their DVD collection.
In the words of Mann:
"You find out things when you're with a real-life thief, things you could never make up just sitting in a room with executives."
Real Life. Something the cosseted likes of JJ Abrams, Sam Mendes and the 'diversity!' Hollywood crowd are actually scared of.
(EDIT: EXPANDED to include Star Wars relevant suff.)
Someone complained a few pages back that there is no originality anymore.
A Celebrated Fashion designer complained 15 years ago that in his day (the 80s) his peers would find inspiration everywhere around them in the urban environment.
These days, he complained, the next generation are just 'biting' something that someone else has just 'bit' from someone else. And that, in itself, was a 'bite' from earlier designers who actually went looking for inspiration.
Mike Mignola, the creator of Hellboy, explained how he got alot of the outlandish shapes in his comics from spending ages sitting in his apartment sketching the streets and environment outside.
Julia Cameron, the author of the Artists Way, said that these days most artists desperately cast around for new ideas. They look for new and fresher content to inspire them.
She argues "Our problem is actually Too Much Content. We need to dis-connect, clear our minds."
There's already enough sources of inspiration in our imaginations.
All artists are thieves.
Its a question of whether they are good thieves or bad ones.
A case in point of a good thief is Michael Mann and Heat, his masterpiece.
He was working on that for decades. He wrote alot of the screenplay for 70's movie Straight Time with Dustin Hoffman in it. That was a great film and an adaptation of No Beast So Fierce by ex-con Edward Bunker who decades later worked as consultant on Heat.
In the book Bunker describes leaving prison after decades as being like a time traveller into a science fiction future, the language, the music, the customs of this vaguely recognisable world are all different. Crucially, he says this as his character descends into a pedestrian underpass.
In his later film Thief Jame Caan is almost a time traveller emerging from decades in prison and trying to negotiate a hostile world.
Mann describes how he wanted to describe the city as a system, as a series of tunnels and networks that the mind of his titular character is increasingly melded with.
The motif of car following roads under bridges and underpasses is frequent. The Thief is negotiating the alien system that is undermining him at every turn.
"If somebody asked me, 'What's "Thief" to you?': To me, it's a left-extensionalist critique of corporate capitalism. That's what "Thief" is. What is interesting is that no critics in the U.S. got that, no critics in the U.K. got it."
The evil man that the Thief is working for sourced him an infant, (his wife is barren) delivered to his door at midnight. then he takes away his patronage and threatens wife and newly adopted child "People'll be eating 'em for lunch tomorrow in their hamburgers and not know it."
An opaque system that chews you up (jail) and spits you out.
The opaque windows of the office buildings that the Thief scopes out. Just like the opaque glass canyons of downtown LA in Heat's climactic shoot out.
In the film are John Santucci (ex-Chicago thief) and Chuck Adamson (ex-Chicago cop) who told him the story of the real life Neil McAuley and their real life coffee meeting that Heat immortalised. Mann's grandfather had been a taxi driver in Chicago and had known alot of the high line thieves in Chicago.
Line in Heat screenplay, Jon Voight: (on Pacino's character Hanna) "he blew away Frankie Yonder in Chicago.. and he was a fucking maniac."
Mann spent years and years from when he was an arts student in Chicago bussing tables (diner scene in Thief/ Breedon short order cook in Heat) steeping himself in the world of the Underworld City and the story of Heat.
He directed a shit dry run of it in the 80's (LA Takedown).
He has never fully admitted to the influence of French Director Melville and his 1960s film "Un Flic" on his work but the borrowing is obvious. The blue filter, the abstract expressionist style, the symmetry of the cop and villain who share the same problems and existential angst and who are inexorably drawn to a final climactic confrontation a la Heat.
But most critics don't know where his real theft came from.
Thats a good thief. Shakespeare (No. 1 all time English bard) is the one poet in the English Language that one can't find his source lyrics for. You can find Milton's (No. 3 All time) source lyrics in some of Chaucer (No. 2). But Shakespeares lyrical influences are to an extent a mystery.
THAT is a good thief. Because no doubt he had many influences.
Mann's biggest influence was Kubrick.
"I wasn't really interested in cinema until I saw Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), alongside a set of films by F.W. Murnau and Georg Wilhelm Pabst for a college course. These were a revelation. I'd already seen some of the French New Wave and some Russian films, but the idea of directing, of shooting a film myself? Never. Prior to "Strangelove", it simply had not seemed possible that you could work in the mainstream film industry and make very ambitious films for a big mainstream audience. .. as a young man I found that intensity very exciting"
So sure.. we see the abstract expressionist style or Dr Strangelove and the basic plot of Kubrick's "the Killing" that he borrowed from.
But the real homage was to 2001. The ambient, constantly expanding soundtrack and the almost futuristic abstract world of the high line thieves in their hockey masks with their assault rifles elongated by the Big Screen, the radio masts and the data that Tom Noonan's character could just reach out and scoop up.
A tension between the sense of space and anomie in the movie, and the confined choices, limited options of the cast of ex-cons and the cops pursuing them in cat and mouse fashion.
THAT is a Thief.
Because Hollywood has lifted every aspect of Heat for the last two decades trying to bottle Lightning.
Every Ben Affleck Heist movie is a desperate attempt to create another Heat.
The last few Fast and the Furious movies have had so many obvious borrows from Heat.
When it came out it caused quite a stir amongst actors and film people.
People have often said that Mann would direct a great Bond movie.
And if you watch Skyfall the thieving is apparent.
Mendes said in press releases that he had to strip out all the architecture of a Bond Movie and 'imagine' something completely new and fresh before putting the Bond paraphernalia back in.
What a lying piece of shit.
The whole back from Turkey sequence:
Bond stares at a reflection of a TV screen (Manhunter/ Michael Mann) The camera follows M up the steps to her apartment (Manhunter). Bond goes to China and tails the guy on the Freeway (Pacino chases down De Niro on the Freeway in Heat) Takes the elevator which flies up away from the camera (iconic shot from Manhunter) Takes sniper shot whilst confused by different moving shadows and reflections (Pacino and De Niro LAX airport shootout) the list goes on..
What a dirty dirty fucking cheat.
If he'd have been a good thief I'd have forgiven him.
He would call it a homage but I just think that they have the access media in the palm of their hand and before they even set foot on the set they are writing their own pretentious reviews.
Whats interesting about it is that I haven't seen much of an original for the Scottish Estate scene which .. whilst being incredibly lavish.. felt like eating too many chocolates and bored the shit out of me.
Interesting because Villeneuve ripped off the Haze and Wind and use of red and made a far far better version in the Las Vegas scenes of Blade Runner 2049.
It goes to show what a genius Villeneuve is (and why Dune will show us what we missed out on), a direct successor to Mann (who is used up/ rejected by Hollywood and ancient by now) and by comparison what a hack Mendes is.
I'll give you another film: Gladiator.
That film set off creative shocks that Hollywood are still feeling.
Ridley Scott himself has failed to capture the same thing again.
But look at the "Theft" / "Homages".
If you watch the TV series "The Last Kingdom" you can see its influence/ borrowing in the "Dead Can Dance/Lisa Gerrard" ethnic soundtrack alongside sweeping camera shots and the frequent jump cuts in scenes to .. chickens, smith's forges, men sharpening weapons, daily life. All lifted stylistically from Gladiator.
In Tom Cruise's Oblivion movie ... when his character Jack Harper gets captured by "Scavengers" ... that is shot-for-shot the sequence where slavers capture Maximus in Gladiator. Shot-for-fucking-shot. How brilliant by the director Kosisnki! What a Homage!
In the (utterly shit in my view) Attack of the Clones Anakin and Padme end up in Very Familiar Gladiator Style Predicament, in a Freaking Colliseum of all places.
And then they walk out and the camera pans around at the baying crowds of Roma- sorry! Insectoid Aliens up in the rafters.
What the Fuck? Shot for Shot. And that movie had only just come out.
I did some research on it and it turns out that Lucas initially denied any 'influence' on his scene. If I'm right, he even tried to claim that it was filmed before Gladiator came out. Then it transpired that he had seen the rushes of Gladiator before filming the shot.
Too much content.
If you look at the buildup to the original Star Wars film Lucas was hungry, he was tortured, his inspirations were heterodox and all over the place and drawn from life.
(In the car driving thru the woods with a Radio DJ at night they hit something. "Oh.. I just hit a Wookie!" says the stoner DJ. "Whats a Wookie?" asks Lucas. "I dunno" says the DJ.)
All those seeds had to be fed, watered, turned over by alot of creatives (who realised the very original but very shitty version Lucas initially turned in) and composted until it was ready.
But what is the biggest hangover from Gladiator in the Star Wars Universe?
I never understood the rationale for Darth Emo, his unmasking, and his weird relationship with the Mary Sue bitch..
Look no further than Joaquin Phoenix's tortured, sinister, weirdly incestuous Emperor Commodus.
Hollywood has been desperate for Villains like Magua (Michael Mann again and Wes Studi from Heat) or Commodus.. they just cant be fucking bothered to take the time to dream them up.
So they just impose a cheap, knock off Joaquin Phoenix on Star Wars audiences and give themselves a pat on the back.
There is no new Art anymore because these fuckers are too scared and too lazy to create any.
Mendes and Abrams go on about this and that. They just look at some films that are 'trending' and copy them.
Contrast that with Mann who spent decades building up to Heat and experimenting successfully with everything, soundtrack, visuals, non-actors, filming in prisons, along the way.
Even when he obviously ripped off screenwriter Richard Price from the Wire fame and his Al Pacino film Sea of Love he did it well; no one complained.
If you were around the blizzard of PR for Mendes' film he actually wanted it treated as some kind of iconic movie. Javier Bardem is always good value but the script and some of the characters in that film were a joke.
Those media fuckers have forgotten the work required.
Richard Price wrote of the creator of Homicide and The Wire, journalist David Simon. "He 'hung out'. He was willing to go places and just 'hang out'. Wait for the story to make itself real" Thats commitment,
Hang out and wait for inspiration: it will come, faster than people think.
Sit around in their flats, turn off their wifi and phones. Sketch things outside their window for a few hours.
But they don't have the balls to even do that.. not if its easier to just rip off every film in their DVD collection.
In the words of Mann:
"You find out things when you're with a real-life thief, things you could never make up just sitting in a room with executives."
Real Life. Something the cosseted likes of JJ Abrams, Sam Mendes and the 'diversity!' Hollywood crowd are actually scared of.