Oh, There'll Be Revenge, Alice

[filkertom]

I have to spend a lot of time recording over the next couple of days. 24HCD2 is almost completely arranged, and I think I really will have a CD-R for sale at MarCon. Thus, I cannot devote the time I would like to devote to a certain subject. For now, I will say this.

George Lucas made my girlfriend cry.

For this, and for the crimes of this lousy, pathetic, hilariously stupid movie, I owe Lucas a smack in the belly with a wet fish.

Fuckin' billionaire and he can't buy someone who'll tell him, "Uh, George, that's really dumb."

Comments

[nightface.livejournal.com]

There was a nice shot at the end... and a couple in the middle.

Now if only someone had known how to write dialogue and Hayden could even vaguely, sort of act.

This I say, having just seen it a second time. Star Wars I saw well into the triple digits of times. This - not so much.

[the-misha.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I was beginning to feel like a lone voice of sanity in a sea of "hey, it wasn't that bad", and my cries of "what movie were you watching?" were going unheeded. (My review of Sith is here (http://www.livejournal.com/users/the_misha/276759.html).)

[kitsana-d.livejournal.com]

Thank you for showing me I wasn't the only one who HATED Hayden's acting and Lucas's hack-job writing....
And Vader yelling "NOOOOO!!!ONE!!" all angsty damn near made me cry...with laughter! 'Twas just so wrong...

What we did ...

[joshbrown.livejournal.com]

... was to yell along with him. "KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!"

Re: What we did ...

[kitsana-d.livejournal.com]

::applauds and wipes tear from eye:: very nice, very very nice

[aiela.livejournal.com]

If they had kept all the damn love scenes out, it would have been a fine, fine movie.

I will admit, however, to being a girl, and having cried through most of the last half of the movie, starting with Windu's death scene and Anakin's fall. Cried and cried and cried like a baby.

[partiallyclips.livejournal.com]

Yes. The whole thing just hurt me. I am glad it's over. Such a remarkable work ruined.

I did enjoy the political subtext, though. That "freedom dying with thunderous applause" line may prove the most prophetic in Hollywood history. Hope not.

And of course, all of ILM's work was worth the ticket price. Even when sh!t is blowing up for no fathomable reason, it sure does blow up purty.

But the way this supposedly explains everything? Obiwan is going to go from looking 30 to looking 75 in the 17 years it takes Luke to grow up? He must be hitting the Mos Eisley Cantina pretty hard in those years. And who could blame him?

So glad I saw H2G2 the same day. Took the sting out of this one.

It wasn't that bad

[skipjim.livejournal.com]

You know...

You'd that that by now Lucas & the Star Trek people would realize that they could come up with a far better film if they'd just sit down with a random group of fans before making a movie, show them a script, and say "Ok, what parts of the plot suck?" And we could answer:

IT's the #@$@#$ future man, don't they have prenatal care?????????
or
Why would she just give up and die?? Living well is the best revenge!
or
Good script, just cut out any scenes with Anakin and Padme and you've got a great flik here.
or
Get rid of the scream at the end it proves he's still slightly human, just have him shrug.
or
Well you get the idea.

On the other hand even with a lot of the complaints I had with the plot it was still a good movie. The whole thing with the younglings disturbed me to no end. I'd be willing to bet that most of the people in the audience got the chills when Vader took his first "real" breaths.

The lightsaber duels ruled. Give me a movie with two hours of light saber battles and I'd be a happy man.

Re: It wasn't that bad

[hitchkitty.livejournal.com]

IT's the #@$@#$ future man, don't they have prenatal care?????????

Point of order: It's not the future. It's "a long time ago". That having been said:

It's a #@$#@$ different culture, man. Are they not allowed to have different mores about wanting to know everything about children ahead of time?

Why would she just give up and die?? Living well is the best revenge!

You seem to be under the impression that she WANTED revenge. She wanted Anakin back. She wanted the man she loved back. And she knew she would never see him again.

Good script, just cut out any scenes with Anakin and Padme and you've got a great flik here.

Padme was Anakin's means-justifying end. What would you propose in her place?

Get rid of the scream at the end it proves he's still slightly human, just have him shrug.

Right. Because if he were at all human, there might be just the tiniest chance of some sort of redemption, say, twenty years down the road.

Re: It wasn't that bad

[skipjim.livejournal.com]

Yes yes...you caught me venting.

The problem I think we're all having was that we all really wanted to love this film. We wanted to love it in such a way to make The Lord of the Rings trilogy feel like a summer fling.

And Lucas in many ways failed us. He sold us the dream back in '77 and he didn't live up to what could have been. Maybe he'll correct some things in the director's cut in a few years.

But lets face it we're at the fringe of the audience. We'll give him our $7.00 no matter what. We'll buy the DVD next year when it comes out. We'll rant and rave about how disapointed we were in it, then we'll buy the Special Edition when it comes out in two years.

Now onto my rants...

It seems to me that Padme was more of a way to provide Luke and Leia for episode IV. I guess I just didn't feel the love between them as real. Anakin fell to the dark side, not because he was inherently evil but because he doubted his own ability to protect the ones he loved (shadows of Luke's decision to go to Cloud City?). In some way Palapatine wasn't lying when he told Darth Vader that Padme had died because of his actions. She didn't die due to a light saber wound but she did die because of what he did. How could you love someone who kills younglings....(possibly the most disturbing scene in the whole movie for me).

Orson Scott Card's review of ROTS

[skipjim.livejournal.com]

http://www.hatrack.com/revengeofthesith.shtml

Worth reading...

Re: Orson Scott Card's review of ROTS

[partiallyclips.livejournal.com]

The irony of this kills me, as Orson Scott Card is literary science fiction's best answer to George Lucas. OSC is right about Lucas in this review, of course. But as he systematically dismantles his greatest work, Ender's Game, with every worse revisionist retelling, he's more guilty of most of these accusations he's flinging even than Lucas is.

That movie script for Ender's Game he's posted parts of is an atrocity. And talk about turning a great villain like Darth Vader into a whining, snivelling, self-pitying brat...what about what Card did to Peter Wiggin in the Shadow series? He took this ruthless psychopathic master manipulator and made him a depressed little baby whose mommy had to guide him along.

I feel deeply betrayed by what these two did as crotchety old men to the great gifts they gave to science fiction when they were young and had something to prove.

Re: Orson Scott Card's review of ROTS

[skipjim.livejournal.com]

I fear that Enders Game will turn into Starship Troopers. A fabulous book ruined by a terrible movie. I bet there's a list in that somewhere...

1). Vampire$ - John Carpenter should be shot many times, starting in the foot, for what he did to this book.
2). Ender's Game - Maybe?
3). Starship Troopers - Maybe the book wasn't a literary masterpiece but where was the armor????????????????????????????

Anybody else got a suggestion?

[trdsf.livejournal.com]

What I want to know is this:

Most people I know consider SW1 and 2 to be failures, either in part or in whole, and most of those saw the seeds of those cinematic failures as early as Return of the Jedi (as ever, I pin the moment of the Fall from Grace to the first frame to clearly show an Ewok).

Condemnation of Lucas' meddling with the DVD version of 'A New Hope' (and of 'THX-1138', a much greater cinematic crime, since that was the better movie in my view) is all but unanimous and roundly deserved.

Lucas made three astounding movies in a six-year stretch: 1971's THX-1138, 1973's American Graffiti, and of course, Star Wars itself, and then laid down the director's mantle for twenty years, producing and exec-producing what can only be called a mixed bag. Sure, there was Last Crusade and Tucker in that time, but there was also Howard the Duck and Captain EO (the last of which he also wrote).

So why has the interest (or at least the hype) gone up with each movie? Is it being driven by the money on Hollywood's side, or does hope really spring that eternal in the fannish breast?

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

I suspect the latter myself, as evidenced by my own reactions and the reactions of my friends both here and in Real Space. Those of us who love the OT love it so much, and we wanted the back story of Darth Vader to set it up so well, that we just kept hoping.

The problem is, the original crawl letters, "It is a time of civil war....", set up SWE4 better than these three entire frickin' movies.

[partiallyclips.livejournal.com]

You know, the OT set up the expectation that the Galaxy was very large, and that the Empire was so old that it was a fact of life to all, and that Yoda and Kenobi were veterans of a war which had ended about 50 years before (or maybe HUNDREDS of years before, with them drawing on the Force for their longevity).

It seems to me that a very compelling story could have been told within those parameters, using some of the things which were implied as well. By giving Kenobi the droidlike designation "OB1" and referring to the Clone Wars, it implied a failed rebellion in which clones were made of the remaining Jedi stock...clones as Good Guys, of which Obiwan was either the progenitor (number one, after all) or a last survivor.

A desperation to marshall the remaining Jedi stock would explain both the cloning and rushing Anakin through his training. I saw the Emperor and Yoda as counterparts, the ONLY players in Episode IV whose memories stretched back to the fall of the Jedi and the founding of the Empire. "General" Kenobi and his Padawan would have been the major players in Yoda's carefully-planned attempt to defeat the empire, the Clone Wars, in which Anakin's betrayal to the Dark Side undid the only serious threat to the Empire in a long time.

In the aftermath of the crushing Clone Wars defeat, Luke and Leia and the ragtag Rebel Alliance would have therefore represented A New Hope, a new attempt to replenish Jedi stock by some form of subterfuge involving some reproductive technology or Vader siring children without his knowledge.

In any event, the story that should have been told was large and complex, and only peripherally concerned with familiar Star Wars universe characters. The story that was told actually shrank the story that came before. Instead of a vast epic on grand timescales, we have a historical blip. Instead of a vast galaxy, populated by countless trillions and an endless supply of whole intelligent races, we get the same races, the same people, the same droids, the same settings.

Why we had to have this parade of asinine contrivances, I'll never understand. C-3PO is Anakin's son? R2-D2 is Anakin's personal astrodroid? Jabba the Hut is running the pod races? Tusken Raiders killed Anakin's mom? Chewbacca is Yoda's old pal? ...Captain Fecking Antilles??? Where was Han? You couldn't work in a 12-year-old Han Solo, in Corellian Junior High, struggling with a report on Naboo? Why not Lando? Where was Biggs and Admiral Ackbar and PORKINS??????? Porkins could have been a little fat kid asking annoying questions as comic relief!

If I ever create something so great that it is certain to outlive me by centuries, please someone, shoot me in the head if I start to mess with it? Please? *glower*

Lumpy fer crissake!

[seanmonster.livejournal.com]

I consider Lucas' 'Fall from Grace' to be the Star Wars Holiday Special, from 1978. I've been fairly forgiving of the prequels, mainly because I think that Lucas was never that great of a director to begin with, and this is coming from a fan of Star Wars. I remember his directing style being referred to as "Don't act, just stand there", and that before the prequels were even in the works. Empire is most often considered to be the best of them all, and it wasn't written or directed by Lucas (neither was Jedi, for that matter). He is a good technical director and FX innovator, but he's never been good at working with people.

[partiallyclips.livejournal.com]

Oh, if you're feeling that Darth Vader stole your movie money this weekend? You're not alone. Hee!

[partiallyclips.livejournal.com]

Sorry, one last one. I just cannot even believe this article was written 22 years ago!!!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/04/AR2005050401540.html

A prophecy, which misread, was not.