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Star Wars Phantom Menace 1.1 Editor Speaks
guinnessy writes "Studio 360 interviews the person who carried out Phantom Edit 1.1. You can listen to the interview here if you have Real Audio. It's quite interesting and explains why he hated Jar Jar Binks so much and what he did."
well, he pretty clearly speaks with some sort jamaican accent, and might as well be wearing blackface as far as i'm concerned.
and the trade federation was pretty thinly-veiled racism against the japanese.
to be fair, i also thought lotr has some racist undertones as well...i mean, the book is especially bad on this score, equating darkness of skin with evil, and fairness of skin w/ good. imagine how that makes someone with dark skin feel...when really it's all a function of evolution and differential exposure to radiation over time...
-------- -praktike
Sorry, but I think you've been had there.
i ke-the-most?" film series. It's a pretty faithful (so far) movie adaptation of what's commonly regarded as the best book of the twentieth century.
The "Lord Of The Rings" movie trilogy isn't your average Hollywood "gee-what-kind-of-ending-did-the-test-audiences-l
The second book in the trilogy is called "The Two Towers". And the title isn't a prescient, Nostrodamus-like reference to the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center but (shock, horror) a reference to two, uh, towers, that appear in that book as Frodo and Sam continue on to Mordor and the rest of the fellowship take part in an assault on Isengard.
Now, unless I'm truly living in an Orwellian society (which, ironically, is how I perceive the revisionism that Hollywood seems to be obsessed with whenever it turns its hand to historically-based entertainment), those are the historical facts. (Unless, of course, the Ministry Of Truth truly has tracked down every copy of LOTR, had them destroyed and replaced with "corrected" copies that aren't as offensive to The Party. Who knows, this could have happened. It might explain why my copy of LOTR has gone AWOL.)
I can't vouch for him personally, but Peter Jackson strikes me as a man of integrity. In every interview I've read or seen his love of the original text and his desire to bring it to life as faithfully as possible is clear. And I very much doubt that he's going to presume to meddle with Tolkien's masterpiece by changing the title of the second film.
The irony that he'd even be asked to do so is dripping - is there any way the world of Tolkien could possibly be further away from the world of September 11th?
The Hollywood suits asking for a name change are probably the same ones that were so vocal in the aftermath of last year's tragedy, spouting (script-written?) lines about how they couldn't produce another violent movie after what had happened yet barely waiting more than a heartbeat before rubber stamping the release of movies like Black Hawk Down and Collateral Damage.
All this while the Israeli army, funded by the US tax payer ($4 billion of US military aid per year, total military expenditure $7 billion per year), murders people in their homes with US-built, US-supplied hardware while the Bush administration vetoes any attempt by the United Nations' Security Council to condemn Israel's actions.
(When Israel kills, the world complains but the US pretends that nothing's happened. Ditto when the US military kills allied personnel in "friendly fire" incidents.)
Change the title of "The Two Towers"? How about changing the damn record instead?
(Go ahead, mod this down. Like I give a damn about karma.)
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
The most interesting part of that pathetic interview was the discussion afterwards, without the phantom editor, about Memento. That the England dvd release will have an easter egg that you can watch it in chronological order.
"he wants the kids involved so they stick through all 3 new movies and hopefully watch the other 3."
Don't forget that Star Wars movies = release of some really cool toys. Go to your local Toys R Us and see what companies such as LEgo are doing with Star Wars. It's pretty impressive.
I have no doubt that Lucas had kids in mind when he made Jar Jar. He even said so in this month's Issue of Maxim.
Is this a bad thing? I agree that Star Wars would be more interesting if it were geared more towards the adult world, but the kids spend more money on it after the fact. The truth is that we can fully expect more kiddie stuff as Star Wars trickles out. Look at the preview for AotC. Anybody catch the flying R2D2 scene?
There is some hope, though. Older people are buying more video games these days. It's possible we'll see Star Wars tuned more to the adult audience in the next couple of movies, because now the older people have a reason to buy Star Wars merchandise.
At least that's what I'm hoping for. I'm not holding my breath, though. When I see AotC, I fully expect to see some silly moments that'll make the kids cheer. The best I can do is try to enjoy it. I know I thought the Ewoks were cool when I was 6.
"Derp de derp."
It'd be nice to define a way to re-edit a film from DVD footage, such that you can redistribute the edit as simple "score" information. You just list the edit segments as references to timed slices of the original data. The resulting file would be tiny, and you're not sharing any copyrighted information. When you "play" the edit, the DVD player just skips around the source movie playing the edits in order.
More complicated editing techniques like the separation of audio and video tracks (to maintain music continuity for instance) could be implemented by having separate edit information for each. The player software must become a little smarter at this point though.
This mechanism could also be used to implement the "amateur commentaries" that Ebert talked about a little while back. You just include the commentary information in a separate file, which would be much smaller as you would have to provide only the actual commentary, not all the "dead air" between comments. The edit score would play the appropriate comment at the right time, with nice crossfading if you prefer.