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Attack of the Clones
ramakant writes: "It looks like George Lucas has really sold out this time. If you thought Jar-Jar Binks was bad, MTV.com is running a story that a few members of 'NSYNC will be making cameos in Episode II. I think the target demographic for these films has changed a little since the original trilogy. Oh well, at least LOTR rocked." The MTV article says that NSYNC asked for the part; an article in a UK tabloid says Lucas asked them.
Okay, my last comment, "Now you know why Episode II is called Attack of the Clones" was beaten to the punch by fifteen seconds. Durn. But it took me less time to change my mind about the whole thing.
I hate boy bands as much as the next guy. But 'NSYNC was darn funny in their Simpsons episode. They spent the whole 18 minutes making fun of themselves after all. They can't be ALL bad.
*beep* *beep*
Oh no! Our clothing is out of style by 15 minutes! Quickly, to bananna republic!
Ynav eht Nioj!
listen, complain as much as you like, but it doesn't change the fact that you would get yourself casted in starwars, even for a brief cameo, if you had the power.
so use the force or something. i never saw the movies.
"when life gets complicated, I like to take a nap in a tree and wait for dinner" - Hobbes.
I don't understand why people are so upset by this new fact. We were told before episode 1 that the new trilogy would be for Lucas's kids. I understood when people were amazed that the first episode was aimed at such a young target audience, but now that we were told, how can anyone really think that the movies won't be aimed at CHILDREN.
This new travesty is a horrible perversion of what should be a beautiful thing, but at least it's in charachter. He told us what he wanted to do. He's doing it. Quit complaining that "the target demographic for these films has changed a little since the original trilogy," because at this point, you shouldn't expect anything less from the producer of Episode 1.
I'm a concientious
That trailer actually gave me shivers in ways that NOTHING about the previous film was even remotely able.
To be honest, I have high hopes for this film. --We might actually see some good messages. How passion of any type can lead to the dark side. And, anyway, there's nothing quite like a good romance story when it's well told.
Weird about the boy-band members having cameos, although I'd venture to guess that this is a sly attempt to capture the female viewership fully and completely. Interesting ploy.
We'll have to see. I do sort of worry, though, that the new film might serve primarily to reinforce certain messed up societal ideals, a la "Titanic". --Including, of course, that the perfect boyfriend must now die of hypothermia in the North Atlantic in order to be properly acceptable to a girl.
Ah well. We'll just have to see, won't we.
Fingers crossed!
--Fantastic Lad
It's not the logistics of their appearance, it's the reason that Lucas would put them in the movie: namely, so it will connect with a market that's not exactly taken with the whole Star Wars thang. Now, girls that would never pay to see anything like Star wars will do so to catch a glimpse of Justin, or Fag-wad, or whatever their names are.
That's pretty fucking low, if you ask me. The market, and in fact the bottom line, has become a greater influence to Lucas' decisions than his creativity. Dis-fucking-gusting.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
How about making a mod pack for something like Quake that lets you do the fragging yourself?
You're using her as bait, Master!
What are you rambling on about? Nobody is challenging Lucas' right to make his films as crappy as he pleases. Obviously, we are equally free to call them as we see them, and to spread the word far and wide.
Dear Mr Lucas:
When you made the original "Star Wars" movie- now known collectively as "A New Hope", your team was forced to create a motion picture here on earth. I remember watching (as a child) "The Making Of Star Wars", which showed the then young- not yet existing(?) ILM create all of the scenes we love and admire... using carefully sculpted models and stop motion photography. You were all on the cutting edge.
Repeat that story for the two movies that followed...
Then, a few years ago, you re-released those three movies with "added visuals"... claiming that THIS was the correct vision of Star Wars... the technology was absent when you created the movies- and in the end, you ruined them. You claimed it was because you were never happy with them...
That's not why you re-released the movies...
The reason you bastardized your own artwork was the same reason you marketed The Phantom Menance to a decidedly YOUNGER crowd than A New Hope- and it's the same reason that you have decided to "cast" a tennie bopper's dream-boy band as Jedi Knights in your upcoming film.
money
Shame on you, George.
Shame on you.
Sure, Lucas is breaking no law in becoming a total whore and letting some marketing committe script his movies. In the same way, a politician breaks no laws if he sells out his principles and does exactly what some tobacco company tells him to do. Breaking a trust which is not backed up by a contract is something anyone technically has a right to do. And just like no one is forcing you to buy any specific movie ticket, no one forces you to re-elect the backstabbing politician. Does that make this sort of behavior is alright?
Lucas, like some corporate-tool-politician, has shat on the heads of the very people who made him what he is. But it's worse than that in his case. You see, only Lucas can legally make the remaining movies in the Star Wars epic because he owns every last bit of Star Wars IP. There are plenty of directors out there who would be willing and able to finish the series well. Unfortunately, their doing so would be illegal. If LOTR had been made badly, I could have tried to make it again, though better. The future Star Wars movies will be made badly, but we have no recourse. We just have to take it, even if they're opportunistic, poll-driven, stroryless product placement ads (which they will be).
The Lucas of today makes me feel dirty for ever having liked Star Wars and for having spent every cent of my childhood allowance on those overpriced action figures. I imagine some people who voted for Nixon felt betrayed in the same way. Fine... I was a tool, a means to an end for some greedy bastard in whom I once had faith. Excuse me if I'm a little mad about that, but maybe being indignant about this sort of thing is a necessary part of self-respect.
Well, I wouldn't say that I "originally saw it as a child" because I was well past the "age of Star Wars" when I really got into it. I'd say it was in high school, so maybe I was 15 or so. Yes, I did know about Star Wars before that but I was more into things like GI Joe and Transformers.
Now I'm almost 23 and I will happily sit down and watch Episodes 4 thru 6 in one sitting. They're fabulous movies and just because I've gotten older doesn't mean that I still have to be a child to appreciate them.
The movies have been analyzed over and over by critic after critic, but the movies have a certain charm to them. They're like Aladdin; the target audience may be children (debatable) but I think that adults get more out of the movie than their kids. Episodes 4 thru 6 were more of an epic tale for the 20th century, and not just something trying to capture the interest of a 8 year old child.
For whatever reason, Lucas has lost sight of the original vision of his filmmaking career... look at American Graffiti or Episodes 4 thru 6, and even the Indiana Jones trilogy (if you want to stretch things). Now compare to more recent works by Lucas, in comparison to the Lord Of The Rings trilogy. LOTR has quite a large budget, and has many well known actors, but still managed to save that "filmmaking innocence" that is sincerely lacking in Hollywood.
Whether Lucas lost it or has simply abandoned it of his own will, I cannot say. But I can tell you that I will be buying the LOTR DVD but have yet to buy Episode 1 on DVD... despite being a self proclaimed "Star Wars nut." Now tell me who's the target market...
How many of you will vote with your pocket book, and mindshare by not seeing it (including in the theater, pirating it, renting it on video, etc)...
:)).
Wouldn't it be a lot more quiet in here if all the rest of you would shut up?
I'll go see it. It'll have cool FX, lots of stuff will go boom, and I can pretend I'm a 12 yr old. Heck, at my age even a couple of hours of being a 12 yr old again will be worth it.
Do what I did next time, watch Ep 4. Watch it honestly, not in nostaliga mode. It's predictable, and geared for 12 yr olds. Gee, I seem to recall seeing commercials for Star Wars toys playing when I was 12, in between the cartoons. Maybe, just maybe, the movies aren't getting dumber, maybe we're getting older and have different tastes (I wouldn't say we're getting any smarter
Just some food for thought.
Minupla
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Make it better than Ep1?
ho ho ho ho!
Check out TheForce.net and view some of the home-brewed films. They're in quicktime, but free for download. I shit you not when I say that I enjoyed some of the 15-25 minute shorts they had on there than I enjoyed SW:Ep1! I even watched one or two of the shorts a couple times, they were so well done. Better acting, plot, story, and a less flamboiant integration of CGI and reality. All that, and with the only budgets being people's own financial donations. Now shut your mouth, you uninformed n00b, before I have to slap you.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
LOTR:FOTR has some modifications to widen the audience, but that was just to give a little more female identification. However, it is generating a lot of people who want to see it again who are far from being either traditional movie goers (teens) or LOTR fans. You don't have to bend over just to get a large fan-base if the starting material is good. The film wasn't even that expensive to make (if you divide the total budget by 3)
Please could someone explain this to Mr. Lucas.
See my journal, I write things there
And it worked, despite the fact that Lucas isn't a good writer. (He said so himself, long ago around the time of American Graffiti.) The script for Star Wars still isn't really very good. Watch the movie trying to be an objective bastard instead of a long-time fan and you'll see what I mean: most of the dialogue is pretty stilted, and even the direction is somewhat dubious--great visuals, to be sure, but the relatively inexperienced actors clearly weren't being given a lot of support from the man behind the camera. But what the movie had was, as Campbell would put it, "the power of myth"--and it had special effects and action sequences like none ever seen before. When Lucas first showed a private test screening to his friends, most of them thought it was terrible. The one who didn't? Steven Spielberg, who said, "This movie is going to go on to make a hundred million dollars."
And, lest people think I'm slamming Lucas a little too much, keep in mind that he neither wrote nor directed The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi; he only came up with the general stories. (He didn't even write the Star Wars novel that bears his name; it was actually ghost-written by Alan Dean Foster.) Almost everyone I know, including myself, thinks Empire was the best of the set--and I suspect that was largely due to Leigh Brackett's script. Almost everyone also seems to think Jedi was the weakest of the set--and I'd argue the things that drove most people nuts, from Luke and Leia being sisters to the insufferable Ewoks, were sadly part of Lucas's original story.
But at least then he still had the power of the first one propelling things forward. Now, George Lucas has become... George Lucas. Evidently he'd decided years ago that his original concept was background for the "new" story of Star Wars, and now he had the confidence to make it--because he knew that audiences had grown up with his mythology, and they'd flock to see his new work.
Lucas isn't selling out--he's becoming egotistical. He was part of a group before, not one lone visionary--what genius there was in Star Wars was a collective genius. Now we're getting pure, unadulterated Lucas. p.And the sad thing is, he's right: people will keep flocking to see it.
Incidently, while Hamill is notorious for making crappy, crappy movies, he does really great voiceover work in animation - as the Joker in the Batman animated show on the WB, and several other things I can't think of now and can't be bothered to find.
The big deal is that these guys, who are never going to have to work another day in there lives are taking parts that would otherwise have gone to struggling actors who really need the money. Don't you think it's funny seeing big name actors in tiny bitparts in their early days?
J-aims
--
Yo, whatever happened to peas? Join T( H)GS
I very much enjoyed the original three films when I was a young girl. I can't be the only one who did.
Here here! I also loved the original films as a young girl-- and I still like them. On the other hand, part of the reason that I liked the "Battlestar Galactica" television show was the extreme cuteness (to a girl my age at the time) of Starbuck and Apollo. For that matter, by the time "Empire" came out, I was more than aware of the physical attractiveness of Han Solo. My point is, it's quite possible to make a movie that has certain attractions to young girls without compromising things like plot and characterization. ("Battlestar's" problems were unrelated to the choice of actors.)
I keep thinking of how the Star Wars prequels would have come out if Lucas had hired someone interesting to write them, like Harlan Ellison or even C.S. Friedman.