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A Closer Look at Star Wars on Film and Off
mclove writes "Revenge of the Sith comes out on DVD today, and there's an interesting article on Slate dissecting the now-complete trilogy as the avant-garde, intellectual sort of film that Lucas keeps saying it is."` Relatedly inkslinger77 writes "ILM model maker, Brian Gernand, speaks about what it is like to work with George Lucas and why he thinks Star Wars attracts such a huge following, particularly among the IT community. He also gives some information about the technology that is used behind the scenes. "
Don't count on it...
The toad can't burp - and for some reason can't fart either, so it swells up and eventually explodes. --Anonymous Coward
...It's a cash machine.
...when the author commented that R2 and 3P0 landing on tatooine was a coincidence.
I'm not that big of a SW geek, but even I know that there is a reason they ended up back in the same place.
The slate article seems more interested in the academic thought than the actual subject matter. They should at least be related.
Revenge of the Sith comes out on DVD today, and there's an interesting article on Slate dissecting the now-complete trilogy
All I can say is that I'm very grateful to have episodes IV, V, and VI in their original untouched format. IMO they are the only films deserving to be called the 'Star Wars Trilogy'.
The others films are an embarrassment at best.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
Jar-Jar and the prequels "needed" to happen so that Toys'R'Us could squeeze that bit more Star Wars junk on the shelves.
This article is a load of rubbish, unless of course if it is satire, in which case it is great.
That's a big "if" ladies and gentlemen.
Jar Jar represents the inventive whimsy of the characters.
Heh. Jar Jar represents the desire to sell a shitload of action figures to young kids via fast food outlets. If ever a character was invented purely to suck another age group into the maw of the Merchandise Machine...
Still, lesson learnt eh? Thy characters may be good or evil, funny, sick, demented or violent, but thou shalt never again employ irritating characters.
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
As for me, the newest three episodes have been horrible but this author definitely casts new light on the whole masterpiece.
TW
Television is dead. Long live That Weasel Television
I was talking to a friend about Episode III. He pointed out, his words, "It was the best of Star Wars, it was the worst of Star Wars." You'd have an incredibly great moment followed immediately by something soul-crushingly stupid. The POV shot of Vader's mask coming down over his face; Vader's first breaths. Chilling.
Followed by Vader whining about where Padme is, and then, of course... "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"
Lucas is great at molding basic story material, but he can't write dialogue or characters to save his life. He should have stuck to producing, which is what he's really good at.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
He's not impressing people with no interest in the arts. He's sure not fooling anyone who even casually takes this seriously. I guess is supposed to be a joke on both Star Wars fans and students of literature, but where is the Monty python foot next to the submission?
I think it's a very interesting read and it is serious.
However it doesn't change the fact that the prequels (and indeed Jedi) aren't particularly good movies, even if they have some good moments in them.
I'm reminded of the defenders of the 2nd and 3rd Matrix movies who seemed convinced that the whole Danté allegory made the films better. Clearly it didn't. The two Matrix sequels are turds, no matter how hard their authors tried to be clever.
Agreed. What I meant was that something like 70-80% of the LOTR footage was recoloured afterwards and they did all sorts of amazing things with lighting. (I enjoyed the docos on the DVDs as much as or more than the films themselves ;-) If any films could claim to be heavy with special effects it's the LOTR trilogy. Everything was tweaked, tweaked, tweaked until it was just so, but the end effect is such a fantastic blend of real and imaginary that you're completely absorbed. Overuse wasn't the right word - 'heavy use of' is more appropriate.
The only thing absorbing about Eps 1 & 2 was the official SW toilet paper. I can't say anything about Ep3 because I haven't seen it and don't plan to.
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
It looks like the slashdot audience is getting really hung up on the whole, "Is the Slate piece a satire or not?" thing. The thing is, as I commented before, "'satire' and 'non-satire' is a binary distinction that post-modernism transgresses proactively."
What I mean, is that the author both is and isn't kidding. Also, I'm both kidding and not kidding when I say "transgresses binary distinctions." Here's a helpful analogy: Let's imagine you're writing a horror story. You write, "Start breathing harder. OK. Let your pupils dilate. Shake a little. Cower. Think about other scary stuff. Be worried that something might kill you soon!" How effective would this be as a horror story? The answer is not at damn all. The best way to make someone frightened isn't to say, "be frightened," it's to say a bunch of other stuff that inspires fear in them.
Similarly, the content of the Slate piece isn't the point. The author almost certainly doesn't care whether Star War is "post-modern" or "avant garde." Instead, the author likes challenging his brain, and wants you to enjoy challenging your brain. So, he's given himself a task: come up with a post-modern meta-framing of Star Wars. Now, we the audience are supposed to allow our brains to quiver with joy as we connect the dots and think about whether and how the Force as a meta-explanation for plot coincidences in Star Wars can be called post-modern. The author is almost certainly serious in that this explanation is a valid one for Star Wars. The author is almost certainly joking in suggesting that Star Wars is High Art. The author is both serious and not, and that's the point.
If the author had written, "let your brain light up with activity. Think about connections. Enjoy the tingling of neurons firing," it wouldn't be effective. Instead, we're supposed to accept what the piece gives us without trying to shoe horn it into the category of "joke" or "not a joke." We're supposed to be enjoying how the piece is and isn't a joke, not trying to make it fit what we think about the quality of the Star Wars movies.
Now that we have all six films, we know that the main thrust of the story is Anakin Skywalker's fall and eventual redemption. The main story is good. The execution is patchy, to say the least. You can imagine Lucas sitting on a big pile of money at his ranch thinking "Now what this dark, tragic story really needs is an annoying rasta guppy fishman..'
So, this might be heresy, but I'd like to see a bunch of remakes in twenty years time, where the story isn't made up on the hoof and the budget for hiring writers is slightly higher than cake budget. Imagine Joss Whedon writing the dialogue...
Just as long as Han shoots first, natch.
Funny thing, but part of the problem of deconstructionism is that it's almost impossible to distinguish between incidences of it that exhibit "extreme insight" and those that are merely "blithely reading what you want into it regardless of the author's intentions"... or just "furiously intellectually masturbating".
I can (hell, we used to do it for fun with our English Literature undergrad friends) construct deconstructionist arguments that shows that half the kids shows on TV as anarcho-capitalist propaganda pieces, or tracts of leftie-pinko-liberal-communist ideology... often in the same program, and often using the same quotes and events.
It's also very, very (really, I can't stress this enough) important to remember that
Postmodern != Good
Postmodern != Entertaining
Postmodern != Coherent
Just because something's "postmodern", it doesn't mean it's "worthy", interesting or any good at all. However, many lit-crit writers seem to make this mysterious assumption.
This essay also uses a common postmodern lit-crit trick of setting up flawed axioms[1], frantically hand-waving to make sure nobody notices the basic problem, then (gasp!) proceeding to show how your flawed, biased axioms inevitably lead to your conclusion.
Finally, when assessing any kind of field as logically flimsy and frequently intellectually self-pollenating as lit-crit, it's important to remember the differences between fields like it and the hard sciences and engineering:
In science, you get points for being Right - producing theories that stand the test of time, and map 1:1 to reality. In Lit-Crit, you get points for being Clever - your position doesn't have to have any kind of basis in reality at all, as long as it's well-argued and persuasive. In fact, there's some evidence that interpretations that do actually map to reality are looked down on, since arguing in favour of those doesn't require much Cleverness.
Oh yes, and you should really read "How to Deconstruct Almost anything". I once gave it to a English Lit undergrad girlfriend, and while she didn't like the implications one bit, she really couldn't fault a single argument.
Footnotes:
[1] Examples of flawed (or at least questionable) axioms that underpin the entire article:
The force makes everything in the universe happen - Less some waffle about destiny or "prophesy", there's no evidence that I can remember that the Force makes everything happen according to some predefined plan. This would completely negate free will, which undermines Anakin's entire fall from grace.
The light side of the force is all about feeling and passivity, the dark side is all about conscious control and order - Right, which is why (for example) Obi-Wan is always telling Anakin to reign in his emotions and be more calm and ordered, and the
emperor is trying to get him to lose control and give in to his anger. Both individuals argue for both things, just in different contexts.
"we are led to understand in Sith that it was Palpatine himself who set the entire plot in motion by manipulating the Force toward Anakin's virgin birth." - Now, maybe I haven't watched it enough, but I don't recall this implication anywhere, and it's a pretty important one, which changes the whole epic story. Did I miss something here?
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
its so good because its a fancy sword made of light!
:-p
but, going a step further and a tad geekier, consider that the blade itself, which can cut through anything except the beam of another saber, is incredibly light-weight. since light itself has no mass, the only weight of the thing is in the handle, so its incredibly easy to do quick shifts of position. add that to the jedi's ability to sense the world in a unique way, and not only is it a sword, its also a shield against incoming projectile attacks.
compare that to the longsword of comparable size (when the saber is extended, anyway) that I bought at the renaissance festival, which weighs (probably) 20 pounds, which i can (awkwardly) lift with one hand but couldn't likely swing with any accuracy or force, and you'll understand why people like the concept of lightsabers so much.
Anakin was a loving, good-intentioned person with a conscience. The film's attempts to drive him to the Dark Side were staged and pushy and contrived and ultimately ridiculous. --You can frustrate a person and make him/her angry, but to become Vader, you have to scramble a person as a child. Anakin was already well past the point of such vulnerability; he had seen and learned love and friendship during his formative years. --His love and selfless good deeds were rewarded with the gratitude and returned love from solid, respectful friends, and thus his belief system and internal compass about how the world can and should be would have been set and anchored deeply. It would have taken a LOT more than a sly Palpatine whispering shit at him to screw up a 20-something year-old Anakin. Heck, even the flying junk-dealer from his childhood spoke of little Anakin with pride. --There are fatherless kids out there in the real world who would do anything for the kind of affection Anakin was shown in Phantom Menace. If you want to create a Vader, you have to start kicking him as a baby and never let up. Anakin should have been the second coming. Vader? No chance.
2. I DID however like the illustration of how a republic can easily turn into a fascist state. We all can take a lesson from that and pack our bags and move to Canada, France or New Zealand. . .
So Lucas gets half marks for insight. Politically, he's got a clue, but otherwise he's still learning. Evil is a tough problem.
-FL