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Attack of the Clones

Posted by michael on from the stars-wars-loyalty-fighting-with-disgust dept.

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.

4 of 691 comments (clear)

  1. you hypocrites! by minusthink · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  2. Re:uh... a few seconds ruins a film? by dimator · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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))"
  3. So, all you people who are panning Ep2.... by Minupla · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  4. Re:Bah... by Watts+Martin · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Actually, The Phantom Menace was much closer to Lucas's original script ideas for Star Wars, one he drastically reworked at the urging of friends who told him, essentially, that for anyone to give a crap about the story it needed to be archetypal: a sci-fi incarnation of myths and legends. Lucas found the works of Joseph Campbell and used The Hero With a Thousand Faces as a virtual blueprint for the reworking of the script, morphing the tale he'd come up with about the young boy Anakin into a tale about the young man Luke Skywalker, changing the rather passive kidnapped princess--also nearly pre-teen--into a feistier adult, and stripping the convoluted Dune for Dummies politics down into a straightforward tale of good and evil.

    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.