Hacker Cinema
Howard the Duck
1986 · Film · 110 min
Directed by Willard Huyck
ComedyAdventureScience Fiction
A scientific experiment unknowingly brings extraterrestrial life forms to the Earth through a laser beam. First is the cigar-smoking drake, Howard, from the duck's planet. A few kids try to keep him from the greedy scientists and help him back to his planet, but then a much less friendly being arrives through the beam...
6 negativefrom 6 commenters
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6 comments on Hacker News
OT, but that take on Lucas has to stop. Was he surrounded by many capable people that contributed to his works in great ways? Of course, that's what collaborative art of movie making is all about. Spielberg movies would probably suffer a lot without Kahn editing them, so would Scorsese's without Thelma Schoonmaker, etc.. Look at the other world-building things Lucas did to gain some perspective on him as an artist - from THX 1138 and Graffiti, over Star Wars OT to Indiana Jones, Willow, and ultimately the prequels - yes, the prequels; Compare their cultural presence and impact (even mentioning Jar Jar here) to what Disney Juggernaut with all of the talent and money couldn't bring to presence. Now, combine that with the gravity around him that brought in people that managed to pull technical wonders of digital video editing (AVID) and image manipulation (Photoshop), and many many other things (THX, Pixar, etc.) on top of all of the legendary businesses that spawned up from Lucas Film itself, to Lucas Arts, Skywalker Sound (THX), and ILM. That's not a coincidence, and not on his ex wife (alone) - that's a bunch of smart and hard-working talented people around guy that told them a story, people including Spielberg, and De Palma, and Coppola... Story which they all liked. Give the guy a break, number of successes around him, and not any of the mentioned individuals, is no coincidence. One Howard the Duck does not his legacy make.
Remember how George Lucas made Star Wars and became the genius billionaire who could do no wrong. Then he got a divorce and made Howard the Duck (quite possibly the worst movie of all time).
I think the same thing is happening here. As a startup founder you have guardrails, spouses, investors. You have Brian De Palma rewriting the opening trailer crawl, you have Marcia Lucas helping the edit, and you have your old professor at USC Irvin Kershner guiding your hand.
Now, Elon is the wealthiest man in the world and he has turned into Jar Jar Musk. It's time to see how this bird themed turd pans out.
I can't say which films were the most influential, but here's a list of ones which were at least as influential IMHO and also sort of stand on their own: Star Wars Trilogy (epic sci-fi), 2001: A Space Odyssey (hard sci-fi), The Thing (body horror sci-fi), Alien (body horror/dystopian sci-fi), Mad Max (post apocalyptic sci-fi), E.T. (family sci-fi? lol), The Terminator (post apocalyptic), Howard the Duck (still reading?), Predator (dunno?)
I could list a lot of others but I'll stop there.
No one's claiming that it's malicious or illegal. It's just that a recommendation engine that recommends an old, unmaintained, copy-cat extension which wasn't exactly great back when it was new and maintained is not very trustworthy -- it's either very bad, or vulnerable to rigging.
It's like a movie recommendation engine that preeminently features Howard the Duck or something. It's not malicious or illegal but its recommendations are probably useless.
Plinkett is saying that my brain noticed that the animation correctly accounted for the movement of the lamp. That is not an argument against not bumping the lamp in the first place.
I'll bet dollars to donuts that Howard the Duck, Waterworld, and every other big budget bomb you can think of has a lamp bumping in it. They were wastes of money in those movies, and if those movies had been successful like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, they still would have been wastes of money.
Complete agreement.
Let's use another great sci-fi 'verse to provide context on why the "frontier" is not a necessary backdrop for good Star Wars, but rather, was a convenient short-hand for the rebel alliance who had to live there.
In Firefly, the browncoats lived in the outer planets (the frontier) because they wanted to be far away from the Alliance (ironic, I know) in the central planets. This embodied the separatist/individualist spirit.
But we needed aspects of the Alliance to show a sharp contrast to what the browncoats fought against and lost to. Some of the best moments in Firefly came from Ariel or Trash, which were set very much in the Alliance world.
So how does this relate back to this wonderfully produced (hey, nice commercial!) but woefully short-sighted plea from some group who claims to speak for the "fans". Well if you ONLY watched the original trilogy, you would think that Star Wars was all about the frontier. After all, there was no Coruscant and the moments in the Death Star were really limited in backdrop and exposition.
Then again, if you've read any of the canon books or played any of the games, you will know that dozens of storytellers have expanded the Star Wars universe, giving it beautiful color and context around the edges that 7-8 hours of the original trilogy couldn't possibly cover.
Sure the prequels were bad, but they were bad because they're bad movies. I certainly don't agree with the de-mysticism of the Force, or Jar Jar, or the implicit racism, or Han not shooting first or Mannequin Skywalker's casting, but let's be honest, those are just bad movie dialogue, story-telling and direction. These are problems every movie has (have you seen Howard the Duck?)
The reason the prequels were NOT about the frontier because it's really a story about Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin and Palpatine, whom coincidentally, all lived in Coruscant, a city. The original trilogy were about Luke, Han, Chewie and Leia and they all lived in the frontier, away from the Empire. Let's also not overlook the fact that Threepio is comic relief and the Ewoks are cute.
In conclusion, let J.J. Abrams make a good movie and let's not put artificial boundaries in because we have some misguided fanboy adherence to rules that were made up to begin with. If we listened to the fanboys, we'd never have Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, Heath Ledger as the Joker and there would be 30 minutes of Tom Bombadil singing in the Lord of the Rings.
TL;DR: Let JJ Abrams do his job without constraint and Firefly rocks.