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Sketches Released of New Star Wars Museum
An anonymous reader writes Chicago has some great museums, but none have architecture that excite me as much as the renderings (read "storyboards, not blueprints," but they're also called "plans," which I hope means they're pretty accurate) of George Lucas's Star Wars museum. Technically, it's the "George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art," but we know what he means, and these pictures only make the point clearer. Says the Associated Press story, "The Beijing-based principal designer, Ma Yansong of MAD Architects, released the first sketches Tuesday. The seven-story museum will be located between Soldier Field and McCormick Place on Lake Michigan. It's expected to cost about $400 million. Ma has said it's the most important project of his career to date."
$400m dollars? I get the whole preserving your legacy thing, and it's his money he can do what he wants I guess...but is there nothing better that he could put $400m towards that will actually do the world good?
Living near and often visiting Chicago and it's lake front... I can attest to the fact that the absolute last thing it needs is yet another useless modern art building at the expense of Grass and trees. I have friends and family that live in Chicago, and all of their yards are spotty grass, fence, spotty grass, fence, alley, fence, spotty grass... for miles and mile and miles. They visit the lakefront parks weekly so as not to shoot themselves in the head after realizing that they indeed moved to a dystopian urban nightmare with a higher murder rate than Afghanistan.
One more building with nothing interesting in it will do no-one any good.
I'm sorry, I really should let it go, but...
Terminator 2 was not empty. Aliens was not completely empty. The Abyss was classic start shooting before you have a script debacle. True Lies was just plain offensive. (Those movies are fundamentally about Fatherhood, Motherhood, Marriage, and Cameron not realizing that he's a dick, respectively.)
The LotR movies, including The Hobbit, all made my ass hurt. Here's a good rule of thumb: movies should not take as long to watch as it takes to read the book.
It's the budget (which you allude to above) which is the problem. For a given film-maker, pretty much the bigger the budget, the worse the movie. Peter Jackson made Meet the Feebles, for goodness, sake. When he had to scrape by, he made amazing things. Cameron and Lucas have basically the same problem.
In your comment above you say Lucas only directed one good film. This is wrong, because you've forgotten THX 1138 and American Graffiti -- neither as good as the first star wars movie, but neither as bad as anything he did after that.