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Roger Ebert Answers Star Wars Questions
pamri writes "Roger Ebert, in his weekly answer-man column, answers Star War related questions, chief among them being, why he gave the "Revenge of the Sith" 3.5 stars despite his criticism of the acting and whether George Lucas be faulted for violating his own work?"
There seems to be a disconnect between critics and just about everyone I've talked to about the movie. Just about every review has overlooked the awful dialog, bad editing, and crappy sructure/pacing and praised the movie as one of the best, I'm sorry but in a post-B5, Firefly world, my Sci-Fi (or Sci-Fantasy, if you prefer) requires MUCH better dialog than 14 characters commenting on how much STRESS Annakin is under. F-in STRESS! As though the Republic could have been saved if the Jedi had had a better insurance program that had covered counciling!
Someone needs to stand up and hit Lucas with a rolled up newspaper, hopefully it'll be #2 this weekend and some lesson will be learned (though they'll probably blame it on poor elitetorrents and their crappy workprint).
> Translation: "My job is so easy
Ebert has always said that he hates the "star" ratings, but his newspaper makes him do it. Unfortunately, most readers just want to quickly glance at a rating rather than read a review and draw their conclusions.
Ebert has said before that the ratings are relative in that if the movie is intended to be a popcorn action movie, then he rates the movie compared to that. If it is expected to be art, he rates the movie against that.
Ebert is a very good reviewer, and he really knows his stuff about movies, although the wearing a sweater on TV and doing the thumbs up thing may mask that. I watched the DVD for "Dark City," and he did a commentary for it, and it was amazing what he drew out of it. Watching it and listening to it, I felt like I was sitting in a graduate level film class.
I think one problem is that Ebert is that he watches too many movies that he must review, and sometimes he glosses over a movie because he expects that he doesn't need to study it at a deeper level.
For example, Ebert's review of Episode II was very superficial (to the point that he even misquoted some key dialog in his review). However, on the whole he is probably correct that Episode II does not stand alone as a movie, and must be viewed in the context of the other movies, and his reviews rate movies based on how they stand alone.
In contrast, someone on Slashdot linked to another review of the movie by David Begor where he draws out the symbolism in the movie. The review is quite enlightening, and it changed the way I viewed the movies, as I could recognize the symbolism.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
An odd observation - I have seen all the SW movies their first weekend out with the exception of ANH, which I saw about a month or so after it opened, though it was still a *packed* house just as the opening weekends of the others. I remember at the end of each movie, people cheered, clapped, went nuts, and were generally really, really positive (even with Empire, which ended on a down note).
With thRevenge of the Sith, people filed out of the packed theater *without a sound.* It was like leaving a funeral. Completely different from the others, it was strangely depressing. Anyone else see this?
From Wikipedia: The Dragon Quest series is so popular in Japan that, following the release of Dragon Quest III in 1988, the Japanese Diet passed a law forbidding the release of new installments of the Dragon Quest series on any day other than a Sunday or a holiday, to prevent children from skipping school to wait in line for the latest Dragon Quest title.
Buffy - "I really thought that you were a nice, normal guy."
Riley - "I am a nice, normal guy."
Buffy - "Maybe by this town's standards, but I'm not grading on a curve."
- Buffy The Vampire Slayer
Like Buffy's love life, movie reviews should be on an absolute scale, not comparing a film to previous films of the same series. Because, quite frankly, I'm sure ROTS is f**king brilliant compared to the previous two. That doesn't make it a good movie, it makes it "less sucky".
Freedom: "I won't!"
(Clearly, I have a vested interest in this complaint, but...) I've never understood Ebert's relativity rationale. How are we poor schnook viewers to choose our fare, when Ebert gives 3.5 stars to some mindless b-movie merely for being in focus? It smacks a bit of those "most underrated player" awards...
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
The voice is higher-pitched, and sometimes even shrill. Daniels spoke with a slow, consistent tone in the original three, and in the newer three, it seems as if he is rushing the words. However, the pitch is so consistant, I would blame it on audio effects.
Informatus Technologicus
The audio engineers just processed it differently, I'm guessing. I mean, I can notice a slight difference, but it doesn't really bother me in any meaningful way. Maybe the droids got a frigging tuneup in the intervening 20 years.
...His head is detached, and the power is off. Apparently, the power source (possibly the batteries) is located in the torso. Later, Chewbacca re-attaches the head, and it turns back on. Of course, C3PO continues his comedic monologue.
Now, in SW II, we see that C3PO loses his head again when an assembly tool knocks it off in the droid factory. However, the head continues to be powered and keeps talking....
One possible explanation: NiCad battery in the head, charger in the torso (where there is some kind of generator.) The battery got fried when he was shot in Empire, so he needed the juice from the charger to power up.
Another: The torso has nothing to do with head power. Chewie just happened to close a broken circuit (or open a short) when he put the head on.
Of all the possible nitpicks I've heard, this isn't really a very big one.
Watch any version of Star Wars prior to the DVD (including a bootleg of the theatrical "Special Edition.")
After killing Ben, Darth walks toward the Falcon and the iris doors close in front of him... They forgot to animate his lightsaber! He's carrying a metal stick.
Not good enough for you? Try this one: In III, Obi-Wan says goodbye to R2 after all they had been through together. In IV, he doesn't recognize him at all. "I don't remember owning a droid."
Still want more? Leia tells Luke about her childhood memories of their mother... but now it turns out that mom died on the delivery room table. Either Leia was never told (and never suspected) that she was adopted, or she sees dead people.
There. That should be enough to fuel your nitpicks for a while.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Did a quick google, and couldn't find any critics that panned the movie. It's like they all were afraid - "If I pan the movie, people will reviel me" or some other shit. So here is my review, posted earlier today:
Fuck the reviewers. They're nothing more than shills nowadays. Tell people the movie is crap, you don't get any more "previews", so you're out of a job. Big deal - you're not doing your job if you lie (oh, silly me, lying is part of being a movie shill).Ok, most AMericans in a life time watch probably 90% Hollywood made films. Well-written is a term so unbelievably diluted in U.S mainstream cinema.
Die Hard as well as Revenge of the Sith was written mediocre at best. These are substance movies with enough machine guns and hype to attract the average crowd. I rarely if ever give credit to Hollywood screenwriting. Where Hollywood always shine is the producing and directing.
I figured he was calling up the lightning for so long that the dark side was starting to take its toll on his body a little faster than it usually does.
This won't be modded up enough to be visible to anyone, but I'd like to chip in and say that Ebert is pretty much accurate. The acting is dreadfully wooden in the non-action scenes, and this is probably due to the fact that the script isn't really very good.
I was sat with a group of five or six friends watching it, some of whom weren't really massive fans of the Star Wars series and hadn't seen Phantom Menace or Attack of the Clones, and I was actually embarassed by the quality of this movie.
It's let down by the script to some degree, but I think what really killed it was the direction. Actors never seem to know what they're doing, where they are, or what they're supposed to be feeling and this makes their delivery poor and wooden. When Anakin (Hayden Christensen) turns to the dark side, he's clearly been directed to be "mad, insane, confused, evil". And here he excels; it's easy to be mad and evil. However, in the more delicate scenes he's hopeless and swimming around without direction.
Excellent examples of awesome direction are the "SHE'S LOST THE WILL TO LIVE!" line announced by a med-bot. What sort of diagnosis is that? Rather convenient. It's as if whoever voiced that line had no idea that Anakin/Vader had actually killed her with the dark force. Another is the "Noooooooo!" that Vader screams when discovering this fact. No self respecting director would use such a dreadful cliché. He might as well have added "WHY, GOD? WHY!!!?" to the end of it. It's almost as bad a cliché as the "Oh no we are approaching a perilous waterfall of lava" bit. There's also the whole wordless ending segment where Luke's foster parents just get handed a child without question and look a bit bemused, then just gaze at the sun. What?
A few things are left unexplained too. The Death Star. Why? I was desperate to find out more about the Death Star but it's just presented as a matter of course. Slapped into the film like an afterthought. All in all, I left the theatre without the sensation of awe that I'd hoped for.
In summary: cut out a few of those massive "let's have a fight on a volcano planet" bits and wrap up the end of the film a little better.
Please. Star Wars was always about special effects and nothing else.
The first Star Wars was nominated for Best Picture in the Oscars of that year. It did not do so because of only technical acheivement. It was because it had compelling story and characters.
Look at Chewbacca. He can only speak in unintelligible grunts, yet he is a complex character with conflicting traits whom we end up caring about by the end of of the movie. Look at Jar-Jar Binks. His only trait is that he's annoying, and by the end of the story the audience wants him dead.
There are scenes in Star Wars that are so memorable that they've become shared cultural cliches. The garbage-smasher scene. Luke's swing across the abyss. They Cantina scene, or Leia as Jabba the Hutt's slave. These scenes have been parodied countless, countless times in other contexts. It's hard to imagine any such equivalent in the Phantom Menace.
Look at the Imperial Walkers. We first see them as tiny, blurry ants through the underpowered lens of a rebel infantrymen's binoculars. We see them growing larger until they're huge and seemingly unstoppable, all the while moving slowly and formidably. This is dramatic structure. You find yourself caring about whether or not the rebels win, you feel their frustration along with them, and the slow unveiling of the walkers makes it more believable -- not the beautiful CGI. They're actually ugly, industrial-looking, rigid and inflexible.
Try to think of anything like this in the prequels.
The millenium falcoln. The Death Star. The Imperial Walkers. They are cool not because of the fantastic rendering. They are cool because they are scary, or dramatic, and their properties are interesting and novel even if only in a purely theoretical way, not simply because of how realistic they look.
Star Wars was always about the human imagination. The special effects were always only a medium for that imagination. You cannot capture the human imagination with wooden characters doing uninteresting things. Chewbacca is a 8 foot tall hairy monster that can't speak English but we end up caring about him because of his human-like complexities. Without stuff like that, all that animation is like a math textbook with a pretty dust jacket.