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Star Wars Fan Movie Challenge 2007
Sarah Giannantonio writes "AtomFilms and LucasFilms launched today the 2007 Star Wars Fan Movie Challenge. This is a yearly competition where the Star Wars community send in their fan films to be judged by George Lucas. Award recipients will have their film shown during Celebration IV and also on Spike TV. New for 2007 is the fan fiction category."
Let me guess, on their potential for product placement and merchandising?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
My brother in law the film professor loathes Star Wars, largely for what it has done to the film industry. I don't agree; EP IV was watershed film, and if it somehow corrupted Hollywood's sensibilities, that's Hollywood's fault. Judged on its own, EP IV was a very good movie. The acting, aside from the old pros who turn in a solid performance in their sleep, may have been uneven. The dialog was unquestionably dreadful. But it had its corresponding virtues. It was fast paced, energetic, and had a kind of visual wit that more than compensated for its lack of verbal wit.
None of the subsequent Lucas movies are nearly as good as EP IV. I don't count EP V as a Lucas film; it was much more solid but much less innovative than EP IV. In EP VI, the franchise is starting to show signs of middle age spread, but the movie is carried by the greater maturity of Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher. I think the later Lucas films suffer because Lucas the story teller needs the pressure of limited resources to stay on track. The actors never have a chance. Samuel Jackson has that rare quality that differentiates the movie star from the actor: its fun just seeing him on screen. Utterly wasted.
Necessity is the mother of invention. When Lucas made EP IV, he had to overcome two limits: screen time and budget. He didn't think he'd get to make another one of these movies, so he put as much as he could into EP IV, which was the fastest paced 121 minutes most people had ever seen on screen.
The other thing that helped Lucas in EP IV was the limitation of what he could put on screen given the budget and technology available. For Ed Wood, two guys sitting on folding chairs in front of a blank wall was perfectly acceptable as set for an airline cockpit. For Lucas, no set that was not created largely in CGI would ever be good enough, however good it might be. So where he put special effects into the movie, he did not dwell on them; they'd simply fly by. It made the story more credible by putting it in a believably detailed setting.
A fantasy story needs the details to be credible. That's what made The Day the Earth Stood Still such a great movie, it was so believable in all its other details that accepting a man in a cheesy foam rubber suit as a giant robot was possible.
CGI is what killed Lucas' filmmaking. Once he could put anything in his head up on screen, he could not resist drawing attention to it, to the detriment of the story. The characters are lost in epic set pieces. What is worse, the more you look at the details, the less credibile they seem, be they ever so well crafted. In contrast, the LotR series was stuffed to the gills with incredible sets, props and effects, but Peter Jackson uses them with restraint. Jackson had a way of alternating between huge and intimate scenes that somehow made the characters expand to epic scale. This may have been what Lucas was aiming at. EP I - III actually try to tell a rather interesting, somber story, but it is a story that requires a focus on the actors. People didn't take to Hayden Christensen's uncharismatic Anakin, but his portrayal of Anakin as a shallow and somewhat spoiled was entirely right. It's just that story wasn't told coherently enough to make its point: evil comes from people trying to do the right thing in a narrow minded way. The story desperately needed to connect the dark glamour of Darth Vader to Anakin's stubborn willfulness.
I don't want to be too down on the later Lucas movies; I got my ticket's worth of entertainment. But I have zero desire to see them a second time.
When you look at EP I through III, they are very different movies than EP IV, much more ponderous. In EP IV the story drags you forward when you'd like another second to look at the details. In later Lucas movies you keep wishing the story would get a move on. Things would have been different if Lucas had been constrained to use the same budget and technology he had for EP IV.
I do take my hat off to Lucas though, for encouraging f
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
How many of us have directed major feature films that have grossed $4 billion, created two legendary movie series, and shepherded cinematic developments like ILM, THX and even Pixar? You may not like some of his movies, but George Lucas has probably done more for the movies you DO like than you can ever realize! Oh, and most of the teenagers I know (who were seven or eight when "Phantom Menace" came out) happen to think Jar-Jar rules. Remember when no one liked Ewoks? Now everyone thinks they're cute and cuddly and forgets how much they were hated. But that's beside the point. To bash George Lucas because you didn't like a few of his movies is just crazy. Thirty years later, you're still arguing about "Star Wars" ... that says a lot to me!