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[Space Wars] The Next Generation
SaraLuna
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
In 1977, a movie came out and it was pretty sweet. Then in the 80s, they made some sequels that were also pretty sweet.
Then eventually Carrie Fisher stopped doing drugs and George Lucas freebased her whole stash one afternoon and wrote the screenplay for Episode One. The rest is history.
So this is the thread for discussing everything Star Wars related:
-Good Movies
-Bad Movies
-OK Books/Comics
-Terrible Books/Comics
-Video Games
-Toys
-The completely unnecessary show they made to sell more of those toys.
-George Lucas, and his many flaws
-The upcoming war with our greatest Enemy, the Trekkies
and of course,
The Holiday Special
May the Force be with you.
SaraLuna on
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about 10 years ago, I got a bootleg on ebay and a bunch of my friends gathered to partake. We got about halfway through before turning it off (shortly after the boba fett cartoon)
It is every bit as horrible as people say.
Luke is in enough makeup to put on a drag show, Leia is obviously coked out of her mind, there is a wookie watching porn. There really aren't the words to describe it.
The PT sucks
The EU sucks (except for a few people here and there, but no one can agree on any of that)
Absolutely every-fucking-thing in the entire universe has backstory, explained somewhere in said horrible EU
Lucas sucks
Lucas can't write
Lucas hates everyone, and is out to get you and take your monies
Did I miss anything?
Lucas first wife was amazing and a talented woman.
Also Jar Jar sucks.
Ewoks too.
BTW did anyone mention that some guy was so upset over the reviews of the prequels by RLM that he made a 108 page counter arguement about it, seriously.
This is why the term fanboy came to be.
I sat through the whole thing. Just to prove I could.
ELM I really want a blu-ray of the original, but there's always the chance that he's not lying when he says they were destroyed.
Hmm. I don't really know much about film, I'm assuming those would be pretty high quality digitizations? I'd hope so.
Man what a jerk. Losing/taping over/whatevering the originals. Those were clearly the best.
If you haven't seen it, then here it is. Complete with MST3K style commentary overlaid over top of it.
http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/videolinks/thatguywiththeglasses/nostalgia-critic/15087-swchr
Remember folks. This is the movie that George Lucas was ashamed of.
That video is truly a must see. The imagination cannot comprehend how bad the thing is. The video at least makes up for it by actually being funny.
A Wookie that's like the equivalent of 80 years old!
A Wookie that's doing it in front of his kids!
And his family!
And Art Carney!
They weren't totally awful.
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
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I still have my original VHS copies if Lucas wants to borrow them. But some part of me feels that this is all a ploy, like he still has those tapes but he's waiting another 10 years before saying "surprise, I have them!".
Present wallets!
Everyone wants to buy them.
If the idea is that he's in it for the money, what the hell?
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
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I've started reading the guy's review of RLM, and while I do have to say he does present interesting points, they don't necessarily make the prequels good movies just because he found holes in RLM's reviews. Couscous is right, his taking the negative reviews as an insult is seeping too much into his writting and corrupting a view that should be unbaised. Something he's claiming RLM is guilty of.
But I'm only like 1/4th of the way through his review.
Eh, the prequel movies didn't exist except as an interesting visual intermission between the books that came out in the EU for me. There was some great character development throughout that really makes the movies make more sense, even beyond their stupidifying writing.
Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace
Rogue Planet by Greg Bear
Outbound Flight by Timothy Zahn
The Approaching Storm by Alan Dean Foster
Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones
Shatterpoint by Matthew Stover
The Cestus Deception by Steven Barnes
Jedi Trial by Dan Cragg and David Sherman
Star Wars: The Clone Wars
Yoda - Dark Rendezvous by Sean Stewart
Labyrinth of Evil by James Luceno
If you are this person, please kill yourself right now.
Our finest scholars are already reviewing the review of the review.
Hope there's a couple of people willing to take it in chunks.
There's no way to get through it alone, and I haven't the slightest interest in trying. Someone using that much time and energy to defend the PT needs a stint in some kind of re-education camp.
but yeah we're never getting the original stuff on blu. a damn shame.
One of the weirdest positive aspects of being my age is knowing that at some point I'll probably live to see what gets brought out to market from "The Lucas Estate."
I was all set to thouroughly analyze and dissect Jim Raynor's whole rebuttal of RLM's Phantom Menace review, but I realized that no one would care to read my review any more than they care to read his. That, and a review of the review of the review is just a downright retarded concept. But I wrote this little bit anyway so bear with me. Part of why I gravitate so much toward the RLM reviews is because they're entertaining, arguably more so than I found the actual prequels to be (and that is sad George Lucas). Not only do they have entertainment value, I gravitate tooward a lot of the points the Plinkett character makes because they seem to best characterize the way most of us felt when we saw the prequals, but didn't have the ability to put our dissapointment and rage into coherant words.
Now this Raynor fellow does make good points, RLM did have bias in making these reviews and the reviews were overtly critical at times about how the Phantom Menace portrayed its characters and story-line. But the overall point wasn't that the characters and story did have more to them than RLM let on, but that they were so bland and uninteresting I didn't really care about the characters and just wanted to skip to the fight scenes, the only parts that I actually found to be entertaining. The basic point of RLM was apperently lost on this guy and he didn't address the underlying issue that most people had with these prequels.
The basic failure of the Prequel Trilogy was that it failed to connect with the audience. It didn't make me care about the Jedi, didn't make me care about the Republic and its struggle, and worst of all it didn't make me care about Darth fucking Vader, the coolest bad guy of all time.
All that being said, why make a review of a review? Is the Phantom Menace and Jar Jar Binks so worthy of your time you would fight to the death to preserve its honor?
I think you'd be sadly surprised.
And anyway, it's illegitimate to say Plinkett (or anyone) had an "agenda" in taking apart the prequel films. The perceived "agenda" is just a logical endpoint of reviewing an awful source. That's not even the definition of "agenda."
Basically Raynor is saying, "you're saying these negative things about TPM because you didn't like it, ergo you are biased against it."
However, the bias on Plinkett's part is clearly derived from his post-viewing position. I'm quite sure Plinkett didn't pony up for his ticket and say to himself, "Gee, I hope this is one of the worst movies ever made so I can eviscerate it on the internet a decade from now." But that's the only context where you can accuse Plinkett of "bias" or "agenda."
Seeing a product and using critical reasoning to explain WHY it's a massive failure is not, nor has it been, nor can it be, considered bias. You are automatically biased against things you don't like, that's just how reasoning works.
Raynor is an idiot of the highest magnitude.
Skip to the second minute?
His schtick is grating, but he's as good at cinematic theory and deconstruction as any film school professor.
Man, I really want a Trailtracker now. Who doesn't want to draw on paper and have a bulky toy van follow the line?
The holiday special's not so bad if you skip the wookie sitcom. You get to see overly tan Mark Hamill (actually, everyone seems overly tanned), wookiees watching porn, Harvey Korman apparently dressed up in a purple dress with four arms cooking broth, stormtroopers shaking down Chewbacca's family like Nazis (...along with stormtroopers strong enough to throw adult wookiees around), and a ridiculous cartoon featuring Boba Fett.
And an uncomfortably large number of musical interludes.
I watched the NC review of the Holiday Special a while back and I know for certain that I'd never make through the actual Holiday Special with my sanity unscathed.
He does.
I lurk at the forum this guy post at and a few days back read a thread in which he was going off against RLM basically insulting anyone that liked the reviews and calling them sheep etc. He was acting as if the three reviews were the largest form of insult out there, he was taking it very personal. Trying to talk to him is like talking to a brick wall. Then he said he had written at the time I think it was 90 page plus counter to it, a lot of people laughed at that, I mean surely no one had done such a thing right? I mean so many pages dedicated to a review, one that isn't entirely serious at that? What kind of person would do that.
Star Wars is serious business and this guy wanted blood.
But the rest of the reviews are really well done, IMO. As someone said upthread, the Plinkett reviews put into words all of the various things that bugged me about the PT. Most of us never bothered to sit down and flesh out all the things that were wrong with the trilogy, we just knew it didn't work.
Rigorous Scholarship
He's spewing vitriol and it completely nullifies any good points he has with pointless insults.
Have you ever slept on a huge pile of money?
It's comfortable as hell, but there's a problem.
After a while, the money nest gets packed down and crumpled and is less comfortable. The only way to resolve this is to add additional money. And no, you can't just fluff up the existing money pile, as it's compacted around your diseased bodily excretions.
So, this is why Lucas is delaying the re-re-release of the original version of the OT. He has to carefully husband his reserves of nerd-hunger to translate it into the largest and longest lasting income source that he can. Otherwise he's left sleeping on a crumpled up pile of his own filth coated money, instead of nestled comfortably in a warm nest of crisp, clean 20's glistening with the tears of a million nerds.
You're not alone. My ideal way to watch RLM would be to read a transcript of it (since I can probably remember the scenes he's speaking of), after the superflous stuff about pizza and serial murder were cut out.
Case in point: camera angles. in my first term at film school, I was expected to understand such concepts as the line of tension and how that would determine what the master, medium, insert, over the shoulder and close up shots would be. Further, it was expected that as a first term film student I would be able to use ALL of these shots in a scene with a single camera. George though makes use of as few shots as possible in mostly uninspired, static scenes. The only three reasons you would have such static shots are 1: your director of photography hired a bunch of idiots who don't know how to adjust the camera to compensate for movement, 2: your actors don't know how to walk and talk, 3: you didn't want to distract the folks from your environment (which would be ok in one or two scenes, but this is pretty much all of them.)
Frankly, Plinkett knocks it out of the park nine times out of ten.
I've watched all three RLM reviews of the prequels, and there is a great moment in the third that has to do with the "stupid serial killer" parts...
Right after he has dissected the fall of Anakin, it cuts to a part where a hooker that he kidnapped in the second review (and escaped) comes back for "revenge," and the Emperor comes out of nowhere and urges her to find Plinkett and kill him.....and you realize that this completely nonsensical moment in a dumb story you don't care about and want to skip during the review is actually a better "fall" moment than in the prequels.
All I could think was: "Well played, sir, well played."
The fact that they can seemingly make a half-assed attempt at it and do it better, keeping in mind most of the critiques of the PT, than Lucas says something.