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The Star Wars thread

The Star Wars thread

Quote: (04-29-2019 02:49 AM)Bienvenuto Wrote:  

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.

Ridley Scott and James Cameron talking about the decline of literature and reading among the public from when they started, though they would like to think film was replacing books, makes the point that film is a lazy passive way of consuming a story and everybody has knowledge of tropes now.

Gary Kurtz in old interview from 2002 on IGN said modern filmmakers essentially hadn't lived enough of life itself, he said there are few Hemingway-life filmmakers.

Also Michael Mann considers Cameron's Avatar (which many think a photocopy) as one of his top 10 favourite films, which surprised the hell out of everyone.

And Christopher Nolan had everybody on his crews, watch Heat before he made The Dark Knight.

https://www.indiewire.com/gallery/michae...uwmw-_v1_/






Not derived from the boardroom:




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The Star Wars thread

< It does not matter now who copies from whom.

The far larger issue of Hollywood is that they have to put in so much crappy propaganda - stuff that twists the story into insane writings, they hire not only the last breed of at least talented Jewish writers with some marxist bent, nah - they go full retard and hire people who are not even interested in creating Star Wars. 1000 more talented male writers were rejected so that KKK could put in her all female story group who did not give two shits about Star Wars.

The same goes on everywhere else - it would be great if they would copy at least some of the great works of art. Even Gladiator would not be made today - ugh - a movie about a White slave? Another icky white male movie!? Come on - it's 2019 - women or POCs should run the show.

--------------------

Oh - and while I am at it - spoilers for the upcoming stupid crappy movie.

I heard some credible spoilers:

The Rise of Skywalker means just bullshit that they will call every force user a "Skywalker" - you a Skywalker, you a Skywalker - everyone is a Skywalker. The entire movie is about the diverse heroes and the Mary Sue go looking for the second or first - who cares - death star, so that they can transmit a bloody message by the old decrepit Luke Skywalker. And that message should be able to ignite the spark of rebellion. The end.
They only travel across the galaxy being chased by the Empire and the Nights of Ren to transmit the message. The Emperor is in the movie as a form of Holocron AI bullshit that turned Kylo Darth Emo to the dark side. It's blatant idiocracy fan-service. Also they do a jab at Trump saying that the empire created an economic boom and Kylo isn't doing so bad managing the universe - just like Trump. But he is evil and thus has to go!

Of course are they not going to end the empire, because Disney cannot imagine any story where they cannot have the stupid old Rebels vs evil Empire battle. God forbid that they would have to come up with something unique or different.

So there - you know what the bloody hell this movie is about - just bullshit. The magical Luke Skywalker transmission will make things all better now - maybe they show him all inspiring drinking titty milk - that will certainly ignite the spark of rebellion into everyone.
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The Star Wars thread

Quote: (04-13-2019 02:27 PM)Aurini Wrote:  

I don't think that the kamikaze thing was as bad as everybody thinks it is. Or that 'nuking the fridge' was the moment where Indiana Jones fell apart. If I wanted to, I could imagine some technobabble to justify that only an expensive capital ship could kamikaze, ergo it's almost never done. I think we just focus on these, because the movie in general sucked. It was a great scene, that was emotionally and plot-wise disconnected from the rest of the film.

The hyperspace kamikaze is a lazy Deus Ex Machina that solves the central conflict of the entire movie. It's not set up at all. The problem isn't that there's no line of technobabble explaining why it's not a gross violation of the setting's rules. The problem is that it's the focal point of several huge flaws in the movie (and some minor ones). Flaws like: The central conflict is dumb. Finn's entire subplot amounts to nothing. The moment doesn't have meaning for any character we care about. Holdo's character is terrible. Admiral Ackbar was killed offscreen for no reason. The "setting-rules" violation is also important in that it adds to the sense that the writers just don't respect Star Wars.

All those flaws come to a point in that scene. Fixating on the setting violation is just the easiest thing to do, the first and most obvious problem with the scene. It's also a sensible place to start from if you were revising drafts of the script. A lore specialist identifies this and points out that it violates the setting conventions, so you need to fix it.

Can we fix this with a line of technobabble? No, that's still the same ass-pull just in a different spot.
Can we fix this by a longer dialog exchange that establishes some clear limits and risks on the tactic? Much better, but maybe not good enough for the audience.
Can we fix this by ditching the 100% pointless Finn and Rose subplot and use that entire 20+ minutes of screen time to actually set up and build towards the kamikaze moment in a way that is meaningful for the characters and works for the story? Much better.

Quote:Quote:

Keep in mind that Empire had an enormous plot hole right in the middle. We have the impression that Luke spends at least a couple of months on Dagobah. But unless there's some sort of time-distorting effect of space travel, events on Cloud City show that he was only there for a couple of days at most.

The timeline is a bit nebulous but this isn't really a problem as far as plot holes go. The amount of time it takes Han to reach Bespin at sub-light speed is left vague and could easily be weeks or months while Luke trains on Dagobah.

Quote:Quote:

Luke Skywalker - the greatest Jedi of all time - spent a total of 2 hours training under Obi Wan on the Millenium Falcon, and 2 days training under Yoda.

Apart from the point above that Luke's training could easily have been weeks and the timelines could still align, the combat skill in ROTJ comes from the multi-year gap between movies. It's still an unanswered question especially since ROTJ implies that Luke did NOT return to Yoda during that time (we don't know for sure, though). More importantly though, Luke is a hero in ROTJ because he's selfless, willing to reject Palpatine's offer and accept the consequences (being tortured to death). This inspires Vader to attack the Emperor. That's the hero story.
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The Star Wars thread

Quote: (04-14-2019 01:54 AM)Leonard D Neubache Wrote:  

Quote: (04-13-2019 02:27 PM)Aurini Wrote:  

I don't think that the kamikaze thing was as bad as everybody thinks it is. Or that 'nuking the fridge' was the moment where Indiana Jones fell apart. If I wanted to, I could imagine some technobabble to justify that only an expensive capital ship could kamikaze, ergo it's almost never done. I think we just focus on these, because the movie in general sucked. It was a great scene, that was emotionally and plot-wise disconnected from the rest of the film.
...

The pathetic thing is that even a mediocre writer could have used the whole "hyperspace death rocket has never been done before" thing to their advantage.

Instead of sending the dynamic duo to find some kind of super dooper master hacker to defeat the empire ship's shields why not send them to find a super dooper master hacker that could manipulate the hyperdrive computer that has always had here-to-fore unhackable anti-collision software.

Captain purple-bitch sells the ruse as "hacking the computer to go randomly hyperspace without suitable fuel levels as a last ditch escape".

Not genius, but about a thousand times less stupid and nonsensical than the plot as it was delivered.

Exactly. Also this is the kind of thing you're supposed to catch when you revise drafts of a script. Which apparently just wasn't done for TLJ. Rian turned in his script and Kennedy just loved and and turned him lose.




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The Star Wars thread

My point was that we find excuses for the (admittedly minor) plot hole in the originals because they're great movies; even if it was a big plot hole we'd still ignore it because the movie was so good. The reason this (fairly large) plot hole stands out to us is because the rest of the movie was crap, with unlikable characters, and constant violations of logic; this was just the most prominent.

It wasn't that this movie violated in-universe logic (though it did); it's that it violated narrative logic.

Every movie has plot holes - some big, some small - but if it has engaging characters, a meaningful theme, and it's well presented, we ignore them. But when you screw up basic character arcs, we have trouble explaining why exactly. Narrative is a hard thing to understand intellectually, because we understand it so innately. Like calculus: our hands can catch a ball, but it took us thousands of years to figure out the math behind it. All we know is that we didn't like the movie, and wind up focusing on the plot holes, when the deeper issue is narrative.

It's not the suicide doors that ruined the RX-8 - or any other particular feature - it was the overall try-to-hard design philosophy.
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The Star Wars thread

Just when you thought the bar for stupidity couldn't be lowered for Star Wars, here's another gem from a recent Vader comic and the backlash.






Where the fuck were these SJW's when Vader slaughtered younglings, his wife, numerous Jedi from both sexes and employees he's choked to death for incompetence? It's ok when he does the above, but oh but kill a woman being an obessessive stalker of him, bring out the "REEEEEEE" alert. Clown World.
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The Star Wars thread






In defense of the prequels. He is right.

The funny part was then Red Letter Media was defending the Mary Sue and the new sequels initially. Those asshats were just chiming in on the mainstream media bashing that deliberately hate anything THEY DON'T CONTROL! That is why they hate PewDiPie and that is why they hated George Lucas for owning the then biggest franchise in Hollywood.

It was a good psyop and a wonderful karmic revenge that they realize now - the prequels did not destroy Star Wars, at best they had some corny dialogue or scenes.

Nah - the globohomos destroyed your Star Wars you stupid morons!

To this day the prequels had scenes in it that were never seen and will never be seen again. You can bet on your left nutsack that Disney is not going to give you jack-shit in a SJW galaxy very nearby.
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The Star Wars thread

Quote:[url=https://twitter.com/HamillHimself/status/1121835018282627073][/url]

Apparently, some genius thought that photoshop came from the alt-right. God, I hate people sometimes.
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The Star Wars thread

JJ Abrams Says "F--- it." to Star Wars


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The Star Wars thread

I think that Hollywood is catering to a more diverse audience than just straight white males. I think that they are trying to appeal to a wider range of people, and that includes women and people of color. I don't think that there is anything wrong with that.GBWhatsapp
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The Star Wars thread

I'd just like to leave this here for anyone that finds it.



This is a really good movie, better than anything out in Hollywood today.


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