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Harrison Ford Turned Down Han Solo Role
eldavojohn writes "It's being widely reported that Harrison Ford turned down a £20 million deal to play Han Solo once again in a George Lucas spin off of Star Wars. The source of this information seems to be a tabloid called bangshowbiz. Harrison was approached by Lucas with two roles but instead opted for the same amount to play Indiana Jones for the fourth time. Could the spin off centered on the rugged Han Solo save the Star Wars franchise from its prequels or would it have been another mediocre release disappointing demanding fans?"
Good for him, at least he knows his limits and marketablity. Now for a few Hundred posts on 'how old he is', and 'he'll sprain his back' or more such silliness.
"Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life." Terry Pratchet
Could the spin off centered on the rugged Han Solo save the Star Wars franchise from its prequels or would it have been another mediocre release disappointing demanding fans?
Given that Lucas most likely would have partnered Han with a squadron of Jar Jar's children and a midget in a monkey constume, I think that questions answers itself.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Revenge of the damn kid who is always on my lawn!
*pSig = NULL;
HAN SHOT FIRST
I don't want to see Han Solo's great character trashed by a bad script and the over-use of special effects.
Lucas helped kill my vision of the star wars universe with the prequals, I will never watch another Star Wars thing he does again.
Lucasfilm would have to apply so many effects to the aging Harrison Ford that they might as well computer generate him from the get-go :P
R2D2 turned down the droid role. They are contacting a Jack-in-the-Box garbage can now for the part.
Table-ized A.I.
The deal fell through because Ford stipulated in the contract that greedo couldn't shoot first.
George Lucas, on the other hand, has lost a tonnes of credibility with the Star Wars prequels. As Brent Spiner said, "it took him twenty years to come up with something lousey". George's quickness to return to the Star Wars well is more evidence that he has become a sell-out of the highest order.
George should forget about Star Wars spin-offs, go back to his roots and start a new project. Maybe a remake of Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers ... something he loved as a child.
boxlight
There's NO WAY that anything Lucas or anyone else did would ever satisfy the "demanding fans" - the die-hards saw the originals when they were 8-12 years old, a long time ago. Their *memories* of seeing it the first time are far better than the movies actually were, so when 25 years later movies of the same general quality come out, of course they are disappointed. I was old enough to see them all with some degree of objectivity, and the originals weren't all that better than the prequels. The main thing that struck me about the originals were the effects, which were so much better than anything you had ever seen (aside from maybe 2001: A Space Odyssey). That Imperial Star destroyer coming in over the camera in the opening shot literally drew gasps from the audience. Very impressive compared to what came before, like Star Trek/Lost In Space, etc. That sort of "dazzle factor" is never going to be seen again from effects, and although the prequels effects were MUCH better than the originals, they didn't stand out. Take that away and all you have are some pretty predictable stories that anyone who watched B-movie Westerns would recognize.
There's no way that the grown-up fans are ever going to be satisfied the way they were when they were 11 years old.
Brett
Could the spin off centered on the rugged Han Solo save the Star Wars franchise from its prequels
I guess if "rugged" is the new word for "over the hill", then possibly.
Is Lucas TRYING to emulate Trek here? ie: Keep re-using the same geriatrics until enough are in the grave that you have no choice but to finally re-cast the character?
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
If they did an entirely CG Han Solo, would they have to pay Harrison Ford anything? I mean it would be "Ford's likeness", but the "Han Character" is what they would be depicting...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Probably because you've done it three times already and he knows a cheap date when he sees one.
Breakfast served all day!
I mean... looking at IMDB... the Tom Clancy movies, Air Force One (Worst Idea Ever), The Fugitive, Firewall, K-19... the guy's become a grim automaton. Some of those movies were decent, but his characters were pretty much the same in every damn one. Anyway, let's hope that IJ4 breaks the long grey-brown streak.
For reference, http://imdb.com/gallery/granitz/3463/CarrieFish_Gr ani_5733926_400.jpg.html?path=pgallery&path_key=Fi sher,%20Carrie&seq=2
Look as good at fifty-something you will not.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Okay, here's the REAL deal.
Harrison Ford took the Indiana Jones role over the Han Solo one because it's going to be a much better movie.
The rumour that it takes place in the sixties is true, and fits in nicely with the Mr Ford's present age.
What hasn't been widely revealed is that Sean Connory *will* be in the movie, although the role will probably surprise many people.
Since Satan owns the pink slip for the soul of pretty much everyone who has ever worked in motion pictures, he can shuffle the deck however he sees fit... and some interesting studio mergers mean that Sean Connory will play an elderly James Bond who fell through a temporal rift as the result of Xindi interference with Earth history - the theory being that if they could get all the kids hooked on beer and acid and dope then warp drive would never be invented. Little did they realise that Optimus Prime would ride in on My Little Pony and save the day by assassinating Kennedy and illegitimately fathering Rosie ODonnell with, you guessed it, Rosie ODonnell - who fell through the same temporal rift James Bond fell through. Pygmies re-discover left-over gou'auld technology that permits them to build hypersonic blow-dart weapons, which are capable of destroying ICBMs and thereby save the USA from the tyranny of total destruction when they decide to make the Ukraine glow in the dark...which happens two-thirds of the way through the movie, because the Ark of the Covenant (which was stolen from Area 51 by the Xindi) has been given to the Russians, who are using it to try to re-animate a cut-n-shunt SuperPolitician they've made from the cryogenically preserved remains of Adolph Hitler, Josef Stalin and Walt Disney - but exposure to nuclear fallout causes this re-animated monstrosity to sprout wings and fly to Tokyo, where as Mothra it does battle with Godzilla until Indiana Jones...
Sorry, I've given too much away already. You'll just have to buy a ticket like everybody else.
Therein lies the danger. Star Wars I, II, and III suggest that Star Wars IV was just a stroke of luck for Lucas. He is a poor storyteller and could easily cast Ford into the wrong kind of story. Ford's career would then end in a wimper. Of course, I would waste my $10 on Star War VII.
Ford made the right decision.
Dude, please! Use the spoilers tag next time!
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
Why waste $100 Million just to disappoint the fans in 2 years, when you can disappoint the fans right away for free.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Natalie Portman can be a great actress. I felt her roles in Closer, Garden State and V is for Vendetta were really good. I remember liking her in Mars Attacks. However, her performance in Star Wars was horrible. Lucas seems to do a good job of taking really good actors and coaxing bad performances out of them. I'd imagine the only reason that episodes IV - VI were liked at all is that Lucas didn't have enough recognition to force HIS vision on the actors. They had grown with him and were probably more iconic of the movies than Lucas was, and had the ability to ad-lib around awful dialog. It's that, or Lucas has become so enamored with the technology behind movie making that the actors are in front of a blue screen for so much of a movie that they can't really immerse themselves in the role and flush it out. The other choice is that Lucas has simply become disconnected from what it is like to be a person, and as such has lost the ability to tell a story that people can really jive with.
That said, I'm hoping Natalie's in the next Indiana Jones. With Spielberg's direction I think this could actually go somewhere. And Lucas has always been and seems to be still good at creating good characters, and arguably made excellent choices with the actors used. It's just that something seems to go wrong when he's actually directing. Spielberg may be able to take this vision and make another excellent film.
I had this discussion with a friend of mine, and we came to the conclusion that the best way would be to watch 4 5 1 2 3 6.
My reasoning is that if you watch the prequels first it ruins many plot points (ie Leia and Luke are brothers, Vader is Luke's father, etc.). However if watched 4 5 1 2 3 6, the prequels serve as a cool flashback, fleshing out the characters, and drawing out the conclusion to the cliffhangers left by Empire. Or you could just watch the original 4 5 6, and ignore the terrible prequels. Either way...... May the force be with you.
That's partially true, but the prequels *DO* objectively SUCK waayyyyyy more than the originals. Remember the original 3 movies were re-released a couple years *before* any of the prequels came out? I went back and saw the re-released originals as an adult, and yeah, you're right...they really weren't the same watching them as an adult.
However, they were still FAR FAR FAR FAR BETTER than any of the prequels, with their wooden acting. As far as the special effects, the technology of the special effects used on the prequels may be better than that of the originals, but the actual use of the technology (you know, imagination, etc) was way inferior. The special effects in the prequels was just shamelessly piled on, without any art to it. Take the battle scenes for instance. It's all just a bunch of random chaos, with lasers shooting every which way, and stuff blowing up all over the place, and the camera doesn't stay on one shot for more than 50 milliseconds until it switches over to some other scene, making it impossible to really follow the flow of the battle. You basically just sit there, completely overwhelmed, and it's only after the battle is done that you finally figure out what the hell just happened. There's no tension, just confusion. Special effects just for the sake of special effects is crap. You can't just pile it on endlessly and hope it will automagically coalesce into something wonderful. More is not always better.
It's always about Marcia!
Marcia! Marcia! Marcia!
weren't episodes 1-3 written before 4-6? i don't think storytelling is the problem. i think the problem was anakin skywalker and jar-jar binks. in all other respects, the newer movies were decent. firstly, a story centered around a little kid is naturally not as interesting (for most 16+ audiences) as an older character--which is why episode I, while a decent movie, doesn't live up to episode IV-VI. And then there's that douchebag who plays anakin in episodes I & II. He's just a shitty actor. I mean, c'mon, Natalie Portman, Samuel L. Jackson, and Ewan McGregor were all in the cast, and they hire a lamo for the leading role. Throw in Jar-jar binks and the whole franchise is ruined forever...
First of all, did you hear that he's playing Indiana Jones instead? It's in the same link. So it's not like he refused SW to go play some peaceful suburban father with 2.5 kids role.
Second, we don't know the details there. It could be simply that the Indiana Jones role paid better.
Third, after what George Lucas did to Episodes 1 to 3, can you really blame him? I mean, it's ok to bitch and moan about it as a fan, but he's the one who gets it on his CV and maybe conscience. Maybe he's good at knowing a dud when he sees one. Or maybe, especially given the choices of roles as a good guy, he doesn't want to star in Lucas's recent moral relativism (and revisionism) lectures.
SW started as a simple kids' story, a SF version of a mix of fantasy and swashbucklers and WW2 carrier battles. Brave knights with magic swords against clear super-villains. (You'd be hard pressed to paint blowing up a planet they already knew was not a rebellion planet, just to make an example, as a moral grey zone.) The rebels are good, the Empire is evil, and it tells you so right in the opening text. Even when the good guys tell a little lie (e.g., Ben saying that Luke's father is dead), it's with the best intentions, and even when the evil guys tell the truth, you know it's just scheming to some evil end. Follow your heart, do the right thing, don't let old farts tell you what to do (even if it's Yoda), don't fall for the excuses and promises of the dark side. And, oh, trust your own skills, not some targetting computer gizmo.
Not entirely applicable to RL, but it's a simple (or simplified) story, that's easy to digest and entertaining.
And it's not _that_ far off the mark either. While RL situations are a lot less black-and-white, it's not as impossible to have some principles as some people try to tell you. Just because neither side is pure black or white, it doesn't mean there's no difference. If one side is only 75% right and the other 75% wrong, it still doesn't mean that they're perfectly equivalent and it doesn't matter which you choose. Moral relativism is a subject very dear to both philosophers (since that's their job) and sociopaths (who just love muddying the waters and justifying any evil they do), but RL isn't _that_ relative. Just because some details varied across time and space, doesn't mean that the entire concepts of good and evil are purely arbitrary and irrelevant. But I digress.
So a long time after Episode 6, Lucas seems to have decided to undo that whole simplicity. Most of what Episodes 1 to 3 do isn't as much about showing you the history of it, as about trying to undo the good-vs-evil theme of the original trilogy. It's a lecture in how, see, the good guys weren't really good, they were just some self-serving self-indulgent caste, and, see, the evil guys weren't evil as such, they were really just another point of view and at most a bit mis-guided. And Vader (you know, the same guy who supervised blowing up a planet full of innocents) didn't as much fall to the dark side by some act of selfish evil, but was just yet another guy who thought he's doing the right thing, if in a bit of a mis-guided way. Etc.
It's been about rewriting the SW universe in more profound ways than "Han shot first." The whole "A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack" got kicked into the garbage bin, for example, and that was a far more central idea than Han shooting first.
It's not just the bad acting and bad scripting and bad directing and Jar Jar that make the prequels hard to swallow, it's also that it's a moral ambiguity lesson with some special effects and badly acted/scripted/directed at that. Once the whole monomyth structure and clear cut sides fly out the window, it becomes a lot harder to empathise with the heroes or follow why did they have to do this and that. Or to what (justifiable) end.
Contrast Episode 4 where it followed a logical and archetypal structure to destroy the evil Death Star, to Episode 1 where the grand achievement is finding Anakin
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
weren't episodes 1-3 written before 4-6?
Probably not written. He may have had a vague idea of the general story, but he wouldn't have made such incoherences : Obi'wan doesn't know C3PO or R2D2 in 'New Hope', he doesn't know that Luke has a sister before Yoda tells him. Also, the six episodes just "don't work" together. The "I am your father", which is quite a dramatic climax in the original serie doesn't work anymore if you watch Starwars in the correct order.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Are you are referring to that little exchange between Obi-Wan's ghost and Yoda in ESB right after Luke left Dagobah?
Ben: That boy is our last hope.
Yoda: No. There is another.
I figure that a way to reconcile that with Ben's knowledge from ROTS would be to assume that Ben knew about Leia, but for one reason or another, he simply didn't feel that she would be up to the task of becoming a Jedi and overthrowing Vader and the Emperor.
Now, how about when the Obi-Wan ghost appeared to Luke on Hoth and told him to go to Dagobah though?
Ben: You will go to the Dagobah system. There you will learn from Yoda, the Jedi Master who instructed me.
I think that was a rather big oversight on the part of Lucas, considering the Jedi Master who instructed Ben was Qui-Gonn, not Yoda. That one might be a little more difficult to explain away.
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I was kinda looking forward to the scene where the Millennium Falcon makes the Kessel run in 12 parsecs with the left blinker on the whole time.
Finkployd
There's some cult of eye makeup artists in California that believes in heavy racoon-like black eye outlines for older women. They've gotten to Nancy Pelosi, too.