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Keith4832's Replies
Not deference just honesty.
You can't say "the fans love the movie" when you really mean that the kids and mum fans are wholesale loving the movie. They are fans but they are not the entire population of fans.
It's a cheap commercial PR tactic to generalise in order to boost perceptions of success (and displace criticism). They should stick to the facts.
Well, I'm appreciative of both Star Wars and Star trek and I try to be as objective as possible. I'm definitely not a slobbering fan. Inventing new editions to an original story may lessen the impact of the former one way or another and frequently because profits matter more to studios than anything else, so I'm sceptical of the new.
Looking at it from the in-narrative perspective, it might be prohibitively costly to do that whilst being effective in the short term. Where would they get new ships to travel between systems and engage in the remaining conventional fighting?
About 80 percent of the cast (and thus military forces depicted on screen) would be male so the probability is higher that men will be killed. Yeah, I do recall female characters being killed early in the movie - the Asian looking bomber pilot, one of the fighter pilots (of an A-Wing?) and Laura Dern's character.
Except Luke Skywalker is still a hero. Why can't a hero be fallible, experience fear, anger, regret, etc? Luke is someone who takes his responsibilities very seriously and was caught unawares by the influence of Snoke who was creaping about in the shadows like a vampire. In Ben Solo he saw something he had never seen before and could not handle or confront at the time. He fled.
His appearance and actions on Crait was his best effort to make a stand and send a message to his former pupil (Kylo) and help make good the escape of the Resistance team. Kylo will not easily forget the confrontation or Luke's words - "I will always be there".
To reflect this reality then Disney should be candid about their target audience and stop pretending that fans are one indivisible amorphous mass of people.
Yeah, the new movies cannot hope to be fully comparable to the original trilogy of films. However, in my view this is limited to only a few areas:
- As you mentioned, craftmanship: Technicians will not spend nearly as much time on "real effects" and models as they did in the period around 1980. They are not compelled to be inventive when CGI can fill in or emulate a number of things.
- The originals had access to actors of the traditional stage tradition: Alec Guinness, Peter Cushing, James Earl Jones and maybe a few others. Whilst it's true a few theatre actors appear in TLJ they are not necessarily of the calibre of those men, at least in the sense of lending their characters a stillness and measured intensity whilst depicting people of a bygone age as they might see themselves. If Jedi were an historical reality from the ancient world or from the period of Nineteenth Century gentry what would you expect? Not people of a modern, abbreviated sensibility.
- There will not be an original creative mind involved again - every movie since the originals riff off them as templates ready made for production with some tweaks here and there. George Lucas was a serious inventor and intellectual.
That said, I think the new films are well made. They sometimes suffer from feeling a bit detached whereas in the original films you felt a visceral sense that when a character was in jeopardy they definitely were in danger.
This is exactly what happened at the meeting. ;) Why bother with plot and story development when you can insert tidbits, baits and enticements? :P ;)
Still was a cool movie, though. :)
It's a video still photo being displayed for about 20 seconds.
I saw the video of the press conference which the still is taken from and Mark most definitely looked out of sorts. Didn't smile much or laugh (at least at nothing Rian had to say) and didn't seem to look at him.
Some of the humour didn't work.
I loved the Achoo stuff. :D
Four times...:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcZvkIB-mGo
Won't that kid turn up to Rey's inevitable training temple in a few years - wasn't that a potential initimation behind him celebrating the Resistance victory on Crait and starring at the stars in the night sky?
That's pretty intense. We can blame the aggressive marketing strategy of the SW commercial arm to some extent for this sort of delusional bahaviour. I agree, the only joy someone can have in something is if they feel interested and emotionally engaged in it. You can't command or force enjoyment in someone. Instead, why not be happy with your own enthusiasm and the fact you can share this with those who can appreciate it like you do.
No problem. :)
(Continued):
As they ran out of time for approval, Kurtz says that he and Lucas made a desperate back-of-the-envelope calculation: Any movie with that title would make as much as $8 million in ticket sales to science-fiction fans—if the filmmakers were lucky, maybe $12 million.
That was enough to convince Fox to throw that much at the movie. But of course, the full size of the business empire built around Star Wars dwarfed Lucas’s 1975 imaginings. Eventually, it even dwarfed the profit Fox made from Lucas and Kurtz’s movie."
- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2016/05/04/look-at-the-size-of-that-thing-how-star-wars-makes-its-billions/
"Outsiders have always underestimated the longevity and appeal of Lucas’s galaxy far, far away. After the first movie became a cultural phenomenon, when toy companies were selling 24 million Star Wars action figures a year, Lucasfilm still struggled to sell merchandising rights for the sequel, The Empire Strikes Back (1980). The original movie was seen as a fluke. Then in 1983, after Return of the Jedi seemed to wrap up the series, toy sellers told Lucasfilm executives that “Star Wars is dead,” preferring to stock action figures from G.I. Joe and “Masters of the Universe."
- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2016/05/04/look-at-the-size-of-that-thing-how-star-wars-makes-its-billions/
I think Lucas wanted the film to succeed both as a story and as a pop culture activity. As you say there was a lag as to the financial potential of the films, but Lucas was actually thinking about this before anyone in 1975. Before the first movie came out in 1977 (before really production started on that movie) George Lucas foresaw the possibility of making money from toy and other paraphenalia in view of a predicted doubtful profitability of ticket sales from the movie screenings. The results though exceded expectations, but apparently overall it was a slow process to convince industry that Star Wars was here to stay.
"Lucas gained control of licensing and merchandising rights before "A New Hope" was even released. This smart move ultimately turned him into one of the most successful people in the entertainment industry.
This is the path that George Lucas took that turned him into a billionaire.
[...]
Convinced the film would be a flop, Fox let Lucas pass up an additional $500,000 in directing fees in return for keeping licensing and merchandising rights for himself. This was great for Lucas, but terrible for Fox."
- http://www.businessinsider.com/how-star-wars-made-george-lucas-a-billionaire-2015-12/?r=AU&IR=T/#a-new-hope-was-released-on-may-25-1977-it-shattered-all-expectations-with-a-gross-of-7754-million-worldwide-but-it-wasnt-this-number-that-really-made-george-lucas-rich-6
"Nineteen seventy-five is now a long time ago, some 40 years before millions of us teared up at the sight of an old man in the Miillennium Falcon, before anyone had heard of a holiday called “May the Fourth be with you.” But that’s the year when a young director named George Lucas and his producer, Gary Kurtz, were trying to convince their skeptical studio, 20th Century Fox, to approve a modest budget for their next movie, then called “The Star Wars.”
(Continued.)
Okay, I think I have it now. She is Amanda Lawrence and plays Commander D'Acy.
An interesting interview with Her: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zss9QTT-qig
No standard? Probably. Would it be because everyone is different, has different strengths and weaknesses? The mental side is probably like Zen, where the objective is to clear your mind of illusory thinking and fears that have no basis.
Answer 1: We'll find out in Episode 9.
Answer 2: She is an spiritual avatar from the higher Force World living in human form in order to fix the imbalance in the galaxy. To be accepted and learn the ways of mortals in order to best guide them, she incarnated in a human form, forgot her origins and has grown up knowing only the life of her chosen human form. Therefore she has complete Jedi training and acquaintance with Force but her mind needed to awaken to remember her mission and identity. Working with Luke increased her awareness of her role but she hasn't fully awakened yet.
All Jedi before her didn't have the capacity to correct the imbalance between Light and Dark as developing students of the Force, so the Jedi spiritual group sent her as a potent, unshakeable personality to confront the Dark or the Sith decisively.