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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.
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.
Well, disregarding the fact that it's only a few seconds and they will be unrecognizable. It's a poor move to date a movie with a current fad in pop culture. In ten years people will hear this and think who? A tv show can generally get away with it because of the format, tv shows are contemporary by nature whereas a movie that locks itself into something like this is doomed.
These shitheads are just a short lived trend, not that that matters. Looking at past movies you can see that huge stars, from outside the movie industry generally seem to make the movie worse.
Personally, I'm happiest when a movie doesn't have any huge names at all you usually get a more enjoyable experience because the actors don't carry the baggage that someone you've seen in a number of movies does.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
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!
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.
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.