George Lucas is retiring from blockbusters.

Speaking of Spanish Soaps, we had to watch El Destinos in college for spanish class.

I seem to be in the minority here but I liked aspects of the prequels. There are parts where I wish he would have listened to his younger self and remembered that you need to tell a story. I could have done without Jar Jar and Watto though.

Black Barney wrote: I prefer ANY of the OT lightsabre duels to ANY of Yoda's lightsaber seizures. Not fun to watch and just downright boring and terrible.

Darth Maul is the only really impressive saber-user cuz the guy that plays him is good and looks natural moving around with one.

The OT saber fights feel very real, raw and viseral. They feel clumsy which is great because Luke doesn't know what he's doing and Vader hasn't used his saber for anything except cutting cheese for the last little while. He hasn't had any youngling padawans to carve up and has grown lethargic. You can't help but think that Palpatine in Return of the Jedi while watching Vader fight his son and looking all slow is thinking to himself, "dang, I need a new sith. This is nothing like my first wife, Darth maul"

For those of us that are a little older, try to remember how BAD ASS Obi-Wan seemed when he had to pull out his saber in the cantina to settle everyone the fock down. It was like the ultimate trump card. I don't want to have to use this thing but you give me no choice. It's SOOOOO cool.

The prequels RUIN this magic because the jedi are honest-to-God using the sabers every second they can. From the padawans swinging them around with the blast shields on inches from each other's heads to the infamous early scene where Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon pull out their sabers on the Trade Federation blockade ship because THEY HEARD A NOISE. It's SO STUPID

Well said.

Disgustipater wrote:

JonJacob wrote: Not all fights have to look like choreographed dances.

The bad thing about learning how to fence (or any kind of fighting I suppose) is that every single fight in a movie, with swords or fists, just looks horribly choreographed. There are so many ignored blatant openings and opportunities for the killing blow that it drives me insane.

It's probably true about absolutely everything. I lost count of the number of times I facepalmed when computers, programming, hacking, or anything like that is depcited in a movie or TV show. According to Hollywood, a hacker is someone who can type frantically on a keyboard, while on the screen there's no feedback other than an unrecognizable, rotating 3D object. Also, if your computer is attacked by a virus, it either causes your GUI disappear one random pixel a time (until an animated skull appears and you hear a shittily digitized laughter), or millions of windows pop up on your screen. And the only way you can deal with it is if you type really fast on you keyboard. Of course, sometimes it's not enough, in that case your friend also has to start typing on the same keyboard, simultaneously. It makes the virus go away twice as fast.

JonJacob wrote:
Not all fights have to look like choreographed dances.

The bad thing about learning how to fence (or any kind of fighting I suppose) is that every single fight in a movie, with swords or fists, just looks horribly choreographed. There are so many ignored blatant openings and opportunities for the killing blow that it drives me insane.


It's probably true about absolutely everything. I lost count of the number of times I facepalmed when computers, programming, hacking, or anything like that is depcited in a movie or TV show. According to Hollywood, a hacker is someone who can type frantically on a keyboard, while on the screen there's no feedback other than an unrecognizable, rotating 3D object. Also, if your computer is attacked by a virus, it either causes your GUI disappear one random pixel a time (until an animated skull appears and you hear a shittily digitized laughter), or millions of windows pop up on your screen. And the only way you can deal with it is if you type really fast on you keyboard. Of course, sometimes it's not enough, in that case your friend also has to start typing on the same keyboard, simultaneously. It makes the virus go away twice as fast.

Is this the same way I feel when I see somebody pull some wires down beneath the dash of a car, use the wrapper from a stick of gum, and drive the car away?

OMG makes me want to smash the screen. All the other bullshit aside..how the fuck do they turn the steering wheel as every car made from about 1968 on up has a locking steering column?

I know I'm not the first to say it, but it bears repeating: the OT was great precisely because Lucas didn't have a free pass to do anything he liked.

Did you see the first couple of versions of the screenplay of Star Wars (later renamed to Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope)? They are disastrous. The man had some great ideas and a shitload of bad ones, and we should be thankful to the good folks at 20th Century Fox, that they kept tossing it back to Lucas, until he came up with a reasonably good story (in which, as I heard, he got a lot of help from his then-wife). Then, he had almost nothing to do with The Empire Strikes Back, other than gaving a story idea to Lawrence Kasdan and Leigh Brackett, and letting them and Irvin Kershner to do their job. He tried to control Return of the Jedi with a firmer hand: it gave us the Ewoks. Not that they are even tenth as annoying as Jar-Jar: they are cute and funny, but don't try to be cute and funny 100% of the time.

I wish someone told him "keep it simple, stupid", after reading the script of The Phantom Menace, instead of apparently accepting the very first draft. That would have save us from this boring, convoluted and eventually nonsensical plot of intergalactic trade agreements and blockades. It also didn't help, that he now had an almost infinite amount of money + unlimited access to CGI, so he could just go, and put millions of unnecessary moving objects in every single frame of the prequels.

Also, someone should have helped him with the dialogs. Lucas' inability to write good and believable dialogs is so legendary, it made Harrison Ford say to him: "George, you can type this shit, but you sure as hell can't say it". Remember one of the best dialogs in Empire (Leia: "I love you.", Han: "I know.")? That was Harrison Ford's improvisation. I'm pretty sure Lucas didn't allow anyone improvise anything in the prequels. I refuse to believe that the actors didn't feel that their lines are completely devoid of emotion and that their characters don't have any chemistry whatsoever.

Shit, I got carried away by my nerd-rage, sorry for the long rant.

repoman wrote: Is this the same way I feel when I see somebody pull some wires down beneath the dash of a car, use the wrapper from a stick of gum, and drive the car away?

OMG makes me want to smash the screen. All the other bullshit aside..how the fuck do they turn the steering wheel as every car made from about 1968 on up has a locking steering column?

LOL. Yes, probably. I didn't know that, so I totally believe this shit every time I see it in a movie. Then again, all I know about cars I learned from the Pixar movie with the same title.

Egg Shen wrote: Its not about him getting stale...its more about him trying to completely change his accomplishments. The fact that he changed his movies and then made a big fuss to not let the originals be seen is what pisses me off.

I hear you Egg, but consider this:

The fact that Star Wars is such a sacred cow that his later changes provoke this kind of visceral reaction shows you how deeply his original creation is embedded in pop culture. And that says something about him as an artist.

No amount of revisionist history is going to convince me he's the Mini fucking Vanilli of Star Wars. Here's the thing as an artist he has the right to do whatever the fuck he wants with his shit. Even if he wrecks it. I recently read an interesting Twitter exchange between sci-fi author Neil Gaiman and a fan. And the fan was looking for support about a complaint he had about George RR Martin. Seems the guy had invested a good deal of time and years of his life in faithfully following Martin's Song of Fire and Ice (as have I).

But now with George over 60, the guy was despairing he would ever finish the series. He tweeted Gaiman that the last book, A Dance with Dragons, took Martin six years to write and didn't the author have a duty to finish this shit in a timely fashion. Moreover, was there any way of legally applying pressure on Martin for all the time he'd invested in his books as a reader?

Gaiman wrote, that Martin doesn't owe the guy shit. That there is no contract between an artist and his audience. The only contract is whether they show up for the stuff he's putting out there right now. That's it.

So George doesn't owe you ungrateful fuckers anything. The fact is Star Wars wouldn't exist without him and without him you wouldn't have anything to bitch about. One of the things that's wrong with us today is we don't respect anything anymore. That's why everything's going sideways. So I may not like his later stuff, I may think he sold his soul and that he put on too much weight, fat fucker.

But I'm still going to give him his due as the creator of a magnificent and for its time groundbreaking tale that decades later we're still talking about.

i think you're wrong, Mike. I think Lucas intentionally has destroyed art in an effort to 'enhance' it according to his tastes. probably to fix old disagreements he had with people back then (who were obviously right). Right now the awesomeness of Star Wars is a MEMORY in my head. i don't have any of the originals anymore, I only have redone versions which I hate. This is Lucas' fault. He gaveth and taketh away (that's scripture)

This is an argument I don't get into much, but I like the prequels. I could list a lot of reasons why, but most of them boil down the fact that as a late-comer to Star Wars, they were the trilogy that is "mine," for better or worse. The single worst aspect is the dreadful love story in 2 and 3. Jar-Jar is bad, but he's not a central aspect of the movie (though Lucas seemed to be convinced he should be.)

Black Barney wrote: He gaveth and taketh away (that's scripture)

LOL...Amen Brutha! But that's my point. As the artist he has the right to do that. If you don't like it, don't watch it. I guess I'm old enough to have watched the original when it premiered in movie theatres in 1977 so I viscerally recall just how ground breaking it was.

And being a life long sci-fi fan it was like: thank you, thank you, thank you...somebody finally gets me and made a movie about the kinds of worlds that were in my books. And did it with effects I'd never seen in a move before. Your guys' problem is you don't know or remember THAT guy. But I do. And it's just too easy today to destroy people's accomplishments or pretend they didn't happen. We're living in a culture of destruction, but it's the builders that create the future. So yeah I'm gonna give him his due for at least that.

It true that Lucas doesn't owe us shit. But we don't owe him shit either and in a culture where people can get as rich and powerful as Lucas has, simply by re-writing fairy tales (with a lot of un-recognized help), and then use that power to remove others from the creative process until it's essentially just him, we have a responsibility as a culture, as a critical people to demonstrate how wrong headed and arrogant that is. We have a responsibility to be very critical of those changes, to warn others off that same behavior.

wice wrote: It also didn't help, that he now had an almost infinite amount of money + unlimited access to CGI, so he could just go, and put millions of unnecessary moving objects in every single frame of the prequels.

Something I read a while back sticks in my mind. Lucas was visiting Martin Scorsese on the set of GANGS OF NEW YORK when it was being filed outside Rome. Scorsese of course is old school, and the entire Five Points neighborhood was constructed. Lucas said "Sets like that can be done with computers now.”

Ewan MacGregor was not fond of the vast majority of his acting being done in front of green screens.

JonJacob wrote: It true that Lucas doesn't owe us shit. But we don't owe him shit either and in a culture where people can get as rich and powerful as Lucas has, simply by re-writing fairy tales (with a lot of un-recognized help), and then use that power to remove others from the creative process until it's essentially just him, we have a responsibility as a culture, as a critical people to demonstrate how wrong headed and arrogant that is. We have a responsibility to be very critical of those changes, to warn others off that same behavior.

Spoken with true head lopping fervor. You're right of course, but so am I.

Empire Strikes back was awesome. I'm convinced Lucas might have been locked in a cupboard while the other guys put together that. I'd be quite happy to get rid of 1 and 3 just to keep Empire and strike Lucas from my memory like he never existed. I realise that Jedi had a great ending, but fatneck even decided to fuck that up. You're right that he doesn't owe us shit, but by the same token it works both ways, we don't owe him shit. Why should we respect him, when his actions clearly show fuck all respect for the fans that helped make him a name, all he needed to do was put cleaned up versions of the originals on DVD and Blu Ray, and everyone would have been happy.