When the first movie came out, a friend of mine speculated that the Oracle was an AI or some sort of expert system, and not human at all.
If that's the case, it should be easy enough to give her a new "residual self-image," should they need to do so for story purposes.
It's too bad about Ms. Foster, though. I thought she was one of the best things about that movie. It was refreshing to know that the Matrix wasn't made up entirely of goons in suits and leather-club hairdressers in PVC.
Well, ultimately, the original was a cheap grab for box-office bucks, as are all movies. Moviemaking is a business, of which entertainment is a by-product.
However, if you can get a good writer or director that can act as a skillful intermediary between the "money-grubbing" studios and the demanding audience, you can sometimes end up with a good story, or at least a story worth telling and exploring further.
The Wachowski Brothers are behind the sequels, and in their interviews they seem to have a lot of love for the material. I think that will go a long way towards making worthy sequels.
My favorite moment in the Matrix DVD interview with the Wachowski brothers is when you see Joel Silver and Laurence Fishburne talking about the film:
"The Matrix is about humanity, and about love, and hope, and what it means to be a person..."
Cut to the Wachowski brothers:
"The Matrix is about robots vs. kung fu."
I don't think Matrix was ever intended to be a particularly high-concept movie, and if people go to the sequels expecting to see the wheel reinvented a second time, I'm sure they'll be disappointed. If they go expecting robots vs. kung fu, then it'll be a worthy sequel.
My point here is not so much "keep your expectations low" as "don't try to make the franchise into something it's not." The original had a nice surprise that a few people didn't expect. I wouldn't go into a sequel expecting the world to get turned on its ear again.
Ugh. I shudder to think what the Cartoon Network will do to Bebop. If it gets people interested in purchasing the originals on DVD or VHS, that's a good thing, but still, it gives me pause. I watched Outlaw Star on Cartoon Network after buying the DVDs and they're like two completely different shows.
True, there is a massive contrast between ESB and TPM, but they're also very different movies telling very different kinds of stories.
TPM is essentially prologue. It's setting the stage for what will happen in the rest of the series. The atmosphere (one I think Lucas didn't do that good a job of portraying) is that of an idyllic Republic that's soon to fall apart. It makes no sense for such a movie to be dark, especially considering Anakin's just a kid -- and one has to portray his innocence for his descent into corruption to have any meaning whatsoever.
ESB, on the other hand, is the middle act of the classic trilogy. It's is the moment in the story when all seems lost, before the final victory of the good guys in ROTJ. So, of course it's going to be light on the cutesy-poo.
I like ESB a lot and wouldn't have it any other way. But to have all the movies resemble it wouldn't make any dramatic sense to me. There'd be no story arc of corruption and redemption to speak of. It'd just be corruption all the way around, and if I want to see that, I'll go watch Blade Runner again or something.
Of course, Episode III is the middle act of the whole series, and Lucas has said it will most likely be the darkest of all the movies, with the wholesale slaughter of the Jedi and the triumph of the Empire -- before the upswing of Episode IV. So you'll have that to look forward to, if that's your thing.
I was a big fan of Star Wars as a kid, because it was a science fiction movie with starships, lasers, and weird monsters. I still enjoy it for those reasons today.
Like many others, I was heavily influenced as a child by Star Wars, and Star Wars played a huge part, I think, in the shaping of my personality. To this day, I still enjoy movies with starships, lasers, and weird monsters. And I still enjoy Star Wars.
However, I never expected Episode I to magically return me to twelve years of age. I never expected it to erase my capacity for critical thought and open a world of childlike wonder in my head for one simple reason: I'm no longer a child. Neither did I expect the Messiah to come down and fellate me, as so many who were disappointed by Episode I seem to have expected.
So, while I wasn't all that crazy about Jar Jar, I had relatively few other complaints with the movie. It didn't blow me away, but then, I didn't really expect it to. Especially being an expository prequel such as it is. I feel its biggest weakness as a movie is that it's essentially all backstory. A computer-generated Gungan... not that big a deal.
To be honest, what's disenchanted me more than anything about Star Wars is all the Lucas-bashing and vitriol that seems to characterize the "fans".
I get tired of "Kill Jar Jar" humor that's neither clever nor funny. I get tired of seeing Lucas demonized and slandered by people who won't put their money where their mouth is and just refuse to see the movie they supposedly hate -- instead of demanding it be put on DVD immediately. I get tired of people pretending that someone's putting a gun to their head and forcing them to buy merchandise they don't want. I get tired of people attacking Lucas and his movies for not living up to their "mythical hype" when Lucas has said many times that it's just a Flash Gordon serial with a budget.
That, more than anything, has sapped my enjoyment of the Star Wars universe, far more than any annoying CGI character ever could. But I still enjoy the movies. I just wish others could do the same, or at least move on with their lives if they no longer find the movie enjoyable.
I saw that script, and read a good portion of it, but the source I read it from debunked it as being a "false" script, or at least a third-party script not really up for consideration by Spielberg or Lucas.
It was a decent script, but I fell victim to Star Wars sequel syndrome reading it... "It's good, but it's no (insert favorite movie of the series here)"
I know it goes against the present-day flow of portraying all Germans in WWII as inhuman jew-hating monsters and reconsidering the Japanese as sort-of-victims of WWII and of American bigotry, but the real story is not as black and white as movies, games, books and other popular media make it out to be.
Well, in my experience, people who choose to glean all their historical facts from books, movies and video games in the first place aren't going to be shamed or browbeaten into enlightenment.
The real issues may not be as black and white as portrayed in entertainment products, but the truth is, no one really cares. Even grognards who buy hardcore military strategy games mostly play them for the historical accuracy of army placement and battle tactics -- not so they can have their soldiers bayonet pregnant women or die of scurvy. Likewise, I don't think many people really wants an historically accurate game about Nazis, complete with death camps and so forth.
I have a degree in European history. I also killed a lot of pre-college hours playing Wolfenstein. Obviously there are few similarities between the real Nazis and the comic-book villains of the video game. If you play to the end of the original, Hitler is a ten-foot superman wielding double chainguns who can sustain multiple rocket hits. Obviously, if that had any roots in historical reality, we'd all be eating bratwurst now.
After I got out of college, I found I had one of two behavioral options before me:
1) Sigh and roll my eyes at the poor, unenlightened, unwashed buffoons that didn't realize that (insert book, movie, video game, or other entertainment product here) was offensive and devoid of real historical fact; why can't those ignorant sheep understand that is didn't happen this way? Oh the humanity, etc.
2) Sit back and enjoy the show.
I spent a lot of time pursuing the former, and it made me very dissatisfied. Since I've opted for the latter, I'm a lot happier.
This is not intended to invalidate your points, which are all good ones -- all I'm saying is that bludgeoning people with the historical inaccuracies or cultural hypocrisy of an entertainment product ("how can you have a German villain when Americans have done evil too?") is just going to send people into that most comfortable of defenses, which is: it's just a game, after all.
Well, if my digital cable company is monitoring my viewing habits right now, they're not doing a very good job of targeting ads towards me. "Dear user. As someone who watches a lot of the History and Discovery channels, we think you might like WWF Ultimate Flatulence Rumble XVIII!!! Only $19.95 on PPV!"
Amazon hasn't done much better. "We notice in the past year you've purchased The Seventh Seal, Rashomon and Magnolia. Might we suggest you'd also love American Pie: Unrated Edition!"
And these are the people who are supposed to home in on my every consumer weakness with Machiavellian efficiency? Big Brother, my ass!
I don't expect it to live up to the books, either. But I'm going in with that expectation, so as to cut down the potential for outrage.:) I am hoping that the adaptation won't be too loose, and that they will preserve at least a few of Tolkien's great lines -- but, given the state of movies today, if Frodo doesn't say "talk to the hand" or "don't go there," I'll count myself ahead of the game.
As for the Shining -- I loved the book, and I thought the movie was great, but they're two separate entities in my mind. I thought the movie was so different from the book that it might as well have been called something else. Still, it was light-years better than the much more faithful (but atrocious) TV movie version that came along later.
...but I'll tell you what I'm not looking forward to: Jon Katz's review of Lord of the Rings.
"In the wake of post-Columbine injustice, everybody but the Pinkertons are watching Lord of the Rings, a cyber-geek, cyber-thriller which will revolutionize open source. Blah blah blah sweeping generalization blah blah blah rhetorical grandstanding blah blah blah self-aggrandizing claptrap blah blah blah raging jackass..."
Frankly, I trust Peter Jackson to direct LotR more than I would trust Kubrick, Gilliam, Ridley Scott, or what have you. While they are/were all great directors, I think each of them would try to bring too much of themselves to the film's direction. (A good example of this is The Shining, which exudes Kubrick-ness but bears almost no resemblance to the book on which it is based.)
In every interview I've seen, Peter Jackson has shown a lot of respect, admiration, and outright love for the Lord of the Rings. He really seems to like his subject matter a lot, and that means more to me than any directing credentials.
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When the first movie came out, a friend of mine speculated that the Oracle was an AI or some sort of expert system, and not human at all.
If that's the case, it should be easy enough to give her a new "residual self-image," should they need to do so for story purposes.
It's too bad about Ms. Foster, though. I thought she was one of the best things about that movie. It was refreshing to know that the Matrix wasn't made up entirely of goons in suits and leather-club hairdressers in PVC.
Well, ultimately, the original was a cheap grab for box-office bucks, as are all movies. Moviemaking is a business, of which entertainment is a by-product.
However, if you can get a good writer or director that can act as a skillful intermediary between the "money-grubbing" studios and the demanding audience, you can sometimes end up with a good story, or at least a story worth telling and exploring further.
The Wachowski Brothers are behind the sequels, and in their interviews they seem to have a lot of love for the material. I think that will go a long way towards making worthy sequels.
My favorite moment in the Matrix DVD interview with the Wachowski brothers is when you see Joel Silver and Laurence Fishburne talking about the film:
"The Matrix is about humanity, and about love, and hope, and what it means to be a person..."
Cut to the Wachowski brothers:
"The Matrix is about robots vs. kung fu."
I don't think Matrix was ever intended to be a particularly high-concept movie, and if people go to the sequels expecting to see the wheel reinvented a second time, I'm sure they'll be disappointed. If they go expecting robots vs. kung fu, then it'll be a worthy sequel.
My point here is not so much "keep your expectations low" as "don't try to make the franchise into something it's not." The original had a nice surprise that a few people didn't expect. I wouldn't go into a sequel expecting the world to get turned on its ear again.
Anybody have a link I can try?
You can try this (gnome.org).
I'm not that guy, though, so I don't know if that's what he's talking about -- but it looks it.
Your post makes a lot of sense.
Unfortunately, network execs and sponsors don't have a lot of sense.
Ugh. I shudder to think what the Cartoon Network will do to Bebop. If it gets people interested in purchasing the originals on DVD or VHS, that's a good thing, but still, it gives me pause. I watched Outlaw Star on Cartoon Network after buying the DVDs and they're like two completely different shows.
...because when thrown, PDAs can be considered a deadly weapon.
And have you seen that stylus? You'll put your eye out, kid.
I can see why they're defunct. "Error 403?" Very hip, but kind of light on the content if you ask me. They should've hired a copy editor....
/. effect I'm always hearing about (but never see because I read the stories long after everyone else has moved on)?
Oh, wait, is this that
True, there is a massive contrast between ESB and TPM, but they're also very different movies telling very different kinds of stories.
TPM is essentially prologue. It's setting the stage for what will happen in the rest of the series. The atmosphere (one I think Lucas didn't do that good a job of portraying) is that of an idyllic Republic that's soon to fall apart. It makes no sense for such a movie to be dark, especially considering Anakin's just a kid -- and one has to portray his innocence for his descent into corruption to have any meaning whatsoever.
ESB, on the other hand, is the middle act of the classic trilogy. It's is the moment in the story when all seems lost, before the final victory of the good guys in ROTJ. So, of course it's going to be light on the cutesy-poo.
I like ESB a lot and wouldn't have it any other way. But to have all the movies resemble it wouldn't make any dramatic sense to me. There'd be no story arc of corruption and redemption to speak of. It'd just be corruption all the way around, and if I want to see that, I'll go watch Blade Runner again or something.
Of course, Episode III is the middle act of the whole series, and Lucas has said it will most likely be the darkest of all the movies, with the wholesale slaughter of the Jedi and the triumph of the Empire -- before the upswing of Episode IV. So you'll have that to look forward to, if that's your thing.
I was a big fan of Star Wars as a kid, because it was a science fiction movie with starships, lasers, and weird monsters. I still enjoy it for those reasons today.
Like many others, I was heavily influenced as a child by Star Wars, and Star Wars played a huge part, I think, in the shaping of my personality. To this day, I still enjoy movies with starships, lasers, and weird monsters. And I still enjoy Star Wars.
However, I never expected Episode I to magically return me to twelve years of age. I never expected it to erase my capacity for critical thought and open a world of childlike wonder in my head for one simple reason: I'm no longer a child. Neither did I expect the Messiah to come down and fellate me, as so many who were disappointed by Episode I seem to have expected.
So, while I wasn't all that crazy about Jar Jar, I had relatively few other complaints with the movie. It didn't blow me away, but then, I didn't really expect it to. Especially being an expository prequel such as it is. I feel its biggest weakness as a movie is that it's essentially all backstory. A computer-generated Gungan... not that big a deal.
To be honest, what's disenchanted me more than anything about Star Wars is all the Lucas-bashing and vitriol that seems to characterize the "fans".
I get tired of "Kill Jar Jar" humor that's neither clever nor funny. I get tired of seeing Lucas demonized and slandered by people who won't put their money where their mouth is and just refuse to see the movie they supposedly hate -- instead of demanding it be put on DVD immediately. I get tired of people pretending that someone's putting a gun to their head and forcing them to buy merchandise they don't want. I get tired of people attacking Lucas and his movies for not living up to their "mythical hype" when Lucas has said many times that it's just a Flash Gordon serial with a budget.
That, more than anything, has sapped my enjoyment of the Star Wars universe, far more than any annoying CGI character ever could. But I still enjoy the movies. I just wish others could do the same, or at least move on with their lives if they no longer find the movie enjoyable.
Why? To carry on the tradition of excellence and compelling gameplay fostered by Daikatana, which everyone now associates with Ion Storm?
If I were him, I'd want to get as far away from that name as possible.
I'm sure the RIAA isn't worried about plausible deniability one bit in that regard. Everyone will just blame "@#$%& Microsoft."
It was a decent script, but I fell victim to Star Wars sequel syndrome reading it... "It's good, but it's no (insert favorite movie of the series here)"
Okay. The new Indy Jones movie will star Freddie Prinze Jr. as Indiana and Matthew Lillard as Marcus Brodie. Happy now?
Well, in my experience, people who choose to glean all their historical facts from books, movies and video games in the first place aren't going to be shamed or browbeaten into enlightenment.
The real issues may not be as black and white as portrayed in entertainment products, but the truth is, no one really cares. Even grognards who buy hardcore military strategy games mostly play them for the historical accuracy of army placement and battle tactics -- not so they can have their soldiers bayonet pregnant women or die of scurvy. Likewise, I don't think many people really wants an historically accurate game about Nazis, complete with death camps and so forth.
I have a degree in European history. I also killed a lot of pre-college hours playing Wolfenstein. Obviously there are few similarities between the real Nazis and the comic-book villains of the video game. If you play to the end of the original, Hitler is a ten-foot superman wielding double chainguns who can sustain multiple rocket hits. Obviously, if that had any roots in historical reality, we'd all be eating bratwurst now.
After I got out of college, I found I had one of two behavioral options before me:
1) Sigh and roll my eyes at the poor, unenlightened, unwashed buffoons that didn't realize that (insert book, movie, video game, or other entertainment product here) was offensive and devoid of real historical fact; why can't those ignorant sheep understand that is didn't happen this way? Oh the humanity, etc.
2) Sit back and enjoy the show.
I spent a lot of time pursuing the former, and it made me very dissatisfied. Since I've opted for the latter, I'm a lot happier.
This is not intended to invalidate your points, which are all good ones -- all I'm saying is that bludgeoning people with the historical inaccuracies or cultural hypocrisy of an entertainment product ("how can you have a German villain when Americans have done evil too?") is just going to send people into that most comfortable of defenses, which is: it's just a game, after all.
Yeah, but Quake XV]|['s framerate will still be too damn slow.
I mean, I've only got a 56K dialup connection and I shudder to think how long all that gold is gonna take to move through the pipes.
I used to be a big fan of protein and DNA until they got big and sold out.
Matlock browser.
...for the reader on the go: "The sky is falling! The sky is falling! Bawk bawk bawk! CYBER-GEEKS!"
Well, if my digital cable company is monitoring my viewing habits right now, they're not doing a very good job of targeting ads towards me. "Dear user. As someone who watches a lot of the History and Discovery channels, we think you might like WWF Ultimate Flatulence Rumble XVIII!!! Only $19.95 on PPV!"
Amazon hasn't done much better. "We notice in the past year you've purchased The Seventh Seal, Rashomon and Magnolia. Might we suggest you'd also love American Pie: Unrated Edition!"
And these are the people who are supposed to home in on my every consumer weakness with Machiavellian efficiency? Big Brother, my ass!
Also in the news today: Bear Shits in Woods Pope Catholic Earth Goes Around Sun
I don't expect it to live up to the books, either. But I'm going in with that expectation, so as to cut down the potential for outrage. :) I am hoping that the adaptation won't be too loose, and that they will preserve at least a few of Tolkien's great lines -- but, given the state of movies today, if Frodo doesn't say "talk to the hand" or "don't go there," I'll count myself ahead of the game.
As for the Shining -- I loved the book, and I thought the movie was great, but they're two separate entities in my mind. I thought the movie was so different from the book that it might as well have been called something else. Still, it was light-years better than the much more faithful (but atrocious) TV movie version that came along later.
...but I'll tell you what I'm not looking forward to: Jon Katz's review of Lord of the Rings. "In the wake of post-Columbine injustice, everybody but the Pinkertons are watching Lord of the Rings, a cyber-geek, cyber-thriller which will revolutionize open source. Blah blah blah sweeping generalization blah blah blah rhetorical grandstanding blah blah blah self-aggrandizing claptrap blah blah blah raging jackass..."
I'll take The Man Himself speaking Elvish over Liv Tyler speaking Elvish any day :)
Frankly, I trust Peter Jackson to direct LotR more than I would trust Kubrick, Gilliam, Ridley Scott, or what have you. While they are/were all great directors, I think each of them would try to bring too much of themselves to the film's direction. (A good example of this is The Shining, which exudes Kubrick-ness but bears almost no resemblance to the book on which it is based.) In every interview I've seen, Peter Jackson has shown a lot of respect, admiration, and outright love for the Lord of the Rings. He really seems to like his subject matter a lot, and that means more to me than any directing credentials.