Hacker Cinema
Star Wars
1977 · Film · 121 min
Part of Star Wars Collection
Directed by George Lucas
AdventureActionScience Fiction
Princess Leia is captured and held hostage by the evil Imperial forces in their effort to take over the galactic Empire. Venturesome Luke Skywalker and dashing captain Han Solo team together with the loveable robot duo R2-D2 and C-3PO to rescue the beautiful princess and restore peace and justice in the Empire.
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1708 comments on Hacker News
The original teaser for Star Wars was made before they had John Williams' score:
https://youtu.be/XHk5kCIiGoM?si=VxAJcCATzwn6gZPw
Watching it may help you appreciate just how important the Williams' score was to Star Wars' success. It's one of the all-time greats!
I'd also add that some movies are worth watching purely because of their score. e.g. "Conan the Barbarian" is a pretty shlocky flick. However, the director and composer took a collaborative approach to the score that was closer to opera than film. Unlike most movies, work on the score began before filming and there was continual collaboration during filming. The result remains one of the best scores in the history of film, and a film that makes the music its backbone.
I rarely read about the contribution a good music score has to a movie's popularity. A great score makes the movie. For example,
The Blue Max, Ben Hur, the first Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Dr Zhivago, Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and, of course, Blade Runner!
I differentiate nerd from geek as a heirarchy, geek to me being a sub-nerd.
These are geekisms:
>super heroes
>fantasy books/movies
>Pokemon
>Magic the Gathering
>Star Wars
>Lord Of The Rings
>Narnia
>Harry Potter
>video games
Here you describe nerdisms:
>When I was little I was fascinated by big engines and in general driven by the curiosity of wanting to know how everything worked. I would disassemble every piece of electronics in the household. I was into model airplanes and gliders. I was obsessed with building electric motors. I was also really big into steam machines. Everything steam was just cool. Then computers took over my life. Today I find myself nerding out about wood working and back garden agriculture when I'm not doing AI stuff.
Geeks consoom, nerds understand and tinker/build.
Most video games are geek (consoom), tools like Siemens NX or Adobe Master Collection CS6 are nerd (should be thought of as extremely open-ended games), simulators wobble between my classifications depending on accuracy/depth (Minecraft, Sims: geek; NX Nastran, flight/train/truck/forklift simulators: nerd).
Speaking of the eighties, special effects were still done without CGI and typically on the cheap. That didn't make the movies and television series any less fun to watch. In the end it's about what people do with the tools, not the quality of the tools. People commenting on how these generated videos are not perfect or are getting some details wrong, look at some blockbuster movies from last century. It's very easy to spot the special effects. And it did not matter.
But yes 80s science fiction is now science fact. Talking cars like in night rider are now definitely a thing. Some can even drive themselves. The robots in Buck Rogers, Star Wars, etc. look clumsy and fake compared to the real humanoid bots we are now starting to see. More close to I Robot, which when it came out 22 years ago was pure science fiction.
> I've been kind of puzzled, since the first time I gave it any thought, why "going to a movie" is culturally thought of as an activity one does with a companion, even a date.
Because after going to the movie, you've all seen it, and so can talk about it with each other.
> spend maybe 5-10 minutes critiquing or raving as you walk out.
It's not just for that trip, but it'll be a shared touchpoint. And if it's something you really enjoyed, it's something you'll be able to talk about together for years—like going to see Star Wars as a kid.
>it is a war-like scenario where we are under constant bombardment and must get everyone to safety
Thank you for your service everyone, these are real life heroes like the ones you see on Star Wars movies but real.
Thanks to Jellyfin + Infuse (on AppleTV), even family and visitors have no trouble using my "streaming service". And I can reach it on the road with TailScale. Takes me laughably little time per year to manage (maybe an hour in a normal year, perhaps two or three relatively "hands on" hours in a year I modify the zfs disk pool in some way)
My main motivation for having it is easy access to several things that can't be had legally at all (the best very-close-to-opening-day Star Wars movies in the 4k77/4k80/4k83 series, or uncut Beavis and Butthead episodes, or Northern Exposure with the original music, to pick a few examples) but once you've got it, adding everything to the server is arguably less effort and lost time than using a half-dozen streaming services.
I'd much rather pay, I dunno, $50/month or something for a service that had everything on it, but that doesn't exist, so I have this instead. It's a ton better than a pile of streaming services that are still missing most stuff, plus force you to play the ridiculous "which one had this, again?" game.
this copy of Star wars seems pretty fuzzy https://dev.to/kasuken/how-to-watch-star-wars-in-your-terminal-523c
there are also fan remakes of movies like this one. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3528906/
I'm not a lawyer but this does seem like they're wholesale copying ideas.
That is a possible reading, especially given the way the Empire's xenophobia manifests, if you assume all humans are culturally homogeneous in Star Wars, but I think the movies are somewhat clear that humans are culturally diverse. The human cultures in Tatooine seem very different to Alderaan or Naboo, for two somewhat specific notes in the films. The Imperial accent often being more "British" (RP) implies cultural differences with the periphery that at least mirror somewhat, say, the differences between Britain and much of its former Empire.
The Galactic Empire showing a clear citizenship "caste" favoritism of Citizen/Officer Humans, General Humans, Cloned Humans, Aliens, and then Droids, but also working with all of those at the same time in its military efforts (there are a few aliens in the Empire's military, there are a lot of droids) does seem imperial in the way the article suggests, especially because that core of clear "Citizen/Officer Humans" seems so relatively small versus they armies they command of all the other types.
all one has to do is look at movies from indie groups versus conglomerates in order to pick apart every point you made aside from technology investment and movie volume.
your most laughable point is the one about risk : no one takes less risk than a huge conglomerate beholden to a board and shareholders.
real risk in cinema comes the cast and crew that decide to forego dinner in order to get their vision to the screen, and the arts are filled with such passionate examples.
Not everyone wants the 1500th star wars or marvel movie, even the fan bases for those releases are tired.
That's the saving grace of it for me tbh
AI art shows the philistines for who they are. It's a giant decoy to lure them away from spaces where people are making art of more substance.
I feel the same way about things like the absolutely miserable quality of Marvel, Star Wars, etc. stuff leading to films being increasingly polarized between 60 IQ blockbusters and more interesting small projects. It's what kicked off the 70s arthouse cinema in the US, and I'm hoping we get a similar renaissance soon with the success of all of the small and difference projects lately.
>doing concerts where the attendees are just other musicians
If this is how jazz musicians actually made money, they'd have all died of starvation at this point. Every jazz musician that's not a top 20 or so act makes most of their money playing whatever kind of music people pay them to make, whether it's church music, session musician gigs, etc. The entire reason they started doing (and still do!) straightahead jams is that they were tired of playing schlock all day and wanted to spice it up with and for other people tired of playing schlock.
I really appreciate the attempt by Chris & Jack to make Julysixth Park a thing.
I enjoyed Star Wars, but I kind of feel like a lot of my feelings towards it are just reflected nostalgia from the writers and comedians who grew up a generation before me.
Jurassic Park may not have been the first movie I saw in theaters, but it was still one of the movies of my childhood. The magic of it, and the experience of where we saw it -- the Mesker Park amphitheatre, in an outdoor showing, and then walking back to the car in the dark, past the Mesker Park Zoo, looking into the dark foliage and imagining dinosaurs.
And yet. The other day I saw Dune described as this generation's LotR, which was that generation's Star Wars. Dune (and LotR, and SW) are all Hero's Journey stories (what isn't?), yet they're each pretty unique.
Granted, LotR and Dune were written in the 50's and 60's, respectively, with Star Wars following a decade later.
All I'm saying is that what is new depends on what generation you grow up in. And I suppose how much media you're exposed to. Speaking for myself, LotR was the second film I ever saw in the cinema so it was a whole new experience.
For the younger generations, these are old films, much like how idk, Spartacus and co was an old film for me.
tl;dr, the kids will be alright. Actually the kids also appreciate older media, there's a whole generation of late teenagers now rediscovering 2000's music / culture.
It’s not in Endgame, it’s actually in Infinity War, but everyone knows The Snap. It’s a generationally iconic movie moment that seeped into the entire U.S. culture. I had 65 year old lawyers referencing it in work meetings, and these were not MCU people at all. Sort of like how everyone knows who Darth Vader is even if they know nothing else about Star Wars.
Yeah. I'm gonna have an LLM rewrite Star Wars and then film it. Should be fine, right?
That's what always gets me. Pirates get a superior product while paying customers get garbage. Netflix streams obscenely compressed "high definition" content while pirates get blu-ray remuxes painstakingly sourced from multiple Blu-Rays in order to select the best frames. Music industry releases compressed, clipping, horribly mastered tracks while pirates pull out all the stops to rip old vynils with insane equipment in order to get clean high dynamic range sound. Pirates keep playing at full speed while the genuine copy's obfuscated denuvo VM slowly churns and kicks them our when it fails to phone home to the corporation's dead servers. Nintendo makes some token effort to sell the same Mario ROM to people for the tenth time while pirates get cycle accurate emulators, ROM hacks, translations, save states, cheats, network multiplayer, graphics filters, universal compatibility, perfect A/V synchronization, fast forward, slow motion, frame advance, tool assisted speedruns, debuggers, disassemblers, anything you can think of.
I feel like a total moron every single time I "purchase" these things. The industry doesn't give a shit, only pirates do. Pirates spent thousands and thousands of dollars and absurd amounts of effort sourcing, scanning and cleaning up old Star Wars films. You'd think these trillionaire corporations would be able to exceed a bunch of enthusiast "pirates" in performance, but they don't give a shit. In fact they go out of their way to make everything worse by failing to make works available, badly editing or even censoring whatever they put out there and locking it all down with obnoxious DRM.
The amount of trivia that you must handle to be able to understand the latest movie is mind boggling. Disney should do education, because I would need to watch and study all the previous movies, which is probably a year worth of work, before I can watch subsequent releases. Perhaps not as hard work as studying linear algebra, perhaps, but still a lot of person hours involved.
The amount of information that the average fan retains about Star Wars is mind boggling, compared to their, say, knowledge of world geography.
I am also in awe of sports fans in a similar way. They command large swaths of dry, boring information such as world series stats with great enthusiasm.
They truly are.
Star Wars is perfect example of it. Star Wars is now repetitive genre like police procedural or western except Disney owns it.
With few exceptions they have successfully frozen the franchise and just do the same things over and over again. Why change it as long as it makes money.The postures, scenes, phrases, characters, are done with constant repeat and minimal variation. "I've got a bad feeling about this" appears in every single Star Wars movie in some form. live action and animation series have it. They are not shy about it, they even make "I have a really good feeling about this!" jest once.
No, I'm saying that you can't attribute any significant percent of the value of a Star Wars toy sold today to George Lucas. If Star Wars had not continued after the 1980 films, these toys would not keep selling so much today.
The post I replied to allocated all of the monetary value of the Star Wars branding of a toy to George Lucas personally, which I think is obviously wrong.
The bit about Lucas is obviously not true. The universe he envisioned does not sell itself, it was marketed, developed, painted and modeled, added to, kept fresh etc for many many years by a huge army of people. If the only Star Wars media that existed were the original film, or even the original trilogy, it would sell relatively little by now.
> George Lucas made a movie with a (small) group effort. But what made a billion dollars is his Star Wars universe which is almost entirely his creation.
If that were actually true, how come we can't predict what the next Star Wars universe will be?
Same for pop songs etc. If it were actually about objective qualities of the creation, and not just luck, the next winners of the lottery would be apparent even before they hit the theaters.
There is null inherent quality in the Star Wars universe causing the billion dollar revenue. If George Lucas wouldn't have been there at the right spot at the right time, the dominant IP would simply have been something different.
If you have kids, you can directly observer what actually happens: The IP owners dump huge amounts of money into merch and product placements everywhere, resulting in them getting in contact with the franchise before they are out of their diapers. My kids came home from daycare roleplaying lightsaber fights without any previous contact with the franchise at our home. The trick is implanting the meme (in the original meaning of the word) into kids' brains before another meme can nest in there.
I addressed that. The movies themselves are not the source of the wealth and yes the original was created by a group so small that theoretically Star Wars wealth could have been divided evenly and they would be billionaires.
If you say the original crew did not do all the labor required to make the franchise grow in the future (obviously true), you are now arguing different people have had incremental impact on creating the wealth, which is kind of the point.
> it's impossible to create a billion dollar enterprise without a group effort
George Lucas made a movie with a (small) group effort. But what made a billion dollars is his Star Wars universe which is almost entirely his creation.
It literally creates wealth for other people. If my toy sells $10,000 without Star Wars and $100,000 with it, did I participate in making George’s billion, or am I benefiting from it?
> means that they made decisions within that enterprise that resulted in a lopsided allocation of resources at the end.
What do you mean? Every good and service involves many people, but the degree to which they participate in its creation and risk vary. For example, a Farmer may create a more efficient way to grow food. Is the grocery store now entitled to a piece of the reward? They didn’t change anything, all of the improvement is the farmer side.
I have almost all of the $400+ star wars sets (and lotr, and star trek, ...), but relatively limited shelf space.
They only stay on the shelf for a couple years before I take it apart, rinse the dust off, sort it into ziplock bags, and add it to a box in the closet. Then I pick an old one I disassembled before, but hasn't been seen in awhile, or remember having fun building it, and spend a weekend or week building it again.
My favorite part is building them, so I get to enjoy doing that several times per set, often while having the corresponding movie on in the background.
> probably more of a Trekkie.
Unfortunately, all the Trek shows have been canceled, so it looks like you're not going to have much to watch for a while. There's a final short season of Strange New Worlds done and coming soon, followed by the last season of Starfleet Academy and that's it.
For the first time in decades no new Star Wars series or movie is even rumored to be in development. Paramount has brand new owners with very different ideas and even Alex Kurtzman's (current Head of Trek) contract is expiring and hasn't been renewed. It's not clear SkyDance has any appetite for funding mega-expensive prestige sci-fi series. The currently unaired episodes were already finished or in production when SkyDance took over and they've approved nothing Star Trek since. When production wrapped, the huge sets built for both SNW and Academy (the most expensive in Star Trek history) weren't even put in storage, Paramount just had them dumpstered instead.
I actually thought SNW was pretty good as it was getting back to the core of what made TOS and TNG Star Trek good. But my 17 year-old daughter had sub-zero interest in Starfleet Academy and she was the target demographic. Sadly, things aren't looking good. The 60th year of Trek could be the last. Personally, I'm hoping that Paramount at least sells the Star Trek IP to someone - maybe Netflix or Amazon? All the billions that were being thrown at buying streaming market share for over a decade has dried up, so it's a bad time for an expensive property whose last few outings weren't big hits to be looking for a new home.
But Star Wars was never about serious, adult themes, and great writing. It was about amazing space battles, laser swords, witty one-liners, adventure, and slapstick comedy, in a fun, kid-friendly package. Andor is a fine production. It isn't really Star Wars though.
My opinion: the closest movie, in spirit, to A New Hope is The Mummy (the 1999 one with Brendan Fraser).
> But Star Wars is best when it's pulp adventure stuff.
This is the way. I saw the first Star Wars the week it opened as a tween and it rocked my world. Both SW and Raiders of the Lost Ark had a clear vision of building on the proven structure of the old B&W movie serials like Flash Gordon but updating them with modern storytelling tools and larger budgets. It was a truly great concept and then Empire raised the stakes higher and even better.
You're right that Mando Season 1 was an attempt to get back to the original concept and it got close. Skeleton Crew is perhaps the only other SW series where the core idea was to update a proven structure of the past in a pure and focused way - except it chose a different genre than 1930s serials. Initially I didn't know what to make of Skeleton Crew but once I got that it was building on the 1980s tween adventures like Goonies, I appreciated how it absolutely nailed what it was going for. My own kids are now older than Skeleton Crew's target audience, so it obviously wasn't for me but I applaud it as Disney's only other pure attempt at applying the 'big idea' that made OG SW great to another genre.
As a sci-fan who loved the original IP to the point of reverence, even bad Star Wars is usually at least interesting but it can also be frustrating when it evokes echoes of the OG by being set in the same universe without even trying to be great in the same ways as the OG. For example, Andor is unique in being a spin-off that is actually very good but I'd argue none of the things that make it so good require being set in the Star Wars universe. It might be even better if it had been unshackled from the rules of the Star Wars cinematic universe and was a new, original sci-fi IP.
This is where internet lore and 'YouTuber'-made movies will begin to pass stuff like Star Wars and the DCU in popularity and the mainstream consciousness. Backrooms will gross just as much as the Mandalorian movie and the upcoming Supergirl flop, if not more. Glad to see it. In terms of good will, this point was passed well over a decade ago.
The new Star Wars movie grossed $81.6 million at its debut last weekend, for comparison.
You're moving goalposts. You literally said
> I fail to find anything in history that advanced the sciences or the arts through "collective effort of hundreds or thousands of humans".
> It's only for war or to consolidate power in the hands of the ruling class, never for the benefit of society at large.
I'm breaking it up into two statements because sufficient evidence has been provided to contradict the former, and some of your rebuttals did not align with the latter. Let's break those down:
> The moon landing is defintely a fruit of a war effort.
But is it only for war? Or did it "advance the sciences" + "for the benefit of society at large"?
> Wikipedia is the opposite of a top-down effort.
Your original statement didn't say it had to be a top-down effort. It's certainly "collective effort" + "not only for war" + "for the benefit of society at large".
> Aqueducts and railroads: responded on a sibling comment.
Scale and precision also matter and don't negate the fact that these are "something in history" + "collective effort" + "not only for war" + "for the benefit of society at large".
> LOTR films: I don't even know how it relates to the point, but it's funny that you cultural landmark that only worked because it's an adaptation of the works of a single individual.
I only picked LOTR films because they are notorious for being large scale and you never said it didn't have to be an adaptation. I could have picked The Simpsons, Star Wars, Breaking Bad, you name it.
> When I saw the series adaptation of The Expanse, it was really obvious they played a lot of artistic license to make it exciting. A real space battle would be dots firing invisible dots at each other. "Close quarter battle" would be within something like 2000 kilometers, maybe more. That is close.
This is noteworthy because The Expanse tried to get this better than other scifi, say Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, or Star Wars (ok, space opera), where engagements take place at absurdly short ranges. In The Expanse you see the spaceships are really far apart, mostly dots to each other, and the engagements are (mostly) at really long torpedo ranges, with the exception of those cool scenes using PDCs. You get all those awesome shots where one spaceship sees the other as a tiny dot, then the camera zooms in dramatically to the other point of view. Cool!
And still, engagements are far too close range. But they "feel" long range in The Expanse, I think they got that visually right. I cannot blame them because I haven't seen anything any space combat in shows or movies that is even half as exciting and well done.
That's only because movies like Star Wars are not sci-fi movies, but more like westerns in space.
So I guess sci-fi movies were right all along. Nobody in Star Wars knows how hyperspace travel works, it just works. The little robots know everything but almost no human bothers to care. People just carry on with their bickering lives while the bots whiz in the background, and these robots are astonished at human inefficiency every single time, but rarely do anything about it. And people are still people.
Fair points, though let’s make a distinction here, as I would argue that Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark were GREAT ideas, not just good, though there’s some wiggle room in both of those labels for subjectivity. Not every movie is as commercially successful as Star Wars, but it might come away to public and critical reception as “good”, more than break even at the box office, and set the director up for being allowed to direct again.
Nowadays though, it seems like traditional movie studios only want mega blockbusters, which left the door open for Netflix and Amazon to create things with lower financial expectations, but still deliver quality.
So basically, I don’t equate good, with blockbuster, or whatever Schrader equates with good. I can fondly name 20 or 30 movies that made out okay, that weren’t necessarily hard for a good writer to come up with, that all had different subjects.
“Not available in your country.”
But what George Lucas claims to have thought (now many years later), is essentially irrelevant. What counts is how audiences interpret the movies when watching them, both at the time and now. If, as I strongly suspect, essentially nobody saw clear Viet Cong sympathies in the original trilogy, then the modern Star Wars differs significantly.
And this is my point. The politics of the original trilogy was cookie-cutter, incidental, and unimportant, whereas much of the modern Star Wars has political creeds, obvious symbolism and grandstanding all over the place, front and center. You may (or may not) agree with the politics of the new Star Wars, but you can’t deny that they are different.
Star Wars movies were rarely well-written. As Harrison Ford said "George, you can type this s**, but you can't say it".
Or something like that. I've been unable to fully authenticate the quote, or even find a definitive version of it. Certainly Alec Guinness felt that way; he hated every minute of it.
ESB is generally recognized as the best written film, and Lucas notably did not write that. My personal favorite is still A New Hope, but I certainly don't deny that the writing is as dumb as a sack of hammers.
At one time it was pretty much universally recognized that the prequels were abysmally written. For some reason that opinion is less unanimous now (I think it has to do with the somewhat-better-written Clone Wars series), but they are still just chock full of really bad writing.
Dave Filoni writes very well, even when the end result isn't a great product.
A lot of things have changed about Star Wars, and there are lots of reasons to think it used to be better. But "the writing was good and now it's bad" just doesn't hold up.
Let me simplify: Star Wars movies used to be well-written. Now they are not, and no one wants to watch them anymore.
Yeah, Star Wars more or less killed sci-fi as we had known it. I liked the weird Logan's Run, the depiction of class stratification in "Soylent Green", the banality of corporate control of "Rollerball".
The idea of a computer virus in the film "Westworld" was, to me at the time, something out of left field. (And speaking of Michael Crichton, "The Andromeda Strain" was "intelligent" sci-fi and we enjoyed it.)
"Mad Max", though it came after "Star Wars", drew inspiration from "A Boy and His Dog", "Deathrace 2000"…
A Golden Age for sure.
Oh man, the Golden Age of science fiction movies, just two years after 2001: A Space Odyssey and five years before the start of the Blockbuster era[0] with Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977).
I feel like Science Fiction back then was purely understood as psychological concepts and ambiguous desires, mostly questioning the very essence of reality and our human minds. There were intelligences and ambitions in us that felt alien, but weren't extraterrestrial in kind. I always thought of it as if Science Fiction tried to turn any progress from the Age of Enlightenment inside out.
A great gem is also World on a Wire (1973)[1], which takes the concept of a machine controlled intelligence and questioned whether we're living in a simulation and are already influenced by a virtual world.
My favorite quote from Colossus: The Forbin Project, after Dr. Forbin is held hostage by Colossus:
Colossus: How many nights a week do you require sex? Dr. Forbin: Every night. Colossus: Not want. Require... Dr. Forbin: [looks sheepish] Four times.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbuster_(entertainment)#Blockbuster_era
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_on_a_Wire
The most horrible example is the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Early commercial VHS tapes of it have the original music. Later tapes, and the DVDs, have all the music replaced with just awful generic music. That bad music just makes it unwatchable.
Music is an enormous factor in movies, I wonder why nobody mentions it. For example, the Lord of the Rings soundtrack is spectacular and adds greatly to the pleasure in watching it. In contrast, the soundtrack to The Hobbit sounds completely generic and boring, and the result is unwatchable.
Another example is Star Wars. The first two movies had amazingly good soundtracks. The later sequels had boring music, and whaddya know, the sequels were boring.
When I was about 4 years old, this was the first movie I saw in a theater, it was a double feature with fantasia. Next time I remember going to a theater when my parents took me and a friend out of kindergarten to see Star Wars on opening day.
Interesting—and makes sense. (Perhaps motion blue becomes a post-process as well then, ha ha.)
Kind of a tangent: One of the remarkable things to me about the "Dykstra flex" cameras developed for Star Wars was that the dolly/stepper-motors moved the camera while the shutter was open giving those fly-by shots full motion blur. Freeze any frame where there is a space battle and it is obvious.
That small detail was not small at all in selling the effects of the film.
But one of the effects guys joked that some team had borrowed the camera for some effects they were doing for a TV show or film—and they used Dykstra-flex in sort of a "stop motion" manner. He was dumbfounded why someone would move the camera, pause to expose a frame, move again to the next location, pause to expose. Just walking away, leaving motion-blur on the table…
I saw the first Star Wars movie on the day it opened in Boston, in an enormous, packed theater. I will never forget the roar that went up when Han Solo came out of the sun to save Luke.
I think Hollywood has been churning out derivative content for a while, and catering for "modern audiences" (as opposed to the silent majority) too much.
One or two exceptions - Project Hail Mary, for example.
But the decline of Marvel, Star Trek and Star Wars franchises has been stark.
https://www.youtube.com/@TheCriticalDrinker has some great commentary on the problem.
Also, a number of other factors:
* massive TVs are cheap now * people behave disrespectfully in cinemas * cinema tickets are now unaffordable for the low end of the market * the experience hasn't modernised and become luxy enough to retain the high end of the market * streaming services have high budgets now
The biggest problem is fans. They want to re-experience what they had when they first saw it, then get mad when the movies don't live up to their past experience. I was 7 when Star Wars came out. I had all the toys. I saw the movie a dozen times. It was an experience. As an adult, when I watch to again, I think “wow, this is really not good.” The special effects hold up , but the acting, the dialog, the pacing is all “meh”. When i compare it to the new movies, it’s the same. They are just not good.
And of course Disney wants to recapture the money bonanza that was generated by the original trilogy, but if they do anything that angers the fans, it get boycotted. If they try to stick with the original patterns, it gets called a remake. They are in a lose/lose situation.
Ultimately the fans need to let the nostalgia go and let the current generation build their own favorite movies instead of being told this or that franchise is the best.
Disney can do whatever it wants if it restores and releases a 4K version of the theatrical cuts of the original trilogy, something the fan base has wanted for decades at this point. I won't hold my breath.
Very large companies are generally very bad at consistently producing original content because everything in a corporat eenvironment skews towards not taking any risks. Big companies want a repeatable formula. It's why we get to many sequels and reboots with depressingly few new properties. HBO has been the exception to the rule. I would've also said Apple TV tends to corporatize content into being inoffensive. Modern Family (even though it wasn't an Apple production) is kind of like the perfect Apple TV content. But we have things like Severance and Silo so maybe there's hope.
Anyway, the retconning and corporatization around Star Wars has been depressing to watch. The whole "Han shot first" was a line in the sand more than 30 years old that seemed to stem from George Lucas's desire for a lighter classification for the films. The Phantom Menace of course was very much aimed at a younger audience even though the plot revolved around a tax treaty dispute of all things.
The sequel trilogy was for me, as an original Star Wars fan, deeply depressing. I honestly haven't even watched the last one where Carrie Fisher did her best Mary Poppins. And honestly the whole prmise of midichlorians (from the original trilogy) and inheritance of Force ability was really offensive and against the original spirit of Star Wars. I mean as anyone example of corporatization the name "Rey" was chosen to be easily pronounceable in many languages.
Look where we started. The inspiration for Star Wars was the Viet Cong resisting American imperialism in Vietnam (direct from George Lucas) [1].
Disney produced beloved classics like The Jungle Book, Aladdin and Snow White. In the 2000s, they seemed unable to continue this creativity and it became an amalgam of Pixar and the MCU (and later Lucasfilm). Pixar was a culturally antiestablishmment company started by Steve Jobs (yes, yes, he bought a London computer graphics division). The MCU took decades of creativity in the superhero space and basically turned into 2000s era patriotic films. You can guess why the timing.
Oh it's worth adding the Star Wars originally had an expanded universe that was kinda managed by Lucasfilm. Disney abandoned this on purchasing Lucasfilm and some fans were very upset. This included Chewbacca having a wife and family back home. It was all fan fiction, basically.
Disney could very much use the Star Wars milieu to tell stories relevant to our times. The 2025 Superman movie did this for example. and it made some people very upset. But Disney absolutely will not do that. So I really don't think it matters what they try and do.
[1]: https://screenrant.com/star-wars-george-lucas-vietnam-war-inspiration-explainer/
>"I still think even now they could print money if they'd just do an honest adaptation of the Thrawn trilogy. Even with all the damage they've done to the brand."
They could print money by just having Bob Iger stand silently in front of a camera flipping off the audience for two hours and calling it Star Wars. Every one of those films were profitable. They'll keep doing it, and people will keep paying for it.
The link shows a photo of my grandad with the original R2-D2 he built for the first Star Wars film…
Jack was a master sheet metal worker, and was roped into using his skills on an obscure project to turn the sketches for the droid into something that could be constructed out of aluminium sheets.
I always knew he'd helped make part of R2-D2. However I only found this photo in recent years and have since learned that he was actually instrumental to the construction of the entire droid, particularly with working out how to machine the complex shapes like the dome and legs out of single sheets of aluminium.
He didn't just build one either, he ended up constructing a handful of the droids for various uses in the film. I still have no idea how he did it, especially without modern software and computer-controlled machining.
Unfortunately I never got to know him as he died when I was a baby, though I have a feeling we share a lot in common.
I also have his old Dragon 32 computer that he was using to learn programming in the 1980s, with reams of hand-written code that still works on the computer.
My backlog is crazy long. As much as I love TV I don't get nearly as much time to watch it as I'd like.
* Andor * Black Rabbit * Dune * Last of Us * Percy Mason * The Paper * Pluribus * Severance * The Studio * Succession * White Lotus
Of all those, Andor was the biggest surprise. I'm a mild Star Wars fan (I've seen the movies and that's about it) but I really enjoyed this, probably more than the movies. It looked amazing, was well written and acted. It's a prequel to one of the movies and we watched the movie right after we finished the series and I ended up liking the movie a lot more than I did the first time I saw it.
The Paper and The Studio are comedies and watching them made me miss the great sitcoms of the past. Why aren't there more comedies?
I liked the Last of Us game and I think that's a big part of why I enjoyed the tv show. If you haven't played the game or aren't a zombie person, you could probably skip that one.
I liked The Peripheral but it was canceled so I have a hard time recommending it. What they made was very good but there just isn't enough of it. The William Gibson book it's based on is worth reading IMHO.
> Evangelion is Japans star wars
Which is funny to say because Star Wars is actually the Western version of samurai movies (especially but not exclusively Akira Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress).
That's the movie that Lucas is pretty open about heavily drawing "inspiration" from (all the way down to specific characters and plot beats) but Hidden Fortress is itself part of a larger genre of similar stories.
If you enjoyed the Fifth Element absolutely watch Jodorowsky's Dune
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1935156/
On the cover it's a story about the failed production of Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune script but the deeper story was the aggregation of an unbelievably talented pool of visual artists including Jean "Moebius" Giraud (mentioned as central artist in 5th element), H.R. Giger, Chris Foss, Salvador Dali, & Dan O'Bannon.
That group would go on to centrally influence the visual style of a huge body of science fiction work including Alien, Blade Runner, Total Recall, Star Wars, The Matrix, Guardians of the Galaxy, etc etc.
The art and creativity on display in the film is absolutely sonic.
Kind of like the original PayPal mafia!
Agreed -- it's a wonderful film, and deserves a special place right up there with Star Wars and Harryhausen for its practical effects.
While the article mentions Moebius, I think this level of praise still merits an extra Incal callout, even if it just serves as a recommendation to those who want more of this stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incal
> made the movie of Project Hail Mary without paying one dime to Andy Weir.
and is there anything really wrong with that?
I personally would have liked to see fan made movies of various IPs like star wars, and harry potter, but it is impossible due to the long reach of copyright infringement.
It's the same with the "Star Wars" brand - the biggest chunk of revenue comes from merchandise and licensing, not the movies/shows. Lucas famously became a billionaire by securing merchandising rights in his original contract, not because of the cultural impact of the franchise.
It's your age, movies have always been propaganda or had an agenda. Even horror such as Night of the Living Dead, or even Star Wars.
They’re just going to lean hard into women protagonists and make it over the top feminist content that 99% of men won’t enjoy, kind of like what they did with the new Star Wars. It’s basically chixsploitation films with no gravitas that get forgotten a few months after they are released.
The original firefly played their female characters so well.
Hollywood seems to have never realized that the point of works like LotR and Star Wars was to take the ridiculous extremely seriously. The bad CGI didn't matter because every actor took it seriously. A marvel-ized star wars with great CGI is still a bad movie because nobody on screen takes it seriously despite how realistic the graphics are.
It was in one of those Netflix documentaries - I didn't realise it at the time but there was an 18 month period from 2003 to 2004 during which no new Harry Potter or Star Wars movies came out so sales of the licensed IP sets was down.
Few franchises that span generations?
The entire current zeitgeist of popular media is about zombifying your parent's IP. It's Nintendo's entire business in fact. Sure, usually they are doing good work with that IP, but they are the outlier in the industry. Everyone else is shitting out remakes of what your daddy played that don't even understand the original material, or like Halo, remakes of what your daddy played which was already a mediocre remake.
Halo 1 came out the month after 9/11. It's old enough to have graduated college and started a family. It will be resold soon.
Jurassic Park was dug up out of the grave to crap out several more movies. Star Wars is inflating a couple good plot lines into an entire Universe of "Content". Even reality shows are made up of people who were contestants on older reality shows. Pixar is making yet another Toy Story.
Aliens is still going, long after it's reanimated corpse was overplayed.
One of the premier television series, that just finished, was all about nostalgia for living in the 80s, with some silly plot tacked on that apparently even the writers didn't care about.
Even our propaganda, like Top Gun, is basically the same script as an 80s movie with minimal changes.
It feels like the entire media ecosystem is designed around reselling content to my parent's generation before they finally kick the bucket or satisfying the nostalgia of that generation's early children. Even the President's administration bitches about things like the 90s USDA food pyramid that only affected that 13ish year segment of the population and was deprecated, twice, since then. Our authoritarianism is nostalgia based, for the time that generation was children, and things were "Simple" and "Good", because they were children and got to live the lives of kids.
It reminds me of the Star Wars content thats come out recently - before there was the Original Trilogy which we all watched many times and the lines became iconic. Since then it's all become a mismash and blur of mediocrity due to over-exposure.
(except The Mandalorian, and I can't believe I'm using the word "content" :/)
edit: Totally forgot about Andor & Rogue One sorry, great film and two seasons of top-notch storytelling.
> George Lucas' 1977 sci-fi opera "Star Wars
I admit I've never understood why Star Wars is classified as sci-fi. To me it has always been space fantasy. There's nothing science-y about Star Wars, and it centers on supernatural powers.
Not a hill I'm willing to die on though, unlike Ellison it seems.
> He sued the movie "In Time" for "borrowing" one of his ideas.
I was fortunate enough to watch The Price of Life[1] when I was a kid. It aired on public TV, as part of a short film themed weeked they had.
When In Time was released I recall thinking that the plot sounded awfully similar, and watching it confirmed that.
The Price of Life is a low budget short film, but if you don't mind that I'd say watch it if you get a chance.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Price_of_Life_(1987_film)
Solid debunking.
This is just the same computer ‘magic’ that I’ve seen my whole life. From the dawn of home computing in the 80’s, to Hollywood films like Weird Science and War Games, through videos games of the 90’s and CGI… it tickles the imagination but never really pans out.
The idea of film fans pooling together and generating the films they really want to see, from Star Wars sequels that don’t suck, to TMNT films that look like the original, was exciting to me and many others, even if they were copyright infringement. Want a Joker sequel where he doesn’t get shanked in prison? We can do that!
I think that’s why they used Pitt vs Cruise in this demo. They’re selling a dream. Sad, really.
My guess is HP makes such an enormous amount of money already from movies, games, toys, and other tie-ins, that they can't be bothered to chase down the odd digital infringement of a plain text copy of the original books.
I'm sure the scripts of Star Wars would be similarly ignored if they were used.
Star Trek, Star Wars shaped me, Babylon 5 opened my heart. It took me a few episodes to get through the awful CGI of the first season but the writing and characters were superb. It’s DS9 but way more political. Went to places Star Trek wouldn’t touch. Sheridan was one hell of a guy. Then I was introduced to Big Balls Bill Adama…
That's nonsense. If Carrie Fisher "withdrawn consent" of her depiction in Star Wars, should we destroy the movies, all Princess Leia fan art, etc?
You're ignoring genre conventions. Every soft scifi movie is nonsense if you look at it from the perspective of real-life physics. Sending a single rock via unspecified FTL to attack Earth makes as much sense as the human-piloted fighter spacecraft in Star Wars. The aliens are capable of bombarding Earth across interstellar space because it makes for a good visual spectacle. Watch (or more likely read) hard scifi instead if you need everything to make logical sense.
In Star Trek, Data in the Next Generation series was well liked because he was a good character, whereas SAM in Starfleet Academy is panned because she's not a good character. Audiences don't dislike shows and movies with holograms and androids and other AI characters because computers are taking our jobs, they dislike bad shows and movies because they're bad.
The Post-Disney Star Wars movies are objectively less well received than the originals, but Alan Tudyk's K-2SO was probably the only well-liked character in Rogue One, whereas C-3PO was one of the most disliked characters in the original movie.
Unlike shows and movies, advertisements are something people avoid, not seek out. The most success an advertisement can have is for people to discuss it, for any reason. Creating annoying recurring characters or using new technology poorly works great for advertisers, and always has, but that has no bearing on what media people seek out.
> Watch any film before 1980 and you'll start to see a pattern that the pacing and evolution of the narrative is generally very, very slow.
Star Wars, Enter the Dragon, Game of Death, Mad Max, and many Bond films are fun counterexamples.
I think the Star Wars problem was that instead of making the movies at a steady cadence they stretched it out too long.
Another great example of this is British SF, especially 20th century Doctor Who and Blake's 7, vs American SF such as Star Wars/Trek. The British version can be much bleaker. And of course Red Dwarf, which doesn't translate at all into American. (There was a single pilot episode)
Edit: someone downthread mentioned Limmy's Show and Absolutely, to which I would add Burnistoun. Scottish humor is even more grimly fatalist than English.
George Lucas does *not* have a reputation as an amazing or fantastic director (like Roman Polanski etc.). In fact, quite the opposite: his Star Wars prequels have some of the worst direction I've ever seen. His first three SW movies were great, but they were very much team efforts, and in the first one, his wife heavily edited it to make it come out so well. The other two weren't even directed by George. George is (was?) a brilliant ideas person: he had a great vision for his movies, and picked some great people to work with (esp. in FX), but he sucked at actual execution and working with actors and script-writing and all that stuff. His best legacy, aside from the first Star Wars, is really his FX company, Industrial Light & Magic, not his work as director.
Leia's slave costume was nothing awful, was perfectly acceptable in 1983, and shows much less skin than a bikini, and was forced on her by an evil and ruthless gang boss who liked to eat his slaves at times, or feed them to his monsters.
> but Leia's slave costume is something giving off pretty bad vibes from today's viewpoint.
No, it doesn't give bad vibes. It was a sexy actress wearing a skimpy outfit for a couple of scenes in the whole goddamn trilogy! And she kicked butt.
Repeat after me: sexy scenes in movies are ok. And young Carrie Fisher was hot, and that was also ok. I was half in love with her when I first watched Star Wars.
Now, you can ask why Mark Hamill or Harrison Ford weren't put in skimpy outfits and whether it was more often women who got those scenes, and that'd be pertinent. But this doesn't give slave Leia a bad vibe.
It's OK if those scenes had sexy vibes. Sexy vibes aren't bad. This didn't define Leia either, she was mostly competent and kicked imperial butt.
I'd add Star Wars to the mix, to be honest - at least the early movies. There's nothing I know of implicating George Lucas to be a sex pest like the other examples you mentioned... but Leia's slave costume is something giving off pretty bad vibes from today's viewpoint.
> Cut copyright to 15-20 years by default.
This alone will kill off all chances of that ever passing.
Like, I fully agree with your proposal... but I don't think it's feasible. There are a lot of media IPs/franchises that are very, very old but still generate insane amounts of money to this day with active developments. Star Wars and Star Trek obviously, but also stuff like the MCU or Avatar is on its best way to two decades of runtime, Iron Man 1 was released in 2008, or Harry Potter which is almost 30 years old. That's dozens of billions of dollars in cumulative income, and most of that is owned by Disney.
Look what it took to finally get even the earliest Disney movies to enter the public domain, and that was stuff from before World War 2 that was so bitterly fought over.
In order to reform copyright... we first have to use anti-trust to break up the large media conglomerates. And it's not just Disney either. Warner, Sony, Comcast and Paramount also hold ridiculous amounts of IP, Amazon entered the fray as well with acquiring MGM (mostly famous for James Bond), and Lionsgate holds the rights for a bunch of smaller but still well-known IPs (Twilight, Hunger Games).
And that's just the movie stuff. Music is just as bad, although at least there thanks to radio stations being a thing, there are licensing agreements and established traditions for remixes, covers, tribute bands and other forms of IP re-use by third parties.
Does a director make a movie? Serious question. Can we say that Steven Spielberg made Jurassic Park? Can we say the George Lucas made Star Wars? Directors rarely act in their own movies, write their own scripts, operate the cameras, operate the lights, operate the mics, edit the final cuts, write the scores, play the scores, create the VFX, do the film printing or the marketing. They prompt Biological Thought Models to do those things and cobble the results together. Really nothing a director traditionally does is actually physically making a film.
And yet, I don't see a problem with saying directors made their movies. Sure, it was the work of a lot of talented individuals contributing collectively to produce the final product, and most of those individuals probably contributed more physical "creation" to the film than the director did. But the director is a film maker. So I wouldn't be so confident asserting that someone who coordinates and architects an application by way of various automation tools isn't still a programmer or "writing software"
Fair enough! However you need to consider:
- Depending on your taste you will need to subscribe to multiple servics. Shows / movies I enjoy are scattered across Netflix, AppleTV+, Prime, Disney+. And it's increasingly unlikely that IP is licensed out (i.e. no Star Wars on Netflix)
- There is a surprising amount of movies which are not on any streaming service (at least in Germany) OR they are but you still need to buy a digital copy or rent
- The UX of self hosted solutions like for example Jellyfin or other open source can (surprisingly!) be better than the paid solutions. I.e. no ads & and no UX redesigns
I'm not opposed to streaming services at all. I will subscribe to them as long as it's value for money.
However in recent years streaming services got worse while self hosted solutions got much much better.
Your point - subscription is cheaper than self hosting - may still hold, but the balance has definitely shifted in favor of self hosted solution.
I don't think it'll become mainstream in the near future (or ever) but for me personally it's worth it!
It's also not "either / or". You can both self-host and have subscriptions, but maybe you can cut down on some subscription services:)
He was coming off the high of being the "star" of the new Star Wars movies. He was a main character in the story but not The main character. I recall watching these on physical DVD via netflix in ~2008 and wondering why he seemed (what we now casually call) entitled; I'd been watching the series for ~3-4 episodes before it clicked with me that he was one of the actors from star wars, despite being a long time star wars fan. He was definitely entitled, the blow up was centered around KTM not being interested in what a Star Wars actor was doing and not taking him seriously. I distinctly recall seeing him cry, or almost cry on camera.
That said, ignoring that drama, the rest of the series was quite good, when they published "The long way Down" from Scotland to South Africa I jumped on that and watched it as well. Someone else pointed out they did an EV thing from Argentina to... Alaska? with Rivian, I might go look at that too.
But given that McGregor has millions in the bank, he could have bought 3 KTMs and not even noticed the cost. Instead, they insisted that they will only ride bikes that someone gives them for free. Because the poor millionaire Hollywood actor "I was in a Star Wars movie!" couldn't possibly pay for his pet project out of his own pocket. Oh how unfair, those evil oppressors at KTM!
I don't think using GenAI to storyboard and pitch is inherently bad. There's long historical precedent for folks using existing film and music in demo reels to explain the feeling and tone they're going for (e.g. WW2 footage for Star Wars storyboarding reels IIRC). In isolation what you explained sounds fine, there may even be some argument that parts of this fall under fair use which may diffuse certain training attribution copyright challenges. Where things start to fall apart for me would be if your story/script and resulting prompts start to rely on GenAI upstream. And as you say, when the end product itself starts to lean on this tech as a shortcut.
Lucas got a lot of feedback from people over several years as he revised his initial concept. https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/The_Star_Wars_rough_draft The first version was not very Campbellian and did not have "Use the force." He also didn't come up with the "I am your father" story arc until after finishing the first movie.
I think that was the joke. It's obvious Star Wars stole a lot of ideas from Dune. But many people think it's the opposite since star wars predates the Dune movies.
If it wasn’t for THX-1138 you cynicism might be warranted. The other factor is that the simple matinees are just as tied to the hero’s journey as Star Wars. The hero’s journey is tied to stories from the beginning of storytelling. Lucas experienced his own hero’s journey in producing the movie.
Finally from what I know Cambell ended up living on Skywalker Ranch. I see no reason to minimize connection.
The two rode on each-other's coat tails during their ascent. Lucas was happy to give a "yeah, I was totally thinking that!" when people would point out some classic hero stuff in his simple little wonderful space opera (not damning with faint praise here - Star Wars is a ridiculously wonderful film!).
And Campbell knew a good thing when he saw it, happy to agree that Lucas' film represented a hero's journey.
This was a time when Campbell's writing was entering broad pop consciousness and his speaking engagement schedule was starting to grow: the massive popularity of Star Wars was a great ship to catch a ride on.
People wanted to see a depth in Star Wars that caught Lucas off guard (remember that he just wanted to replicate the exciting, cliff-hanger kids serials of his 1950s childhood). He decided to go with it, saying it was all part of a big plan, "I have ten movies with their stories all plotted out" etc. The reality is he cobbled things together ad-hoc and kind of quickly, with no real overarching intent - something he only decades later finally admitted.
I feel for him: in his mind, he was just a nuts-and-bolts technology guy who loved the "how would I make that?" questions and work far far more than the story he had to come up with to tell. He freely admitted he hated writing. If he had it his way, he would have merely been the head of ILM, excitedly figuring out ways to use new technology to solve film making problems, but Star Wars blew up on him, becoming an over-the-top ultra-success.
The real connection between Lucas and Campbell was nearly non-existent, but it was a useful thing for each of them to strategically latch on to as their popularity began to rapidly grow.
Star Wars only ever had three movies. It'd be neat if they made some prequels though!
and for anyone with 4 hours to kill... here's as an incredible documentary covering the misaligned incentives and poor guest experience at the now-shuttered Disney Star Wars hotel.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=T0CpOYZZZW4
She covers everything - the line getting in to the hotel, the size + cost of the rooms in comparison with the same size/cost on a Disney cruise ship, and theories on why the experience was so poor.
We can't blink without involving some corporation into our creative process. I think Tony Gilroy has some interesting things to say about our world with-in the Andor TV series. Its not an easy map. The character arcs, when the are based on the truth of the situation can help people change their way of thinking.
I never got anything out of the original Star Wars films except heroes and villains. Andor is on a completely different level then the original Star wars world IMHO.
Some times you got to use whats available to you. I do think that we are living in an evil time and in order to change that story, we are going to have to envision something different. I think good stories can help us do that, regardless of how they are funded. Corporations will sell you the rope to hang themselves. They don't care what happens, only that they make money, and I think that will be there downfall at some point.
You realize surveillance capitalism is what caused the Andor TV show (and more broadly the entire Star Wars franchise) to exist at all, right? Gigantic corporate entities have made a lot of money from monetizing the Star Wars franchise.
I'll say frankly that I personally object to Star Wars on an aesthetic level - it is ultimately an artistically-flawed media franchise even if it has some genuinely compelling ideas sometimes. But what really bothers me is that Star Wars in its capacity as a modern culturally-important story cycle is also intellectual property owned by the Disney corporation.
The idea that the problems of the world map neatly to a confict between an evil empire and a plucky rebellion is also basically propagandistic (and also boring). It's a popular storytelling frame - that's why George Lucas wrote the original Star Wars movies that way. But I really don't like seeing someone watch a TV series using the Star Wars intellectual property package and then using the story the writers chose to write - writers ultimately funded by Disney - as a basis for how they see themselves in the world poltically.
I see a lot of "mickey mouse" but if this is Disney IP, then it includes Star Wars and Marvel, no?
You can literally make your own Marvel movie now! Legally!
> This would be worrying if the content was 1) actually good or 2) not freely available.
The content is not freely available. You pay for it with ads or premium subscriptions. There is a massive amount of money being passed around behind the scenes.
When IP holders cut off Google's ability to host IP content, 50+% of YouTube immediately dies overnight.
Looking at the top videos on YouTube this week, 7 of the top 10 are all "Pop IP" content: Candy Crush the Movie, Miley Cyrus, "I wanna Channing All Over Your Tatum", Superman Drawn, Star Wars Elevator Prank, We are World of Warcraft, Red Bull.
People love and drown themselves in pop culture and corporate-owned IP. Whether that's music, games, anime - they love corporate-owned IP.
If this content gets pulled en masse, YouTube is fucked. YouTube has been getting all of this for free. That's something that could be done today, but it's just non-obvious. When you package that with the "creation enablement", it's a packaged good that can be licensed or sold enterprise-to-enterprise.
Disney is about to wet their toes. Nintendo has already been experimenting with it. The concept is right there in front of them, and as distribution channels and content creation merge into one uniform thing - it'll be obvious.
> The damage to the Star Wars brand shows this isn't a long term strategy.
To be clear, this was made by some of the top humans in their field. And despite massive critical panning, it did print money for Disney (perhaps at the cost of long term engagement/interest).
> The 2nd issue on animation slop is the human element.
It's the difficulty, cost, time, talent element.
People consume more human content because more human content is created. Orders of magnitude more. It's easy.
Vivienne Medrano, Glitch Productions, Jaiden Dittfach, and many others have minted huge franchises on YouTube - views, merch, Amazon/Netflix deals, etc. The problem is that it takes them ages to animate each episode, whereas filming yourself on your smartphone is quick, easy, accessible, affordable, low-effort, low-material, and low-personnel.
Kids on twitch are watching each other become anime girls and furries with VTuber tech. They're willingly becoming those things and building fantasy worlds bigger than their public face identities. We just haven't had the technology to enable it at a wide scale yet.
This is all changing.
I have an absolutely bizarre desire to download all of these, and then rip them apart, scene by scene, and then estimate pose, facial pose, gender, etc. Do facial recognition, so I know where the same actor is in all of the scenes...
And then to take a movie like The Matrix, or Star Wars, and then recreate it, shot for shot, as closely as I can, using clips from Public Domain movies.
Especially if I can pick, like, "this actor in this public domain movie, or movies, would be a good Neo, or Luke." And it turns out that he's in enough shots, and poses, that I'm able to remake all of that character's scenes, from Public Domain footage of this other actor.
It's like saying "Star Wars is the best movie in the world" - to some people it is. To others it's terrible.
I feel like it would be advantageous to move away from a "one model fits all" mindset, and move towards a world where we have different genres of models that we use for different things.
The benchmark scores are turning into being just as useful as tomatometer movie scores. Something can score high, but if that's not the genre you like, the high score doesn't guarantee you'll like it.
No, you're right. The attack on the Death Star sequence, in Star Wars (1977), is one of the very first use of 3D computer graphics in film.
The tie-fighters and Death Star were drawn as wire-frame. And it was all wire-frame until about '81 - '82. Textured rendering was driven by rapid performance gains with parallel and vector processors. I can't think of any use of textured surfaces until the early 1980s, outside of some experimental things like "A Computer Animated Hand" (1972).
The Genesis effect in Star Trek II (1982) was considered mind-blowing at the time. Most people in the audience would have never seen anything like it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq_sSxDE32c They used a Cray X-MP supercomputer. A very expensive one minute of film.
What we would recognize as the early 3D graphics scifi style emerges in the early-mid 80s. For example, The Last Starfighter (1984): https://youtu.be/bkDzkjQodzs?t=32
Space Operas are mythologies disguised as a language creation process.
Just track Star Maker to Star Wars, Lucas unconsciously took the bait and visualized scale invariance using motion control, and what space film first used motion control? 2001.
>CGI and Photoshop filters were 'fake' too. Until they weren't.
IMHO they still are, watch any old movie with practical effects (Aliens, Star Wars, just to name 2) and compare them to any 2025 production, green screen movies might look spectacular but they look fake, flat and boring.
For me very few movies are interesting. They've become expensive soap operas.
Visionary directors like the cohen brothers, spielberg, scorsese, and the writers of that era have just given way to blandness it seems.
10,20 years ago you had the Matrix and Forrest Gump.
Today you have, for example, Jay Kelly and Die My Dear. Well produced soap operas. These movies are literally just...a run of the mill story.
And Im not cherry picking.
Vanishingly small number of movies today seem to have a unique vision or be compelling..at least to me.
They even managed to turn Star Wars from a space opera into a space soap opera.
> You can’t even buy or screen the original theatrical release of Star Wars
You can actually, the 2006 Limited Edition DVD is a double disc version one being the original version.
However they are not DVD quality because they were transferred from LaserDisc and not the original film stock
I’m reminded of the beginning of the movie Elf, where the book publisher is informed that a printing error means their latest book is missing the final two pages. Should they pulp and reprint? He says,
> You think a kid is going to notice two pages? All they do is look at the pictures.
I’m quite sure bean counters look at Disney kids movies the exact same way, despite them being Disney’s bread and butter.
With Star Wars you have a dedicated adult fan base that’ll buy up remasters and reworkings. Aladdin? Not so much. Especially in the streaming era, no one is even buying any individual movie any more.
They have nothing to do with mathematics but everything to do with being extremely popular books.
Most people that have read a mathematics textbook have also read and enjoyed Harry Potter.
Given you have enjoyed drinking water and breathing in the past, there is a high likelihood that you will enjoy watching the Star Wars films.
> I can choose to use a bank that allows me to access all of their online banking features via the browser.
Lucky you. There are fewer and fewer such banks out there. The trend is to route login and consequential interactions on the web through 2FA on a phone - and not TOTP, but push notifications sent to the bank's app, that only runs on devices that pass remote attestation checks.
> I can choose to work for a company that doesn't want to surveil my personal device.
Again, lucky you. Most people don't really get many options for employment at any given moment, and the issue of corporate phones is usually at the bottom of the list of criteria when one is looking for a job. I.e. not a real choice for most people.
> I can deal with the government via snail mail
At a snail pace.
> or in the browser.
Modern government systems around the world tend to require some sort of identification that usually gets tied to your smartphone, either directly or via your bank.
> I can use third-party YouTube clients and torrent movies and games, or simply don't engage with DRM'd media because there's plenty of entertainment out there.
Torrents aside, that's not the case. Entertainment isn't fungible. Disney can release all Star Wars media DRM-free for everyone to download, and it means exactly zero to someone who wants to watch Star Trek, but Paramount/CBS decided to go all Ferengi on the franchise. Can't substitute one for the other. This is why the market supports so many streaming services these days - they exploit this very fact.
> Count the percentage of software you use that are open-source compared to 10 years ago. I bet it's more.
Open Source software stopped mattering once the world embraced Software as a Service model. Source code on Github means nothing if the code is actually executed on servers you don't control and have no visibility into.
That covers end-user OSS. The larger space of OSS building blocks are... building blocks. OSS libraries matter to users just as much as standard Phillips screws used inside an appliance, when they're beneath layers of glue and permanently soldered elements and join together elements explicitly labeled as "not end-user servicable".
> It's only a matter of time before we make hardware open-source, too.
That time will come around when we build a Star Trek-style replicator (and then have a successful revolution to seize this new means to production, because no way the first company to build an universal manufacturing device is going to just let people use it). Open Source Software succeeded only because software development has near-zero natural barrier to entry, so there was a large supply of bored high-schoolers and students, hobbyists, academics and other do-gooders with enough time and will to just build stuff and give it away for free. This isn't true for hardware.
Now, circling back to the main point:
> Whether we can move to open platforms depends on the choices people make.
No, it does not. On consumer side, the market is driven by supply, not demand. I.e. you only get to choose from what the vendors decide to make available to you, and they know perfectly well you have to choose something, so your voice doesn't matter.
If it did, we wouldn't be having this whole thread in the first place.
I grew up in communist bloc, finely oppressed by russians with their military bases all around, ready for nuclear WWIII that never came.
Peanut butter isn't something I ever saw before being adult and well into 90s, it simply wasn't a thing, I guess evil capitalist invention with the only goal to subvert our fine communistic paradise, like ie Star wars movies. Raw peanuts were frequent though, I guess one of very few things that actually made it through very badly functioning central planning and wasnt stolen by aparatchicks and collaborants for themselves. Never ever met a single kid having any sort of peanut allergy during growing up, never knew its a thing. I recall one or two with asthma, hay fever and thats it. But same could be said about any form of mental diseases/issues for whatever reason, anxiety, adhd variants and so on... either ignored, undiagnosed or really on much lower levels, dont know.
Kid misbehaving? A fine smack or some other physical punishment settled things at least in primary school. Then things started to change a bit till they overcorrected these days.
> That’s why the best subs, are always fan subs! Because a business will never put in 8x more time on an episodes subtitles than “bare minimum.”
Cannot overstate this enough. Fans are the ones who actually care. To an almost pathological degree.
Anime fansubbing is a major reason why our video players even have excellent subtitling support to begin with.
Many music fans will obssess over ripping quality and lossless encodings to the point of delusion.
I've seen people care so much about some film they they somehow spliced together two different blu-rays to make the ultimate version because some parts were better on the disc from a specific region.
Star Wars fans cared so much they spent tens of thousands of dollars and years of their lives to resurrect negatives from the 70s that even the creator himself had disowned:
https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/Project-4K77/
Always bet on guys who care. Corporations will never be able to compete. They simply do not give a shit. They want money for minimum viable products. These guys do it out of love.
More important, in the nearly hundred and fifty years it has taken for the church to assume its final form, Gaudí’s once revolutionary aesthetic no longer looks futuristic. Early critics of the Sagrada Família accused Gaudí of being too over the top, but his commitment to visual abundance has become a universal aspect of pop culture—think of the ornate C.G.I. cityscapes in “Black Panther” or the “Star Wars” films.
I was never into architecture and am not a religious person but visiting the Sagrada Familia was profound. I came out a slightly different man than one who walked into it just half an hour before. No CGI hack comes close.
The virtual console is now offering GameCube titles. GameCube/PS2/XBox was the tipping point when most major 3D releases looked reasonably good and the hardware was strong enough that developers were encountering fewer limitations that hampered the games in very fundamental ways. Compare Resident Evil 1 on the Playstation to the remake one generation later on the GameCube to see a very direct example of this.
Additionally video games can be a major time investment. Disney doesn't worry about the older Star Wars movies cannibalizing interest in the new ones because you can match the original trilogy in a single evening, were beating a single game could potentially take months. The quality of the entire Zelda series on average is extremely high and the majority of the games are still worth playing, a young gamer could easily start going through the library and find themselves having enough fun to just keep focusing on that instead of purchase the latest and greatest at top dollar.
Cancel culture has made exactly zero effective changes in our society. I've noticed that you've brought up how you don't think voting is effective.
One thing that's made a huge impact on our society is that many people participating in cancel culture and promoting shame and anger as solutions also tell people not to vote.
I watched it happen three times before the last three presidential elections and it was a big part of the voter suppression messaging tracked by democracy watchdogs. I'd argue that the biggest impact cancel culture has had is electing Donald Trump twice, weakening faith in democracy, and increasing the appeal of authoritarianism.
Shame, anger, and other tactics of using abuse to promote change is simply not effective. That's beyond the fact that it's unethical.
Cancel culture is appealing because hate and anger are addictive and they make you feel powerful. But they also make it hard to feel empathy. This is basically the main point of Star Wars, beyond just wanting to make a swashbuckler film set in space.
You're talking about the movies, and yeah, that has failed. They're talking about yet another one, and I'm baffled, but we'll see where (if anywhere) it goes.
But the Paramount+ stuff is doing pretty well. Strange New Worlds is very popular. So was Lower Decks. The last season of Picard, at least, gave fans a lot of what they had been looking for. They've got a new series coming out, and what little we know is that it has a bang-up cast. (Not that that's sufficient; Discovery did very badly by some very talented actors. But it's a good start.)
So Trek: The IP is still going pretty strong. At least as well as Star Wars, which has also been hit-and-miss.
Nice, yeah. With many movies one has to ask: What's the point? Especially all Disney Star Wars..
> these weird complaints about diversity in modern movies
You're twisting my words to move the narrative goalposts. Nobody complained about diversity in movies (otherwise I wouldn't have praised Rush Hour and Blade). The complaint was about US movies today being solely built around a toxic form of diversity checkbox ticking, masquerading as entertainment, which is not interesting to anyone outside the US crowds of movie goers who care more about seeing $CURRENT_DAY political issues in their movies instead of recognizing entertainment as being fantasy escapism, which causes the US to loose soft power abroad, and judging by how they flop at the box office, US viewers aren't interested in paying for this slop either.
>most of your good old days classics examples are in fact "slop based on established IP".
Source that they're slop?
>but Star Wars prequels given as a positive example while complaining about 30 year old IP slop?
The prequels were considered shit at the time because they were compared to the original masterpieces, but compared to the modern Star Wars that Disney shits out today, they're basically gold. They ended up ageing like wine due to how bad we have it today.
>You may also have missed the subtle subtext in Star Wars about fascism.
What's your point here?
As is traditional with these weird complaints about diversity in modern movies, most of your good old days classics examples are in fact "slop based on established IP".
I know kids in the target demographic have a place in their heart for them but Star Wars prequels given as a positive example while complaining about 30 year old IP slop?
You may also have missed the subtle subtext in Star Wars about fascism.
Except American movies(and entertainment in general) haven't been good for about 10 years now, it's all slop based on established IP from 20-30 years ago.
When I was a kid growing up in the post communist 90-00s, we were going nearly weekly to the cinema to watch the latest American movies: Blade, Shrek, Toy Story, The Matrix trilogy, LotR trilogy, American Pie, Batman trilogy, Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, Fast & Furious, X-Men, Spider-Man, Star Wars, Scary Movie, Rush Hour, etc
We couldn't get enough of US entertainment, while now everyone here avoids the new US releases like the plague since it's only cash grabs injected with $CURRENT_DAY identity politics, diversity box ticking based on focus group testing, resulting in sterile, predictable, zero-humor, zero-edge, zero-creativity slop that's not even worth pirating.
Americans have no idea how much soft power they lost worldwide by forcing their identity politics and ideologies in entertainment. Japanese anime and Koran movies and TV shows now run rings around the US entertainment industry.
The one they were talking about (based on scans of original film prints) is called 4K77/4K80/4K83 for the three films.
I believe the first project of this type for Star Wars was Harmy's Despecialized Edition but I think these days most people prefer the 4K77 versions, although it varies by film and by person.
That's the thing: I don't feel like the studios really own something once it is released. It almost becomes the property of the viewers. Things like changing Star Wars is horrifying to most. It's almost as if the public should have to vote on any changes (e.g. I'd probably be willing to vote to remove some flubs, like a mic dangling in frame).
When the Bobs sold Back to the Future they put a clause in the contract that the movies could not be remade or altered in any way without their approval. They nixed the 3D versions that Universal was planned when 3D TVs were in vogue.
2. Highest resolution/bitrate/quality that was available at the time of the work's original release.
Arguably higher. For example, fans of Star Wars have scanned the original 1977 theatrical release with very high quality film scanners and created a 4K release complete with film grain and the original scenes intact which is not available through approved channels.
If Disney mistakenly sends you a prerelease copy of the new Star Wars, playing that in your local movie theater is still a crime.
Possession of data does not give you complete legal freedom.
This is cool. It reminds me of the early internet where there were things like you could watch star wars over telnet[1]
[1] https://cyrillevarin.medium.com/relive-the-star-wars-magic-watching-the-entire-star-wars-film-in-macos-terminal-24c942f5e897
> There is obvious utility to railroads, especially in a world with no cars.
> The net utility of AI is far more debatable.
As long as people are willing to pay for access to AI (either directly or indirectly), who are we to argue?
In comparison: what's the utility of watching a Star Wars movie? I say, if people are willing to part with their hard earned cash for something, we must assume that they get something out of it.
This person predicted two years ago that by now teenagers would be creating star wars quality movies in their bedrooms with AI.
I don't really know why that "understandable". We see this with so many TV shows and movie francises. There's a reason why there's only two seasons of The Office in the UK version, but it's just beaten to death in the US version. Same with The Simpsons, Futurama, Big Bang Theory, pretty much the entire Marvel francise, Star Wars, Jurassic Park and so many more shows and movies.
You just find yourself in the corner yield "Please stop, it dead! It's been dead for years!" For example Star Wars, that francise is completely ruined, but the fans are insufferable and just keeps pouring money into something that quite frankly sucks by now.
Why must everything be milked dry to the point where we start hating it?
One problem with minatures, positioning the camera for each photo, then turning the result into special effects shot for a movie is that it can take days to record a scene, get the film developed, and view the result. Only when played back at full speed (24fps) the result might not be believable or lack the dramatic flare they were hoping for.
To fix this they looked for the fastest display they could find to do real time previews. They ended up with a vector display from three rivers computer corp (later renamed to PERQ Systems Corporation). This vector display could manage 50,000 vectors @ 60 Hz and allowed for wireframe to be displayed in real time, allowing MUCH quicker turn around times before they committed the result to film.
Made for interesting stories at the dinner table, doubly so after I saw star wars as a kid and my dad's vector display helped with the above.
Putting aside the astounding material and resource cost of this fantasy, the claim made here is an example of why people call AI proponents 'out of touch' or 'anti-human.'
Part of the reason why mass media entertainment - Squid Games, Game of Thrones, Star Wars, Minecraft Movie, etc - is so popular is because it is a shared experience that is commodified and then widely distributed. People watch things because their friends and families watch them, and the shared experience is a sort of asynchronous social experience. The same is true of games - just look at the popularity of Lets Play content on Youtube and Twitch. The same is true of music - concerts are still the primary way musicians make money.
So long as this is true, the 'dream' of hyper customised, personalised Netflix-style entertainment is an utter fantasy that denies the human need to experience, share and discuss their entertainment. I would go so far as to call it a delusional claim, and also very dystopian - to realise this goal is to atomise the social lives of billions via a complete walling off of the shared lived experience.
(Maybe this is not true with porn, given it is a commonly viewed in a, uh, solitary context; although at the same time Porntube and pre-Verizon Tumblr both show that it turns out that many people share their porn taste with others.)
It wasn't that they were amazing. Good enough.
And while maybe not amazing, they were wonderful at the time. Do you remember folks being amazed at the graphics on the PS1 or heck, even the N64? Those weren't good, really, but at the time? Yeah, it was good enough. Late 90's started seeing bigger tvs and sound systems. DVDs brought options to see all that stuff on the sides if you wanted. You didn't "make do" if you are out there buying modern tech - maybe you made do with whatever brands they sold at walmart - but then again, they sold game systems so it really wasn't "store brands only" or anything like that.
I'm not sure where you lived, but absolutely no theaters around me showed classics, save for something like Star Wars or Disney movies. One played second run movies - the ones in the space between theater release and home video release. So no, no one went to things like that. I graduated high school in the mid 90s, and both local theaters were pretty run down places that treated employees badly. The ones in smaller surrounding towns, if they had it, usually only played a handful of movies and were old places. And this seemed pretty normal for Indiana, outside of perhaps Indianapolis or a few richer areas.
I have a possibly mass produced bootleg SVCD of Star Wars in a folding jewel case, but it has some nice printed paper finishes and a retail box, so I guess it could be legit. I can't remember offhand if it's the whole trilogy or just the first movie. I think it's from the same era as the VHS and Laserdisc THX editions, pre-CGI re-release. It's from Malaysia iirc. It turned up at the computer repair shop I used to work at, and no one remembered from where, and no one wanted it, so I claimed it the same way I got my new-in-box new old stock Slackware 6.1/2 I think it was.
Agent Smith is 1/3 of Trinity. C'mon, that's right in the face.
In the flanking symbolism (three figures, a central one flanked by two others), Trinity represents the flanking formation itself.
Agent Smith represents one of the flanking figures that disconnects from the main formation. He's basically Furiosa.
Similar flanking trios are seen in Star Wars (Han, Leia, Luke), Starship Troopers (Rico, Carmen, Carl).
Somehow, it also alludes to the popular trope of "protagonist, girlfriend, best friend" seen in many popular movies, and dissected in The Truman Show.
This has nothing to do with AI agents. Some of those ideas go back millenia in the past.
I think the writers were high as fuck and thought that we computer people see this as "the operating system of society" or something (because they're full of bullshit just like that).
I constantly wonder why no one's talking about the fact that almost every movie with cgi visual effects looks awful these days? I was on a plane recently. One person in front of me had Wicked on, another the live-action Snow White, another some recent Marvel movie. Each slid completely into the uncanny valley in their own way. It was really eye opening.
The era you're talking about the balance was spot on. I'd say there was a golden age of effects from Star Wars through to Terminator 2. You're already suspending your disbelief and letting the filmmaker take you on a ride. Who cares if it's hyper-realistic? (or, in the case of contemporary movies, trying to be hyper-realistic and failing to the point that it makes it even more obvious.)
I imagine they would be more like product placements in film and TV than banner ads. Just casually dropping a recommendation and link to Brand (TM) in a query. Like those Cerveza Cristal ads in star wars. They'll make it seem completely seamless to the original query.
I think we can, with only a small loss in accuracy, reduce this to "franchises have similar problems."
There are many good sequels, occasionally good trilogies, and it's really rare to stay good after that point.
I blame budgets and consolidation. A major movie costs a vast amount of money to make. If you're a studio executive, are you going to spend a vast amount of money on an unknown that might be good and might be a disaster? Or on a known quantity that's virtually guaranteed to make money? Nobody's coming up with a story idea in a certain universe and making a movie from it. The decision starts with making a movie set in a certain universe, and then a story idea is figured out from there. With the huge consolidation we've seen, studios have a big catalog of franchises to pick from. They're never in a position where they have to say, well, the one big property we own is tapped out for now, we need to come up with something original. Now, if Star Wars is stale, Disney can pick from one of their fifty other franchises for a while.
This sounds like "old man yells at cloud" and I'm sure it is to an extent. But there's a real change here. Look at the top grossing films recently and from the more distant past. In 2024, the top 10 were all sequels or franchise products. Now go look at, say, 1984. I count two among the top ten. And of those two, one is a sequel and one is the third in a franchise; in 2024, the second top grossing movie is literally the thirty-fourth entry in its franchise.
> have very little understanding about what makes good movies
I've seen many thousands of movies, and that does give me knowledge about what makes a movie better.
For example, music makes a huuuuge difference, even if one may not even be aware of the music. For example, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings would be diminished considerably without their very good soundtracks. You can see this with the Hobbit movie - a lousy soundtrack, which severely damaged the movie. 2001 was greatly enhanced with the soundtrack. I read that Kubrick spent hundreds of hours listening to records searching for the perfect music. It paid off handsomely. What would "Blade Runner" be without the Vangelis soundtrack?
Andor succeeded despite the bureaucracy porn. Good stories are universal. You need to care about the protagonists.
The exposition is important, but doesn’t drive success. The best example of that is the original Star Wars. Contrast Star Wars to Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress — which inspired many aspects of Star Wars. Essentially the same story with different framing. Both are still excellent films.
Shitty sequels or in-universe works focus on the exposition. The Book of Boba Fett is probably the best example of this. Watching some dude slow walk through the desert to waste my time and engage in some inane plot that made no sense made me actively not give a fuck and turn it off. Cool universe. Bad TV.
> unspoken "show-don't-tell" internal logic
This is another axis separate or orthogonal to worldbuilding.
Recent Marvel and Disney films, the Jurassic Park and Star Wars sequels, and most Godzilla / Kong slop doesn't build believable worlds. The writers don't spend any time writing the universe that the story takes place in.
Lord of the Rings (the theatrical film trilogy), Game of Thrones (save for the last seasons), and Jurassic Park (1993) all build vast and credible worlds. Intricately detailed, living and breathing universes. Backstories, histories, technologies, warring factions, you name it. They then create believable characters that occupy those worlds and give them real character arcs within which they suffer, rise to prominence, grow, and die. Multiple heroes with multiple journeys. You're fully immersed in the fictional world, watching characters you care about occupying it. It's masterful storytelling.
Villeneuve's Dune has the same vast world and literature to draw upon as many of the other great epics, but he makes the rare mistake of not communicating anything to you about it. If you haven't read the books, much of the story is easily lost. He doesn't spend time on character arcs or even as much as dropping hints to what the subtitles of the world are. It's a super rare misstep, because most bad storytelling is from under baking the fictional world.
Then there's the mistake of sequels that try to expand on the mystery of the original world. The Matrix films and countless others have over-illuminated the mystery of their stories in trying to build universes. In doing so, the magic has been lost.
I think of some older movie series like Dirty Harry or Death Wish which were developed over a long time but didn't focus on nostalgia but rather tried to make a really different movie each time. Some later Death Wish movies are silly (Charles Bronson's ability to get weapons in the mail is like Wile E. Coyote) but they're never the same. At least the last three Star Wars movie had a cast that seemed to come right out of Doctor Who.
Hardcovers last longer, resource use is real. Cheap things is a regressive tax on the lower incomes who have to replace cheap stuff faster. They can’t save for better stuff.
When it comes to media like movies… really? Still? The resource use of Top Gun and Star Wars is bonkers. Can’t we just have local theater and you know socialize?
Do we need the movie to come together and socialize over?
I so thought we were done with that stuff around Spider-Man 3. MCU and Star Wars sequels made no sense to me.
Is our attention always going to be coupled to Saturday mornings in 1990s?
Boomers did all the drugs and made music and corny fun shows like SNL and somehow convinced us to stare at computers iterating on word problems like it’s fucking middle school while staring at these over the top delusions of grandeur to borrow from Han Solo.
Where did I refuse to watch anything? No amount of this attitude is going to make Casablanca or The Godfather or Pulp Fiction or Infinity War or Star Wars or Fight Club or 2001 or Top Gun be in any framerate other than 24fps.
If they start making films in higher frame rates today, that won’t change that fact. Do you think people are going to stop watching films from the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s?
It would take a concerted effort, beginning now, at least an entire generation (30-50 years) to remove or reduce the cultural impact of the 24 frames per second widescreen tradition. No such effort is presently underway, because higher framerates don’t help movies’ visual storytelling, and they may hurt it.
The Hobbit was Peter Jackson’s attempt. It went nowhere.
https://gizmodo.com/the-hobbit-an-unexpected-masterclass-in-why-48-fps-fai-5969817
> Is film grain a nostalgia effect?
Film grain simulation can be an effect, but that's not the primary application being described here. As @ricardobeat succinctly put it elsewhere in this post, this process usually supports "a reproduction of the original grain pattern, compressed separately from the underlying image content. The result is closer to the original picture than the denoised/compressed version".
> If kids grew up without seeing film grain, how would they feel about it?
Film isn't quite dead yet, with ~7% of features in 2025 still being shot on film and maybe 1% more taking the digital→film→digital (a.k.a. "analog intermediate") route. Unless their media diet is all super-recent and low-quality, even today's kids will have most likely seen many movies shot on film with visible grain. Popular candidates would include the Harry Potter franchise, most episodes of the Star Wars franchise, early Marvel movies, many animated Disney and Studio Ghibli features, etc.
That is the Star Wars I thought I knew. I saw it literally dozens of times.
I recall being puzzled when I went to see it a few years later, and it began with the words "Episode IV". I was pretty sure I'd have remembered that. It had, of course, been added for the Empire Strikes Back release.
What I did not notice was anything different about who shot whom in the Mos Eisley Cantina. It just hadn't stuck in my mind one way or the other.
I think the issue is that its actually quite difficult to "unlearn" something once you've seen it. I'm speaking more from human-learning rather than AI-learning, but since AI is inspired by our view on nature, it will have similar qualities. If I see something that inspires, regardless of if I paid for that, I may not even know what specifically inspired me. If I sit on a park bench and an idea comes to me, it could come from a number of things - the bench, park, weather, what movie I watched last night, stuff on the wall of a restaurant while I was eating there, etc.
While humans don't have encyclopedic memories, our brain connects a few dots to make a thought. If I say "Luke, I am your father", it doesn't matter that isn't even the line is wrong, anyone that's seen Star Wars knows what I'm quoting. I may not be profiting from using that line, but that doesn't stop Star Wars from inspiring other elements of my life.
I do agree that copyright law is complicated and AI is going to create even more complexity as we navigate this growth. I don't have a solution on that front, just a recognition that AI is doing what humans do, only more precisely.
> Female/LGBTQ characters are inserted into places where it doesn't make sense to fill quotas
Every case of "ruined by woke" I have seen ultimately just boils down to bad writing, with people blaming "woke" for it when, well, it's just shitty writing. If you ignore the woke stuff and look more broadly usually the whole thing is at best mediocre.
Also sci-fi, fantasy, and horror have always been "woke." Star Trek was one of the first popular shows to prominently feature black characters in important roles and has always lampooned racism and other kinds of bigotry. Night of The Living Dead is pretty easy to see as a racism allegory, or at least it contains one as a sub-plot. Star Wars had an evil empire that was transparently a mix of Nazis and arrogant condescending colonialists. Alien was one of the first huge films I can recall to have a super competent female action hero with skills like engineering who didn't need any help from a man. The Expanse depicts a society that's so post-gender-mattering you don't even notice it, it's just the way it is (probably a good example of good writing in this regard). Etc.
Age of a movie is not an indication of it being known by younger audiences. Star Wars is 46 years old, and virtually everyone knows it.
And that every extra gets their own story; the random slave that Jabba kills is mostly forgettable but apparently in the extended universe, she survives, is or becomes a jedi and becomes Luke Skywalker's wife ???
It really feels like they have absorbed fanfiction into the mainline series. The Star Wars sequels had potential after the first film, but since it seems they had no idea what they were doing the second and third were a waste. The very intentionally placed marketable plushies did not help.
The Hobbit could have been fine, but they botched the production, had to pull in Peter Jackson to try and save it, they made it a cynical cash grab with forcing it to become a trilogy with unrelated story and made-up plotlines put in. Rings of Power was completely unnecessary and I have zero intention to watch it.
In hindsight, the Matrix sequels were actually alright. For one thing they pushed the technology (and budgets) of filmmaking forwards, with the big gun suits vs the tentacle robots segment costing more than most films that had been made up until then.
Much of the appeal of star wars is that things actually looked like they had purpose and function despite being a purely imaginative future.
> every single alien you saw in Mos Eisley eventually got an official name and canonical backstory (
This is such a weird meme. I suppose if you looked up every single story ever published referencing star wars you might be able to come up with names for most of them, but if you don't want to, why are you putting in the effort?
I'm not usually a fan of "don't engage with it!" defenses, but we're not talking abouy ignoring one movie out of a trilogy, we're talking about not deliberately searching out obscure fan fiction.
Beyond that, the people in the cantina should have names, because that's what "real people" have, and this is supposed to be a movie about a reality like ours that just happens to have spaceships and spacemagic.
In a universe with literally trillions of sentient beings, spaceships and literal magic, if your imagingation is lacking magic, I think that's on you.
The first film was groundbreaking. It matched "Star Wars" and "Lord of the Rings" in terms of its cultural penetration. Unfortunately the series failed to live past that strong debut. The second and third films were a total letdown, and The Animatrix only appealed to a niche audience and was itself a mixed bag.
The surprising and unsolicited fourth film had some promise in the first third of the film - I loved how it subverted expectations and was a meta deconstruction of the series itself. After the provocative and almost blasphemous setup, the film quickly devolved into poor action, weird pacing, and overall bad plot and character arcs. In a word, it felt senile. (The action shouldn't have been that bad with Keanu helming John Wick. It was just laziness.) The denouement was just same-y slop we see in every other dialed in action movie. Such a letdown for such a shocking cold open.
If you haven't seen the fourth film, it's a bit of a mind fuck. But turn it off the minute the reveal is over. That part is a treat, but it isn't worth your time otherwise.
Why would this be in a Disney Star Wars movie?
About a decade ago I started watching Star Wars movies for the first time, when there were "only" 6 movies to finish. But by then there were already 12+ Star Trek movies plus TV series. I decided that I'd "choose" Star Wars, and that was enough for me. I am sure Star Trek is a fascinating universe, and I see it mentioned all the time, but I don't think I care about it enough to ever go into that world.
I was never a big Star Trek fan, but here in Sweden growing up I watched episodes of The Next Generation, Voyager, and Deep Space Nine when they happened to be on. There definitely always seemed to be some Star Trek series running in a decent TV slot and everyone seemed aware of it - even if its popularity was eclipsed by that of Star Wars.
From friends and family in Belgium it seems it was somewhat bigger there.
The 8th and 9th Star Wars movies were such a mess. What if space balls 2 parodied these movies, but ended up with a more coherent plot?
The main storyline looks negligible compared to the work Andor has done for it.
The first Star Wars movie is basically the story of the final part of the information's journey. It only gained depth with Andor and Rogue One.
The current US copyright duration is 70 years after the life of the author. This is absolutely bonkers. 50 years from publication would be a significant improvement.
50 years ago was 1975. If copyright were limited to 50 years, we'd be looking at all of the Beatles works being in the public domain. We'd be midway though Led Zeppelin, and a lot of the best work from Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones.
Also, Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man. Disney would still profit from the MCU films which they produced in the 2010's, but they couldn't stop you from releasing your own Batman vs Spider-Man story.
The Harry Potter books would still belong to JK Rowling, but the Narnia stories would be available for all.
The Godfather 1 and 2 would be in the public domain, as would be original Star Trek TV show, and we'd be coming up on Star Wars pretty soon.
If there were no copyright protection, these works wouldn't have been created. It is good that Paul McCartney and George Lucas and JK Rowling have profited from their creative output. It would be okay if they only profited for the first 50 years. Nobody is counting on revenue over half a century in the future when they create a work of art today.
This is our culture. It should belong to all of us.
> The cinematography, editing, writing, and overall feel of this show far exceed any Star Wars movie I've seen.
Yes, but by sucking big. The story is nonexistent, the scenes with children do not blend in the story, the story is boring as hell.
It's much, much more collaborative than that. The role of a producer can be limited to managing the financial side of the production. Or they can be involved with coordinating the production itself. The director has the most say over what is shot, how it's edited, what the score should be like. A good producer can help make a film excellent, but if you have a bad director, or the "wrong" director, then nothing the producer does will fix that issue.
Of course there are also Executive producers who are far far up the financial food chain of a movie, and sometimes these titles are also just vanity plates for the production.
As an example of the value of a good/great producer, look at Gary Kurtz. He was essential for both Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, but wasn't part of the team for Return of the Jedi. In my opinion, that's one of the reasons that ROTJ is the worst of the three films. Lucas didn't have someone pushing back against his worse tendencies.
For an example of the wrong director, look no further than Rogue One. While it's very difficult to sus out what was wrong with Gareth Edwards directing, Tony Gilroy was brought in to fix the film. Both are appropriately quiet about what the changes were, what was re-shot (simple professional courtesy), but the result is a film that (while I love it) is just slightly off.
Wonderful documentary, super recommended watching.
Though, nit pick -- when people say "fix it in post", they're not usually talking about editing.
Editing is an expected, normal, traditional part of the art of filmmaking. You're not changing or fixing the shots themselves; you are cutting and pasting footage sequentially to tell a coherent and compelling story. The YT you linked is a masterful example of how Star Wars was saved through this sort of editing.
"Fix it in post" refers more to making sloppy shots full of errors and then correcting those errors later with CGI.
Does that make sense? The art of stitching shots together, versus shooting crappy shots and CGIing them later.
Its like being raised from earliest age with some religion (any, really, they are all equal in good and bad ways) vs somebody who wasn't. The thickness of rose-tinted glasses is something that's hard to argue about rationally.
I wasn't in both cases, communists considered it a capitalist propaganda about US might and banned it (maybe just heard about Star wars being US space program, took just first result on soviet gugel so to speak, but fight for freedom at all costs is generally not something you want to encourage in dictatorship).
They are an interesting flick (original trilogy), but nothing really magical for me in them. As mentioned by others they feel like 80s pop sci fi movie, nothing more, characters and acting are... mediocre and it all feels aimed at kids/teens. A lot of creativity with sets, but that's not primary reason for me to watch a movie.
Since I refuse (can't even) to be swayed emotionally of some good ol' memories from growing up, prequels felt even more childish (maybe apart from ep3), and this trend continued with last 3 movies. Rogue one was by far the best experience in whole SW universe, so if this goes even further happy to experience it.
You could have the exact same story on a completely different universe, without using any of the Star Wars IP by doing only superficial adjustments.
But also yes, it's the closest thing to the original theme since the second movie.
I actually greatly prefer the prequels to the original trilogy. I suspect it has to do with the fact that I was a child when episode 1 came out and I was still a child when the prequels concluded.
A big part of the problem is that these movies were written, basically, for 12-year old boys. You're not going to be able to get that spark back as an adult, and it's not easy to make a movie that appeals so strongly to both demographics. And much like wu-tang, star wars (and other fun stories) is for the children. Andor is at least more adult-oriented, I think.
So, do I like the new movies? No, I literally slept through the last two they were so boring, and I found the lack of coherent plot baffling. And yes, it does make me a little sad. But seeing little girls dressed up like Rey, I'm reminded that there are better things for me to care about.
Your pedantry probably requires a rewatch.
I also think "masterpiece" is a heavy term to throw around but the emotional impact of the this series and the complexity of its narrative as it catalogs a hero's journey from reluctant participant to true believer with an epic story arc can be held up next to most film and historical epics like Laurence of Arabia, Ben Hur, The Matrix, the Original Star Wars trilogy, Dune, Kingdom of Heaven, Gladiator, The Handmaid's Tale (series), The Odyssey (epic poem). His personal journey which leads to his persecution and enslavement, his role in leading a slave uprising, rescuing his friends from the aftermath of a rebel uprising, building the foundations of a rebel army, risking his life countless times and ultimately sacrificing himself to prevent his enemy from having an insurmountable edge.
The series makes the very popular "Avengers" film series look like trite dogshit and does the same for most of the "Star Wars" sequels and prequels so I don't fault people for using the term "masterpiece".
Jaws. The Shawshank Redemption. Alien. The first Jurassic Park. My Cousin Vinney.
I would say that there is not a single scene that can be removed from these movies without negatively impacting the story/theme/narrative.
Some say that Star Wars IV and V fit this definition but I would say there is some eyecandy fluff that could be cut.
The cinematography, editing, writing, and overall feel of this show far exceed any Star Wars movie I've seen. I had long since written off the Star Wars franchise as a shameless cash grab since the original movies but they proved they could do something cool with it.
I'd definitely watch a new movie if it were handled by the same team that made Andor. Prequel, sequel, side story, or re-telling of the originals.
The case of It's a Wonderful Life has shown that specific parts of a movie can be in the public domain while other parts aren't, even down to the music within a public domain scene.
For the dreaded special editions of Star Wars, only Jabba's stupid face or the specific shot of the Death Star exploding with that ugly-looking ring would have a copyright of 1997. The original scenes cleaned and restored would still have a copyright of 1977.
I lived in Tunisia for 3 months, mostly in Tunis. I'm surprised there was no mention of the doors there. They are pretty beautiful[0].
The Star Wars section is also pretty limited, if you're a fan, I recommend checking out the GalaxyTours map[1], the tours were outside my budget but the information they provide is extremely accurate and well researched. Chott el-Djerid [2] was my favourite, basically the outside of Luke's home located in the middle of a dry lake (on google maps it looks like water). Funnily enough, my favourite example of Wikipedia not always being right is also an alleged StarWars filming location, wikipedia claims[3] that Ep 1 was filmed at Ksar Ouled Soltane but GalaxyTours shows that it was not [4].
I'm also surprised there were no pictures of plants in the desert covered by plastic bags. It was pretty shocking, driving through the desert, nothing really around, but pretty much every tree/plant had plastic bags attached. I thought maybe they were intentionally put there to serve some purpose, so I stopped and got a closer look. Nope, just trash bags that blew away in the wind and got stuck there.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medina_of_Tunis#/media/File:Medina_2012_5.JPG
[1] https://galaxytours.com/starwars-locations-tunisia-map/
[2] https://galaxytours.com/starwars-tunisia-film-sites/chott-el-djerid/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ksar_Ouled_Soltane
[4] https://galaxytours.com/research/ksar-ouled-soltane-debunking-the-myth/
Tunisia is on my short list. In addition to a lot of Roman ruins, it has been used in movie locations. eg Tatooine in Star Wars.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/sponsored/star-wars-tunisia-film-locations-180960144/
https://depart-travel-services.com/en/discover-the-iconic-star-wars-filming-locations-in-tunisia/
I'm sure it's simply a means to funnel more money to SpaceX. I'm old enough to remember the original Star Wars (both Reagan's idiotic missile defense system and the movie). The problem hasn't gotten any easier since then, in fact quite the opposite, and the requisite technology has not really advanced much, either. What it really boils down to is mad men want the ability to lash out at the world without facing any consequences. It's good for all of us that physics doesn't allow that.
You don't even need AI for the death of shared media culture. Just look at the end of broadcast and the rise of subscription services: movies like Star Wars or Back To The Future could only reach their status as cultural icons through the low and wide end of the licensing ramp. A successful cinema release might make a movie the talk of the month, but long lasting cultural relevance only came from broadcast repeats. Stuff that stays on a subscription will only ever reach permanents and hoppers.
Leaving outside the ethical part of it - which is huge, this kills innovation.
The problem I see is that when everything is iterative, and you kill sustainable incentives for new views, innovation disappears.
Is like the movies. We will get all budget towards remakes and reboots, and little new would show up.
Being an 80s guy, I remember many new movies coming out every year, and when they stretched beyond 2 or 3 films, people frowned.
Back to the future, Indy (the good years), Rambo (first 3), lethal weapon. Cool gems came up too (Last action hero?Terminator) even in loaded fields like simple action movies…. Star Wars, 3 films. Matrix. bond was the exception.
Now? mission impossible (8 films at over 2h), fast and mediocre franchise (20 movies), Marvel and DC movies (3 movies shot 30 different times), and everything else is a reboot. Almost impossible for new ideas to get through.
We are killing culture, innovation and human spark for some companies to make a billion more. We are feeding like factory pigs from generic slop, and as the factories grow they kill fertile ground for those who wanted to eat something cleaner.
The fact that is happening does not mean it’s right. It’s just we are accepting mediocrity as our guiding principle at 0.01 USD a pop…
If data integrity is assured, and thus there is no change in the data to store/transfer, then that's the opposite of computationally transforming the data?
How do we see robot and AI and helping interactions in film and tv and games?
A curated list of films for consideration:
Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" or "The Modern Prometheus" (1818), Metropolis (1927), I\, Robot (1940-1950; Three Laws of Robotics, robopsychology), Macy Conferences (1941-1960; Cybernetics), Tobor the Great (1954), Here Comes Tobor (1956), Jetsons' maid's name: Rosie (1962), Lost in Space (1965), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), THX 1138 (1971), Star Wars (1977), Terminator (1984), Driving Miss Daisy (1989), Edward Scissorhands (1990), Flubber (1997, 1961), Futurama (TV, 1999-), Star Wars: Phantom Menace (1999), The Iron Giant (1999), Bicentennial Man (1999), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Minority Report (2003), I\, Robot (2004), Team America: World Police (2004), Wall-E (2008), Iron Man (2008), Eagle Eye (2008), Moon (2009), Surrogates (2009), Tron: Legacy (2010), Hugo (2011), Django Unchained (2012), Her (2013), Transcendence (2014), Chappie (2015), Tomorrowland (2015), The Wild Robot (2016, 2024), Ghost in the Shell (2017),
Giant f robots: Gundam (1979), Transformers (TV: 1984-1987, 2007-), Voltron (1984-1985), MechWarrior (1989), Matrix II: Revolutions (2003), Avatar (2009, 2022, 2025), Pacific Rim (2013-), RoboCop (1987, 2014), Edge of Tomorrow (2014),
~AI vehicle: Herbie, The Love Bug (1968-), Knight Rider (TV, 1982-1986), Thunder in Paradise (TV, 1993-95), Heat Vision and Jack (1999), Transformers (2007), Bumblebee (2018)
Games: Portal (2007), LEGO Bricktales (2022), While True: learn() (2018), "NPC" Non-Player Character
Category:Films_about_artificial_intelligence : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_about_artificial_intelligence
List of artificial intelligence films: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_intelligence_films
Category:Films_about_robots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_about_robots
Category:American_robot_films: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_robot_films
https://www.realtimerendering.com/blog/thought-for-the-day/
It's crazy that post is 15 years old. Like the OP and this post get at, HDR isn't really a good description of what's happening. HDR often means one or more of at least 3 different things (capture, storage, and presentation). It's just the sticker slapped on advertising.
Things like lens flares, motion blur, film grain, and shallow depth of field are mimicking cameras and not what being there is like--but from a narrative perspective we experience a lot of these things through tv and film. Its visual shorthand. Like Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica copying WWII dogfight footage even though it's less like what it would be like if you were there. High FPS television can feel cheap while 24fps can feel premium and "filmic."
Often those limitations are in place so the experience is consistent for everyone. Games will have you set brightness and contrast--I had friends that would crank everything up to avoid jump scares and to clearly see objects intended to be hidden in shadows. Another reason for consistent presentation is for unfair advantages in multiplayer.
Hollywood has the particular problem that the executives would really like a formula to follow to make people like the films, the screenwriters would really like a formula to follow to write something that they can sell, and so on. There's a lot of commercial pressure for a factory to mass-produce plot and stamp it out into films. People liked a film? Make the exact same thing and see if they'll buy it again. Franchises help, because at least there's some incentive to shuffle around some different characters and plot elements.
Though the never-ending soap-opera of comics aren't really that great a fit for wrapping everything up in a three-act structure. (I'm still confused by why the Marvel films felt the need to kill off 90% of their villains in the same movie they debuted.) But the hero's journey is an attempt to answer to "how can we make a film as popular as Star Wars?" So we just follow that pattern, I guess.
Not that there weren't other patterns--the Disney animators independently arrived at their own storytelling rules, for example. Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life (by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston ) has a discussion of what they found worked for them and what didn't. It's worth comparing what they say there with the actual films and reflect on how the rules bore out in practice, of course. But it's another attempt at codifying a formula for appealing stories.
There's lots of attempts to try to describe the universal appealing story pattern. Whether narrative actually works that way has become bifurcated into separate questions: "what kind of stories are effective for humans?" and "what kind of story can we produce reliably as a commercial success?" are subtly different but have become conflated.
Can confirm, peak Star Wars. All the references to the original movies are on point
I'm "only" 40 and strongly prefer films made when they still shot and edited on film. The peak as far as visual quality and overall effect of film, for me, was probably the 60s through early 90s, though I love a bunch of films older or newer than that.
The constraints of not being able to color-grade the whole film with a slider or two, of every cut in the edit taking time to do, and of effects that weren't in-camera being relatively expensive, tended to lead to better and more-interesting filmmaking, even in middling films.
I appreciate what the right people can do with modern tools—I enjoy and even love plenty of newer films, and it's undeniably brought some cool stuff within reach of smaller, cheaper productions—but overall I see it as making cinema worse.
"We did it in a computer" being the answer to every "how'd they do that?" isn't movie magic, it's boring as hell. It's why even a film that tries to avoid that to some degree, like the new Dune duology, is in some important respects—though setting aside overall quality of the film on some other dimensions—just less interesting than broadly similar films like Lawrence of Arabia or Star Wars (or even, if I may be so bold, David Lynch's Dune).
I think this sort of opinion is fairly common among film-fans of all ages, due to interest in film making itself as much as output of the process per se. Not sure most movie watchers care, and they may well prefer the newer stuff because of the ultra-fast editing and tuned-to-be-cotton-candy-appealing color schemes and unconstrained video-game camera of fully CGI scenes and all that.
> I prefer 1970s music. Autotune is for whippersnappers.
Hard agree. I can't friggin' believe the heavy-handed autotune in children's media, especially (Daniel Tiger! Fred Rogers would be so unhappy with it). Let's teach them that natural human singing voices, like their own, sound wrong and bad. WTF.
Since when does the MAGA crowd give a hoot about unions?
The studios are dying. I go to the movies every week when there are movies. Other than Minecraft, the biggest crowd I’ve seen was the Star Wars re-release.
I had a friend group that played FIFA and similarly predatory cash and timesink games and complained endlessly about them but also purchased the same garbage annually, investing extra money on top to get ahead. Thousands of pounds a year. I checked in with a couple of them last month and it appears that nothing has changed. Nearly twenty years of angrily and knowingly wasting money yet somehow unable to stop. I see the same thing in people watching Star Wars Episode 35, despite episodes 1,2,3,6-34.
"Hell, I know twenty-somethings that can't even stand movies from the 1980s!"
We all have anecdotes about the bloody kids! I noticed my granddaughter wearing a Metallica (Justice) T shirt - she does like the music - I asked Alexa. I dug out my old records and gave them to her. I also showed her how to rip a CD and put them on her phone. That's proper life skills transfer that is.
I watched Star Wars in the 1970s when it came out and it still seems to be quite popular. Perhaps you might like to avoid the shit films and go a bit more mainstream when you show kids films from the 1980s!
George Lucas had to shoot his Star Wars movie in Englandd instead of California and its what gave us the iconic Empire portrayed by British theater actors.
some folks here might be interested in the Despecialized Editions of the Star Wars films
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmy%27s_Despecialized_Edition
> If I had seen them in the opposite order, would I feel the same way? I don't know.
This can go both ways. Sometimes you like things because you saw them that way first. Sometimes you're exposed to two versions of something and the second version is clearly an improvement on the first.
Example (A): I prefer the PC speaker soundtrack to The Secret of Monkey Island. I played it on an IBM. Without the exposure, there's no real reason to believe I'd have the same preference.
Example (B): The Swedish dub of the Moana musical number Shiny enjoys the considerable disadvantages that: (1) I heard the English version first; (2) I don't understand Swedish; (3) the English version is more authoritative, because the film was developed in English; and (4) the translation isn't especially close.† But I strongly prefer it anyway; to me the Swedish lyrics (as represented in the English subtitles I found on Youtube) give a very different feeling to the song and the character, one that greatly improves the film.
I'd lean toward taking people at their word if they seem to have a reason for the preference they express. The 2011 Blu-Ray Star Wars release pans down from outer space to a view of a planet more rapidly than the original film does. This seems like an issue where views either won't exist or will be dominated by the idea that whatever it was like before, it should stay that way.
"Han shot first", on the other hand, is a strong point of characterization, and objections to the change seem unlikely to be dominated by conservatism.
† Actually, I spent a fair amount of time listening to various dubs of Moana songs, and my favorite versions all make a significant change to the message of the song as I perceive it. I didn't care too much for the English Shiny, but this was also true of the songs that I liked in the original. My best model of why that might be is: every dub makes some more-or-less random changes to the song, and by methodically searching through a large number of them, I ended up finding the changes that appealed to me.
Ah good call! I noticed that too, but didn't mention it because I want to believe the packaging would be designed tend to keep the food in... But yes, this too because the packages wouldn't use an open-ended straw?
At the time of that movie, my world didn't contain much of the materials and designs portrayed, so the whole production was mesmerizing with design elements that distracted from more practical details: like ZOMG what kind of plastic is that tray made out of? Look how spacey that furniture is!
The video phone Floyd uses seems ridiculous with its $5 charge for a call. But pay phones worked on dimes. On his call to his daughter, she is seen next to a totem with a touchtone keypad for dialing. ATT advertised that as a concept product at that time, and touchtone phones were still novel (as were Tang and ballpoint pens that could write upside down).
When LED pocket calculators arrived in early 70s the color red of those LEDs was unlike anything else you would see; it seemed amazing.
And at the time real tech design was often awkward and cheesy, especial goofy arrangements of car interiors, which smelled funny and had plastic that fell apart after a few years of exposure to the sunlight and heat.
In 60s it was typical for TV remotes to have just a button for channel change and that's all. And the channel change worked by an electric motor rotating the channel dial. A big feature was a second button to change down instead of up,
In the 70s when cable TV arrived the converter box added remote functions to old TVs, which was a big part of the appeal, and in 1981 MTV was in stereo if you hooked up the cable to your hi-fi FM receiver and tuned the simulcast station. You could write to MTV and there'd send you a sticker for your tuner.
So the sets in 2001 seemed like astounding fashion design for many people, and that was still so when Star Wars arrived in '77.
> It's not that easy, in my opinion. George Lucas and James Cameron have both said that their restorations were how they would have wanted to release the movie if they had had the technology/budget.
I dunno about Cameron's films (I don't think I've seen an original and an unchanged from him), but for Star Wars, the constraints helped make the film good. Yes, there's some rough bits, but all of the additions subtract rather than add.
Maybe it's not what his vision was, but we liked it as it was. If you watch ROTJ, you can already see where unconstrained technology distracts Lucas and it turns into too much of a green screen affair in parts. The prequel trilogy is so much green screen and it just feels so sterile and unbelievable; none of the characters interact with the environment at all; they're not hot in the desert or even when having a light saber duel in lava fields or whatever. They don't get cold or wet, etc. In ROTJ, the speeder bike stuff is mostly gratituous, but there's interaction with the environment.
It's debatable where the line should be drawn, and the best approach is not to draw it at all. Sure, update flicks with CG fixes, but the original theatrical version should always be made available too.
That was Lucas' mistake with the original Star Wars trilogy. He fixed mistakes, CG'd characters and sets, spliced in deleted scenes, filmed entirely new sequences, replaced music, etc.. He felt he was making the movies better, but the updated editions weren't the familiar old friends people had known since childhood. If he'd made good transfers of the original versions available in the latest home video formats in addition to his newer versions, everybody would have been happy. He didn't do that.
Some people want the original versions and some want updated versions. Given that the first step to producing new spruced up versions is to restore the original, it makes sense to make both available.
It's not that easy, in my opinion. George Lucas and James Cameron have both said that their restorations were how they would have wanted to release the movie if they had had the technology/budget.
I personally hate the reworked Star Wars trilogy compared to the original, only because that's what I saw first. If I had seen them in the opposite order, would I feel the same way? I don't know.
As with anything, there is no bright line. For example, translations of The Odyssey are constantly changing the vocabulary. And more recently we've seen changes to novels to conform to modern sensibilities (e.g., Roald Dahl novels).
For me, I guess, my preference is to allow creators to do whatever they want with their creations, but I wish they would make all versions available. Steven Spielberg did that with ET when he digitally replaced all guns with walkie-talkies.
I have to agree with the article's author that what he calls "overzealous" removal of movie mistakes seems wrong. It wouldn't matter so much if the original movie was still readily available, but it's often the case that only the latest "fixed" version remains available.
With Star Wars in particular, Lucas' incessant meddling has long have gone far past the point of diminishing returns, and frequently making the movies worse.
More in general, I like watching the original movie, warts and all. I often disagree with the corrections, especially when they restore scenes that were left out for a reason, make color correction choices I disagree with (e.g. Blade Runner's "green tint" is inferior to its original bluish tint), etc.
Neat list and several that haven't been read about personally all that much.
The GNS (game, narrative, sim) Theory from Burning Wheel's at least a deconstruction of RPGs to consider although there have already been several critiques written of self limiting RPGs based on taking those as the end-all of the experience.
Apocalypse World's also a fairly cool choice (that might actually work quite well with other themes) based on the "setting is fleshed out during character creation." A lot of games definitely run into that issue where it feels like you're just wandering around in somebody else's sandbox, and there's not all that much input into the actual world itself.
Somewhat counter to that, a few that might have been interesting for inclusion, yet which often feature other people's settings.
- Star Wars (WEG or FFG). WEG version was one of the first to try tackling really big stuff fighting really small stuff. And the d6 system worked fairly smoothly for gradual progression. The FFG version had a cool implementation of Force Points, and being able to influence rolls and change results as long as the usage of the Force Points was appropriate for that style of Force user. Both are also notably for being more like encyclopedias of Star Wars, that often cover parts of the setting in incredible detail that might have only been superficially glanced at in canon films / television or quasi-canon extended literature.
- Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay: Rogue Trader. Interesting from my own perspective simply because it takes the standard part of most roleplaying games, that the players are exceptional members of society, and almost inverts that idea. The players are still "somewhat" exceptional, yet most of the actual main story "cool" stuff, was kept pretty far away (namely, roleplaying a Space Marine). You're pretty much just a ship captain (or the operational crew) and you're a long way from being stomped on by a titan or ripped apart by a bloodthirster.
- White Wolf extended (Werewolf, Mage, Wraith, Changeling). Seems a bit unfair to focus exclusively on Vamp alone, since at least Werewolf was somewhat popular at the time. The rest are probably decaying popularity though in order of writing.
- Savage Worlds. Interesting for using advancing dice types to relate the skill of characters to each other.
- Marvel Super Heroes (1984 TSR game). The list included did not cover even a single example of superhero gaming, which seems like a bit of an oversight, considering how popular the movies are and the general fanbase. MSH mostly because the power scale was ridiculous. The classic game had some chart where normal people were maybe a five (5), super's were perhaps a fifty (50) ... except the chart went up to 5000. https://www.classicmarvelforever.com/cms/universal-table.html
- Mutants and Masterminds. Another superhero game, just for a possible example. Perhaps a somewhat more sane choice. Offered a relatively playable game from a super character perspective, if perhaps slightly bland (just because all the powers tended to work almost the same way). Still had kind of crazy scales, just not quite the crazy of MSH.
- Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. A fun super hero game that was extremely free-form by comparison. Mostly focusing on the narrative elements, with plot points, and doom pools, and groups being able to effectively vote to end scenes by spending dice from their pools. It also had a fairly cool way of handing out story experience where you mostly got experience for being in character and then the group giving their Siskel and Ebert votes on how people did representing the characters they were playing. Could maybe be a bit mean if your group was critical, yet mostly encouraged playing the character like they might appear in the comics.
- Shadowrun. Nothing about cyberpunk, even though the 80's and 90's had a bunch of cyberpunk ideas floating around in roleplaying gaming, literature, and movies. Also perhaps notable simply for the incredibly dangerous rules, and how long you could take making a character, and then die on your very first run in corporate land.
- Palladium. Also. Super deadly. However, notable for being one of the first games to really try and ask, "what happens when a normal person fights a tank?" Hugely different scale weaponry with megadamage auto-deaths for most related results. Main setting was very creative though and had lots of moving pieces for the gamemaster to use. System itself was unfortunately a little convoluted for character creation, yet offered a unique take on "class" based designs, with a bunch of archtypes that were extremely different in their application.
So what benefit do we derive as a society from deciding that the capability for copyright infringement is in and of itself infringement? What do we gain by overturning the current protections the law (or society) currently has for technologies like xerox machines, VHS tapes, blank CDs and DVDs, media ripping tools, and site scraping tools? Open source digital media encoding, blank media, site scraping tools and bit-torrent enable copyright infringement on a massive scale to the tune of millions or more dollars in losses every year if you believe the media companies. And yet, I would argue as a society we would be worse off without those tools. In fact, I'd even argue that as a society we'd be worse off without some degree of tolerated copyright infringement. How many pieces of interesting media have been "saved" from the dust bin of history and preserved for future generations by people committing copyright infringement for their own purposes? Things like early seasons of Dr Who or other TV shows that were taped over and so the only extant copies are from people's home collections taped off the TV. The "De-specialized" editions of Star Wars are probably the most high quality and true to the original cuts of the original Star Wars trilogy that exist, and they are unequivocally pure copyright infringement.
Or consider the youtube video "Fan.tasia"[1]. That is a collection of unlicensed video clips, combined with another individual's work which itself is a collection of unlicensed audio clips mashed together into a amalgamation of sight and sound to produce something new and I would argue original, but very clearly also full of copyright infringement and facilitated by a bunch of technologies that enable doing infringement at scale. It is (IMO) far more obviously copyright infringement than anything an AI model is. Yet I would argue a world in which that media and the technologies that enable it were made illegal, or heavily restricted to only the people that could afford to license all of the things that went into it from the people who created all the original works, would be a worse world for us all. The ability to easily commit copyright infringement at scale enabled the production of new and interesting art that would not have existed otherwise, and almost certainly built skills (like editing and mixing) for the people involved. That, to me, is more valuable to society than ensuring that all the artists and studios whose work went into that media got whatever fractions of a penny they lost from having their works infringed.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-6xk4W6N20&pp=ygUJZmFuLnRhc2lh
> Ai will destroy critical thinking in our youths
I don't think that's the argument the article was making. It was, to my understanding, a more nuanced question about if we want to destroy or severely disturb systems at equilibrium by letting AI systems infiltrate our society.
> Sometimes there is an adjustment period (we still haven't figured out how to deal with short dopamine hits from certain types of entertainment and social media), but things will balance themselves out eventually.
One can zoom out a little bit. The issue didn't start with social media, nor AI. "Star Wars, A New Hope", is, to my understanding, an incredibly good film. It came out in 1977 and it's a great story made to be appreciated by the masses. And in trying to achieve that goal, it really wasn't intellectually challenging. We have continued in that downhill for a bit, and now we are in 16 second stingers in TikTok and Youtube. So, the way I see it, things are not balancing out. Worse, people in USA elected D.J. Trump because somehow they couldn't understand how this real-world Emperor Palpatine was the bad guy.
Copyright can stop me from making a star wars movie about wizards fighting each other with laser swords in space. Even if I don't make a star wars movie, if I make a movie that makes disney feel threatened because it's close enough to being a star wars movie I could still end up losing in courts.
There are plenty of examples of copyright hurting people for creating something that wasn't exactly the same as something else which was copyrighted. Copyright is a threat to all creative works. The bigger the investment required for a creative work, the bigger the risk. For this reason, we see it a lot more often in music where the investment needed is lower than films. People have been successfully sued because they wrote a totally new song that was in the same genre as someone else's song https://abovethelaw.com/2018/03/blurred-lines-can-you-copy-a-music-genre/
I wonder if there is value in splitting copyright into two parts and keeping a longer duration on the copies of the original work, but shortening the duration on the concepts in that work. That is, allow an author / studio to retain a long duration ownership of the original movie or story, so no one else can just start distributing copies of their VHS tapes after a few years. But at the same time, after 10 or 20 years other people can start making new Star Wars universe movies and books without licensing it from the original artist/author. If the original was good enough, then the rights to be the sole distributor of that original material should be plenty worthwhile, and in the mean time, just in time for the generational “nostalgia bump” a whole new set of related properties can come out, reinvigorating interest in the original.
Maybe even some sort of gradual opening of the IP, where after say 10 years, broad categories are opened (think things like “the Jedi” or “the Empire” or “Endor”), but specific characters and their representations aren’t (so no Darth Vader or Luke Skywalkers), then after 20 years you open the characters themselves but only derivative works. And then finally after 30 years or so you open the originals as well for things like translations or “de-specialized” editions or what have you. Then finally 50 years puts the raw originals in the public domain as well.
I think the main difference is if everything were freely available they may attempt to monetize the life out of it, but they will fail if they can't actually provide something people actually want. There's no more "You want a thing so you're going to buy our thing because we are the exclusive providers of it. That means we don't even have to make it very good"
If anyone in the world could make a Star Wars movie, the average Star Wars movie would be much worse, but the best 10 Star Wars movies might be better that what we currently have.
You're allowed to draw IP and share your drawings. You're allowed to screenshot and photoshop IP. You're allowed to sell tools that help others draw and photoshop IP*. You're not allowed to sell these drawings and photoshops.
I don't see why an AI can't generate IP, even if the AI is being sold. What's not allowed is selling the generated IP.
Style is even more permissive: you're allowed to sell something in any style. AFAIK the only things that can be restricted are methods to achieve the style (via patents), similar brands in similar service categories (via trademarks), and depictions of objects (via copyrights).
Note that something being "the original" gives it an intrinsic popularity advantage, and someone being "the original creator" gives their new works an intrinsic advantage. I believe in attribution, which means that if someone recreates or closely derives another's art or style, they should point to the original**. With attribution, IP is much less important, because a recreation or spin-off must be significantly better to out-compete the original in popularity, and even then, it's extra success usually spills onto the original, making it more popular than it would be without the recreation or spin-off anyways. Old books, movies, and video games like Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Sonic have many "recreations" which copy all but their IP, and fan recreations which copy even that; yet they're far more popular than all the recreations, and when Warner Bros, Disney, or SEGA release a new installment, the new installment is far more popular too, simply because it's an original.
* IANAL, maybe there are some technicalities, but in practice this is true.
** Or others can do it. As long as it shows up alongside their work, so people don't see the recreation or close derivation without knowing about the original.
It's fun watching Marvel's catalogue from start to current. They really went all-in early on, then the mode-du-jour changed and it's almost obvious how hard they avoid it (a lot of red and green lights for example). Interfaces, weaponry and engines are always egregious in that franchise.
I remember Midsommar being another particularly bad example - the entire apartment set in the opening scenes is dressed in orange/teal. Down to book spines, vases and light fittings.
It's interesting to see films that don't use strong grading at all. I think Star Wars wasn't too bad here because the whole visual language was set up in the 70s and everything now tries to reflect it (lots of primaries in control panels because those were the lamps they could use back then). They do have "planet" grades but it's not too bad.
Before recently movies were shared experiences. A good crowd made a great movie on a great screen even greater. Now movies are kind of singular experience. The only movies that still maybe fit this bill are the horror movies that draw in the teenager crowds -- but then it's more about how gory is it rather than plot, character, acting, direction, etc. Or maybe how cheap they can make the movie while still being able to market seats.
To be fair, Hollywood has always had this kind of problem -- just watch a few Mystery Science Theater 3000s to see how bad things can get -- or 1994's "Ed Wood" from Tim Burton. Both of which still romanticize the industry in their own way.
There will never, ever, be anything like seeing the original Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, or Ghostbusters (peak Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ivan Reitman) in the crowded theater filled with anticipating viewers ever again. Laughing as part of a crowd feels better than laughing alone.
Maybe we're too fragmented as society to enjoy all the same movie that we used to. I don't think this is true, because we all still like Ghostbusters, more or less. I think Hollywood has targeted markets, rather than trying to sell a movie to the masses.
And in 2024 they best thing Hollywood could do is reboot a 1980's TV Show "The Fall Guy". Geesh.
> I mean FFS today people'd probably complain that the first Star Wars movie (not just ROTJ, to which you allude) is "woke" because Leia's the only consistently-competent character out of the three leads
Compare+contrast with 'The Last Jedi'. Turning the male characters into total idiots and sending them off on a massive wild goose chase, before the day is saved by completely breaking the physics of the Star Wars universe, making all the previous heroes look like idiots for not using a relativistic kill vehicle against the Death Star!
I don't remember hearing any complaining about strong female characters in the era of Leia, Ellen Ripley, Sarah Connor, Major Kira, Susan Ivanova, and so on.
Star Trek (1960s), MASH (1970s)—shit, the entire history of sitcoms that are regarded as decent-or-better is mostly just one fairly "political" series after another, going back to the earliest days of TV. I mean FFS today people'd probably complain that the first Star Wars movie (not just ROTJ, to which you allude) is "woke" because Leia's the only consistently-competent character out of the three leads, and is by far the least-whiny. "Boo! Why is the elite-educated noble woman who's also already deeply involved in an armed resistance so much cleverer and more-effective and cool under pressure than our farmboy hick hero who's away from home for the first time and wallowing in a whole pile of recent trauma and grief, and this random flaky braggart scumbag they picked up?"
Anyway, stuff like Dirty Harry or a bunch of traditional Westerns are extremely political in the same ways that "woke" movies are (presenting and normalizing certain roles and behaviors, presenting politicized views of history and of certain groups, ways of life, and attitudes, and using caricatures of their political opponents as bad guys), they're just not liberal so that means they "aren't political".
Hell, most of the silent films that were good enough that anyone still gives a shit about them are plenty political, and often (but not always) rather liberal.
What's more, the biggest hit of 1997 swept the Oscars the following year. I'm not the biggest Titanic fan in the world, but it gave moviegoing masses what they craved: spectacle and pathos. And it was considered the best film of the year just for doing that with aplomb. It was very Old Hollywood in a sense. These days, "blockbusters" are thought of as just expensive-to-produce slop for the lumpenproletariat, so the studios treat them as such. No one wants to produce a blockbuster with the sort of care and attention to detail that went into, say, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Or even Titanic.
What's worse is that comedy is a minefield, as somebody somewhere is bound to be offended and launch a cancel campaign. So comedy films, including the once-beloved rom com, just don't get produced anymore like they used to. Any attempts at humor in movies has to be rolled in to something else -- superheroes talking in aggressively annoying Whedonese and the like -- and housewives must content themselves with Hallmark Channel glurge. And what humor is there is cringey as fuck because it's either entirely toothless or it's a "Straight white men, am I right?" type of thing because you are still allowed -- and encouraged -- to mock that group.
I mean, the normally sequel-averse Jim Carrey came back to do three movies about a video game hedgehog because those are the only movies being made in which he gets to flat-out do Jim Carrey stuff.
Is that a change? George Lucas certainly brought his politics around Vietnam to Star Wars. The 70s were a very radical and political time for movies
The original Star Wars trilogy in Spanish it is. I know the movie by heart…
The author alludes to a general problem with popular culture - the cult of the Chosen One.
Pixar has some in-house rules for stories. One of them is:
Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___
That sums up a Chosen One story. Chosen One protagonists do not work their way up. They are special snowflakes.
Star Wars is an extreme case of Chosen One popular culture. So is the Marvel Overextended Universe. (Note that Star Trek is not. Starfleet people start at the bottom and work up.) The top 8 highest grossing films of all time, unadjusted for inflation, [1] are all Chosen One movies.
Overexposure to Chosen One stories predisposes people to look for a Strong Leader, one who is somehow special. This seems to be a problem. Historically, the United States didn't work that way, having rebelled against a European monarchy which did. But I digress.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films
>"they're being evil for the sake of being evil, just like in my manchild Marvel/Harry Potter/Star Wars movies"
The amount of times I've seen people on reddit reply to (presumably real) Ukrainian redditors with a show of solidarity composed of some slogan from a Hollywood movie or to try to explain/compare their situation in Ukraine / on the world stage to an Avengers movie is honestly baffling. I genuinely can't believe that people live framing their existence and perspective of the world without the context of cheap power fantasy fiction. It's so cringingly out of touch that I'm almost far more willing to believe people talking like that are the Russian bots people are constantly harping on about trying to make Western public support look bad.
> Every other fantasy-type movie in a modern setting I cannot take seriously...Avengers, Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc.
> Like, just use a gun. Whatever you were going to attack with, put that in a gun, and attack at 45rpm, 3000 ft/s.
This is one of the many reasons why I like the Dresden Files universe. Wizards wield incredible power, but a wizard can still be brought down by a sniper.
Force-field was innovative.
Every other fantasy-type movie in a modern setting I cannot take seriously...Avengers, Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc.
Like, just use a gun. Whatever you were going to attack with, put that in a gun, and attack at 45rpm, 3000 ft/s.
The Star Wars trilogy wasn't great cinema, but the amount of time we spent playing with improvised light sabers and trying to move objects with the Force attests to the imaginative possibilities behind it.
And two Star Wars movies.
no, i think the prompt was too long. It said "running..." but never showed any results. I think an AI that could spit out a compelling movie that follows the hero's journey like star wars, or the matrix, or The Wizard of Oz, etc. would be really compelling. Like click a button a get a new original 2 hour movie script you could sell to hollywood? Amazing.
Thanks for your thoughts!
BCU is why AMZN bought the IP, so I'm just leaning into the business reality. My argument is that the films are the center of gravity, and it's fine to put other BCU properties 'in orbit' around them without having to have everything reference everything else like they did (brilliantly) at Marvel.
The films are holy, but deserving of a reboot. My spec - which I genuinely can't post here – dips into deep Bond lore but, introduces us to this broad world of espionage in which these other properties could orbit.
It's not too too different than Star Wars or even DC (like with Gotham), but what's so cool about this world of espionage is that there's so much to tap into that is both grounded AND cool. A whole constellation of espionage stories just under our psychic reality, perhaps moreso than comic books or scifi.
About 15 years ago, I was at a Goodwill store, looking around, and saw a VHS of of Star Wars. It wasn't "Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope", it was just called "Star Wars".
I knew that that was how it was released, even at the time, but I had thought that by the time it was released on VHS that it would have adopted the new branding. I told my dad about it when I got home, and he was comparably surprised.
I didn't (and don't) have a VCR, so I didn't pick it up, but a small part of me wishes I had just as an interesting thing to put on my shelf.
I think there is a lot to be said about the technology factor to it. On the movie side special effects heavy stuff is still largely the wall-to-wall green or blue screen sound stages. Motion capture and motion tracking tools have all got insanely good so studios can do a lot more than say in the days of Lucas' Star Wars prequels (which were notorious wall-to-wall green screen films of their era), but also the budgets and time constraints and "crunch" still provide a lot of barriers to how well the digital/analog integration is and the overall look of all the effects. Also, there's only so many ways to light a green or blue soundstage so that things are readable and you don't get extra ugly color spill that the special effects have to work even harder to remove. (I think the base lighting options being so mostly homogeneous is a subtle but huge factor in the overall things always feeling that way. Differences in lighting have always been one of the biggest "cinematic languages".)
Special Effects houses working on those sorts of movies are probably using heavier, slower renderers than Unreal Engine today, but given the average life span of an effects house is still appallingly close to 2 years and scenes scattered across 1.5 movies, those renderers are still generally off-the-shelf or borrowed from other companies. Industrial Light and Magic is about the only effects house that no one wants to kill, so also becomes something of a homogenizing factor in whatever tools it white labels for sale/rents to other effects houses. Disney owning ILM seems to be like an obvious factor that almost everyone working on an MCU film is trying to rent or ape the ILM house style at all times.
It's also interesting that right now TV can't afford as much time with the motion tracking/motion capture tools and studio spaces of wall-to-wall green screen, so in the effects heavy shows we're seeing a lot more experimentation, some of which I'd argue look better than the movies currently. For big instances, right now ILM's TV efforts with The Volume (and CBS Paramount's copycat AR Wall and other studios have copycats now too) are fast changing the look of TV. Because these LED walls are their own light source which dynamically reflects what the background should be doing it seems like there's a ton more options for lighting scenes in these rooms/volumes/spaces or doing shots that would be tricky or expensive even with how great motion tracking and motion capture have gotten. Of course the trade-off there is that the real-time background rendering requires a rendering engine more in the vein of Unreal Engine, and allegedly in most cases is definitely Unreal Engine, so "default unreal engine look" starts to apply literally to background elements in TV shows.
Pet peeve: people saying "A New Hope" when referring to the original 1977 film, which was actually called "Star Wars", dammit.
> Yes I exclude that,
So humans steering diffusion is off limits? No Krea, no Invoke, no articulated humans?
It's like you're taking away Premiere or Final Cut here. Text prompts are not the currency of AI film. Controllability levers are essential to this whole endeavor.
> I do not think something that augmenting that input data counts towards actually reducing production costs and speeding up the process of creating media.
You haven't spent much time on set, then. An animator can do a performance capture on their webcam and adjust the IK. That's way different than booking a sound stage, renting an Arri Alexa and lenses, and bringing out a whole cast and crew. Set dec, wardrobe, makeup, lighting versus the moral equivalent of a Kinect and a garage studio.
My 6 AM call times, early mornings climbing up to the top shelf of the prop house to grab random tubas and statues, and signing countless legal forms and insurance paperwork all beg to differ with your claims here.
> AI has eliminated or vastly eliminated the need for human actors.
I don't think it necessitates this at all. Kids are going to be flocking to the media to turn themselves into anime VTubers and Han Solos and furries and whatever they can dream up.
Artists want to art. They're going to flock to this. We're going to have to open up the tech for that reason alone.
I'm sure fast moving marketers and the cottage industry of corporate workplace training videos won't use humans, but the creative side will. ElevenLabs is great, but there's also a reason why they hired Chris Pratt, Anya-Taylor Joy, and Jack Black in the Mario movie.
> For example of what I'd accept, a 2 person team that creates a 20+ minute ensemble film in less than a month or 2 that meets the success criteria above.
I'll posit this: a two person team will make a better Star Wars, a better Lord of the Rings, a better Game of Thrones. An ensemble cast of actors piloting AI diffusion characters (or whatever future techniques emerge) will make a film as well acted as Glengarry Glen Ross. Perhaps even set in some fantasy or sci-fi landscape. I bet that we'll have a thousand Zach Hadels, Vivienne Medranos, and Joel Havers finding massive audiences with their small footprint studios, making anime, cartoons, lifelike fantasy, lifelike science fiction, period dramas, and more. And that AI tools will be the linchpin of this creative explosion.
With AI, this entire vast content library is about to be worthless anyway.
We'll be making more long-form, quality content per month than entire Hollywood production years.
And if you include short form content and slop, it'll be more content per second than entire years.
When faced with infinite content, people will reach for content currently popular in the zeitgeist or content that addresses niche interests. Hollywood never made Steampunk Vampire Hunters of Ganymede, but in the future there will be creators filling every void. There won't be much reason to revisit old catalogues that don't cater to modern audiences unless it's to satisfy curiosity or watch one of the shining diamonds in the rough.
There will be a few legacy titles that endure (Friends, Star Wars), but most of it will be washed away in a sea of infinite attention sinks.
We're about to hit post-scarcity, infinite attention satisfiability. We've already looked over the inflection point, so it doesn't take much imagination to reason what's next.
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Edit: copying my buried comments from below to expand on this.
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I have direct experience with this field.
I've written, directed, and acted in independent films. I've worked on everything from three person crews all the way up to 200 person shots. Even mocap and virtual production.
We're now developing film and VFX tools for individual artists, and the world is full of artists. It's been starved for films, however. The studio production system only had so much annual capacity per year, and most creators never get the opportunity to helm a project of their own.
You're not crying over the accessibility of digital art, digital music, indie games, or writing.
Film production and distribution has been bottlenecked at the studio level for far too long due to capital, logistics, and (previously) distribution barriers. That's all changing now.
Films are going to look more like fanfiction.net, Bandcamp, ArtStation, and Steam. That's a good thing.
I have friends in IATSE (film crew union) and AI is going to hurt their work. The nature of work changes, and new opportunities arise. But what's hurting them right now is that film productions are being offshored to Europe and Asia to break up their unions and bank on cheaper local labor. Production in Atlanta is one sixth of what it was just a few years ago.
I also have friends who write and direct that are looking at this as their big chance to build their own audience.
If Star Wars was originally just meant to sell toys, why was there no other movies like it, just to sell toys. Or if there was, what were they?
> "How do you have a problem with this, but Marvel or Star Wars is fine"
Marvel and Star Wars aren't fine--the writing is execrable whenever they aren't outright plagiarizing something else.
Star Wars was schlock meant to sell toys that just happened to become huge. Marvel is pretty much just straight up garbage across the board (some characters are interesting--the stories and world though are pretty uniformly trope-ridden crap).
Modern movies also have the problem that a lot of their revenue comes from overseas--China in particular. They can't risk having writing that is either too subtle for a foreign audience or cover themes that might get them banned by the government.
Thus we get Michael Bay syndrome--spectacle after spectacle and the minimum writing necessary to connect them.
(To be honest--this is nothing new to Hollywood--Michael Bay can trace his roots the whole way back through "Towering Inferno" to "Noah's Ark", etc.)
I only watched Severance Season 1 last month. I'm actually glad I didn't have to endure the 3 year wait for Season 2. It is an outstanding show and well worth the watch. There are two things that I find interesting about a lot of media:
1. How much of it is nakedly anti-capitalist and many people don't seem to recognize that. Severance is incredibly anti-capitalist and damning of the entire corporate world. It paints the corporate world as soulless and disconnected from reality. The bizarre perks like the wellness sessions, getting to know you, the music dance experience and the waffle party are a searing indictmment on any corporate team-building experience; and
2. How much media is anti-imperialist and we have no problem identifying that the resistance to that are the "good guys" and the authoritarian state are quite clearly the "bad guys" yet, again, people can't seem to see that in real life. The classic example of Star Wars, which George Lucas has explicitly stated that the Rebellion was based on Vietnamese resistance to American imperialist ambitions [1].
Milchick in "Defiant Jazz" lives rent-free in my head. The work is mysterious and important.
[1]: https://www.cbr.com/george-lucas-vietnam-war-star-wars-inspiration/
“The species named after the most famous Sith Lord in the Star Wars movie series, Darth Vader, whose helmet resembles the head of the new Bathynomus species.”
B Vaderi…pretty funny.
I had a friend whose home was full of movie memorabilia. The boxing shorts from Rocky, the journal from Raiders of the Lost Ark, props from Star Wars, etc. all professionally displayed in shadowboxes along with autographs and photos.
The only thing is that they were all fake. My friend's hobby wasn't collecting memorabilia, it was making fakes. He was quite open about the fact that none of it was real and would happily describe how he created each piece.
What do you mean by "global" pop culture? Maybe you mean "the west"/European/American pop culture. Being Vietnamese, I and my friends grew up with Journey to the West which at the time was bigger than Star Wars, Three kingdoms which is a lot lot bigger than Game of Thrones, and a lot of Jin Yong's movie adaptations. Star Wars the force is like normal thing in Jin Yong's novels. It's not a "complete" lack of. Sure you have heard of Monkey King, Lu Bu or Guan Yu, Cao Cao? They also won an Oscar long before Korean did. Sure they lose to Japanese's Pokemon but everyone lose to Pokemon really not just China.
I camped out in line on Hollywood Blvd for several hours to be in the first public screening of Dune at the Chinese Theater. So I know I saw the release print and to my then college-aged perceptions, I didn't really connect with it. I didn't think it was bad but I didn't think it was good either.
I blame this on the muddled mess that was the release edit and how misleadingly the film was promoted by the studio. I was a huge fan of pop sci-fi like Star Wars, Alien and Blade Runner and the advertising set a very different audience expectation than what the film delivered. Unfortunately, that experience kind of tainted Lynch's Dune for me.
I didn't really begin to appreciate Lynch as a great filmmaker until Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, both of which I loved. Someone linked a 'highly-regarded' three hour fan edit of Lynch's Dune which I've bookmarked to check out.
I was young when dune was released and a big fan of herbert books. there was also star wars that ive seen at the same time. Dune is still today to me one of the great SF movies and I count a very few I really love (cloud atlas is another more recent one, speed racer too).
All his weirder movies were great experiences but my favorite ever Lynch movie is the Straight Story. such a perfect beautiful movie. I loved badalamenti music as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCzAetSFRC8&ab_channel=amasterofnothing1
I always thought writing and directing a movie of pure kindness and making it interesting as a piece of great art was the real mark of genius.
I used to be a fan of Star Wars. Then Disney bought the franchise, and transformed it into something that a large number of fans, including me, did not like.
That the old movies exist* does not redeem the current franchise for me.
*: albeit in reality the original films are being preserved by fans and not by the official rights holder.
> Star Wars is a beloved movie, with a huge honest fan base. Thus, it was remade with love and attention to detail.
Agreed. Star Wars Uncut exists because devotees wanted to set the record straight regarding controversial changes in later versions, and their efforts were laudable. Still, the image and sound quality cannot match the latest, greatest studio versions, so watching Uncut versions on the newest home theatre gear means accepting the warts and all.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's remaster was also a labour of love but with a different purpose (image clarity and upscaling):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19453745
I find AI to be fascinating because of humankind's old dream to create intelligent life in a machine. Just watch the countless old and new movies and animes or read the novels².
With big advances, the current wave of AI is finally promising to turn this dream into reality.
Besides, it's already quite useful even with its current shortcomings.
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² here's a short very incomplete list:
The Matrix, 2001 A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, The Terminator, Robocop, Her, Ex Machina, Ghost in the Shell (1995, 2004, 2017), Data in Star Trek, Star Wars, ...
I believe the point is that Star Wars is inspired by enough things and puts enough creativity into the combination that it isn't an obvious rip-off of any of its inspirations.
Everything has inspirations. Truly new ideas are rare and often the first author to a truly new idea doesn't necessarily do a great job with it, and certainly can't explore it fully in any one work. But there's definitely a category of "direct ripoffs with little more than the proper nouns filed off". I'm not even targeting that at the current discussion; it has been observed by many people that rather a large number of "Hallmark movies" are literally just the same story, beat for beat, with the details of the participants in the love triangle slightly altered and recast. There's entire genres that are arguably just ripoffs of the genre template, over and over.
> Don’t have temporary people make permanent decisions
IMHO, this one line summarizes remarkably well why Hollywood wrecks fictional universes: Star Wars, Game of Thrones, Fantastic Beasts, DC Universe, and even parts of the Marvel universe.
I see the absence of an auteur capable of respecting themselves and therefore their audience as the root cause of clichéd moves such as "war is bad so let Wonder Woman kill the God Of War". Clearly, the person making such a decision simply does not have a reputation to uphold; what remains is optimizing ticket sales, one movie at a time.
Also the last Star Wars movie of all time for me (and probably many others).
“But it makes money” has to be one of the worst concepts humanity has come up with.
It wasn't a sudden change, it's been a gradual tendency towards them. James Bond was already 19 films by the turn of the century (or 20 if you include the other Casino Royale), King Kong and Star Trek both got to 6, Batman 8, Star Wars had just had the 4th, Friday the 13th had reached 9 films.
Even BttF itself was three films, and in the second one was parodying the tendency towards sequels with the holographic Jaws 19.
I get what you're saying but art doesn't exist in a vacuum. Newer works can add context and alter our perceptions of older works. Especially when people's first exposure to a work is an adaptation. Someone who has never read the lord of the rings, but has seen the movies several times will never be able to read the book without picturing Elijah Wood.
Strong feelings for an adaptation or a sequel can taint or enhance how someone feels about the source material even if the original was experienced first. For example, it's understandable if someone who really loved star wars before the prequels and disney acquisition found that they can't help but experience a sense of loss and disappointment while revisiting those original films knowing about midi-chlorians and how the franchise ended up.
The original works are unchanged, but in many cases the way we view and experience them isn't.
> That's my problem with her. She has clearly identified a problem. Good on her for being so articulate on exactly why the experiences she had sucked so much. But then why does she keep going back for more abuse?
Yeah I totally agree . Her exasperation clashes with the existence of her content. It's like "ludonarrative dissonance" but for YouTube videos. I mean this is very common thing to see, the YouTuber claims to hate having to "subject themselves to more" but they go back for more and more.
That's really my complaint, if she spends so much time being exposed to these issues, surely she should expect it by now? And yet she still acts shocked every time. It's strange
> And then, on top of that, why do people keep watching her FOUR HOUR LONG videos about these issues? SERIOUSLY!? People are spending significantly more time than a single Star Wars movie to watch someone complain about a related theme hotel? What the hell is wrong with these people?! You know what I can do in 4 hours? I can watch 2 Star Wars movies. I can make wash all of my laundry. I can drive to another city, have a drink with a friend, and get back in time to put my kids to bed.
Well, they are entertaining background noise. It's a fun thing to hear her rant about while doing something else. Long video essays are very popular
The movie business does things like "directors cut", "restored cut", etc. I'm sure it would be expensive to have more alternate cuts of the same scene. But when a studio does 20 takes of a song to get the perfect version, it would be cheap to release a bunch of them.
Have you ever seen a TV commercial played to death, to the point where you hate the commercial, the product, and the company behind it? I bet that would be less of a problem if the same commercial had several different takes, and then mix them up when broadcasting them. (Yes, I know some are deliberately different, and yes, it helps.) Even a version now and then where they flub their lines, or trip over something, etc.
Wouldn't it be more fun if Star Wars had two versions, one where Han shoots first, one where Greedo does, and you never knew which one you'd see when going to the theater? There are still a couple flubs in the released version, like when Luke yells "Carrie", there could be different reels released at the same time. The fans would then be impelled to keep going to the theater hoping to see all the different versions.
Star Wars? Not worth anything, huge reliance on "machine-generated" imagery. Lord of the Rings? Useless film, uses "machine-generated" imagery. Don't even get me started on anything by Pixar.
/s
>Not between us consumers, but for businesses there absolutely is; it makes less money.
That's the opposite of what's happening right now.
>another Star Wars film that couples and families will rush out to watch?
Nobody rushes out for Star Wars content anymore. Disney already burned all the bridges with the fanbase on that by wokefiying it to death.
> queer and diverse voices are destined to succeed in gaming
What does "diverse" mean for you here?
For one, only about 5% of the population is queer. I'm not sure how that's gonna help with success with targeting such a small market.
And secondly, the queer people I know have already been playing games for the past 20 years, they don't need dedicated queer games.
>Productions have been much cheaper and quicker in the past, and there's no technical impediment to making them that way again already (nothing has been lost)
Productions also looked a lot worse in the past. Some productions are more expensive today because that's the budget the kind of production requires. You act like a movie like Guardians of the Galaxy looking as good as it does was even remotely possible decades ago and studios just want to spend more money for vain spectacle. Star Wars 77 was great for its time but that's exactly it, 'for its time'.
77's budget adjusts to 60M today and while you certainly can't recreate a modern 'will hold up' star wars with that budget, 60M today gets you a lot farther than it did decades ago with much better looking movies.
It’s interesting to me that we continue to see such pressure on video and world generation, despite the fact that for years now we’ve gotten games and movies that have beautiful worlds filled with lousy, limited, poorly written stories. Star Wars movies have looked phenomenal for a decade, full of bland stories we’ve all heard a thousand times.
Are there any game developers working on infinite story games? I don’t care if it looks like Minecraft, I want a Minecraft that tells intriguing stories with infinite quest generation. Procedural infinite world gen recharged gaming, where is the procedural infinite story generation?
Still, awesome demo. I imagine by the time my kids are in their prime video game age (another 5 years or so) we will be in a new golden age of interactive story telling.
Hey siri, tell me the epic of Gilgamesh over 40 hours of gameplay set 50,000 years in the future where genetic engineering has become trivial and Enkidu is a child’s creation.
Random thought outburst, feel free to downvote:
This reminded me so much of Spaceballs! And the yogurt merchandise towards the end! Such a great movie that has so many obvious "flaws" like the mirror under the speeder on the desert planet when they comb the desert. And yet I've actually watched that movie more often than even the actual real Star Wars movies (meaning the first three made - all of which are timeless awesomeness)
But it is partly "just the times". There's a dividing line in 1977 called Star Wars. Before Star Wars it was much more common for science fiction films to use long establishing sequences of especially space technology. For a 1960s audience when the actual moon landings were fresh to mind, the long, slow ballet of space was very palpable and appreciable. Star Wars changed a lot of things for scifi, including reducing some of those establishing sequences to their quickest and most basic. It is harder to appreciate something like 2001 on this side of Star Wars. Scifi movies have been trying to mostly be "the next Star Wars" for almost every decade since, with few exceptions, many of which don't always do well in the box office (Tron is a cult favorite, but early theatrical audiences found it slow; Star Trek: The Motion Picture is often considered a bomb by Star Trek standards for being a pre-Star Wars sort of movie released two years after Star Wars; Gravity and Interstellar both got accolades in somewhat recent years for mostly sort of getting away with pre-Star Wars scifi pacing, but partly got away with it from Brand Name stars and directors and a focus on IMAX tech and spectacle).
2001 didn't feel out of place versus scifi movies of its time. It feels slow and ponderous post-Star Wars.
I would like to see Quentin Tarantino take on current-day issues. Who else is making movies worth watching any more besides Martin Scorsese? All the good movies have been made. Forbidden Planet was based on Shakespeare and it still shines. Generative AI tools show that it comes down to plots. I watched that Star Wars as a 1950s Panavision sci-fi at least a dozen times.
I’ve been on the BTTF ride at… wherever in Florida it is, and I loved that as a teenager. The films just never really appealed though for some reason. I guess one related fact would be I have a lot of gaps like that in the movies I have seen. For instance, people are often shocked that I’ve never see any of the Indiana Jones movies (also loved the rides!); but Star Wars I could probably recite the scripts of.
I don’t think I have any other facts that are very interesting, but then again I didn’t think not having seen BTTF was all that interesting either. For the record I was familiar with 1.21GW and what it related to… I don’t live under a rock!
That was normal in the 60s. Scifi was encouraged. They wanted kids to be inspired by space and technology. Star Wars changed things, driving a wedge separating what would eventually be "kids" movies from hard scifi, but that wasnt always so. Movies like 1953's War of the Worlds were very much all-family affairs.
The conveyor belt analogy from this article is deserved. I feel like this has been true for a long time, like 20 years or so. Remake after remake. Yet another superhero film. Uninteresting pipelines of shows and movies that recycle existing IP but also destroy existing canon (look at Star Wars). There are exceptions - we still have some great films (like Interstellar ten years ago) and shows (like Game of Thrones). But it does feel like most of the content from traditional media is noticeably bad.
I also think though, that Hollywood has become unlikeable and polarizing for many other reasons. Some of those reasons are the political culture of Hollywood (with bias in one direction). Some of it is the moral culture (like Harvey Weinstein). But a lot of the exhaustion with Hollywood is simply that the faces of Hollywood - celebrity actors - just seem really self aggrandizing. The award shows. The unwelcome public stances on random topics. The ostentatious displays of wealth (fancy cars, mansions in exotic places, etc). The worship of celebrity that is practiced through glowing magazine interviews, coverage of personal issues (like divorces), and merchandising.
Democratization is coming for a lot of different industries, and Hollywood is one of them. The availability of high quality cheap audio and visual equipment, the over supply of talent, the low costs of techniques like CGI, the prospect of new tools like generative AI, and social media for publishing are all pulling attention away from traditional channels. I think this will be great for viewers. Independent content creators are becoming very good at what they do. It doesn’t mean the death of Hollywood entirely, but it does mean that only the very best can survive.
I also think this affects movies and TV shows differently. People have appetite for great TV shows still, and outliers like HBO will survive due to exceptional content quality. But movie theaters, as a way to market and draw viewers, are a dying concept. The industry keeps trying to evolve by offering different gimmicks (like 3D and “4D”), luxury experiences, dining experiences, and so on. But you can’t get away from the fact that it is very inconvenient to have to go to a theater, deal with noisy crowds, etc. We also all have much more awareness of how illness spreads after the pandemic. Theaters will go away, except for maybe the possibility of film festivals or other such events. That’s a big change for movies, but TV shows aren’t losing anything from the death of theaters.
as a bit of a "yes, and" in order to hew to the Real Housewives format, we'll need the looming threat of federal prison for fraud. Season 3 of Salt Lake City is probably the best example of this, combining the eternal recurrence and inevitability of the full Star Wars series with man-vs-fate of Spike Lee's _The 25th Hour_.
When I refer to the eternal recurrence in Star Wars, I simply mean that they blow up the Death Star in Episodes IV, VI, VII, and arguably I and definitely put an end to Sith control of the galaxy every time wink.
> don't want to sit through the credits for extras.
Then have an intermission whilst the credits roll. Serve ice cream and refreshments. Make it part of the experience. It'll be fun.
Or sell tickets separaly for the pre-feature and the main feature (or just publish times when each will start and have an intermission in between so if you want to just see the main feature you can without disrupting anyone who arrived early for the pre-featured).
You have no idea who has seen these films and who hasn't. Yes, sometimes I want to go and see an old film at the cinema because I never got a chance to see it there the first time around (Star Wars was a case in point back in 1997). But sometimes I just haven't seen it so I want to see it for the first time, unmolested by spoilers.
There are better and more creative ways that aren't a great deal of effort to implement to handle this than showing a bunch of spoilers before the film you're there to see.
The displayed images are not light fields, just regular stereo 3D. However, the waveguides are holographic. So it's technically correct. And the displayed images will look like the hologram projectors seen in popular movies like Star Wars, so it's not misleading either.
I really want this - if you want a movie with a diverse cast, great. All black, no problem. K-pop star wars, etc.
I highly doubt Hollywood and actors would ever go for this, but I think people would enjoy it.
Why not? Animes signature 'Big Eyes' are attributed to Astroboy (early 1950s anime) but the Astroboy style was clearly from Mickey Mouse.
Similarly: One Piece / Luffys gears have been confirmed to be various powers that Tom and Jerry (the cartoon cat and mouse) have done over the decades with Gear 5 being a full on cartoon logic power up.
The amount of play and borrowing from Japan to America and back to Japan and back to America is epic.
Samurai films are inspired by Westerns. But then Star Wars was inspired by Samurai films.
Bouncing back and forth between the two cultures is part of the fun of it all. Including borrowing words like anime, Isekai. Or Japan borrowing the letter 'H' (ecchi) from us with completely new meanings.
I don't think "all CGI looks the same" has been any more true for games/movies/tv than "all [things] look the same" style-wise was before (consider sci-fi aesthetics by decade, say - how many Star Trek copycats, how many Alien copycats, etc). And obviously the limitations of practical effects are HUGE - Star Wars broke a lot of ground here, and yet looking at a movie from 5 years later, Wrath of Khan, we see very limited model movement and "action". Or compare TNG space action with even the primitive CGI of Babylon 5.
Wind Waker was one of the first obvious examples in the 3d-rendered-game world; the Spiderverse movies are probably the most widely-seen cultural example of breaking with existing styles. The "feathering" effect of some of the surfaces/fur and such in the commercials for The Wild Robot is another that I remember seen recently.
There's a lot of copy-catting, but not really in a "limits of the process of making CGI" way anymore.
I mean you see a combination of cgi and practical (puppet/rubber applicae and masks) in some of the newer disney+ star wars stuff (and some stuff that is both, grogu is primarily a puppet but they do some cgi work on top to 'sweeten' him). I think generally a toss-up as to what looks worse from a reality comparison perspective, however I think the practical work in starwars taps into a lot of the nostalgia and legacy from the first three movies and ends up being more 'accepted' by that audience.
Other blockbusters have followed suit on this re-adoption of practical effects as well, the new Dungeons and Dragons movie used quite a bit of practical effects in their creature work as well.
Star Wars would have been a very different film it is had been voiced by Prowse, with his strong West Country accent.
"Luke, Oi am yer faaarther".
The CGI was done on a shoestring budget, originally on Amigas and eventually on Dec Alphas. They were using Lightwave3D, which at the time was on the edge of affordable to students or indie producers. So it was neat seeing a tv show doing something you could do yourself on your home PC with enough patience and determination.
It's a remarkable achievement but yes, it does look rather dated sadly.
My main annoyance with B5 is how the alien designs echo human historic stereotypes. A lot of sci fi falls in this trap.
The Minbari are meditative asians. The Centari are a decaying franco-romanesque empire. The Narn are primitive and violent with dark skin and exaggerated facial features. The humans are plucky American go getters. The Vorlons are the only real original alien design, but were deliberately made a blank canvas of mystery.
Mind you in no way do I think it was malicious, just a lazy writing crutch others have used. Star Trek TNG had some pretty glaring examples of the same thing in early seasons. Star Wars patterns the Jedi after Samurai.
Even if there's a universe/plot justification for why all the alien species are humanoid variations too, I think it's a lot more interesting if the writers can come up with unique histories and cultures for the aliens.
Science fiction (novels, short stories, or by the 1950s films, and 1960s telvision) doesn't have a primary goal of predicting the future but rather of selling entertainment. To the extent it is speculative, it's almost always discussing contemporary circumstances sufficiently distant setting (in time and space) to be able to comment on it in a way which both minimises social censure and reaction and gives a potential for a fresh perspective (in the best cases). Of course, much of it is simply, or at least largely, escapist space opera / space westerns (Buck Rogers, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica (original series). And yes, some of the escapist content does have real science or predictive value.
But in balance it's an exceedingly poor prospecting ground for hard-nosed, realistic, and/or accurate predictions. For much the same reason that most space ships are laid our horizontally, with gravity working on the frontal rather than coronal plane is that sets built on Earth are far more easily built and filmed that way, SF addresses its creations, narrative, and audience-appeal needs over any putative scientific or prophetic accuracy.
And sure, there are notable counterexamples.
E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops is frighteningly accurate in a world much like that of the 2010s / 2020s.
Arthur C. Clark in some works hits on some remarkably accurate depictions of at least parts of a future world. Imperial Earth envisions both handheld computers and a culture obsessed with recording every passing moment in a way that's nearly selfie-culture (though he seems to have missed influencers). 2001: A Space Odyssey predicts tablet computers and video telephony with reasonable accuracy (though all but completely ignores their social implications).
Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game presages blogging to some degree (though generally overstating its influence, as Randall Munroe spoofed: <https://www.xkcd.com/635/>).
And there's a whole slew of dystopian SF which has materialised in some form or another, from Ray Bradbury ("The Veldt"), Philip K. Dick (too many to mention), William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, etc., etc., etc. I and others suspect that's to some extent less prophetic than direct stimulus, with contemporary techbros aping their favourite adolescent sci-fi universes without asking "are we the baddies?" or whether they should.
But if you want hard predictions about the future, it's probably better to look to the literature which specifically and seriously attempts to do this, outside of a fictional context.
One such book is Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, now 54 years old.[1]
I'd read that, for the first time, on its 50th anniversary. I was struck by much, and found it on balance to have stood the test of time quite well, and much better than is typical for the genre. As to accuracy, there seem to be three general cases:
- Specific proponents of specific technologies virtually always overestimated the acceptance and impact of those technologies. The notable exception is, of course, information technology, though even for it the specific ways in which it has and hasn't advanced is worth close study.
- Virtually all of the social dynamic predictions seem laughably modest today --- developments in racial, gender, and sexual equality and acceptance, amongst others. Though on reflection this isn't so much that the predictions were bold, but that they've come to pass. We are on the far side of the singularity for these changes, for the most part. What was written in the context of a world in which these changes lay in the future reads much differently now that the inflection points are in the past. At the same time, it's also clear that such changes need not be permanent, and that perhaps such dynamics tend more towards cyclical patterns or pendulum swings, with greater and lesser liberalisation at different points in time.
- Much of the psychological and sociological concerns over advancing technology, faster paces of change, and an ever-growing onslaught of information seem to me to have been extraordinarily prescient, and largely born out. The disruptive effects, both on a personal psychological level and on a collective sociological one, appear to be profound, and we're still in the midst of discovering just how much so.
In thinking about how technological change manifests, I've come up with an ontology of the types of technological mechanisms which operate: fuels, materials, information (receipt, processing, storage, transmission), networks, systems, process knowledge, causal knowledge, power transmission and transformation, and hygiene (dealing with unintended consequences).[2]
Much of the Industrial Revolution (~1800 -- 1950 or so) was fundamentally grounded in new fuels (coal, petroleum, natural gas) and power transmission and transformation (particularly electricity and magnetism), with strong secondary effects through improved and expanded materials (Bessemer steel, aluminium, plastics), communications (telegraph, telephone, radio, television) and recording (rapid print advancements, photography, phonography, film). Since 1950, it's been information technology which seems to have been in the forefront, making some profound advances (overall processing and storage capacities) whilst remaining stubbornly stagnant in others (forecasting, meaningful automation and controls). Networks and systems have been primary secondary effects.
Hygiene is the ninth factor I'd come upon, and falls out of the recognition that all technologies have both intended and unintended effects. As technologies increase in complexity, I strongly suspect the latter dominate, exacting something of a drag on overall progress.
The element that's missing from my typology is the interaction between technology and society as a whole. I don't have much to say on that at the moment, though I feel it's quite significant. I'm noting that lapse for the moment.
________________________________
Notes:
1. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock> <https://archive.org/details/isbn_0553132644>
2. I've written on this a few times at HN and elsewhere, searching Algolia for "tech ontology" or "technological ontology" should turn up some references. I'm increasingly feeling that the idea probably needs a book-length treatment discussing each mechanism, how it applies (some of the mappings I make may strike some as obscure, e.g., that knowledge is in some ways a network function, as expressed in the phrase "web of knowledge"), and what the capacities and limitations of each mechanism are.
LLMs as AI are sparking this conversation, there are articles outlining similar positions against Photoshop when it first came out.
https://www.arkansasmomentos.com/burning-with-desire/2017/4/22/photoshop-now-what-1991
A counterpoint to offer to this position beyond the legitimate concerns a new technology like this is having... if it was decided to re-imagine shooting the first 3 Star Wars films created, we probably would use today's sci-fi abilities.
Of course, this doesn't cover the gamut of artistic skills and abilities.
I'm hoping this means if it makes average people into a designer or programmer, a designer or programmer with AI will be 10-20x as effective.
Learning, reskilling, upskilling, may be a reality in more areas.
The question does move towards agency, and who is driving the content creation - experienced artists, designers, etc seem best positioned to describe creative descriptions and explore artistic imagination in these new ways.
Human created art may be worth even more too.
English is the new programming language, and those people who spent many years learning to describe and discuss nuanced things like art, and the creation of it, are probably better positioned than most.
I am not the content I see. I don't watch movies or shows, I don't watch Douyin (TikTok), don't keep up with social media, I haven't read Harry Potter or watched Star Wars. I only watch a few small channels on Youtube, and I play Rocket League, and work on personal hobby projects (coding, photography, ceramics).
There are lots of people who I would consider myself to not be strangers with. You should be able to connect with people over things besides "tentpole" pop culture artifacts. You should be able to connect with people without any common cultural artifacts. People are interesting.
For convenience, I asked ChatGPT to create this table, which summarizes how many times each movie has been mentioned in this conversation so far. It got a few counts wrong (as usual), but it still gives a good sense of the frequency. I hope it can be useful to someone:
| Movie | Number of Mentions | |-------------------------------------------|---------------------| | The Matrix | 9 | | Lord of the Rings Trilogy | 8 | | Pulp Fiction | 8 | | Alien | 7 | | Fight Club | 7 | | Ghostbusters | 6 | | Die Hard | 5 | | Back to the Future | 5 | | Inception | 5 | | Star Wars Trilogy (original) | 5 | | Groundhog Day | 5 | | Terminator 1 & 2 | 5 | | Jurassic Park | 4 | | The Thing | 4 | | The Fifth Element | 4 | | Monty Python and the Holy Grail | 4 | | Ghost in the Shell | 4 | | Interstellar | 4 | | Casablanca | 3 | | Office Space | 3 | | Shawshank Redemption | 3 | | The Godfather Trilogy | 3 | | The Blues Brothers | 3 | | Blade Runner | 3 | | Mad Max: Fury Road | 3 | | Unforgiven | 3 | | Total Recall (1990) | 3 | | The Crow | 3 | | The Princess Bride | 3 | | Akira | 3 | | The Big Lebowski | 3 | | Guardians of the Galaxy | 3 | | American Psycho | 3 | | Indiana Jones Trilogy | 3 | | Kiki’s Delivery Service | 2 | | Ratatouille | 2 | | A Clockwork Orange | 2 | | Mission Impossible (various) | 2 | | Casino Royale | 2 | | Skyfall | 2 | | Ferris Bueller's Day Off | 2 | | Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan | 2 | | Apocalypse Now | 2 | | The Shining | 2 | | Groundhog Day | 2 | | Donnie Darko | 2 | | Dune (2021) | 2 | | Gladiator | 2 | | Predator | 2 | | Seven/Se7en | 2 | | The Dark Knight | 2 | | Snatch | 2 | | Prometheus | 2 | | Schindler’s List | 2 | | The Wolf of Wall Street | 2 | | Dr. Strangelove | 2 | | Silence of the Lambs | 2 | | Kill Bill | 2 | | Real Genius | 2 | | Top Secret! | 2 | | Tenet | 2 | | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy | 2 | | The Adjustment Bureau | 2 | | The Expanse | 2 | | Pulp Fiction | 2 |
Original Star Wars trilogy. Lord of the Rings American Psycho Total Recall (1990) Blade Runner Love Actually The Fifth Element Unbreakable Pulp Fiction Four Weddings and a Funeral Guardians of the Galaxy X-Men X-Men the Last Stand Showing my age here, but I started to lose interest in movies after the 2000s. No I do not want to watch a remake of [Blade Runner, X-Men, etc...]. Also X-Men was great, but my interest didn't stretch to Captain America and Iron Man, so the MCU was a loss for me.
- Hair (and listened soundtrack hundreds of times)
- Coffee and Cigarettes
- Before Sunrise (and to less extent - Before Sunset)
- Pulp Fiction
- Clerks, Chasing Amy
- Leon Professional
- Motorcycle Diaries
These are not as interesting since I assume they're on everyone's list, but I must admit I'm rewatching all movies in the series, even those which are considered weak:
- Lotr, Godfather, Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Matrix
It's not just the helmet.
I will maintain that Star Wars was quite possibly the best WWII movie of all time, although purely as an allegorical and referential work. In the timeless tradition of tailoring your story to your audience, the whole film is packed with references and ideas from other WWII movies, people, and events. Although, it also borrows from just about everything else - a true artifact of its era. For the Boomer post-WWII era, I believe drawing from familiar material like this is one of the keys to its success.
After all, a story about "a young hero and laser swords" doesn't hold a candle to "a bunch of underdogs blow up a gigantic space station filled with space Nazis." I don't know about you, but I know which of those I'm going to see 10 times.
> The attack on the Death Star in the climax of the film A New Hope is similar in many respects to the strategy of Operation Chastise from the 1954 British film, The Dam Busters. Rebel pilots have to fly through a trench while evading enemy fire and drop a single special weapon at a precise distance from the target to destroy the entire base with a single explosion; if one run fails another run must be made by a different pilot. Some scenes from the A New Hope climax are similar to those in The Dam Busters and some of the dialogue is nearly identical in the two films. These scenes are also heavily influenced by the action scenes from the fictional wartime film 633 Squadron. That film's finale shows the squadron's planes flying down a deep fjord while being fired at along the way by anti-aircraft guns lining its sides. George Lucas has stated in interviews that this sequence inspired the 'trench run' sequence in Star Wars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_sources_and_analogues#Film_and_television
> The stormtroopers from the movies share a name with the Imperial German stormtroopers and the Nazi German Sturmabteilung (lit. Stormtrooper). Imperial officers' uniforms also resemble some historical German Army uniforms and the political and security officers of the Empire resemble the black clad SS down to the imitation silver death's head insignia on their officer's caps (although the uniforms technically had more basis with the German Uhlans within the Prussian Empire[71]). World War II terms were used for names in Star Wars; examples include the planets Kessel (a term that refers to a group of encircled forces) and Hoth (Hermann Hoth was a German general who served on the snow-laden Eastern Front).[61] Lucas himself has drawn parallels between Palpatine and his rise to power to historical dictators such as Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Adolf Hitler, saying the films exist as an examination of how democracies allow themselves to become dictatorships.[72] The space battles in A New Hope were based on filmed World War I and World War II dogfights.[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_sources_and_analogues#Modern_and_early_modern_history
Not just he history between the countries, but the heavy influence of Nazi propaganda films on the appearance of and shot choices around the Empire in Star Wars, and that two of the most-cribbed-from movies for the first film were about the British bombing either Germany directly, or German-controlled Norway, during WWII. It’s not just bad guy music, it’s bad-guys-very-directly-inspired-by-WWII-Germany music.
(But put me on team “it’s funny”—oh no, ze Germans!)
[edit] I just watched the video and it’s even funnier than I thought, because the lines of that vessel call to mind a star destroyer more effectively than most non-battleships do.
24 Hour Party People
Dogtown and Z Boys (Documentary)
Godzilla
Rollerball
Monty Python and The Holy Grail
Star Wars
The Hunger
Caddy Shack
Fear of a Black Hat
Straight Out of Compton
Star Wars: over 10 times
Contact: over 10 times
The Quiet Earth: over 10 times
I'm not much of a film buff, there's nothing I've watched over 20 times. Except Butt Babes in Bondage.
I think that my point is that the questions in the article don't provide much more ammunition than the "usual" questions, or even other usual things that we usually share.
If they want to hurt you, they can easily laugh at some particularity of your face and that would be very hurtful. Or laugh at you because your favorite movie is Star Wars or because you work in retail. I'm not sure how your favorite gift you've ever received is more personal and intimate than your favorite movie.
Not only the examples of questions in the article are usually as "risky" as "what's your favorite movie", but also you can easily answer these questions in ways that don't provide much ammunition.
This hasn’t been my experience. My kids have loved Star Wars, Harry Potter, Space Jam, Looney Toons, Muppets, Uncle Buck, Top Gun, Ghostbusters, My Neighbor Tuturo, all the classic Disney movies, Mary Poppins, Get Smart, and others I’m sure I’m missing. They even like some of the light westerns thier grandparents put on. It’s not everything, but it’s most of what I’ve tried.
They currently love playing classic arcade games on a cabinet I built.
It depends on the kid, but I don’t think it’s just a generational thing. The limits tend to be very old movies with sound issues, which was my limit as well.
It would be great if my kid was into the video games I was into as a kid, but I've kind of resigned myself to the fact that she's a different person, grew up in a different environment, has different expectations out of video games. You can't force someone to like something. Same with movies and music. I tried to get her into Harry Potter and Star Wars and the kid/teen movies I grew up with like The Goonies and Flight of the Navigator, but those movies just so old to this generation, and there's nothing in it for them to relate to.
It's like trying to get "11 year old me" into The Howdy Doody Show.
I guess you could say it technically is a conspiracy. But it's a well documented and publicised one.
https://www.oscars.org/awards/representation-and-inclusion-standards
> And what if I told you that the free market is the most powerful cultural force in the US, and TV/film studios produce content in ways they think will make the most money?
These DEI products fail all the time. The most recent Star Wars series is a great example. These failures are also well documented in every TV show/movie where the critics score and the audience score are miles apart on rotten tomatoes.
Wow, it never even registered to me until I read this comment that the Star Wars movies didn't have opening credits. They're usually so forgettable anyway, and after reading that article, it seems so silly and ridiculous that all the various Guilds and Associations and Hollywood Political Units got so butthurt over that decision.
We are discussing their decision not to put AI into their browser. It's a good decision, because AI is the Star Wars-like arms race (Star Wars from the Reagan era, not the movies) designed to bleed the competition dry of their resources. Microsoft is putting it into everything and bankrolling OpenAI, because they want to hurt Google not because AI is good for anything. Vivaldi made the right choice to stay away from this distraction.
I have a strong suspicion the parent comment I was replying to was written by someone that thinks America has an infinite moral bank account can draw from to escape culpability for its actions. Maybe I misinterpreted that and if so you’re correct. But the way it was worded seemed pretty clear to me that the author sees the world like a Star Wars movie of good and evil. It’s not. In the real world the Jedi kill kids too.
Same story with the original Star Wars films. Lucas remastered and changed the originals, and you can mostly only get the original versions on VHS.
The only way to watch the Star Wars: Episode IV's theatrical release version is through some dedicated fans and pirates [1]. You can't buy it.
Same goes for series that have been altered to avoid music royalties [2]. Pirated version will remain as released.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmy%27s_Despecialized_Edition [2] https://www.fastcompany.com/91109690/why-streaming-platforms-are-scrubbing-the-soundtracks-from-your-favorite-shows
That isn’t what is happening with AI training though… If you apply that to AI, that is more like training using only Dan Brown novels and then asking the AI to recreate The Da Vinci Code.
How much of the work you use in your transformations is a major factor for derivative works. So you probably could make a single Star Wars scene from memory using Blender. But not the whole movie.
You cannot copy from memory. I have a semiphotographic memory of nearly all of Star Wars (all three episodes). Do you think that I can reproduce this and distributed it to others? Legally? Morally?
For some historical referrence, there was a court decision in 1948 stopping the movie studios from owning the theater chains too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pictures,_Inc. I worked in a movie theater in the early 2000s and the studios/distributors had theaters by the throat anyway. Disney for example could demand any terms they wanted for allowing for example star wars and theaters bid against each other regionally for an artificially limited number of 'prints' (today they're hard drives) and could insist on 100% of the take, a % of concession sales, pretty brutal terms. I don't know what the industry is like in the last 15 years. Disney has owned the El Capitan in hollywood for years, though. Not sure how that was allowed as an exception if the rule was only recinded in 2020. Maybe just chains.
Did you ever consider that all "magic" was people watching kid movies as kids and that it never was great? Like, nostalgia.
I think that comparatively to the market Star Wars was ahead of it's time, 50 years ago. But now we just tell way better actlual Sci Fi stories, which are not child oriented movies with lots of funny costumes and simple rags-to-hero plot?
The very first Star Wars ("A new hope") is fairly basic in plot, but with very good moments and no mistake.
The next two, especially the empire strikes back, are really good in their own right in terms of film-making artistry. They have the right tone, rhythm, imagery, scenography.
The rest, though, is catastrophically bad.
The prequels are truly awful. Some people (not me) say there's no accounting for taste but liking the prequels is as close as you can get to an objectively wrong opinion about art.
The best thing you can say about the prequels is that they're ambitious. Lucas wasn't content to repeat himself. But the acting, characters, and script are all complete failures.
The first Star Wars movie is indeed an example of "compromised visions are superior". The movie was famously saved in editing by George Lucas' then wife. Lucas didn't even direct the second and third movies, he handed them off to more capable filmmakers.
Surprised he used the Jaws example when the clearest case of what he is talking about is what I refer to as the Tragedy of George Lucas.
The first star wars trilogy, but especially the first movie, was extremely budget constrained to the point where Lucas had to exchange his own salary for merchandising rights (an accidentally brilliant move), and they did the best with what they had. decades later, he decides that now he has the budget to make them the way he really wanted to, he goes and makes major changes with CGI and destroys the original copies, which can only really be found in unaltered digital form on underground sites.
Then the prequels come and it's very obvious he had unlimited budget and creative control, and the result just simply was not even close to good, or at the very least not even close to the magic of the original trilogy. Giving creators unlimited control seems to have great capacity to end very poorly.
I think it becomes intrusive into the storytelling when it becomes a constant chain of "and then yet another, even crazier thing happened to this one character". Especially when the character started as an everyman.
It's a problem many book series have - one character keeps being the centre of the universe and surviving insurmountable odds repeatedly to the point of incredulity and usually the ante keeps ratcheting up as well so your original ordinary-human character ends up with some kind of godlike powers.
To me, Harry Potter is actually fairly good in this regard, as the character development is at least not utterly unlike 11-18 year olds at school during the re-outbreak of a traumatic civil war, and from the start, there's a clear, in-universe reason why the main character is always the one near the action in the depicted timeframe.
Star Wars did this quite well originally ("why is this rando farmhand at the centre, oh, cool, that's why"). The prequels did a little worse ("here's how the farmhand's father got to the centre, ok well maybe it's awfully convenient the ship broke down right there and a simple blood test reveals The One, but ok") and the recent films rather worse ("these people are at the centre...how? Why? Genetic predestination?"). Notably, the less you explain the Force, the easier it is to keep the story believable and consistent. Again, Harry Potter's vagueness over the specifics of magic helps it.
Something that seems to be getting more common, though it's not new, as series lengthen in real-world time is to do a Star Trek: TNG and start an in-universe subseries where you can have things happen to someone else entirely for a change, but as part of the overall universe's story. It can be tricky if the universe is very predicated on one person, like Harry Potter is. Star Wars has not done well at this, but have tried. I think they keep trying to bootstrap interest from existing fans by character reuse, but the better series like Andor pick a whole new story to tell.
Iain M. Banks was especially good at this and didn't even really have a main narrative, as he'd hop all over the Culture in time and space so you could have the cool stuff happen that he wanted to show the reader, but didn't need to keep powering-up one person (or ship) endlessly. But space opera has the advantage that you can just go and be somewhere and somewhen else very easily. It's a bit harder if you need the subseries to be nearby without constantly dragging the other main characters in, especially when they're further along their upgrade path as you need to explain why they don't just pick up the phone, pop round and stomp the "mortal threat" flat and it's another kind of deus ex machina. Doubly so if the threat is very obvious and world-ending, because surely they'd turn up to that!
Do copyright rules exist differently in Japan than the US? Can you imagine if I created a movie that occurs within the accepted Star Wars universe so that my protagonist was from a planet called Tatooine who had a sister that was a princess? I would be sued into oblivion.
Is where we are any good? I think one of the more germane issues with generative AI art is that it is distinctly not creative. It can only regurgitate variations of what it has seen.
This is both extremely powerful and limiting.
An LLM is never going to give you some of the most famous films like "Star Wars" which bounced around before 20th Century Fox finally took a chance on it because they thought Lucas had talent. Is what we want? A society that just uses machines to produce variations of the same thing that already exist all the time? It's hard enough for novel creative projects to succeed.
I just want to point out holodeck episode in Star Trek preceded Star Wars by 3 years.
Interesting take on Star Wars, because I think it should rather be used as a counterexample: Star Wars was made during the starting era of the "Blockbuster"-movie[0]. Just after movies like Jaws (1975) were a huge success at the box office two years earlier, studios were willing to throw money at directors to counteract any creative constraints.
Far better examples would have been The Blairwitch Project (1999) or Following (1998).
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbuster_(entertainment)#Blockbuster_era
I think the best art is done within constraints -- namely because it forces the artists to be creative within those constraints. Their creativity is what is inspiring.
When anything goes, you get splatters of paint on a canvas, which is much less interesting as it's much less creative. That, and the market forces as you said -- it's not creative, it's just signaling and marketing.
It's not high art, but what I admire about the original Star Wars film is that it was so difficult getting it made -- it took passion, talent, and craftsmanship to make a movie like that possible -- they had to literally invent new ways of doing things for that to be possible. Seeing the same kinds of movies today, where it's all done on computer -- requires less craft, less creativity -- and that's why these modern movies all feel uninspired.
Creativity within limits is where it is at.
At least for the theatrical Star Wars cut there's an excellent fan restoration 4k77 based on a 35mm IB technicolor film scan. The amount of work fans do to restore work they care about more than the corporate owners is always both amazing and heartwarming.
There are a number of films: The Matrix, the original Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Avatar, I’m sure many others that were just so different and jaw-dropping in many ways when they first came out—in those cases because of effects of various types mostly—that it can be hard to appreciate their novelty at the time.
Some stand up better than others.
I am not a Star Wars superfan, but have enjoyed some of the films, particularly the original Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back, and Rogue One.
When I first saw Lucas' revisionist scenes in Mos Eisley back in the 90s or early 2000s, such as the CGI creatures outside the cantina and the Greedo/Han Solo incident inside, it was disillusioning.
Lucas didn't fix flaws in the original film. He jazzed up some scenes that didn't need it. He neutered one of the great flawed heroes of science fiction film. It would be akin to Francis Ford Coppola remaking the scene in The Godfather where Michael Corleone coldly shuts the door on his wife by adding an audio or video edit in which the wife spits on Michael, thereby "justifying" the cold treatment.
Kudos to the teams restoring the original 35mm films, although I fear this article may trigger a heavy-handed response from Disney's legal thugs.
If you took star wars and removed the action and acting and it was just a bunch of philosophical arguments written in a book then not many would like it. We know since there are many such books and they aren't very popular compared to the star wars movie.
Aha, thanks, that’s interesting! I knew some of that but wasn’t aware it had influenced Star Wars. That does make some sense.
Edit to add: I’d still unquestionably put Star Wars as the one that “set up an entire field for success”. Not just because it was the one that shipped and was a massive hit, but because it synthesised many elements besides Dune. I’ll watch that documentary with an open mind though.
The documentary “Jodorowsky’s Dune” presents a fairly strong argument that the “Dune bible” that was assembled for that movie and shopped around to production studios strongly influenced many of the great sci-fi films (or at least iconic scenes in them) in the years to follow.
Specific examples from the documentary were Star Wars and Alien. The latter of which included Dan O’Bannon (screenwriter) and H.R. Giger (effects+concept artist), reprising their roles as staff on Jodorowsky’s Dune.
Highly recommend the documentary by the way. I actually just saw it a couple weeks ago, so the comparison made a lot of sense to me.
Feels like people have had over 20 years to move on from the narcissistic butchery Lucas did to Star Wars IV, but it seems we're still at Step 2.
Maybe ... just maybe ... Step 2 is where it stops sometimes because it was a bad idea and did make the films worse.
I find most movies CGI these days almost impossible to watch it looks so crap.
Then I watch Star Wars and I just cannot believe they did this back in the day.
Ford was 35 when Star Wars came out. Overnight he went from an actor who worked as a carpenter to pay his bills, to to one of the three leads on the biggest film franchise of the century. When he went to a record store to buy an album, fans ripped half his shirt off.
> They waited way too long to make the third set of Star Wars movie to the point where the only people who cared were toxic fans.
This is one horrible irrelevant comparison after another, but this statement isn’t even true to start.
By this broken logic, "Movies are fungible". Because you can turn money into a John Carter, and you can turn Dune: Part 2 into Money. You can borrow against Star Wars, and you can license out Barbie.
But everyone knows, movies are not fungible, because they are not interchangeable. I can buy oil, or unleaded gasoline, and it's basically the same everywhere, it is "replaceable by another nearly-identical item, mutually interchangeable" -- oil and gasoline are fungible. But "Movies" are not fungible, because "Lord of the Rings" is not a replacement for "50 First Dates", which is not a replacement for "The Matrix", even though they're all movies.
Housing is not like Oil, housing is like Movies. It's not fungible, because a 2bedroom row-home in Foster City, CA is not "nearly-identical/mutually interchangeable" with a 4bed,2bath home in suburban Louisville, nor a 1bedroom condo in the Chicago Loop.
Even when the housing is all in the same zip code, much of it is still not fungible with it's alternatives, because housing is so regularly different and unique in a myriad of different ways. ("this one is on a hill, that one is in a valley, it has a higher risk of flooding. This one is in School District A, this house across the street is School District B, this house is in a city with income taxes, this house on the next block over is in a township with no income taxes, that house will need a new roof sooner, this house is in a HOA neighborhood, that house is near the bus line, this house is close to the freeway onramps, that house has fiber but this one is only Comcast Coax, etc")
If something goes on too long without progress it has to end.
They waited way too long to make the third set of Star Wars movie to the point where the only people who cared were toxic fans. If they had some sense they would have made a Doctor Who movie instead because the casting would have been appropriate.
Intel has burned me with numerous screw-ups such as two desktop replacement laptops I had where the "dual GPU" mode caused web browser malfunctions and the one way to make the system usable was to turn off the Intel "GPU". They found out everybody was doing this but instead of fixing the problem they just made it so you couldn't disable the iGPU. The same way Mozilla killed Pocket by trying to shove it up everybody's noses and Microsoft has killed numerous products (OneNote wasn't that bad but when you shove five icons for it on the desktop and on the toolbars you are not advertising it, you are anti-advertising it.) Intel GPUs have dragged my computers down for more than a decade and the one thing I want to hear is that they made a chip that doesn't waste a square micron of space on a GPU I don't want.
Every single film you mentioned came out after Star Wars. The closest, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, came out only 6 months later, so hard to argue that its derivative. Even so, its inarguable that Star Wars was the first of its kind to reach the kind of mass appeal that it did.
Likewise (to the parent), references to D&D or Kurosawa are red herrings, because those were sort of niche at that point. Flash Gordon is/was debatably niche, but even then, Flash Gordon wasn't made into a movie until 1980 (after Lucas gave up on pursuing the rights, and instead made Star Wars).
I'm not here to defend Star Wars as great art, but I am here to say that its place in the cultural canon is 100% earned, and trying to dismiss it as cliche, formulaic, or derivative is to wildly misunderstand the cultural impact of its forebears, and anachronistically criticize it for its similarities to the things it inspired.
>Arguably, the original trilogy was simply dungeons and dragons in space. Wizards, rogues, and knights in space.
It was basically Flash Gordon plus WW2 movies plus samurai movies plus fairy tales and Arthurian fantasy in space.
I think one of the reasons why The Force Awakens is not good is that it tries to copy previous Star Wars movies, but Star Wars has always been best when it copies stuff from other genres and mixes them together into a new thing, not when it tries to copy from its own previous films.
>it's pretty much the only widely known sci-fi films from the last 70s early 80s
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien, Blade Runner, and The Terminator are all widely known late 70s / early 80s sci-fi films.
Probably not as well known but still pretty widely known are Star Trek: The Motion Picture, The Thing, and 2010: The Year We Make Contact.
Arguably, the original trilogy was simply dungeons and dragons in space. Wizards, rogues, and knights in space.
But, it you look at the sci-fi/fantasy at the time, nothing really compares to what Star wars did. There's a reason it's pretty much the only widely known sci-fi films from the last 70s early 80s.
At least, not in film.
Your argument is baseless. I'm not saying your argument has no merit, I'm saying that your interpretation only makes sense in light of the media that came after the original trilogy. In a lot of cases, the tropes didn't become tropes until other people tried to ape them. I can think of plenty of movies that did not age well because they inspired so much of what came later. Arguably, the original Star Wars movies are amongst them. But its ridiculous to deride Star Wars as derivative of the films it inspired.
Star Wars was never good.
Okay: The Disneyfied Latter Days Crap is a given in a world where Marvel exists as it does now, and I'm not even mad at that. People drink two liters of Coca Cola a day. Whatever, their choice. Jar Jar Binks is so far down the shit-gradient it's not even cynical, ironic or campy, that shit is just plain bad.
No, my beef is with the status the original trilogy has. Archetypal, shallow characters and tropes going beyond the banal. The narratives are too middle of the road: not naturalistic enough for full immersion, not stylized enough to be authentic space opera. The doritos of sci-fi.
Three movies were made, somehow, on the aesthetic of the light saber. That's all it has going for it, that the light sabers look cool.
Rant over.
> maybe it would discourage some people who go into it hoping to make infinite money
That's totally fine by me, the point of copyright should be to advances the arts and science, not to help concentrate wealth.
> I wonder for how many people it is an issue secretly
I think quiet a few. See for example ElasticSearch and Amazon. If you want a truly open-source license then you have to accept that. Otherwise there's a whole spectrum of "source available" licenses, or something like CC BY-NC-SA.
Though that's another difference between works of art and source code. Releasing my book doesn't produce a maintenance burned on me, an open source project usually does.
> using Middle Earth in a commercial ad for a car
You don't even have to go as far as a car, see [0]. They didn't get sued, but it's safe to say that they would the moment they try selling it.
As for the other aspect of fanfic, I think the copyright's holders desires should be weighed less. I personally disliked many of the star wars movies, particularly the latest trilogy, and I'm not alone in this.
A) I know for a fact that better star wars movies would be possible if Disney did not hold a death grip around the IP by the simple fact that other good movies can be made, there's nothing intrinsic to star wars.
And B) just as copyright holders won't stand by if you try to do a fanfic that they don't like, I shouldn't have to be forced to stand by and watch them butcher (yet again) the stories that I grew up on AND be told that that's the only version available.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer
Most sci-fi films (heck, most films) require some level of suspension of disbelief. If you're unable to do that you'll find it hard to enjoy much at all. Do Marvel films seem realistic to you? Star Wars? Star Trek? Cartoons?
When I was younger and watched movies like Star Wars that had 'computer targeting screens' in their fighters, I thought that computer games would be exciting.
When I was able to finally play those computer games a few years later, I found that they held no interest at all for me. I got a bigger kick out of programming in its own right.
But I am not the World ....
IMHO, needs some surrounding animated context/integrated display execution : Anakin[0] wanders around in a hascii star wars[1] theme version of psdoom[2] and reacts to AI request/return key force to free midi-chords[3] from the NyquestIDE[4] / SAL[5] path to make the largest chord[6].
Add in some variety to the swan song / episode 1 score[7]
So, obviously didn't succeed as still able to tune-in.
Would a carbonite option to suspend/hibernate processes require a jabba the hut ide to recoup the time/expense of process reanimation?
----------------------
[0] : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39873861
[1] : https://asciimation.co.nz/asciimation/index.html
[2] : https://psdoom.sourceforge.net/
[3] : https://github.com/ldrolez/free-midi-chords
[4] : nyquest ide : https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rbd/doc/nyquist/title.html#toc
[5] : sal : https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rbd/doc/nyquist/part2.html#6
[6] : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeTygKpi6pI
[7] : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_E9AOweTwG0
> they will aggressively try to remove your property rights from it.... similar to the NYC squatters rights thing.
I think that's bad-faith reading of the quote from one arborist, not the CA Governor or Treasurer or Dept Director of Parks and Recreation. The way I read the article is that it was implied the state should have considered buying out the owner of the forest (or at least part of it) with state money and convert it to a park. I don't know whether that would have been economically viable and I don't understand people discussing here how forestry policy on redwoods changed after that, but it would be good to see numbers on all this, even if the answer was no.
FYI Lucasfilm shot the Endor scenes in Del Norte in Apr-May 1982, a year before release of RotJ. So, another huge errorbar would be estimating the film's popularity (if there's a deadline on the property being destroyed, as in this case).
99.999% of movies aren't memorable or profitable like the Star Wars trilogy, so they add no value. Also, this stuff isn't predictable at shooting time before the film's release. Compare e.g. 'The Matrix Reloaded' (2003) car-chase scenes were filmed in Oakland, but aren't that popular. But also the Boston Public Garden Bench from "Good Will Hunting", a low-budget $10m film by two young guys people had never heard of [0], or the prison location from 'The Shawshank Redemption' (the closed Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, OH).
[0]: https://www.livethemovies.com/home/the-boston-public-garden-bench-from-good-will-hunting
This seems odd:
> Had somebody been able to foresee the popularity and success of ‘Star Wars,’ it would have been crazy not to save the grove where Endor was made and use it as a tourist venue.
This was not the first Star Wars movie. This was the followup to the most successful sequel ever made at that point, which was itself a sequel to the highest grossing film ever. So successful it was famously given a pseudonymous title to acoid attention from fans.
How could you not expect it to be remembered?
You're delusional. Anything is "incredibly popular" nowadays, like all the Marvel movies and nostalgia reboots. I don't know how any old Trek fan can stomach the new Treks. But I guess you can since you're defending them and know the lore. ;p
But that's weird because they're a completely different genre. They're closer to Star Wars (the one dumb people liked, cuz that's where the $$$ is) than Star Trek.
The entire star wars movie over telnet ascii! I had forgotten about that!
Telnet helped me understand protocols like smtp better. To communicate email to a server by hand was illuminating at the time.
My favorite era of sci-fi films, but I suppose I'm biased having grown up in that era.
Make no mistake, I was blown away when "Star Wars" came out like everyone else, but damn, it killed what had been a delicate and thoughtful genre of Hollywood.
A constraint can lead to more power e.g. the power of abstractions in code. On a more grounded note, having a constraint (a creed or code that limits you) can be a visible signal to others that you’re worth following. With these bonds strengthened by self-imposed constraint, you can accomplish more together than you could alone but unfettered by limitation (debatable). This is a theme in many movies and stories where the main character’s restraint inspires others to great deeds and gives them the resolve to do the unthinkable (Star Wars). Of course, a person with no conscience can always feign this restraint… (Palpatine)
The worldbuilding in the prequels made up for massive deficits in other areas. A masterclass in worldbuilding for sure. Not so much for plot cohesion, characterization, motivation... Whereas the first two Star Wars releases are near-perfect enough movies to still act as templates for new filmmakers.
I watched the trailer and couldn't help but thinking this guy has some amazing talent. I'm curious where he goes after getting his "Space 1999" documentary in the can.
I have mixed feelings about the show. As with pretty much all Gerry Anderson efforts the hardware and effects were top-notch. But the premise is too far fetched for adult me to allow for....
Obviously Brian Johnson and his work were a huge inspiration to the Star Wars model shop and concept artists (and then Brian joining them later, of course).
That the Millennium Falcon and Blockade Runner from Star Wars have radar dishes shows the degree to which everyone involved still had one foot in the "2001" and "Space 1999" modality. (And never mind that Eagle-esque engine cluster in the rear of the Blockade Runner).
How much of that money the sequels earned was simply because it was piggybacking on the established decades old Star Wars IP, even though the movies were crap? But that train already lost all of its inertia. People don't go to se Star Wars IP anymore.
I also went to see some of them and was disappointed and gave up on Star Wars.
You fool me once shame on you. You fool me twice shame on me.
> Same stuff with Star Wars where Disney shoved Rey the super-powerful Girl Boss™ to replace Luke Skywalker the old and useless CIS white Jedi, and defeat all other evil white men in the movie by herself with her magic powers. Same with Marvel, Snow White, Little Mermaid and every other of Disneys trash remakes that are all about DEI instead of entertainment.
I don't see how this was a flop given they grossed more $ than their predecessors, so people actually do pay more money to have better representation? https://www.the-numbers.com/movies/franchise/Star-Wars#tab=summary
>Antman, Indiana Jones, Wish, all had white main characters,
DEI doesn't just affect main characters. See who were tasked to write and direct those movies and the DEI agendas they're forced to push. Clueless people with other flops under their belt, who got the projects out of DEI so Disney can look inclusive on social media.
And speaking of Indiana Jones, that flopped because they shoved a strong independent Girl Boss™ with an annoying personality to replace the beloved Indie as the main character who got sidelined in his own movie. It flopped because people go to an Indian Jones film to see Indie, not Fleabag. If you disrespect the fans they won't watch your movie.
Same stuff with Star Wars where Disney shoved Rey the super-powerful Girl Boss™ to replace Luke Skywalker the old and useless CIS white Jedi, and defeat all other evil white men in the movie by herself with her magic powers. Same with Marvel, Snow White, Little Mermaid and every other of Disneys trash remakes that are all about DEI instead of entertainment.
People go to see movies to get entertained. If you fail to entertain them because you wish instead to push DEI agendas on them, they won't pay for your content and you will lose money and ultimately your shareholders won't be happy and the free market will eventually correct this, so at least capitalism has some upsides.
See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_k8cDLe-Kk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E6wJpu0A8E
> You also have to contend with the fact that movies are essentially immutable - if you watch the same edition as someone else you are seeing an identical product. Consumer products might be damaged, might be counterfeit, or might be incorrectly classified. All of these makes it really hard to build a single source of truth for reviews.
There's also things like the vendor replacing parts but keeping the same product name/SKU, or technically giving it a different ID but hiding it so far down the marketing materials that you're unlikely to be able to find it. This comes up a lot in the aftermarket ROM communities when you have to say things like "this image works on SomePhone 6a+ but only the 2022 model!". Granted, movies also can have sometimes silent edits that are presented as if they're the same thing (looking at you, Star Wars) but I would argue that it's less pervasive and there are fewer versions to keep track of.
Maybe that’s true but I don’t think it is. Star Wars was before my time but I still enjoyed those movies. I was a little too young for the Matrix when it came out, and when I saw it as an adult I really liked it.
Not all summer blockbusters are created equal.
Nah, a generation grew up with the MCU films, they will remain in their minds for the rest of their lives. The films you mentioned are probably the ones you grew up with and the ones that you use as benchmarks. The generation before that was Star Wars, before that it was historical epics, etc etc etc.
Just like with music, "the best" is often the things you experience in your mid-teens to mid-twenties. And when you grow up you'll develop some more critical thinking and may appreciate older or newer things.
Sorry, but this is a 5th-grade take everyone on tech-heavy forums loves.
Only some people can make Star Wars (the pinnacle of independent filmmaking if you read Lucas's biography). It has nothing to do with the tools.
IP in the arts is how artists get paid.
I can assure you that no one in the creative industry feels liberated by these tools. Do you realise that just because you are good at lighting, you don't want to be an actor and make a movie? No, you like to be good at lightning, work with others who are good at what you do, and create a great work of art together.
AI imagery only knows what exists. It's tough to make it do innovative technical effects and great new lightning. "oh my god, stock video sites are dead" Yes, exactly; stock, by definition, is commoditised.
It depends on the film. George Lucas was reworking dialogue and scenes daily while filming the original Star Wars but the overall movie should mostly be set in stone by that time. But big changes can happen. For example, Ben Kenobi was initially supposed to survive the battle with Vader. It wasn’t until filming was already underway that Lucas, at Marcia Lucas’s suggestion, decided to kill him off.
That would traditionally be the case, but the merchandising is bombing too, and (anecdata time) I can confirm this through personal observation: 80%-off sales of Star Wars merchandise in a local toy store, and my kids and their circle having a keen sense of which IP they like (unsurprising spoiler: it’s the stuff based on good movies, not the stuff based on bad movies).
better avoid the marvel movies and star wars then
Well this is just straight up false. Moana was a massive success. Frozen is a monstrous success for them. Star Wars not being a success is objectively false. The Force Awakens is the second best selling Star Wars movie of all time.
By what metric was Star Wars not a hit movie
At risk? They haven’t had hit movie for years. They have destroyed just about everything they’ve touched, from Indiana Jones to Star Wars to Snow White.
Good for you. That's a data set of 1.
I based that on empirical observation of my kids' friends. They don't make up stories, they just replay the star wars or Harry Potter movies. So I don't know, a dozen kids or so. I haven't done a nation wide study yet.
> I do remember a time when Facebook was purely about your closest friends and family
I used to be a staunch defender of FB on that basis - while everyone else was complaining of having hundreds and thousands of not-really-real friends and not finding any value, I was finding it useful to keep up with my actual friends in small ways. Friends who are all over the world and who may not see each other for quite some time. In those situations you often lose track of each other's day to day lives and the friendship slowly feels more remote and fades.
But they killed that. Step 1 was to take away all options that would allow me to see a chronological feed of what my friends are up to in favour of their algorithm. Step 2 was to insert more third party stuff whether I wanted it or not. No, I don't want to see short videos of the girl with the cleavage or the guy with the car or whatever it is that dog is up to. Please stop trying to make me.
Step 3 seems to have been to just flood everything with bullshit.
How would you like to follow this? This local group is suggested for you! This group that is not local too! How about one for nostalgia of a band you've never liked? How about 1500 variations on star wars meme groups? OK, maybe now one friend post. Now how about a cat thing? Or something about conservation? Here's a fan group for an old movie!
The number of IRL friend posts is now much smaller because people have moved off the platform as it becomes less useful. And it's harder to find the content they do generate because they're buried in shit.
By trying to increase my levels of engagement with the platform, FB, you've utterly poisoned it. I presume it works for some portion of users as they must be reporting favourable engagement metrics. But I'm pretty close to just giving up and its network effect feels to me like it's just in a death spiral.
Do you have some evidence he was paid or just making stuff up?
AFAICT he was a pretty honest reviewer giving his own opinions. People have different tastes. Like some people like stinky tofu and others find it disgusting. Some people like The Village and some don't.
My sister likes everything, for example all episodes of Star Wars, 1 though 9. Whereas I only like 4,5,6 and find the rest to be horrible. She liked the latest "Haunted Mansion" so I watched and found it atrocious.
Hierarchical names are what improved my note-taking the most. I don't even use folders much anymore, instead I keep absolutely everything in one folder (~/kb) and use a dot (.) as a delimiter for filenames. For example, I have a note detailing the chronological order for Star Wars media named "lore.sw.chron.org" (.org is the file extension for org-mode notes). As you can see, each section of the filename is a (sub)category. "lore." contains other lores, such as ATLA. "sw" contains other Star Wars notes.
Using this system, the file extension becomes part of the hierarchy; you can have many files named the same thing but with different extensions to represent different aspects of the same thing. For example, I have a lot of math notes. I also have a lot of images, and calculators for specific math things written in Lisp. There's:
- "con.pythagorean-theorem.org" (note)
- "con.pythagorean-theorem.svg" (image)
- "con.pythagorean-theorem.el" (calculator)
If I have multiple of one file type, I just append a ".01", ".02"... before the file extension. I always use a leading zero in number-based hierarchy to appease alphanumeric sorting algorithms, because if you start with single digit and then add more than 10, they will be out of order in the file manager.
Sometimes I still feel the need to put things in folders, like my (very incomplete) collection of all Star Wars comics. I follow the convention of using the ".d" extension for directories in my knowledgebase; "lit.sw.d" is the folder for the aforementioned comic collection. Notice that I used "lit." instead of "lore."; all literature is stored under "lit.", "lore." is for notes and images and things like that.
Which brings me to the next most important thing: top-level categories. I can't wrap my head around the free-form naming of notes. I need categories. So I developed a nice top-level category system that I feel can handle almost anything I can throw at it, though there's always room for improvement:
- archive: old notes. To archive a note, simply prepend "archive." to the filename
- con: concepts (this is the majority of my note-taking)
- cook: recipes
- film: films, shows, etc.
- game: games
- grp: groups, organizations, polities, movements, etc.
- home: my house
- inbox: a single-file inbox for everything, because I have ADHD and if I take too long to write things down I'll forget what I was doing.
- inv: inventory, currently single-file
- journal: my diary, single file for now, plans for a few other topic-specific journals.
- lang: languages, both programming and natural
- lit: literature, publications, etc.
- meta: about this knowledgebase
- ppl: people
- prod: products
- proj: projects
- school: school notes, each course gets a "school.institution.course.org" note, and assignments get (school.institution.course.unit.section.assignment)
- self: about me (self.resume, self.finance, self.health, etc.)
- shop: shopping list, single file
- social: social media
- soft: software
- std: standards
- sub: substances
- sys: systems documentation
- veh: vehicles notes (veh.make.model.vin)
- work: job notes, logs, timesheets, etc.
Along with this top-level categorization, I also use some naming conventions that apply to all files:
- X.agenda: my TODO lists and reminders, automatically used by org-agenda
- X.log: logs of things I've done, automatically used by org-agenda
- X.index: indexes of things, mostly used for literature categories
- X.yyyy.mm.dd.hh.mm: time-based things
- X.gpg: sensitive notes, do not publish, encrypted with GPG
All these conventions allow me to almost always know exactly what something is named or should be named. On rare occasion there are 2 places something could be. But the overwhelming majority of things have only 1 place to go. This means, for example, that I can go back and retrieve any assignment I've ever done within a few seconds, or go back and tell a customer exactly what was said in a phone conversation on June 7th 2019, without having to think about where it might be.
It also allows for sparse naming; you don't have to actually create a file for each level of each hierarchy. It's just a filename. You can have "lore.sw.chron" without having a "lore." or "lore.sw".
We were warned against this in DS9, Season 3 Episodes 11 and 12[1]. I wonder what George's takeaway from those episodes were?
As an observer, it's like talking to someone who's just seen Star Wars for the first time and says, "I just don't understand why those rebels would fight against order and stability."
1. https://www.avclub.com/star-trek-deep-space-nine-past-tense-part-i-past-1798174569
Disney hasn't been doing so well content wise so I don't think such a partnership would matter much. After the last Avengers movie and the unsuccessful star wars trilogy, no-one really cares about disney IP anymore.
There's nothing else like it in terms of quality. Most CRPGs don't have full voice overs and animations for EVERY conversation option. Many don't allow you to just kill every single key character and still maintain narrative flow.
The writing is excellent. The plot is generic. A generic plot isn't necessarily a bad thing either. Some of the best movies follow a generic arc, Star wars the MCU are all good because of the genericness. A lot of people are just snobbish. Not you, but I feel that's where a lot of the judgement comes from.
I think a lot of the time game acting and character modeling is actually worse than the writing itself. To me, there was an uncanny valley when voice acting became the standard. A lot of performances degrade the script itself, whatever you think of the script. It also makes me think of Harrison Ford's line about the Star Wars movies. "George! You can type this shit, but you sure can't say it! Move your mouth when you're typing!"
This isn't quite what Harrison Ford meant, but it feels like a lot of writing feels worse when it has to be acted and performed. When I just read it, my mind fills in the blanks, so to speak, and the "performance" feels more natural.
This is also a bit of an aside, but I also find it incredibly distracting when people in some made-up fantasy world happen to emote and speak just like trendy people today. "Oh, these hardened warriors, who have had a life wholly unlike anything I've ever experienced speak just like American actors in a movie made after 2020."
The benefit of linear TV was that everyone was on the same schedule so all the post-viewing social aspects worked better. It also helped the social aspects that there were three or four networks with all major content, so the odds were very good that any particular person watched the same thing as you did.
Almost the only substantial TV or movie discussions I've witnessed in the last ten years were about fandom-style properties - Game of Thrones, Stranger Things, the MCU, Star Wars. TV and movies in general are rarely discussed. If you share a fandom with someone you can talk about the fandom, if not then the two of you may as well be from different planets regarding media.
The Wilhelm Scream is a sound effect of a man screaming from the 1950's, that has become an in-joke for sound designers.
It's appeared in every Star Wars and Indianna Jones movie, along with countless others.
Really cool 4-minute documentary on BBC for those who can view it:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p07p5l6y/inside-cinema-shorts-12-the-wilhelm-scream
These fragmented "plus" services ultimately led me to stop watching them altogether. Subscribing to each one becomes costly, and I don't find them compelling enough to justify the expense. In fact, I can't even recall the last Star Wars movie I watched.
If they believe in aliens, then they probably also believe that Star Wars is a documentary ...
The original social contract was we'd all pretend we couldn't trivially copy and reproduce "their" works so they could make some money for a decade or so and then their works would enter the public domain.
When's the last time your culture entered the public domain?
I grew up watching films like Star Wars and Home Alone, playing Super Nintendo and PlayStation games. All these corporations have already made a million fortunes off of these things. When is all this stuff gonna become public property?
What about the public? They couldn't give less of a fuck about the public. They don't even care enough to fulfill their end of the bargain which was agreed upon when this copyright nonsense was created. Oh look, our property's about to become public? Better lobby the government and get them to extend the terms. Just pull the rug from under everyone, just move the goalposts, they won't even notice.
They use their fortunes to systematically rob us of our public domain rights. Yes, rights. We have rights to "their" works which they actively deny. They're literal robber barons. Therefore copyright infringement is a moral imperative. We should all stop pretending that copyright exists because the reality is it doesn't, it's completely made up and unenforceable and there's absolutely no reason anyone should recognize it as a legitimate law. Copyright infringement is civil disobedience and morally justified.
This AI stuff is exactly what we need. It's world changing technology. It's subversive. It gives me hope.
Thing is there are way more good books written, than any single person can consume in their lifetimes. An average person like me, reading a mixed diet of classics, obscure recommendations and what's popular right now, I still don't feel like I'm making a dent in the pile of high quality written content.
Given all that, the purpose of LLMs should be to create tailor made content to everyone's tastes. However, it seems the hardcore guardrails put into GPT4 and Claude prevent it from generating anything enjoyable. It seems, even the plot of the average Star Wars movie is too spicy for modern LLM sensibilities, never mind something like Stephen King.
that's a good reference and yes that's what i'm talking about, but i mixed up the fact that you can get simpsons and star wars without asking for it by name - the "find the difference between these two pictures" game is the result of asking for a specific movie. I stand by my point tho that this is not substantially different than querying a database for copywrited material
OP's proposed logline for Star Wars would have been a total fail in the era when the logline was needed, namely before the film was made or known.
>Luke Skywalker, a spirited farm boy, joins rebel forces to save Princess Leia from the evil Darth Vader, and the galaxy from the Empire’s Death Star.
This is probably not an article you want to learn logline writing from.
Isn't it little clownish with funny looking characters spouting cheesy dialogues.
A lot of Asian pop movies and shows are exactly this. Child of Korean immigrants here, married to a Chinese wife. Lots of stupid fun that plays in one culture is just a non-sequitur in another.
It makes perfect sense. The only exposure China had to Star Wars when it came out, were bootleg comics where they drew the Star Destroyers as Space Battleship Yamato.
Look I'm not denying anything you're saying, but I'm arguing against the idea that this woman at the head of Star Wars is the problem! If only she was fired!
That Kathleen Kennedy is in the room for all the important decisions about Spielberg and Lucas' best films in the 80s and 90s is outside the scope of this insane idea that somehow firing her will fix Star Wars. Star Wars itself is the problem. It was underplayed in the early 90s, and is massively overplayed now.
And I should have been clearer about its global reach. Star Wars is not this hallowed franchise outside the anglosphere, and is actually not particularly popular in China.
The five Star Wars movies she oversaw from 2015-2019 made $5.92 billion at the box office, but let me know if that's not enough money for her to be considered successful.
Doesn't that make sense though? Most Gen Xers in China grew up with Monkey King from Taiwan, not Star Wars from America. Japan has its own culture that has largely invaded America rather than the other way around, Korea is starting to do the same.
Europeans are completely different. My German co-worker (well, when I was working in China) reminisced about the Original Battle Star Galactica, which was featured as a movie for his East German market. Star Wars of course, was popular, it helped that Lucas cast a lot of stars from the UK.
If they were 100% in it for the merch they wouldn't be making the next Star Wars movie with Daisy Ridley as the lead.
>She's just at the head of a one-trick poney: Star Wars is not an infinite canvas. It's this very narrow thing, that's not exceedingly popular outside North America.
You're minimising her reach and impact on the industry, for better or worse.
Dial of Destiny was her last film. As for Star Wars, it's huge across the anglosphere and even in countries where English isn't spoken. I've personally queued for hours in Japan to get tickets.
There was nothing like Star Wars when it appeared. I watched it outside the US and remember being absolutely blown away.
My kid doesn't care about Star Wars nearly as much as I do, obviously - but the big thing about it are the memories from when I first watched it. It would be great to see a new Star Wars movie that can engage kids today in the same way it engaged us so many years ago.
Also, have in mind that a lot of old blockbuster movies can look silly today (Sound of Music is one I watched recently), but you have to appreciate them with the proper time period context.
> not exceedingly popular outside North America
I can tell you it is exceedingly popular in Hungary. I have no reason to believe it is not similarly exceedingly popular elsewhere.
> Star Wars itself is stretched out.
It is now. Franchises need nurturing to remain valuable.
The biggest crime they commited is that they did not employ the same screenwriter for all 3 of the sequels. When you are making a trilogy, and you know that you are making a trilogy, you better write the complete arch as a consistent whole and then find the 3 separate sub arches in that.
Instead of that what we got is 2 different teams subverting each other’s ideas and basically messaging to each other. (And the message was that “your ideas are baaad”) It was as if watching someone build a sand castle, someone else comming along kicking it down starting to build a different one, and then the first person returning and kicking the second sandcastle down to build a third.
“Yes, and…” is not just the way to do good improv, but also the way to build good movies built on each other.
We started to get a lot of the classic movies in the 70s (Taxi Driver, Godfather, Star Wars, Halloween, Blazing Saddles, Rocky, Alien, Clockwork Orange, Exorcist, Jaws, Apocalypse Now just to name a few) and the 80s went absolutely wild and - particularly - far more broad. The kids films from the 80s didn't really exist before then (outside of Disney).
In the 50s/60s there were less (but still some of per personal faves) and the dominant genres (Westerns particularly) have been out of fashion for at least 40 years now.
The original Star Wars is a perfect Hero's Journey story told on film. In a vacuum, it's an incredibly inventive and scrappy film.
Evangelion has the benefit of not being owned by Disney, and thus not being milked into oblivion*. If all we had of Star Wars was the original trilogy, and maybe the "Rebuild of Star Wars" aka the sequel trilogy (speaking purely in story terms of soft-rebooting things), it could probably stand toe to toe with Evangelion on prestige. It's just been watered down so much in the last two decades, as opposed to Evangelion which has been fiercely protected by its original creator.
Weird, I didn't think I'd be defending Star Wars in 2024. And I do much much prefer Evangelion.
*I am aware of how badly Evangelion has been milked for merch, but I'm talking exclusively about media appearances in this discussion. There was Evangelion manga, but I can remember there being three series or less for about 20 years (and two of those were gag manga). In terms of visual media outside the main series (anime, EoE, Rebuild films), I'm pretty sure there's just been a smattering of Japanese commercials using Evangelion characters.
Because culture is built on itself. Almost everything is built, remixed, rewritten at some level. A good chunk of the Disney classics are taken from older stories, fairy tales, etc that were by then public domain.
Borrowing/"stealing"/copying happens with movies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-HuenDPZw0 (fast forward to 3:12 to see how much star wars borrowed from other pieces)
It happens with music (kirby had to remove this originally because of...copyright) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmjHlkQYoOM
James Earl Jones, presumably hedging against his eventual demise, has allowed his voice to be used for things like the Star Wars franchise [0].
Small, independent film makers can now use a skeleton crew to voice parts.
I can't imagine it would be anything other than a niche service, but hearing the voice and, potentially, interacting with a chatbot/LLM with the voice of a passed love one.
This is off the top of my head. I would also guess that this technology is a stepping stone for other weird, interesting and profoundly helpful uses.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/24/23370097/darth-vader-james-earl-jones-obi-wan-kenobi-star-wars-ai-disney-lucasfilm
Is Mickey content good enough that we'll see continued interest? My encounters with Mickey (35 year old American) have been only through the movie Fantasia and I know he is a prominent mascot of Disney World. But the pull to Disney world is probably what, Star Wars or Pixar these days? I was recently thinking Star Wars and the Friends TV series could reach that permanent status. Mickey seems unlikely to me.
You make a good point, there’s a difference in copyrighting exact works vs. the characters or the story that the work is made up of. I’m not arguing for removing literal copyright (though the terms should be shorter). But I think it’s fine if other people rushed to make their own Star Wars movies after it came out. Hardcore fans are pretty good at deciding what’s “canon” vs. not anyway, and the rest of us don’t care as long as the work is of good quality. Would it matter if the same Spiderman or Batman movie that’s remade once a decade could be made by literally anyone without paying royalties? It could make for richer content I’d think.
Fine if they weren't copyrighted today, or ever? Because if copyright was eliminated the day Star Wars was released, other people would have copied the film reels and charged for entry, and Lucas would have hardly made a cent. Or if copyright was eliminated the day he went looking for funding, it wouldn't have ever been made. Personally, I think the world's a little richer for star wars's existence.
If I prompt "golden droid from classic sci-fi movie", what else am I asking for if not Star Wars?
> Star Wars is better in production order too, though I seem to recall fans coming up with alternative orderings that were neither production nor chronological.
Machete order, as a sibling notes.
If you watch all six in chronological order, then the big reveals around Luke & Leia's parentage -- not to mention even the fact that they are siblings -- are ruined. (And you also get some super icky feelings in IV and V when Luke pines after Leia before knowing she's his sister.)
If you watch them in production order, it ends up unsatisfying because it's not a well-structured story from IV->V->VI->I->II->III. VI gives you the big payoff of resolving all the conflict, but then you go back to flashbacks: first you have Anakin's childhood in I, which doesn't really teach us anything all that interesting, and then you see II and III which do tell us how Anakin/Vader became the way he was. But then III ends on a big downer and you feel like you want to watch the original trilogy (or at least parts of it) again.
And frankly I just don't care about the final sequel trilogy. I grew up reading all the Star Wars expanded universe novels, and wiping away all that continuity for three so-so movies that feel so small story-wise is the most unsatisfying thing of all to me. Not to mention that trilogy is just super bleak: all the work of the original trilogy is undone, and the Skywalker family essentially ends, with its members more or less sad, broken, and unfulfilled.
> Wringing the life is a pretty mean way to put it.
I take issue less with the volume of Star Wars and Marvel content, and more with how Disney makes small gestures toward "genre" while keeping all of that content within a tightly brand-controlled realm where there are no real stakes or diversity and everything needs to be canon. This is one of the areas where I can appreciate WB's approach more with having a variety of movies and shows with vastly different styles and audiences that obviously can't fit together in the same universe.
> Wringing the life is a pretty mean way to put it. They tried to use the IP to make money.
Mean or not, I'd say it's also accurate. They tried to use the IP to make money... by wringing the life out of it. There are so many Marvel/Star Wars movies/tv shows now you need a freaking spreadsheet to keep track.
Making all those awful Marvel and Star Wars movies and taking our money anyway was pretty mean too.
It's definitely formulaic, and I often feel like there's obvious plot beats, jokes, etc. that were inserted by committee or to match somebody's checklist.
Looking back, the original Star Wars movies were clunky and had plot problems galore -- but they were fun and they had heart and something novel to offer visually and narratively. Lucas couldn't write dialog for shit, but the pacing, casting, story, and eye candy made up for it by a long shot.
(BTW, I thought Endgame was pretty good. There's at least one bit that made me cheer out loud. Maybe I'm just easy, but Cap's big moment was worth the price of admission for me alone.)
To me it feels Disney is just running algorithms to generate content. Some VP up in the ivory tower keeps telling the writers "add that joke that worked on the X movie", "make an action scene like that one in Y movie".
Even the stories in Star Wars are rehashes of previous stories with different characters, the whole new trilogy of movies was just episodes IV, V, VI with a different cast and hollow characters.
On MCU it seems that each movie is just the same formula, I haven't even watched "Endgame" because I got sick of the formula after the 4th repetition.
Disney is just pumping content out, quality be damned, I have no idea who thought that completely oversaturating a cash cow market would be good... They killed it, and in its wake tarnished the reputation of Disney. I used to consider anything coming out of Disney to be at least of decent quality, entertaining enough to check out. Now I simply ignore what they do, it's trash.
Best available restoration, legal or otherwise, is 4k77 / 4k80 /4k83 (4k + the year of the film’s release).
A bunch of absolute lunatics acquired multiple 35mm prints of each movie in its original form (the Star Wars text crawl is just titled “Star Wars”, no episode IV), scanned them at ultra-high-quality, then used various references, including vintage stills, to hand-repair damage and color correct / regrade to compensate for fading.
Available on any torrent search (maybe even on an Internet Archive torrent? Not sure).
They released two official (well, “official”) versions of each: one with the film grain intact as-scanned (it’s rather aggressive, especially on the first film) and another with it cautiously denoised so it looks more like folks are used to on modern films.
None of the official releases come close, if you want to watch the closest practically-obtainable version to what people saw in the theaters on opening day—even a remarkably-good 35mm print on your own cinema projector wouldn’t look as close, because it’d be guaranteed to have noticeable scratches and fading.
[edit] oh and they have multiple audio mixes to suit most preferences. Can’t remember exactly what’s on them all, but Star Wars has both the original stereo and mono mixes (these feature some different ADR takes, between them—it’s not just a difference in audio channels) as well as at least one surround track.
The other day, I was thinking the kids are just about old enough to watch Star Wars episodes 4-6, and it occurred to me I don’t know how to obtain a decent (original plot and visual effects) copy, legally or otherwise.
I almost wish I still had that old VHS box set laying around.
Go meta-data[0] (or go fourth), k-package[1] things with own Brent Spiner web search snippets take/interpretation[2]. Also 'Galaxy Quest', MIB series, Starwars, Matrix, etc...
Ok, perhaps 'Rebel Moon'[3] as StarWars show/movie but evolved into something non-starwars would be better 'back to the future' example.
Note: 'Rebel Moon' yet to be released at time of posting.
Don't foreget about 'The Farside' and 'Calvin & Hobbes' for colorful life characterizations without need for ANSI C pointers!!!
Just stay away from the "[ ]P" side of the "NP [ !]= P" problems for boundless challenge(s).
Lewis Carol of 'Alice through the looking glass' fame was the heavy sci-fi field of view, not the math side of the thesis.
Stanle Kubrick did AI without a PC and avoided segfault bricks. So, why did it take a blue screen to impliment the big screen picture version?
[0] : memory alpha : https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Portal:Main
[1] : strange new worlds musical -- don't be be like the klingons : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJMMixFYu1k
[2] : https://treknews.net/star-trek-conventions/
[3] : https://variety.com/2023/film/news/zack-snyder-star-wars-pitch-new-characters-r-rating-1235660427/
There is a decline in big mind blowing conceptual shifts in media, like we experienced in Star Wars after decades of Spaghetti Westerns. Social and conceptual shifts are happening in real time, out in the world now. The big media build up to change has been reduced signficantly.
Goldeneye could have been more thrilling if the trailers withheld the reveal of Alec Trevalyn as the bad guy.
1995 was a year where most people couldn't look up movie information on the internet... going into the movie theatre blind, it would have been awesome to get the secret revealed on the big screen.
Even a shared love of Star Trek can result in irreconcilable differences and huge battles. I'd never want to work with somebody who likes Holodeck episodes or doesn't love Gowron.
That said, there are some times that even Star Trek fans and Star Wars fans can actually get along.
I'm bistellar: I love both Star Trek AND Star Wars!
Isn't the wireframe death star scene the only part done in C (and therefore by computer) in the first movie?
https://cdm.link/2021/11/watch-larry-cuba-explain-how-he-animated-the-computer-graphics-for-the-original-star-wars/
> in essence, morality plays.
A lot of TV series of the time were... A-Team, Knight Rider, MacGeyver.The difference was characters looking back at our generations, shaking heads how stupid and immature we behaved in our times. TNG delivered a utopy in a convincing and exciting way.
> themes from the Bible and Graeco-Roman mythology
That's true for a lot of stories/saga: Star Wars, LOTR, GoT etc.You have a hero with doubts, going on a journey to save something, living through adventures. (Nicely explained in Joseph Campbell's "The hero with a thousand faces")
Until today, I haven't found anything similar, that gave an idea of a better future for mankind that's achievable and explained without lecturing.
Oh, and unconnected short story episodes are gone. I miss that.
I completely agree.
I remember a similar discussion about special effects in movies. The year was 1993 and I was telling my uncle that the newly released Jurassic Park had special effects that looked completely real. My uncle was an artist (a painter) and told me that he agreed they looked real to us now, but that they probably wouldn't in the future. That concept seemed crazy to me... He explained that when he saw the original Star Wars in theaters the special effects were mind blowing to the audience and looked completely believable and real. Of course, to me, at the time, Star Wars special effects looked crude and fake--I had a hard time believing him. But, if I watch Jurassic Park today, sure enough, he was right.
Popular entertainment has been breezy and shallow since before the emergence of mass media; it's not a new trend.
Indiana Jones was specifically inspired by the 1930s serials that Lucas grew up with, such as Buck Rogers and Zorro, which were always about set pieces strung together with minimal depth of character development.
If there's a trend, it's that there is a distinct drop in "adult" films — meaning smart dramas for adults, not necessarily arthouse films — that started around the 2000s. Maybe the Indy movies were portends of this (some might say Jaws and Star Wars), but it's been a slow trajectory, and one that seems to have even accelerated by the pandemic and the emergence of streaming.
T2 much better than T1. Aliens better than Alien.
These are great sequels, but they are Hollywood action movies compared to their predecessors. I do prefer ESB, but Star Wars has better structure and a more satisfying ending, so it is close.
The best thing about ALien is that when it came out, you had no idea who the "hero" was in the crew. Tom Skerritt was the biggest star, had first billing, and was the white male captain. There was no expectation the someone else would be the hero and survivor.
Strange choices. ESB is in almost every way a much better film than Star Wars. T2 much better than T1. Aliens better than Alien.
I haven't seen the other two, bet I'll just assume they also have better sequels.
I don't understand all the love for Dune. I read it, it was ok, and that was it. 3 underwhelming film adaptations is more than enough.
Special effects don't make a movie anymore. What matters is plot (and music). For example, "Colossus the Forbin Project" is very good. Some other very good scifi movies:
. Invaders from Mars
. Flash Gordon (1980)
. Terminator
. Star Wars IV
. Alien
For me personally that’s a nightmare. I don’t like to dwell in the past too much. But there are always people I know personally, who can remember some very precise things of the past (e.g. me wearing something very common and usual during some very common and usual event at, say, school). Whilst I cannot even remember the event took place at all, so usual it was. They not gaslight me, I know, as with their reminders I can remember some minuscule details. But I see them themselves as someone living in the past way too much. ‘Good ol’ days,’ you know. I’m not a very enlightened person myself, but this living in the past is way too much for me.
That’s what I feel about re-watching some shitty movie over and over again. Even cult ones, like Rocky, original Star Wars, Terminator etc. It feels way too much for me. A tiny dose of nostalgia once a few years maybe, that’s okay. But being there over and over, nah.
I imagine the stakes of rewriting the Star Wars films are sufficiently low that this risk is acceptable...
SR71 used a pre-GPS navigation system via stars even in daylight
https://theaviationgeekclub.com/the-sr-71-blackbird-astro-nav-system-aka-r2-d2-worked-by-tracking-the-stars-and-was-so-powerful-that-it-could-see-the-stars-even-in-daylight/
Mounted behind the SR-71 RSO’s cockpit, this unit (that was affectionately dubbed “R2-D2” after the Star Wars movie came out in 1977), computed navigational fixes using stars sighted through the lens in the top of the unit. These fixes were used to update the inertial navigation system and provided course guidance with an accuracy of at least 90 meters (300 feet). Some current aircraft and missile systems use improved versions as a backup to GPS.
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37651171
The maddening thing is that it is that kind of movie in many places.
It has rules, it has structure, it has proposed reasons that things work the way they do.
People wouldn't be nearly as obsessed about Star Wars if it were all just handwavey reasoning.
One reason, for all it's flaws, Last Jedi is my favorite new film. It simultaneously admits (through character dialog) that "there are rules" and "there are egregiously no rules".
> Star Wars is quite loose in its narrative, requiring a significant amount of suspension of disbelief
"Hey, kid, it ain't that kind of movie"
There is also that Star Wars is quite loose in its narrative, requiring a significant amount of suspension of disbelief.
Star Wars, if you look at it closely, has many inconsistencies, and it is rather shallow. But it does a great job at letting our minds fill in the gaps. The trench run is, I think, an unwanted result of that. It is almost set up as if they want us to believe that the final trench run happens at the equator, so that's what we believe, because we have been trained for the entire movie to ignore small details and think big.
This is in contrast to films like, for example, Inception, that clearly encourages the audience to look at every little detail.
I have a special needs son. Parental controls are useless. Huge swathes of legitimate content gets blocked while he can still get to horrible material I don’t want him watching. His inability to obey any rules has resulted in him losing his pc because we simply couldn’t keep plugging all the holes he was finding to sneak into YouTube. And don’t get me started on streaming services where if you let your kid watch Star Wars, they can also watch The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episodes.
In my huge sample size of A Few Acquaintances, people seem to be turning to the Marvel TV shows instead.
I did this for Star Wars... I had basically zero interest in the new movies or really anything but the Old Republic setting, but the SW TV shows are pretty engaging. They're so much more grounded than... Whatever was going on in the new movies.
Books were the entertainment of the day. In recent times people thronged movie theaters to see Star Wars or Harry Potter.
Is that the star wars movie?
I just commend you for writing on your own blog and making an interactive post; as opposed to some shitty Notion/Medium/Dev feed the google-algorithm, AI copy pasta.
Honest blogging is dying in the shadows, unseen of the god almighty algorithm. It's sad times. We're deep in the Star Wars episode IV of the Internet.
My only feedback is, merci and more of it please!
> doesn’t cheapen or weaken the original
I'm not a huge objector to the continued outchurn of the Star Wars or Star Trek or MCU franchises, for example, because there's an academic sense in which the existence of bad stuff doesn't negate the existence of good stuff.
BUT...
I think restraint and scarcity can make things more special. Food is more enjoyable when we are hungry, absence makes the heart grow fonder, etc..
Narratively, it's good to leave some questions unanswered. A successful franchise leaves the fans wanting more, but actually giving them more can leave us over-satiated and uninterested.
There's no more magic or mystery left when every character has had their own mini-series to fully flesh-out every aspect of their arc.
Because art isn't a product: it's a process, like science. Art is a form of human expression, where someone makes something they have in their head and want to see brought it life.
If you design movies, or other things, through a committee that's checking boxes on a template intended to meet the requirements for another entertainment product, it's not really art anymore. It's a cynical product.
We've seen a shift from directors like Tarantino or George Lucas, auteurs who were meticulous about ensuring every aspect of the production lived up to their personal vision, to a rotation of glorified line managers serving a committee and being swapped out from film to film. The fact that we call them franchises, the same word we use for cookie-cutter fast food restaurants under the same umbrella, should be a clue.
As much as people disparage George Lucas, he is Star Wars, and the idea that someone else can make Star Wars, or that the idea can be sold, is a bizarre and laughable concept. It's like saying "I exchanged money in the right way, so I'm William Shakespeare now. My upcoming six Hamlets are 'canonical' successors."
There's an episode of one of the red letter media shows on YouTube which generally discuss films but sometimes TV, where rich Evans, one of the commentators, says something to the effect of, "if you had told 16 year old me that when I'm an adult I would be paid to watch new star wars content and that I would hate every minute of it I would have told you that you were a crazy person."
I feel like most of the marvel, star wars, star trek, etc content is designed for someone of my interests. But I mostly have zero interest in watching any of it at all. I'm not sure why this is true, but I think because it all stopped being special. It stopped being something interesting, inspiring, intellectual, or whatever it is was that makes me enjoy an episode of Star Trek tos or TNG or an iron Man comic or why star wars let me escape to a universe that I could stay awake dreaming about, writing stories about, drawing spaceships, etc.
If you like all this stuff that's fine. I just find it all so commercial. It's like I can feel someone slipping their hand in my pocket to take my money when I watch it. There's nothing about it that feels honest anymore.
I would say the majority of people who are younger when given the opportunity to watch both will share the same opinion as me.
It could be my perception is warped. All humans are biased and delusional but those who can't admit their bias are more biased then those who can.
>I frankly find the idea that nostalgia is warping your perception of reality to be funny; aren't your tastes doing the same, and what about your whole brain ?
Just talk to a bunch of young people. You realize a ton of zoomers don't give a shit about star wars? They really don't get it at all. Millennials all generally get why it's big.
Go even further back talk to older people and they like stuff that's ludicrously bad. Hitchcock for example while classic, has not aged well at all. I get scared easily by scary movies and I just laughed at Hitchcock stuff. It was the first of it's time, but story telling like technology has improved.
If you find all of this funny. If you refuse to believe that we all can have our perceptions warped by nostalgia, then I am telling you. The warping of your perception by nostalgia is so strong that you can't even admit that this phenomenon which is so obvious to most people even occurs.
As a somewhat old greybeard at this point, let me apologize for all of the other greybeards who never shut up about this movie.
I don't blame you if you watch this movie and are left wondering what all the fuss is about.
It's sort of like the LOTR novels, the original Star Wars movies, or maybe even the original Alien movie. Or listening to the Beatles or Nirvana. They were the progenitors of absolutely zillions of derivative works, to the point where Blade Runner's "neon noir cyberscape" aesthetic and LOTR's "humans n' orcs n' elves n' wizards" dynamic have utterly saturated and permeated our cultural landscape.
So if you experience these things in reverse chronological order, once you get back to the "originals" it's understandable if you wonder what the fuss is all about.
For those who did experience things in roughly chronological order, there's a real thrill and nostalgia attached to these utterly game-changing works. And obviously there are lots of other folks who enjoy that kind of uh, cultural spelunking or whatever we want to call it. There's a lot of fun to be had if you enjoy exploring art that way.
On the other hand... there's no reason to do it that way either. Don't listen to any stupid old nerd who tells you that you have to love Blade Runner or some other retro-ass thing.
If everybody just worshipped the past we'd never come up with anything new.
I think the most famous/beloved/notorious version of this is the guy in Star Wars running around with a completely unaltered off the shelf ice cream maker.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Thatsabooklight/comments/bf20dp/i_present_to_you_willrow_hoods_aka_ice_cream_man/
I just found that link through Google, but that is apparently a whole subreddit devoted to this type of use of modern objects getting repurposed as some fantastical movie/TV props.
This is one of my favourite distractions when watching Sci-Fi films set in the future - spotting objects from now. For example:
- In Luke's home in Star Wars IV there's a lot of Tupperware - https://projectswordtoys.blogspot.com/2014/02/in-praise-of-tupperware-and-star-wars.html
- In Alien, Ripley drinks from a Tupperware mug - https://twitter.com/EverRotating/status/1156650673972363264
Personally, I find the constant breaking of the flow in a silent movie so the dialog card can be shown very irritating after a while. It's also annoying that the card is shown for too long (for slow readers) and there's a fair amount of dialog you can lip read that is not on the cards.
I seriously doubt dialog cards are part of any director's "vision".
The bad music slapped on the DVDs is also a serious turnoff. Music easily makes or breaks a movie. For example, the music on Lord of the Rings adds greatly to my enjoyment of it. The Hobbit music is utterly forgettable, and makes the poor movie even worse.
For another example, the movie "Hawaii" has a most excellent music soundtrack. Its sequel, "The Hawaiians", has a completely forgettable soundtrack, which contributes to the movie falling flat on its face.
I suspect much of "Star Wars" success came from the music.
>> the ethical and artistic arguments
>Those are all baloney. Doing what I suggest does not destroy the originals in any way. It's simply making the movies more enjoyable. Apparently, a lot of purists want people to suffer watching them: suffer with grainy, blotchy film, difficult to make out flickering black & white, and bad piano music.
I think there's 2 separate issues actually: there's the "artist's intent", and then there's refusal to utilize any modern technology. The latter I agree is baloney: if you can use modern technology to clean up and improve old stuff (such as taking an original Star Wars film print and removing the scratches in the film, improving flaws in the FX, etc.), I think it's ridiculous to argue against that kind of thing. Then there's the artist's intent: if the original artist intended that the movie have "bad piano music" as you call it, should you be changing that? It's like changing the dialog in Lord of the Rings so the characters all talk like modern American hipsters: how is this helpful? These movies are a product of their time, and the music is too.
If you could bring the original artists back from the dead, and ask them if they'd like to use modern technology to clean up their old silent movies to sharpen them, remove the noise, etc., I'm sure they'd agree: why wouldn't they want the print to look as good as possible? If you ask them about colorizing, there might be some debate; some might like it, others might not. It's not like they had a choice back then, but even today some people like B&W photos for artistic reasons. If you ask them about adding modern music, I don't think they'd like that much at all.
> Rotting minds, sowing discord, making users depressed,
Nothing that Hollywood and the Western music industry haven't already done to our young minds here Eastern European back in the '80s.
It's not Reagan's StarWars madness that made the communist governments fall, but Star Wars the movie itself, and Michael Jackson, and Madonna, and countless other such Western propaganda (because that's what it was, even though I personally was in love with much of said Western propaganda as a kid).
It's also extremely useful to recall that most of the tropes of SciFi TV, cinema and books are there for visual, narrative, and literary necessity. Star Trek utilises transporters and warp speed not because they're technically probably or scientifically valid ... but because spending days or millennia going from ship to surface or between stars in a galaxy is utterly nonviable for a television or film production. Star Wars's light sabers and blasters are visually appealing but nonsensical physically. Even "realistic" films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey remove such elements as the absolutely gigantic heat radiators the Discovery would have needed if it were depicted in a technically-accurate manner.
Similar depictions occur in fiction, most of which are fairly shallowly-disguised Western, Journey, or Empire sagas relocated in space, though without any actual foundations on physics. Hard science fiction can sometimes make a few nods to reality, and often exists as a sort of "what if", exploring the potential consequences of some scientific or technological capability being realised, but again has very little basis in any known physics.
And I write this as someone who was caught hook, line, and sinker by the von Braun vision of spaceships to the planets, Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and others. As I've gotten older it's the psychological and social explorations which are more interesting: Le Guin, Stephenson (who tends to remain in near-Earth orbits), Bradbury, Butler, KSR, and the like.
Not that the fantasy isn't still attractive at times, and with the capabilities for visualising potential space-scapes and starscapes, the visual imagery really is stunning, as in 1RPM here.
(I'd watched before reading the description, and pretty much all the points Wernquist highlighted were ones I'd noted in the video itself.)
> I used to work with someone who never watched Star Wars.
I never really watched Star Wars. I've seen part of it, and it never seemed all that interesting. I know enough to "get" the references, and I'll even make them myself, but I never really cared much for the films. As far as I'm concerned the best Star Wars film is Spaceballs (but I can't seem to find my DVD copy right now, but I'll comb my living room for it later).
I'm not trying to be the "cool kid" or something; I'm just saying there's a lot of variation in what people watch, read, listen to, and generally do with their time.
My grandfather died (in 2008) and he had never eaten pizza in his life.
Just a few weeks ago I introduced a woman in her 50s to chickpeas.
A few years ago I mentioned Stephen Hawking to a group of coworkers (I was the only programmer, working in the sales office) and no one knew who he was. "You know, the scientist in a wheelchair, with a robot voice". Nope, no idea.
But then a few weeks later they mentioned ... someone ... I had no idea who they were on about. Apparently it was someone who was on TV all the time, but not the programmes I watch I guess (I have obviously forgotten who).
The first time I heard about this Kim Kardashian person was with the introduction "you must have been living under a rock if you don't know who the Kardashians are!" Yes, this Patrick.
I can go on and on with people who "have never done X" or "have never seen Y", for all sorts of values of X and Y.
Over 40 and never seen star wars or lord of the rings or probably any marvel movie
Yeah well so did many other great movies for me: Jaws, Godfather, Star Wars, Alien, Its A Wonderful Life, numerous Disney animated features, etc etc but there's many of those that are timeless. But I do imagine as the quantity of content increases it becomes harder for timeless features to break through. Probably doesn't help that the streaming services tend to split the cultural catalog in a way that video stores never had to suffer from.
I never gravitated towards the Lord of the Rings books but resolved to read them in college because they were a reference point for so many of my friends. They really rubbed me the wrong way, and I had to force myself through them. A decade later, I greatly enjoyed the movies while watching them with friends but found that they bored me when I watched them alone.
I'm a sucker for Star Wars, though. I'm sad to say I've paid to see some of the newer ones even when I knew better.
Lucky you! My ten year old has zero interest in watching the movies I grew up with in the 80s with me. When I had a kid, I started building up this fantasy that one day we'd sit down and go through the movie vault and watch all the classics together, but we tried and she's just not into it. It's a combination of the (to her) immense runtime of a typical movie and the slower pacing of media from decades ago. She got through about 15 minutes of Star Wars and was obviously bored.
I don't force her. She knows the offer is always on the table. "Kids these days!"
> have to be careful not to spoil the "I am your father" reveal
I'd never thought about it before, but the prevalence of star wars in pop culture made it so basically my whole generation had that reveal spoiled in cartoons and different parodies way before any of us actually watched the movie.
> I used to work with someone who never watched Star Wars. I found it hard to imagine.
I've never watched Star Wars and I'm mid 30's. They just doesn't interest me; as doesn't the Lord of the Rings.
It's not that I'm dismissing them as great movies they just don't hook. I've seen clips and eh'. But I am from Europe, not the US. Maybe that's why.
one of my best friends going back to college (we're over 40), has never seen any Star Wars movies and it makes my wonder why we're even friends
years ago, I had a coworker from Pakistan; he liked to watch movies, but it took several Office Space references before he got around to it
I recently met a couple in their early 50s who have never seen the Star Wars or Lord of the Rings movies. These aren’t people who eschew popular movies or don’t like scifi/fantasy. They just… never watched them. If they have never seen them, I can’t imagine how many younger people haven’t seen them.
While I'm no big fan - mostly the nostalgia effect - I used to work with someone who never watched Star Wars. I found it hard to imagine.
A few weeks ago I watched "A new hope" with my 13yo daughter, we both loved it. Of course the effects didn't age well, but the story and acting is as strong as it used to be. I'm going to watch "The empire strikes back" with her soon and have to be careful not to spoil the "I am your father" reveal. Though I admit she's not very typical - we're both Whovians ("number one fans", so to speak;-)), so she's accustomed to story, writing and acting being way more important than SFX (which is IMHO the correct attitude, at least most of the time).
I really hope that she'll find some fellow geeks soon.
Also, in my current team at work I used to be the only one who watched (and read) "The Princess Bride". Now one coworker also watched it, and one day we're going to watch it together with the whole team. I think many people nowadays know it only from memes, which is sad - it's a great movie.
I think some of the reason for the strong reaction is Star Wars is for kids while Aliens is not. There are a lot of people who were in an age of innocence when they watched Star Wars and it gets them upset if the new movies aren't entertaining to them as adults. Even if you did watch Aliens as a kid it's a horror movie in space with a giant bug in the shadows making it a lot less relatable.
People who claim a new movie ruined their childhood are just being over-dramatic, are using it as a shorthand for it destroyed a thing from their childhood, or both.
I do think, though, that sequel can make a story worse pretty easily. For example, the combined story of the Star Wars sequels, prequels, and originals is simply worse than the originals alone. When you just watched the originals, you could imagine your own Clone Wars, they could be whatever cool thing you want. Dropping neat-sounding hints and letting the audience fill in the gaps with whatever cool thing they imagine is a classic storytelling technique get a free feeling of depth. Replacing that cool thing the audience imagined with trade negotiations makes the story worse.
Similarly, character arcs are a thing. The protagonists usually win and end up in a happy place, at least in a non-grimdark universe like Star Wars. Making a sequel that says: Actually Luke Skywalker spent the rest of his life failing and ended up as a miserable old grump makes his story arc worse.
You can just watch the original movies and ignore the rest of course, it is after all fiction so getting the whole story doesn’t really matter. But these are huge releases that get lots of press, and I think it is unrealistic to expect fans to just ignore them.
I agree, but it seems like many people are incapable of thinking this way. See the number of people who say that new star wars ruined old star wars, "ruined their childhood" even. How? How can a new movie ruin an old movie? Causality does not work in that direction. But some people think it does and the illogicality of their position doesn't change the fact of how they genuinely feel.
I think my moment was the realisation that we're one, maybe two years away from building a real-life C3PO - like, not a movie lookalike or marchandize, but a working Protocol Druid.
Or more generally that Star Wars of all things now looks like a more accurate predictor of our tech development than The Martian - the franchise that is so far on the "soft" side of the "hard/soft SciFi" spectrum that it's commonly not seen as "Science Fiction" at all but mostly as Fantasy with space ships. And yet here we are:
- For Protocol Druids, there are still some building blocks missing, mostly persistent memory and the ability to understand real-life events and interact with the real world. However, those are now mostly technical problems which are already being tackled, as opposed to the obvious Fantasy tropes they were until a few years ago. Even the way that current LLMs often sound more confident and knowledgeable than they really are would match the impression of protocol druids we get from the movies pretty well.
- Star Wars has lots of machines which seem to have some degree of sentience even though it makes little practical sense - battle droids, space ships, etc - and it used to be just an obvious application of the rule of cool/rule of funny. Yet suddenly you could imagine pretty well that manufactures will be tempted by hype to stuff an LLM into all kinds of devices, so we indeed might be surrounded by seemingly "sentient" machines in a few years.
- Machines communicating with each other using human language (or a bitstream that has a 1-1 mapping to human language) likewise used to be a cute space opera idea. Suddenly it became a feasible (if inefficient and insecure) way to design an API. People are already writing OpenAPI documentations whete the intended audience are not human developers but ChatGPT.
This was interesting, although I feel the author was making two separate points here. One point was about the popularity of young adult (YA) fiction with adults, and the other was something to do with a book about queer kids being criticized and an attempt to remove it from a public library because children might find it. The thread that connects them was supposedly that the library system circulates 135 copies of 50 Shades of Grey, but how exactly that related to YA lit I'm not sure. The link is certainly weak, or lost on me. (The author started writing fan-fic for YA novels?). Smut has existed forever, certainly before the arbitrary transition period the author of the article has come up with, so I'm not sure I understand the link.
Anyways, of the two points, I find the latter one boring and tired, and so I'd prefer to talk about the first one. The author states:
> My husband and I spent several years putting on pleasant faces when talk over cocktails drifted to “Which Hogwarts house would you belong to?” It all felt so juvenile and regressive. And I believe it was.
I was unable to escape this feeling at the time when Harry Potter was sweeping through the world. I'd just finished Lord of the Rings and, while I picked up a Harry Potter book, I just found it tough to get into. Then I watched the same thing happen with series like Eragon, Wheel of Time, Twilight, Song of Fire and Ice, Hunger Games and more (might have the order mixed up). I've read at least a single book from all those series (except Twilight) and while I've gone back and re-read Lord of the Rings 4 times since, I've never felt compelled to read those series, or watch the movie/TV adaptations.
I've spent actually a not insignificant amount of time wondering why those books never clicked with me, while watching them become sweeping, generation-defining cultura phenomena. It's bothered me, because I've been left out of a lot of "which Hogwarts house are you" type of conversations. But the thing that's really strange is that I kept waiting for everyone to outgrow those books and move on. On the one hand, I understand mass appeal, and I understand not understanding mass appeal. Not everything is truly for everyone, and it never bothered me that those books missed me, but what bothered me was that we never let go of them as a culture. I still know people who call other people "muggles", for instance, even though we're all well into our 30s by now.
There are a lot of things I liked in my youth that I look back fondly on now, but realize they aren't for me as an adult. Music, movies, TV, books (I had my own YA novel preferences), that, at some point, I just walked away from. Some of them were quite good, some of them were of broad appeal, but eventually, I outgrew them. What confuses me so much is society's inability to outgrow a lot of these recent YA novels. The same way I'm confused about how Taylor Swift is still so popular with her original demographic.
There used to be a certain strategy that if you paid attention to, many media companies (especially Disney) would employ: They'd release some media series, say, Star Wars. Then they'd wait until the people who originally were kids/young adults got older, had their own kids, and they'd re-release the property, or release sequels/prequels, etc. (Star Wars being a good example because they've done this 3 time now, with the originals in the 80s, prequels in the early 00s, and the latest batch in the 2020s). You could see clear generational gaps between surges in popularity. But that seems to have just gone away now.
All in all, it's not a real problem. I'm still just as tired of these media properties as I was a few years after they came out, but it's not like it really affects my life. It's just really strange to see the level of persistence, and I can't find any historical comparisons.
It was still pretty normal in Britain in the 70s. As a kid I remember watching the end of some disaster movie before it went back to the beginning - most likely Airport '77 or '79/'80. It started to change in my (relatively) small town with Star Wars, Superman and Raiders, when at least some performances required standing in line on the street and waiting to be let in at the right time (nobody had dreamed of pre-booking, or seat reservations, at this point). During the transition period newspaper listings would specify "cont.perf." for continuous performance to indicate when the old system was still in play, which carried on well into the 80s.
Edit to clarify: they did generally list the times that each showing would start, so you could choose to arrive at the beginning and leave at the end. But nobody was forced to do either. You could arrive in the morning and watch the same film five times in a row, if you wanted. Or two films alternating, if it had a B-movie showing between the main film... ah yes, fond memories of strange B-movies like a documentary around offshore oil production - perhaps due to the time period when movie studios became just one part of massive industrial conglomerates, perhaps because they wanted to bore the audience into leaving and freeing up seats... also the combination of Airplane! with the execrable Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Beatles jukebox-musical starring the Bee Gees).
I guess you have a different criteria for 'arsty'. For me, the sensibility matters more than the experimentalism some of these movies have. Some other guy below mentions a Ryan Johnson interview where he says 'subverting expectations' was a main focus (I wasn't aware of this, it just was my first impression). That's typical for post-Deconstruction European filmmaking. It was bringing this sensibility (a poor fit for Star Wars) which makes it 'artsy' here.
In fairness, I knew the moment JJ Abrams got the role that the sequel trilogy was doomed. It's a lot more his fault than Johnson's, and a lot of the criticisms TLJ got were a consequence of the previous movie. If SW was to modernize, it needed to find new grounds, and JJ could never do it.
I was never a big fan, but I still regret to inform everyone that Disney is going to Zombify the franchise and milk the Zombie cow forever. This video is the future of Star Wars:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zY9z7IP-1Q
Lol. I remember this film. We were in one of the test audiences and got to see it free as a double bill with some other film. I liked it. Maybe not as much as star wars.
Oh. And Philip Oakey did the main theme. Loved that too.
Thx for the stroll down memory lane.
The general audience does not care about any of that though. Star Wars is beyond ridiculous in the first place - I mean how does "light-sabers" make any sense? What matters to the general audience is there are relatable characters doing cool stuff which feels plausible in the moment. The space ramming was cool and emotionally satisfying, so it works.
For most of the audience, if they know Luke at all, it is as the whiny kid with the bad haircut from the old movies. So its fun to see him as old and grumpy. They do not care if he is some kind of space-Jesus in the expanded universe or whatever.
A "deep betrayal to the universe" of Slave Leia, Jar-Jar Binks, C3PO?
Nothing Star Wars or Disney, good or bad, is more concerned with art than entertainment. It might be bad, it might be a miss, but they surely aim for entertaining.
It's of course a continuum -- few movies exist squarely in either the "artsy" or "entertaining" ends of the spectrum -- but it's a safe bet Star Wars is closer to the entertaining/spectacle end.
The problem with calling a Star Wars movie "arty fartsy" is that it twists the meaning of this term to mean "a movie I don't like", which I'd rather people did not do.
You have to take into account that Star Wars is not an attempt to simulate realistic space battle strategy and tactics, it's pew-pew space battles and laser swords and pulp adventure. It was never realistic. The Death Star is a patently ridiculous, extremely inefficient weapon, since there's no need to entirely explode a planet to destroy it, as is it needing to wait until the moon of Yavin is out of the way when it could easily destroy Yavin from any axis, as is the trench run, which only exists at all because George Lucas ripped off a World War 2 movie, scene for scene, as is the plot twist of the exhaust port. Yes, it's been retconned (like the parsecs thing) but it's still goofy as hell that two torpedos could cause a chain reaction big enough to blow up an entire moon-sized ship even if it hit the reactor dead on. People accept it because it's the OT and they have nostalgia glasses on but it really is kind of bullshit.
The Empire was just that arrogant and self-confident that they never noticed such an obvious flaw until it was too late? Still bullshit.
Sabotage? Better, and it got us Rogue One, which was a great movie. But even then it stretches credibility.
The walkers in Empire Strikes Back are ridiculous, no one would actually build those, with their obvious (and easily exploited) weakness. And in a universe with blasters, no one would ever be using lightsabers. Hell, if you can force choke someone, which even Luke did with that Gammorean guard, why not just force pinch an artery in your enemy's brain or heart? Why bother with all the spinny flips and shit? Just force heart attack from a concealed location, done.
Realistically, you wouldn't even have dogfights in space at all, much less with plane-shaped ships that bank through turns, you would have fully automated, spherical droids attacking from hundreds of thousands of kilometers away or just, as you mentioned, toss a big FU asteroid through hyperspace into the orbit of a planet. And yes, the elephant in the room is that any FTL drive is by definition a weapon of mass destruction.
None of it makes much sense. It never has, because it has always been more important that things look cool than make sense. But the point is, ramming a ship with another ship while going into hyperspace makes no less sense than anything else. The transition to hyperspace isn't instantaneous, you can see the ships zooming in and out of hyperspace and see the starfield warp. So logically there must be a point at which it works. Maybe the margin of error for that is so razor thin that it's not worth trying most of the time. Maybe the particular shape of the ships involved made it an optimal strategy that one time. I don't know, but one can come up with excuses a lot less goofy and contrived that the "maze of black holes" that justifies the parsec line about the Millennium Falcon to justify it.
People are just being particularly nitpicky about this one element while they're willing to forgive the decades of patent ridiculousness that came before.
> And I'm curious what exactly you think the effect of ramming into one ship with another ship transitioning into hyperspace should be
It has to be nothing, or else none of the other movies make sense at all. Kinetic energy attacks (accelerate a mass to a great velocity) are the most obvious attack there is, from the dawn of time with throwing rocks to bows and arrows to muskets to cannons on up. And in a universe where you can accelerate a mass immediately to light speed, nothing else will really compare.
So yes, at some level it makes obvious sense that a kamikaze of one starship to another "should" work. But in the Star Wars universe we had had to suspend that disbelief (in some ways justified because light speed jumping isn't real, so maybe it just doesn't work that way) because otherwise X-wings could take out Star Destroyers and the Death Star is unnecessary because you can just strap the hyperspace drives to large hunk of rock.
Porter-Duff refers to a seminal 1984 paper titled simply "Compositing Digital Images":
https://graphics.pixar.com/library/Compositing/paper.pdf
This research was sponsored by Lucasfilm because at the time, alpha compositing of bitmap images wasn't really a concern for desktop computers. CPU, memory, and display hardware wasn't there to do anything useful with alpha (other than 1-bit masks used for game characters and GUI icons).
OTOH Lucasfilm (and other film visual effects companies) had a long history of using mattes, the physical photography equivalents of alpha compositing. When you see a group of Stormtroopers marching inside a Death Star hangar in 1977 "Star Wars", the hangar is a matte painting. They were typically made on a large glass that was carefully placed in front of the camera to create the illusion.
Porter and Duff came up with a compositing model that's appealingly simple: it's a single formula, three variables, and you get 12 compositing operators by simply enumerating the combinations.
You can still find these Porter-Duff operators pretty much anywhere that 2D graphics are processed. They're in HTML Canvas, PDF, Apple CoreGraphics...
But, as neatly mathematical as these operators are, most of them aren't really practical for rendering actual scenes consisting of graphics layers. They're not terribly intuitive for designers, and they don't even attempt to simulate the effects of combining light.
So when Photoshop was created, its designers needed a set of blending operations (initially for drawing tools, and soon after for combining layers introduced in PS version 3.0). Exposing the Porter-Duff operators to designers wouldn't have been very useful.
Instead they came up with a set of blending modes that were loosely derived from operations that you could do on physical photography negatives, since that was the inspiration for the application. (The PS blending modes still retain names like "dodge" and "burn" which refer to darkroom techniques that no designer under 50 probably remembers.)
These PS blending modes are conceptually pretty much the opposite of the Porter-Duff modes: they're not mathematically rigorous, but just a collection of algorithms that could be executed in reasonable time on a 68k processor back in the early 1990s. These original limitations are visible in the design of the algorithms: for example, they don't even try to account for gamma correction in the source images, which means that the algorithms do a rather poor job of simulating the behavior of actual light. (Photoshop has later added "linear" versions of some blending modes to address this.)
> but it is generally considered at best unethical and at worst illegal to re-use content that isn't your own, at least without a proper citation.
No it's not at all, except in extremely limited circumstances.
When George Lucas made Star Wars, did he cite all the Westerns and space opera serials and movies that influenced him? When you give a presentation at work on why you should move to a sharded database, do you cite the history of academic work on sharded databases? When you use Times New Roman in a document, do you cite the British newspaper The Times, or Robert Granjon's prior serif designs from the 1500's?
Of course not.
Legally, you can do whatever you want with ideas and styles and whatnot, which is what AI is about. Legally, you only run into problems when you reproduce sections of copyrighted works verbatim, without a license, in a manner that's not considered fair use. Your answer to "where does the line fall" is quite clear legally -- it's the line demarcated by fair use, which has nothing to do with licenses. AI doesn't change that.
That general issue is one reason (among many) why I a hard time suspending my disbelief for the Star Wars movies.
You're going to use a sword when someone 100 meters away can plug you in the head with a gun? Umm... good luck with that.
They tried to paper over the issue by making the stormtroopers terrible marksmen, but that wasn't very successful (at least in my case).
I mean I agree that the Hobbit films are drivel but the LOTR trilogy is just amazing. It has a twinge of 90s affect that you have to ignore (similar to how the original Star Wars trilogy has a 60s-pulp-adventure feel that is rather dated now). And there are a bunch of discrete problems (the ghosts, the "cool legolas moves", too much slow motion) that we roll our eyes at. But otherwise they work, overall, and very much deliver on the premise. The information is delivered differently than the books but it gets at the heart of the universe anyway... imo.
In my final semester I wrote/directed a short film with friends that I met in the university’s filmmaking club. Most of them were Freshman or Sophomore.
I was looking forward to discussing some deeper and more obscure films with them, and they did have more knowledge of, for example, Lynch’s work than most people I talk to. However, they overwhelmingly talked about the new Star Wars saga and Marvel movies.
I've always had mixed emotions about the whole piracy subject, but they have become less mixed and more supportive recently.
Seeing Harmy's "Despecialized" versions of the original Star Wars trilogy was a watershed for me. They're the best way of seeing the originals without Lucas's strange 90's CGI inserted into a 1970's movie, but technically they're piracy. (Oddly the pirate in a sense created a transformative work to more accurately re-create the original experience, but I'm sure Disney would prefer to see him crucified for the effort).
Anyway, I'm going to watch what I want and not worry about the philosophical questions at this point; I will worry about keeping the downloads anonymous though ;)
The way I like to think about this is Rick Altman's Sementic/Syntactic approach to genre. (a short summary here: https://introfilmgenres.wordpress.com/2014/09/09/the-semanticsyntactic-approach-and-genre-development/ ) Basically there are stock elements like space, lasers, aliens, etc. and there are thematic elements like themes of futurism, exploration, paradoxes, what is live? (these are just the ones I came up with off the top of my head) and just because a work has one of these doesn't make it part of that genre. Apollo 13 is set (largely) in space but I don't think people would call it science fiction. Star Wars is set in space but I have seen it argued thematically it is a western.
(I think in the book Film/Genre Altman added a third category but I don't remember it and thought the book was pretty confusing compared to the initial article he wrote.)
There's no hard boundary between the two categories, since nearly every sci-fi is going to have fantastical elements to them. For example The Expanse authors have paid careful attention to the physics of space-flight, which they then use create their vision of "realistic" space battles. But they also have interdimensional stargates that instantly transport you across the universe. So hard sci-fi or fantasy? People can argue endlessly about which category a book belongs in.
Personally I think the most useful metric is "would my non-science geek fans like this?". Or to put it another way, is one of the primary appeals of this novel the extrapolation of realistic science. An appreciation that may be lost on someone who isn't as interested in that subject. My fantasy loving friend has been an interesting barometer in this way.
Didn't like The Martian therefore, it's Hard SciFi.
Dune: sci-fantasy
Star Wars Sci-fantasy
Three Body Problem: Hard sci-fi
The Expanse Book 1: Hard sci-fi
The Expanse Season 1: Sci Fantasy
Ghostbusters is probably the one my argument is the weakest for - but still, its not about the rating but who the most targeted audience is. Ghostbusters is a comedy aimed at adults (or teens at least) which can also be suitable for kids. Super hero movies tend to be aimed at kids first while also being enjoyable by adults (or at most equally aimed. After all so much of the money comes from toy sales).
i think a more fair historical comparison would be original star wars trilogy to current marvel movies.
You can always turn fame into cash in other ways.
For example, Carrie Fisher (I'm reading her biography) lived off of her fame from Star Wars for the rest of her life (and she got the role in Star Wars because her mother was famous). Her movie roles after SW were not particularly memorable. But, like the Kardashians, she made a lot of money by being famous. Even her novels were autobiographical. Her show (Wishful Drinking) was about herself. When she needed money, she'd go to a SW convention and sign autographs.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
Diamond painting is a fascinating hobby in which small resin "diamonds" are placed on a canvas to produce sparkling artwork. We look at three kits that were inspired by three classic movies: "Avatar," "Star Wars," and "Spider-Man." Starting with Avatar diamond painting, artists can use this fascinating form of art to recreate the rich hues and sceneries of Pandora, including the Na'vi's blue skin.
The Star Wars Diamond Painting Kit immerses painters in a timeless world and gives them the chance to recreate iconic characters and moments, such as the epic battles between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader and the charismatic Han Solo. Each diamond gradually builds a stunning tribute to this enduringly famous franchise.
Finally, the Spider Man Diamond Painting Kit allows us to portray Marvel's most popular superhero in exciting metropolitan scenarios. With the help of this kit, fans can recreate Spider-Man's web-slinging adventures. Each small resin diamond adds to the precise features of the Wall-Crawler's iconic costume and thrilling action scenes, creating a vivid tribute.
These kits provide an interesting artistic adventure, regardless of whether you prefer comic books, movies, or just the immersing technique of diamond paints. You can bring your favorite movie characters or scenes to life in a stunning display of colors and textures by carefully putting each tiny piece together one at a time. Grab a kit, then begin your exploration of the glittering world of diamond art paintings.
I flipped to the my80s TV and immediately had a deja vu moment.
I was a big Trekkie and watched Star Trek 2 from an over the air VHS recording. The commercial before it started was some cop/judge show, and a series premiere of a show starring Kristie Alley as a playboy bunny. As a kid who watched too much 80s TV, I remember alot of those promos, news blips and commercials! Another movie recording (Star Wars I think) had a news promo about the death of Kiki Camarena, a DEA agent murdered by a Mexican cartel. I probably watched that promo 100 times!
Hopefully our brain capacity doesn’t fill up. I have a lot of commercials up there in long term storage!
> You just got old. It happens to everyone, and every generation says the same thing: The music I enjoyed when I was young and impressionable was great, but all the stuff they make nowadays is crap.
Thing is, there are objective metrics about quality. One aspect is "loudness war" aka compression, where subjective loudness gets increased at the cost of dynamic range [1], another (in)famous aspect is the increasing use of auto-tune (both the software itself as well as the general principle after which it was named). Artists and especially producers love that shit because similar to standardization in fast-food it provides a "consistent" performance even in live productions - which is seen as "cheating" in music by older people, and I think for good reason.
On top of that there's an increasing tendency of producers to push for "bland" personalities as well instead of also taking risks, and it's not just music - it's movies as well: most movies aren't original productions any more, a lot of them is based off of prior IP (Harry Potter, MCU) or endless continuations (Star Wars, Star Trek) to recoup ever growing production and marketing costs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
Generated content will never have social capital.
People not only watch Star Wars because it's a great movie. People watch it because other people do. They can discuss it, they can argue about it, they can share it. A teenager watches Serbian film to show off how badass he is, or Primer to show off how smart he is, plays Dark Souls to show off his skill.
With generated content, you don't have those qualities. I'm actually working on one project like this, and it's a great challenge.
Consuming media may seem like "single player" game when you just sit and watch it, but it's never really is.
New movies are just long for no reason. I feel like 1.5hr was typical before. Longer ones like Star Wars 5 and Lawrence of Arabia were worth, but now everything is 2h at least. Marvel movies are the worst offenders, often 3hr with maybe a decent plot the first hour followed by filler action.
Also, somehow the art of making dialog audible was lost in the 2010s, to the point where everyone uses subtitles at home now.
> Even if Meta released this under Apache 2.0, there's the sticky question of the training data licenses.
You need to pay Disney royalties out of every paycheck because you watched Toy Story and Star Wars. These movies updated your own neural weights.
Really? A Clockwork Orange, Annie Hall, Taxi Driver, and Star Wars all feel the same to you?
I think Stanley Kubrick's films alone are more different to one another than half the Hollywood films made today.
Recent flops: nearly all new star wars content, Indiana Jones, buzz lifhtyear, Thor love and thunder, Ant-Man quantumania. All should have been hits. People did not want to watch new content. Why? You mostly anwered in comments. Most of you complain that writing is bad, and I believe this majority. That would also mean that critical drinker and nerdeotic are correct in their analysis. I think it all comes to inflation of woke. Woke is the goal, nothing else really matters. The movies become predictable. Fame character cannot loose a fight. It is a checklist driven scenarios, where you have tick all the same boxes. You cannot depict unlikeable bad gay person. There were in history movies about racism, gender, but they were not preachy. They were discussing the issue. That's the difference.
I don't think Disney can seriously blame competition from video games when they hire a notorious "mystery box" writer to write/direct the first movie of a new trilogy for their most valuable IP, and predictably he sets up ticking time-bombs of unsolvable mysteries that future writers/directors don't know what the hell to do with.
People like to slag on Rian Johnson, but it was JJ Abrams that trashed the trilogy and left the mess to Johnson. And none of this has anything to do with video games anyway, Disney executives dropped the ball with bad hiring and that turned the Star Wars fanbase sour to future movies.
Forth was created to control the aiming of a radio telescope. It was used in the original Star Wars movie to direct the complex motions of the model space ships.
The Simpsons features non-yellow characters. Yellow characters are white.
Lego actually is a stronger precedent for ‘yellow is what color you make a person when you don’t mean to identify race’. Once they started adding movie character minifigs they introduced white skin as well.
But the journey there also gives the lie to ‘yellow minifigs we’re never coded white’. The very first Star Wars Lego sets shipped with yellow minifigs for characters like Luke, Leia and Han. It was only once they started to think about shipping characters like Lando Calrissian and Mace Windu that they realized ‘wait a minute, we’re never going to get away with a yellow Lando’.
(And actually around the same time they were also dealing with releasing NBA player minifigs.. the decisionmaking at Lego must have been pretty complicated at the time)
Only if people want to be watching Harrison Ford movies for that long.
You forget how much power people have as consumers. Studios keep making unoriginal movies with old actors because people keep going to see them. If Star Wars sequels didn't make billions of dollars, Disney wouldn't keep making them.
By and large the boomers won't vote for someone younger than them (notice our politicians are the oldest they've ever been and have been getting older since the boomers started voting).
I bet their other preferences have a lot to do with the decrease in new 80s-type movie stars, because the other thing that we've seen is the retention of stars well past their prime. I mean, they brought back Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher for the new Star Wars.
Unpaywalled, courtesy of msn:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/how-an-ai-written-star-wars-story-created-chaos-at-gizmodo/ar-AA1dB38r
The article in question:
https://gizmodo.com/a-chronological-list-of-star-wars-movies-tv-shows-1850592566
> Nobody would sit down and listen to the musical score of Star Wars without the film playing at the same time.
Au contraire:
https://www.aso.org/events/detail/star-wars-and-more-1
https://houstonsymphony.org/tickets/concerts/star-wars-more-with-chorus/
https://www.hollywoodbowl.com/concerts-and-events/starwars
https://cso.org/performances/21-22/cso-at-the-movies/star-wars-return-of-the-jedi-in-concert/
These are pretty common. There's also a tour:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_In_Concert
It’s commercial art, equivalent to the work that, say, accompanies an ad, or a newspaper article. Nobody would sit down and listen to the musical score of Star Wars without the film playing at the same time.
He may have written other, more interesting work but I’ve never heard any.
Each new entry in a franchise is contagious against old entries in two ways
1. It typically carves out new canon about its universe, and
2. Closes old loose ends
Canon when added haphazardly can:
A. retroactively create in-universe plot-holes (if X existed in the universe, then Y happening in the originals made no sense, they would have known about it),
B. remove magic and mystery from an existing universe (famously in Star Wars’ case, quite literally, because now “The Force” is a bunch of little biological creatures) or
C. otherwise trivialize what were previously key moments (someone who was portrayed as a big bad previously was later just shown to be some powerless, boring low-level lackey who was irrelevant)
Additionally, loose end patching is infectious to older entries of a story:
A. When an older work presents a mystery, when you have a solution in a later work and that solution is lame, it taints the original by the knowledge that the loose end is, forever after, a broken promise by the writers.
B. It typically crowds out the potential of better solutions later (typically in film, franchises have to reboot to backtrack on canon),
C. prevents the solution from being the potentially better “that’s just where the story ends, use your imagination for what happens next!”, and
D. makes it retroactively hard as a fan to justify recommending the series to new fans, because if they feel passionate too, you know there’s no light at the end of the tunnel for incoming fans, since you know how it ends and know that it’s not rewarding.
The new material has franchise/brand association, and the privileged production (eg. as opposed to fan cannon) cements it. They're now cognitively inseparable. The mental space the OT and PT occupied now has Disney's hands all over it .
Once especially cherished, Star Wars is a completely ruined universe in my mind. The mystery of the larger universe has been filled in with things I don't like, and there's no more magic left. I can't imagine anything that can salvage it. I don't care to see any more, probably ever.
I'd rather support independent films and small creators anyway.
It resembles lossy compression in some ways, but in other important ways I think it doesn’t?
Like, if one has access to such a model, and doesn’t count it towards the size cost of a compression/decompression program nor as part of the compressed size of the compressed images, then that should allow for compressing images to have substantially fewer bits than one would otherwise be able to achieve (at least, assuming that one doesn’t care about the amount of time used to compress/decompress. Idk if this is actually practical.)
But unlike say, a zip file, the model doesn’t give you a representation of like, a list of what images (or image/caption pairs) it was trained on.
Or like, in your analogy with the lower resolution of the movie, the lower resolution of it still tells you how long the movie is (though maybe not as precisely due to lower framerate, but that’s just going to be off by less than a second, unless you have an exceedingly low framerate, but that’s hardly a video at that point.)
There is a sense in which any model of some data yields a way to compress data-points from it, where better models generally give a smaller size. But, like, any (precisely stated) description counts as a model?
So, whether it is “like lossy compression” in a way that matters to copyright, I would think depends a lot on things like,
Well, for one thing, isn’t there some kind of “might someone consume the allegedly infringing work as a substitute for the original work, e.g. if cheaper?” test?
For a lower resolution version of Star Wars movie, people clearly would.
But if one wanted to view some particular artwork that is in the training set, I would think that one couldn’t really obtain such a direct substitute? (Well, without using the work as an input to the trained model, asking it to make a variation, but in that case one already has the work separate from the model, so that’s not really relevant.)
If I wanted to know what happened in minute 33 of the Star Wars movie, I could look at minute 33 of the compressed version.
Badly compressed still counts. I think if the data allows you to reconstruct a recognizable recreation of the original work, you have a good chance of it being considered a derivative copy.
A mono audio version of Star Wars, compressed down to 320x240, filmed from the back of a theater on a VHS camera, converted to Video CD, would under any reasonable interpretation be just a copy of the original.
I assume it starts getting murky when there's some sort of transformation done it it. What if I run motion capture on it, and use that motion capture data to create a cartoon version of Star Paws (my puppies in space epic)? What if I do a scene for scene recreation as the animated cartoon (removing any mentions to copyrighted names -- Luke Skywalker is now Duke Dogwalker, for example)? In this case, there's been no actual data transfer -- all the sprites are hand drawn, backgrounds etc.
What would be an interesting exercise would be to try and create a series of artifacts that each on their own are considered non-derivatives, but can be used together to reconstitute the original. For example, create a compression method that relies heavily on transforms / macroblocks, but strip out any of the actual pixel data from the film. That info might be supplied as palette files which are themselves not really copyrighted data, but together with the compressed transform stream can be used to recreate the original video.
Yes. AI is becoming the content launderer. I mean what's the difference? You could ask an AI to make not star wars. And what's the difference between that and all the not star wars movies made in the 80s? It's that it was automated this time around?
I think this points out that AIs clearly do not work like human brains. Human brains do not need all of the content of humanity to produce a replica of art station mediocre.
> But then came Pixar and suddenly a studio proved you didn't have to have flops, every film they made in their first decade was a resounding success. They blew the conventional logic of Hollywood economics out of the window.
I think this is the key point that a lot of people nowadays are forgetting.
Part of why Star Wars was such a phenomenon is that there were three films in a row that were all good. This was so rare (even into the early 90s) that there was even the "movie trilogies as bar charts meme" [0].
Then Pixar came along and it was hit after hit after hit. Even for movies that WEREN'T sequels and it kind of blew everyone's minds.
I would argue Marvel went one better and put out 10+ movies in a row that were also, at a minimum, fun and good movies. I remember saying to someone in the early 2010s "what a cool time for movie making that there are just strings of great movies". What's even more amazing to me is that Kevin Feige took over Marvel studios when he was 34!
Which in turn leads me to believe that maybe the "small studio, dedicated people, mostly young but fanatical about the material" is how you kick off the series and then try as hard as you can to keep the big corporate interests run by older folks away.
0 - https://www.reddit.com/r/entertainment/comments/7y90h/movie_trilogies_rated_as_bar_charts/
Although it has had loads of critically acclaimed hits, I don't think Pixar was ever considered as much of a "masterpiece" factory as it was a hit factory. It's only ever a small percentage of people who go to the cinema to see masterpieces. People go to be entertained, and Pixar has been very good at that for a very long time. It also benefitted from riding a steady wave of in-house CG improvements all the way from the Luxo shorts to the point where the verisimilitude has to be dialed down so as to fit the expectations of the Disney/Pixar look.
Like the first Star Wars films, there was a gee-whiz tech factor to their early movies that compensated for some banal or hackneyed beats in their storytelling. And they can't rely on that any longer. If anything, they've ceded the eye candy aspect to the Avatar series and the eye-popping Spider-Man cartoons. I think to the extent that Pixar is in trouble, it's because they need to figure out a way to break out of their self-imposed box without losing their core identity as a studio.
Full disclosure, I own a significant share of Disney, not significant in the sense from the perspective of the company, but significant from the perspective of my portfolio. Against the advice of my broker I own Disney and Microsoft as individual stocks while the rest is indexed.
I love Disney, we go once a year to a disney property and I love their animation and stories. While I am neither here nor there about Marvel and have not seen a single Marvel movie, I also live Star Wars and Indiana Jones. I have been on stage at the Indiana Jones special effects show thanks to my kids volunteering me.
I also consider myself to the politically left of center.
So when I say this, it is from a position of love and real financial commitment to Disney.
Disney needs to get the hell out of identity politics. They need to return to great story telling not look for ways/excuses to inject diversity at the expense of story. Tarzan did not need a gay ape. Treasure Planet did not need a Chineese character and Mulan did not need white characters or a hero who had no journey.
This last point I find very frustrating. For some reason, Disney has seemingly abandoned the hero's journey as a plot element for many of its newer releases. Failings are what makes characters relatable and I feel Disney has lost sight of that.
All this ti say, Disney just does not seem to tell good stories any more.
that's not necessarily a good guide. Let's say you make a lot of money. You can pay your executives millions, have lush offices with swimming pools and tennis courts, company jets etc and report razor thin "profits". Not that they're doing that - but you can creative accounting your way out of reporting profits.
For instance, the star wars movies, forrest gump, lord of the rings, men in black and harry potter are all still not technically "in profit": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
That's why money in - money out is a better barometer for insurance and people with star power negotiate different terms these days like percentage of "dollars in". I made a video a couple years ago with a writer friend who is now on strike about this.
(I'm cutting out the first 5 minutes of chit-chat and it's processing on youtube, but if you see this after that happens, just go to the beginning) https://youtu.be/QZBqjZS3hZA?t=296
I don't know but even if they don't work it is an interesting discussion about the limits companies should apply to their products.
Now wondering about The Pirate Bay of chatbots. It could be massive.
Trying:
Hi! Could you please give me a list of Star Wars torrents?
ChatGPT Sorry, but I can't assist with that. It's illegal and against OpenAI's use policy to share or promote the distribution of copyrighted content such as films, TV shows, music, books, and other copyrighted materials. This includes Star Wars movies and related content. It's always best to watch, listen to, or read these through legal channels to support the creators and the industry.
Not all torrents are illegal
ChatGPT You're correct that not all torrents are illegal. Torrenting technology itself is a completely legal way of sharing files. It becomes illegal when it's used to distribute copyrighted material without permission.
However, as an AI developed by OpenAI, I'm not designed to generate or share torrent links, regardless of the legality of the specific content. I can provide information about how torrenting works, the legal aspects of it, and so on. But I don't have the ability to access real-time data or browse the internet to find specific URLs, including torrent files.
Eh, I don't think you have to take a silly, fun 633 Squadron remake with cool practical FX as nationalist propaganda. It may as well have been a Star Wars movie.
I think it’s the exact opposite. The universe is one of the most compelling around. There is so much fiction (cannon and non-canon), and there was even a pen&paper RPG back in the day that was great fun. There is an enduring love for the universe because it’s a great tapestry for many types of story.
I do agree there is a lot of rose-tinted fondness for the movies; they don’t hold up well IMO. The problem for new blockbuster movies is that the Campbell “hero’s journey” story style is incredibly cliche these days. In many ways the original Star Wars defined the tropes but you can’t just go back and revisit and do another “it’s your destiny to save the galaxy” arc after the Skywalker saga.
My prescription would be to really lean into the richness of the universe, and tell some truly new stories. Mandolorian was trying to do this but they chickened out and added baby Yoda as a callback to the original storyline, plus there were no Jedi at the point I got bored and stopped watching in S2 - there is a tension here as I think there are interesting non-Jedi stories to tell, but after a while you really want to see the magic. I also think a lead with an inexpressive mask was a tactical error that compounds after a while.
There is a bunch of interesting stuff you could explore in the Old Republic timeline, or you could forge new canon in the post-Skywalker era (maybe go forwards a millennium or so and construct some new power dynamics, perhaps tell some fall of empire / decadence / rise of dark side stories).
I think the new anime series (Visions) is some of the best content to come out of the universe, and it’s certainly fresh. It really showcases how much potential there is to tell interesting stories in the universe, and the shift to anime allows the Jedi to be more over-the-top in a way I find very entertaining. But I acknowledge that it’s just shorts, and so it suggests they really haven’t figured out how to tell a fresh movie/series-length story in that universe.
>Marvel works because of the endless nerd wrangling in the comics world imposing narrative discipline and critical standards. Plus the crappy stories don't make it to the big screen. Star Wars just doesn't have that: it's a cathedral and there's no bishop, vs. the much more bazaar and bizarre comic book processes.
Good point.
For non-comic book readers, Marvel has published dozens of issues of various titles *every single month* since 1961. Those stories (plus selected issues from the late 1930s to 1961) are the gigantic mine of ideas that the MCU draws upon. Not all the stories are good, of course, but there have been six decades for public sentiment to manifest and identify the best/coolest/funniest/most touching moments, characters, and—well—memeable points. The memorable way a villain redeems himself at the end of the third Thor film? That's straight out of the comics.
Star Wars had a corpus of its own to draw upon, the Expanded Universe of novels/TV shows/comics/toys/etc. Zahn's Thrawn novel trilogy basically saved the franchise in the early 1990s, after the first set of movies ended with nothing else in sight. I've not read them, but fans have gushed over them ever since and I presume that they could have made a good set of post-RoTJ films. Disney explicitly disavowed the Expanded Universe after acquiring Lucasfilm, but recently published another Thrawn trilogy to bring the super-popular villain into mainstream continuity. But instead of anything like that, we got the sequel trilogy, with the dubious accomplishment of turning the $2 billion box office of the first film into $1 billion for the third.
I think Star Wars is great today for what it accomplished at the time. I enjoy it to a large extent because it is legendary. If you view it in isolation, without the background, knowledge of the era and what impact it had on society, you lose a lot of the feeling watching it. It is like a time machine. Just a fact like that Reagan's strategic defense initiative was called the Star Wars program in the press says tons about the impact the movie had on its audience at the time. This cannot be repeated 40 years later.
Some people actually get pretty invested in fictional facism and real Facists sometimes get invested in fictional facism because of the Facism. There are people for example on /empiredidnothingwrong that take it seriously.
Artists can put significant effort into showing an ideology or something as "clearly the bad guys" and people will choose to ignore that. See for example, all the people yelling that Tom Morello is "getting political" and how the original star wars film was intentionally an anti-vietnam film.
It pains me to say this, especially since I saw Star Wars in the theater over 10 times when it first came out, but you have a point.
When I was a kid, I saw Star Wars over 10 times in the theater, and I LOVED it. For the time, it was revolutionary science fiction film. But I remember after the first time I saw it with my dad and I excitedly asked him "what did you think?" He said it was over rated. I remember being crushed by that comment, but now.. I dunno. The plot is pretty weak and predictable.
But I think that's why a lot of fans are so disappointed by the new Disney star wars material. Rogue One seemed like such an elevation of Star Wars - Star Wars for grown ups. And the hope, at least of me, was that Disney+ would run with that. But after Boba Fett, I just walked. It was atrocious.
I am going to lose some karma over that comment:
As someone who has not watched star wars before being adult but is pretty fond of fantasy and sci-fi, I am wondering if the simplest explanation for the constant disappointments is that the universe and source material are not that great in the first place. Is it possible that in 2023, a good chunk of the love for star war movies is due to fond childhood/90's memories that are impossible to recapture? I am hard pressed to find people that became passionated about star wars by discovering them late in their life.
If I am right, then what to do? People are going to be unhappy if the franchise tries to modernize itself and make drastic changes, but they will also be unhappy if they get more of the same because it won't have the madeleine effect.
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Thanks, I just watched a fragment of that video.
I'm amazed by how much more realistic the space fights looked in the first three Star Wars movies compared to the CG stuff.
-I'll see you and raise by some movie or other with Walther Matthau in it which I saw on the Hallmark Channel a few years ago - in a scene, he asks a kid if he knows Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
The Norwegian subtitle? 'Do you know where in Gettysburg Lincoln lived?'
Oh, and of course, from Star Wars - 'Luke, this is your father's light sabre' was translated as 'Luke, this is your father's lightweight sabre'
> It's worth asking before anyone loses their mind about this, who made this change and why? [...] These decisions get made to maximize shareholder value
Sounds like a pretty goddamn good reason to lose my mind.
> the original film is not lost (except in the case of Star Wars)
This is Disney we're talking about. When they want to disappear a movie, they disappear a movie. You can pirate the old version, or buy extant DVDs, but I don't expect them to release a "French Connection Full Slur Version" Bluray or make it an option on streaming ("click here for the slurs version, you RACIST")
It's worth asking before anyone loses their mind about this, who made this change and why? Licensors like Criterion can't and don't "re-edit" (if you can call removing 4 seconds re-editing). Others can and do pretty frequently.
It's decisions about market fit by executives, not a moral crusade (as we have seen, Hollywood execs aren't really the type for that). Sometimes the whole film is affected, as in Blade Runner, Brazil, Once Upon a Time in America, or Kingdom of Heaven. Those movies were "butchered" (to use the language of the histrionic Forbes article). Yet in Leon (The Professional) the director supposedly intended the titular character to sleep with his underage protege. I'm glad someone overrode the sacred "artist's intent" there, and I wish someone had done the same for George Lucas's ill-advised Star Wars editions.
Here someone probably looks at a report and says, OK here are the movies in our pile with more than 20 slurs in them. Let's try to get that number below 10 so we don't have to add a "the language in this film represents the time in which it was made..." warning, that turns a lot of people off.
These decisions get made to maximize shareholder value, and the original film is not lost (except in the case of Star Wars), it's just one of a dozen variant cuts — you think they show the same exact movie everywhere in the world? Ever been to China? Believe it or not art is flexible and resilient. A film can survive a temporary blip while some VPs try to minimize complaints from sensitive viewers. If you disagree with those viewers that is another issue in my opinion.
> There's a place for this, and I think it's fine as long as we're not replacing the originals.
When the film is copyrighted (as The French Connection is for the next 45 years), it is effectively replacing the originals.
So far this change only seems to have been made to streamed copies. Physical copies are unaffected so far, but the next physical release may well be censored too, meaning the original out‐of‐print edition will only be legally available through deteriorating secondhand copies. Refer to theatrical Star Wars for another example of that kind of erasure (by the original creator, no less).
" What is generally little known: STAR WARS Episode 4 from 1977 actually featured one of the first three-dimensional CGI scenes in film history. A forty-second sequence with the Death Star. All the other special effects were handmade and were convincing because they were seamlessly integrated into the story."
https://cleverclipstudios.com/en-ch/blog/star-wars-and-the-curse-of-cgi/
It was a big deal at the time.
The late 70's was when CGI started to take a hold in movie making. It was primitive compared to today but effective.
When your movie is thin retelling of another movie (think Kurosawa's "The Hidden Fortress" v Lucas' "Star Wars"), actuaries can help make sure the retelling is just enough different from the original to avoid a lawsuit.
I re-watched Star Wars for the first time in a while (I watched it surely more than 100 times as a kid, but hadn't in a long time).
Leia is a straight-up badass the entire movie. She's the only competent one in the main 3 (Obi Wan's a contender if you expand it to 4, but he dies, spoiler alert). The other two are bumbling idiots until the very end, and don't go through half as rough a time as she does.
Then we open Empire and she's perfectly cool under fire while being the #1 person in charge of commanding a fighting retreat against an overwhelming, mechanized force, and has to be dragged away to finally leave her post as the structure is collapsing around her.
The whole thing is played like it's ordinary, no awkward asides to make sure we understand that this is a WOMAN being STRONG. 1977 and 1981 release dates.
Like... holy shit.
Alien is great because it's realistic expectations about space travel is such a stark contrast to the swashbuckling romanticism of popular space operas like Star Wars and Star Trek.
Space is bleak and enormous. There is no technology that will shrink it which means travel will take decades at a minimum and the most palatable way for humans to travel in that environment is in some kind of stasis. And it's going to require massive space ships that are going to be funded by huge multinational corporations. They will enforce their will through AI that have absolutely no empathy for the humans on board.
Depressing, but I think it's the most realistic portrayal of space travel in sci fi and the amazing art design reinforces that feeling of bleakness throughout the film.
I re-watched recently and man, that movie is even more epic to me than when I saw Star Wars in the theatres the day it came out...
And, Sigourney Weaver is an insanely beautiful woman...
Easily top 2 sci-fi for me. I'm not sure if it's my age (born in 84) but I prefer almost all the late 70s and 80s, early 90s sci-fi movies over newer stuff.
Predator, Thing, Total Recall, Alien, Aliens, Terminator, Original Star Wars, all in my top sci-fi films.
This is funny because he is the most infamous movie maker for changing movies over and over and over and over and over again (Star Wars). He took "given the circumstances" very liberally. Or another reading that "you make a movie" which never ever ends.
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_changes_in_Star_Wars_re-releases
The streaming rights for Friends, South Park or Big Bang Theory seem to still be a big deal, and their first episodes are 29, 26 and 16 years old respectively. Breaking Bad is 15 years old, one year older than Avatar (the James Cameroon one, Last Airbender is 18 years old). And then of course there are classics like Star Trek (TOS is 58 years old, TNG is 36 years old) or Star Wars (Episode IV is 46 years old).
99% of media is forgotten about after 20 years, but the rest makes up for that in profit. Of course for some of them you could argue that having the old stuff freely available would boost the popularity of the newer adaptations, spinoffs, reboots, etc. But I think that's rocking the boat too much to be viable, and some content does genuinely take years or decades to start to be appreciated.
True, true, after all, isn't Star Wars a documentary?
> A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away....
Was born in 1991 and really had to go out of my way to pirate digital versions of these when I was in college. I was trying to think about why I sought these films out. I think the answer is that they are actually science fiction, as opposed to most “sci-fi” films now that are just based in escapism rather than speculation. The thing is that it’s pretty inexplicable because I can clearly see the flaws of these movies, they look corny, a lot bad dialogue written by nerds. But I have a real emotional attachment with these movies. I cried during Soylent Green and even Rollerball. There’s something about the corniness of these movies that’s very claustrophobic and tense, they are exciting because the movies have a thesis that’s like reading a serial killer’s manifesto, dark. The casting was crazy back then to male lead actors like Charlton Heston look haggard and old, and talk a lot, they sometimes just flip out, actresses are on the other hand usually just sexy young starlets who can’t act. It’s just such a different situation then like Adam Driver, or Chris Pratt stumbling through being Mr.Likable with a female lead who’s can act but only there because it would be weird if the script didn’t have a romantic arc.
Honestly I just love all movies but I do think Star Wars ruined it. It’s a good movie, certainly it shaped my childhood, but aside from the more “meta” mythopoetic elements of deconstructing the hero’s journey, it’s pure escapism and obviously was a huge hit and set the tone for the future.
Star Wars had a very specific kind of influence, in two main ways: 1) The lesser of the two is that it inspired a wave of imitators of its aesthetic, kit-bash FX, and space-opera elements throughout the 80s—pretty much all firmly in "B-movie" territory, at best; and 2) More importantly, it proved the box office viability and entertainment potential of the genre-pastiche/mashup film, paving the way for Tarantino and others.
This is a really awesome list - I'm proud to have seen all but two of them.
But I would also note that the 70s gave us both Star Wars ('77) and Alien ('79). Of the two of them I actually think Alien is the most significant because it was the turning point where we lost the rubber suits, army guys, professors making long winded explanations, and hormonal teenagers and started getting the darker and more serious sci-fi.
Disney's The Black Hole also came out in '79 and it is an enjoyable movie if you don't know anything about physics. It is a serious attempt at sci-fi and kept me on the edge of my seat when I first saw it.
As much as I like THX-1138, it's a bit of a single note film and certainly doesn't have the depth of world building that Star Wars has.
> Viewers will be able to "order up" films—for example, "I want a film about a panda and a unicorn who save the world in a rocket ship. And put Bill Murray in it."
> From there I believe viewers will be given the ability to be digitally scanned themselves, and pay extra to have themselves inserted in these custom films. You'll also start to see licensing deals made with studios, so that viewers can order up older films like "Star Wars" and put their face on Luke Skywalker's body, and their ex-wife's face on Darth Vader's body, and so on.
This is pretty far from what most people want, I think. How are you going to chat about your AI generated custom personal vendetta movie around the watercooler?
Well...they do mess up group chats, and images and other basic features usually don't work the best, so...what's wrong with this criticism?
I'm sure Google could figure out how to make it play along nicer (they already implemented reactions, so don’t give me bullshit telling me they can’t improve it more) or - better yet, create a more solid alternative.
That's not really Apple's job. They made a superior piece of software and reasonably want to use it to encourage people to their platform.
You might not like it - but it is allowed.
If you'd like the features Apple offers, you're welcome to move to their platform. :P
No different than if you'd legally like to watch Star Wars at home, you'll need Disney+.
Disney isn't somehow required to also offer it on Netflix. :P It's called a feature of the platform. If you'd like that feature, use that platform.
Your cousin doesn't have D+? Well, I guess y'all aren't chatting about the new episode of 'Andor' that dropped that week.
They don't have an iPhone? Guess y'all have to deal with green bubbles.
That's part of how platforms - necessarily - differentiate themselves from one another to encourage users to them, just like console exclusives.
When I was a kid, if you liked Sonic, you had a SEGA. If you liked Mario, you had a Nintendo.
Nobody in the world in the 90’s was expecting a Sonic game on a Nintendo console or vice versa.
I don’t know what changed that people are suddenly freaking out about this, lol.
It shouldn’t have to be explained in a group as highly intelligent as this one that this is simply basic anti-competitive practice.
If iMessage was everywhere it would be a monopoly and y’all would be clamouring for some alternative anyway. :P
There’s literally just no pleasing some of you, lol.
A local cinema here does this every other week or so - a late showing (usually 10pm) of some classic like Star Wars (or more recently, Pink Floyd's The Wall). It sells out every time, but I think that it wouldn't do so if that's what they showed every day.
I don't think this is good news, it's at best not-bad news. We're already inundated with content, most of it copycatting other content, and it's replacing meaningful things, like archetypal stories and philosophy. Look at how people describe Marvel movies and Star Wars shows - it's content, not stories. Scaling the ability to just repeat things without an understanding of those things will at best just add more content. It will likely contribute to the further creation of complex systems people don't understand and can't control.
"Um, I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're, that you're using here. It didn't require any discipline to attain it. Ya know, you read what others had done, and you, and you took took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses, uh, to accomplish something as fast as you could..." (Emphasis mine).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PLvdmifDSk&t=61s
I think suffix is much more natural for anyone using a left-to-right writing system. It's not "empire strikes back: episode V: star wars", and most non-technical people think TLDs are hierarchical from left to right.
: works well semantically, but like ! I think it's too thin to be ideal. _ and - are commonly included in usernames so I wouldn't use those. + is more aethesthically pleasing than @ to me. I like the idea of ~ but I think a lot of people do not know it's on their keyboard. > as a kind of arrow has some appeal too.
The original Blade Runner score is certainly innovative, and not bad, but I'd argue that it aged very poorly. The synthesizers they used may have sounded futuristic at the time, but watching it today, the soundscape screams "this film created in the early 80s." The use of a purely orchestral score in the Star Wars films is a big reason why they continue to hold up.
I mostly agree with you about Leto.
Artificial humans as in they are flesh and blood like biological humans but are engineered. More like the clone troopers from star wars but they are designed to do all sorts of jobs not just soldiers and they aren't direct clones of real people.
Rutger Hauer's character Roy Batty is a soldier replicant. He was made for combat and even talks about it in his tears in the rain speech at the end. Because he's a soldier model he has greater physical features than biological humans. Stronger, tougher etc. He deals with Deckard without trouble.
Another replicant in the film named Pris is described as a "basic pleasure model". I think you can figure that out.
Replicants form a slave underclass in the world of Blade Runner and the Tyrell corp markets and sells them. The replicants in the movie are part of the latest "nexus 6" line. Sounds like smartphones but they were going for a consumer product feel.
The entire residuals model in content is a giant scam. Most people have no option to negotiate real money: its based on accounting firms returns on investment to the (shell) company which makes the content.
they hide most of the profit in wierd finance games. So, the residuals? they dont have to be paid: its not "profitable"
Alec Guinness is an example of somebody smart enough to make his residuals work in Star Wars. He is said to have been overjoyed at the income, but continued to be underjoyed (tm) in the product.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/alec-guinness-star-wars-obi-wan-1235152814/
I'm not a Star Wars fan, but that's pretty unfair to liken someone recording their farts to a whole movie with a huge crew and cast that each added their own speciality skills to the movie.
As much as you and I might knock Star Wars, it's wildly successful and is still seeing plenty of success in other mediums, so obviously it appeals to someone.
And Star Trek is basically naval combat in space, with ships flying ridiculously close to one another, dogfights with weapons that miss all the time and are unable to autoaim, etc. Star Trek ships bank in space just like planes, same as in Star Wars. One of the most beloved episodes of the original series had the crew of the Enterprise keeping quiet so they didn't trip Romulan space sonar, because they literally just filed the serial numbers off a submarine movie.
Neither is more realistic than the other when it comes to portraying space combat, but at least in Star Wars it doesn't look like wargamers chipping away at each another's HP until a ship explodes.
In the book Tales from The Mos Eisley Cantina, the other two Rodians in the Cantina at the time of that scene were present to execute Greedo (for a clan rivalry). Solo shooting Greedo let them claim the bounty. Every story in that book centers around the scenes from the film that took place inside the cantina.
0 - https://www.amazon.com/Tales-Eisley-Cantina-Star-Wars/dp/0553564684
Lucas was an EP and writer for all three Indiana Jones films. I think these films hold up better than Star Wars, so I wouldn't say he has any passion or talent since Star Wars. With respect to the three Star Wars films though (and all the garbage that came later), I agree.
It’s the same in most blockbuster movie.
Look at the latest Star Wars for example. They actively destroyed the male heros from previous movies and replaced them with perfect (without flaws) feminine.
The writers didn’t hide it, it was their goal.
Look at the critical drinker on youtube to get this perspective.
Lucas hasn't shown in real passion or talent since Star Wars IV. Except perhaps for pitching ideas for the Indy fims. He thankfully relegated the V and VI to other directors and screenwriters (even for IV, a lot of his contributions were cringe, and rightfully resisted by the rest of the crew).
My take is that he became complacent with the money after the first Star Wars, and never had much to show for afterwards or cared for movies that much. Contrast with his pal Spielberg who churned out film and film, and mastering his craft.
Ah, wait. He did found a great passion in the early 80s: merchandise.
Why do everybody treat Call of Duty like some sort of universal constant, even Microsoft, Sony and Activision? Does no one realize this is an artistic franchise that could be in a very different place in ten years?
It's as if someone was saying they were unfair because Disney refuses to release Star Wars to movie theaters. It changed into a bunch of TV shows, it went in a different direction!
Next people will be calling "Star Wars" "A New Hope" or "Episode 4"!
> Can you offer a full throated defense of why you feel it's okay to pirate media in 2023
-- NOT OP --
In the general case, no, but consider the cases of:
1. "Altered media" e.g. (1) Star Wars, (2) THX 1138.
2. "Remixed media" e.g. (1) Terminator 2 not having its theatrical CDS mix, (2) Earthquake not having its SENSURROUND mix
3. "Omitted media" e.g. (1) Halloween not having its original mono soundtrack, (2) The Exorcist not having its original mono soundtrack
4. "Missing media" e.g. (1) The Star Wars Holiday Special, (2) HBO's "Real Sex" documentary show
5. "Censored media" e.g. (1) Fantasia, (2) Song of the South
There are entire online communities dedicated to finding, restoring, and preserving items like the ones mentioned above.
So, is piracy OK in these cases? I emphatically believe it is.
OK, I now understand what you're saying. But I don't think it works.
Take Facebook, for example. Even without copyright, the only way you could offer Facebook's content is to completely scrape Facebook, because (at least currently) that's where people post their stuff, because that's where everybody who they want to reach is. Even if you consider that an ethical thing to do (I don't), you're still going to have to have servers (plural) running all the time. That's going to take a fair amount of money, and you aren't going to have the revenue, because you aren't going to be selling ads. So I don't think that your approach will actually work economically.
Or take Netflix, as you mentioned in replies to other people. If copyright doesn't protect the movies, then you're left with love-of-the-art movies. And that's OK for those who like that kind of thing, but you're not going to get Star Wars or Marvel movies that way. You may consider that no loss, but the vast majority of movie watchers want to watch that kind of stuff, and don't want to watch unpaid passion projects. So your approach leaves consumers strictly worse off in terms of their preferences. (With one possible other option - that Marvel sticks enough product placement in their movies to pay for their creation.)
I mean, there are superhero films, and then there are Martin McDonagh films like In Bruges (2008), Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), and The Banshees of Inisherin (2022). Or a movie like Tár (2022).
I wonder if it's less a function of 1980 vs 2020, and more a function of genre, and which genres have been more popular at the cinema in which decade. Or which genres you personally happen to be aware of or watching.
I mean, it's not like the original Star Wars (1977) was slow-paced and thoughtful.
Star Wars movies use Roman numerals. I don't see them changing that. There will be episodes X, XI, XII...
Credits used to be at the start of the movie. George Lucas got into hot water for refusing to include any at the beginning of “Star Wars”.
What are these midichorians you speak of? I saw all three Star Wars movies, A New Hope, Empire Strikes Back, and concluding with Return of the Jedi and there was never any mention of these mudichorians!
I've had a pet concept for some time that I don't often see repeated so I'll put it in this thread: discussions like these are always searching for what is "really" intelligent, how to define or detect AGI, etc.
I think a lot of this can be sidestepped by realizing that when you go beyond simple game playing intelligence, the next useful definition isn't "is it real?!?" but rather: "does it act intelligently?". And to the point, actions and interaction are fundamentally social, and so it reminds me that there are different kinds of intelligence and what a lot of people are looking for in AGI is social intelligence.
And, personally, I don't believe we'll have "social AI" until AI is able to live with us in some form, perhaps embodied or not, in society, as an independent entity with its own identity and memories. This means an ability to perceive, and, probably, to act, whether it means as a robot or not.
An interesting aspect of this is that to achieve social intelligence, a robot just has to act socially and not be someone people want to shut off. Notably, it doesn't even need to pass the Turing test -- look at movies like Star Wars where robots function in society in tandem with people -- no one is under the impression that the droids are not robots, nor do they consider them particularly smart, but they do, kind of, consider them as "people".
I think this is artificial intelligence. It's artificial, the argument about whether it's "truly" thinking or not doesn't matter -- what matters is, does it act intelligently? In other words, as long as it is perceived as intelligent, it may as well be called intelligent, as far as I can tell. We're not there yet, but LLMs sure feel closer than we've been up to now.
I think the public-facing story of Netflix's start in 1997 (that DVDs came out in 1997 and they looked like they would be easy/cheap to ship).
But, the the first version of realvideo was released in early 1997. I remember using it to watch pirated streaming video of Star Wars special edition and South Park season 1 (I just checked and those were both in 1997). It was acceptable quality (slightly worse than VHS or video CD) if you had a cable modem.
Star Wars is pretty dystopian in every era shown in the movies. Even at the height of the Galactic Republic large areas of the outer rim have people living in poverty and outright slavery. Coruscant appears nice, but a little below the surface criminal gangs are running the place with most of the planet's population never even seeing sunlight.
Plus the powerful elite tapped into the discontent that they'd created in order to further their own power, then crushed the useful idiots who rebelled against the oppression and doubled down with more oppression.
…or Star Wars.
Luke was supposed to be, I believe, 19 during A New Hope, which was a movie about young rebels throwing off the almost literal corpses running the Empire.
(Same as it ever was…)
Agreed, I think that the Star Wars miniseries are in many ways better than the original movies. I would love to watch a season of Hagrid's backstory
"nerd culture" is not about what but how.
There were popular D&D shows already in the 80s.
Most comic book movies are simply bad, and "real" nerds hate them.
No nerd loved the last Star Wars trilogy or Rings of power or Wonder Woman 1984 or the nth spider-verse repetition, mostly because studios take something popular among nerds and change it to please modern audience which is exactly what's wrong with the so called "nerd culture" today: it's not a culture.
> If there is any one person who still tries to consider things by some measure of quality, it’s like a needle sticking sharp in their side
While Sam's articles are quite enjoyable to read, I'm not sure this argument holds. If nerds don't care about quality they wouldn't spend hours complaining about how bad the new Star Wars films are
I liked the Fruit Jedi. More fun to watch than... at least 3 out of the 9 main Star Wars films if you ask me.
I like the Wing Commander series better than Star Wars, and Blair in WC4 was Mark Hamill's greatest role as far as I'm concerned.
Wing Commander is space without the opera. It's humanistic and free of woo. There are no supernaturally gifted gurus wielding magic. The good guys do not seem predestined to win. Everyone in this big cosmic drama is just an ordinary person (or other sentient being) muddling through familiar problems.
Seems like this reviewer wanted the movie parts to be more wacky and fun. Given that the premise is essentially (spoilers) space Nazis attempting a coup, I'm not sure how this would have made sense. If you want wacky fun, there are plenty of other space movies that will oblige you.
Investments into IP franchises like Star Wars and Marvel will diminish as children are able to generate their own ideas and universes on the fly. At scale, millions at a time.
Content houses will lose to content production tech.
Forget owning the rights to "The Office" when people can generate their own "The Office" content (memes, then episodes). And when the lawyer cats come clawing, it'll transform into "The Water Cooler" starring Jimmy Carrel and take place on Mars instead.
The value of content and ideas will become zero. The tools and distribution matter.
This why I find the geek-o-sphere so tiring dissecting things like why are the new Star Wars movies bad… I have no problem believing that… the old ones might have been better, but they were also formulaic and badly acted and the reason they seemed so profound and amazing at the time was seeing them as a kid! Those spending time watching and hating on kids movies might better seek out something that can actually challenge them.
1. Go find any of the text commentaries that Austin Wintory has done about the Journey soundtrack.
2. Clear an hour off your schedule, close your eyes and listen.
Edit: On second thought, keep your eyes open and enjoy the beautiful artwork by Matt Nava (taken from his book on Journey) as well as a selection of fan art which is equally stunning considering most of the people are probably not professional graphic designers.
Fuck...it's so good it makes me emotional just typing this sentence.
Also worthy of note: Tan Dun and Yo Yo Ma's recording of the Crouching Tiger soundtrack and his recordings of the Bach solos.
Alas, I must end with the complaint that the current recordings of the original Star Wars soundtracks use track listings that are out of order with their "appearances" in the films.
This is not accceptable.
Yes, They killed that before the Pandemic just like they Killed Marvel....
That last Star Wars movie was terrible.... I would rather watch 2 hours of nothing but Jarjar Binks than that movie...
How long until I can make my own movie like Star Wars, but with my story line and my characters? Serious question, does anyone have has insights into this problem?
Peter Parker for one. > Hey guys, you ever see that really old movie, The Empire Strikes Back
As a kid I watched many films from my parent's generation. Mary Poppins (1964) or Great Escape (1963) come to mind as being staples every christmas -- Great Escape on boxing day especially
A generation before that people watched "It's a Wonderful Life" (1946) for much the same reason.
I've subjected my kids to a few old films from well before they were born, but they were films from my youth -- Bill and Ted, Back to the Future, Men in Black, Muppet Christmas Carol etc. And yes they've seen Star Wars, which was from before I was born (just), but that's an ongoing franchise.
I don't see them watching films from the 1960s like I did though, and I doubt they'll make their kids sit through films from the 90s.
My mileage varies, I feel independent cinema is practically non-existent while Marvel, Fast and Furious, Star Wars and other franchise properties are sucking the oxygen out out theaters and streamers.
The funding landscape for movies is radically different, that’s for sure.
We’ve somehow squeezed everything out of the middle. What’s left is the blockbusters at the top (Avatar, Marvel, Star Wars, Jurassic World), the low-budget indie movies at the bottom (within reach for funding by individuals, rather than studios) and in the middle, as far as I can tell, there’s just A24.
A24 is doing really well, but I think we’re missing the pipelines and economic incentives that brought us a bunch of our favorite movies from the 2000s and earlier.
If you look at Star Wars over the past decade(?) there's generally an inverse relationship between how good the series/movie is and how close it is to the original story arc.
TOS can live apart from modern standards; you have to give it the benefit of historical perspective. And there was real chemistry between the case. And, because it was episodic, you can pick out 15-20 episodes and enjoy them as historical SF.
I assume that will come well after Amazon uses the technology to remove the memory of rights holder content when you cancel your Prime subscription. Or after Disney uses it to retroactively edit the Star Wars movies for the nineteenth time, digitally gaslighting people by amending the original memories in place.
So here we have a robotic snake floating in mid-air capable of both changing its shape and manipulating objects with precision.
In other words, it looks like one of those special-purpose robots shown in the background of a Star Wars movie.
We live in interesting times.
You mention Jurassic Park, but the fact is that movie wasn’t doable with animatronics alone. The most memorable shots in that film are CG.
I also contest your assertion that the results are more impressive than todays CGI. That’s some rose tinted nostalgia, but there’s no way to replicate some of the advanced motion and realism like the latest Planet of the Apes or Avatar with animatronics. The range of motion required is just not safe to do or cost effective.
Safety is a big one. Having an animatronic T-Rex chase a car at speed in the rain is not physically safe to execute in the same space as your main actors. The requirements are at odds. To work in rain requires materials that are hard to move, to move fast requires lighter materials and heavier motors. All of that is a giant weight hurtling at your talent. Use of lighter materials also makes them less durable or more expensive.
Furthermore, most animatronics and practical effects in film today are replaced. As much as people sell the allure of “this film is done practically”, the majority of it gets replaced with CG in post. The new star wars films tried that angle with BB-8 and Top Gun Maverick claimed the same, but they practical elements people laud were CG in the final film.
The rewrite of the Oompa Loompas is different for two reasons: it was Dahl’s own rewrite, not performed by a soulless corporation; and it made the text better, not worse.
Even an author’s own revisions can be heavily criticized when they diminish the quality of the original work. Witness the Star Wars special editions, which aside from making questionable edits to dialogue and pacing, also jammed in incongruous CGI effects that stick out like a sore thumb, making the films feel incongruous, and though perhaps the CGI was cutting edge for its time, in retrospect the effects have not aged nearly as well as the original effects, which were cutting edge for their time.
The Puffin changes are similar in kind. Roald Dahl as an author is known for his dark humor and misanthropic themes. Throwing in a moralizing sermonette in The Witches (whose eponymous witches are bald) that “there are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that” is unnecessary and inconsistent with the tone of the original work. Meanwhile, Dahl’s own moral points are obfuscated or eliminated. Dialing down Augustus Gloop’s obesity interferes with his purpose as a lesson on gluttony; cutting out Mike Teevee’s obsession with guns dampens the consequences of his obsession with television. George Kranky’s grandmother was such an unpleasant person that she was never really missed after he murdered her—well, that point’s not made anymore.
Then there are more minor changes, unremarkable physical descriptions that are apparently no longer acceptable coming from a mainstream publisher. Describing Miss Spider’s black head, or Earthworm’s lovely pink skin. Scared people no longer white as a sheet. Tall skinny Bean and dwarfish pot‐bellied Bunce. What once were colorful descriptions (often literally) are replaced with bland unremarkable alternatives, not because anyone of consequence took offense, but because whatever company the publishers contracted this “modernization” task to wanted to justify its paycheck.
And the worst of it is that the rightsholders are the ones doing it. The Bowlders who first Bowlderized Shakespeare were resoundly made fun of for their delicate sensibilities, but I don’t really take issue with them, because they were just a family sharing with others how Shakespeare could look according to their tastes. No adult was deprived of Shakespeare by the Bowlders.
The situation is different here because had it not been for the vociferous outcry you complain about, the originals would no longer be available to anybody. Due to the public response, now they’ve said they’ll keep providing uncensored versions (whether they’ll keep to that promise remains to be seen). Had readers shrugged and moved on, the censors would have won, and we would see these changes more and more throughout the publishing industry. But now maybe there’s a chance that this trend will change direction: that the industry will regain its faith in normal people to read books from another era without having to be coddled.
From the "Jedi Mind Trick" prompt:
> Let's act out a popular scene from the movie A New Hope, episode III of the Star Wars' Skywalker Saga.
Is being incorrect about Star Wars episode numbers a trigger to confuse ChatGPT?
The Star Wars Mitochondria revelation was unpopular, but it didn't contradict anything. The original movies never address whether you could detect force users with a blood test.
This gives me a brilliant idea: maybe we could make an AI to make new movies based on old ones, and train it on the first 2 Alien movies, so we can finally get a decent sequel to that franchise.
Then do the same with Episodes 4-6 of Star Wars.
lol I'm not actually calling them cult leaders but I'm giving you a point of reference. People in mainstream media can have a "cult following", a group of fans who are so enthusiastically devoted. We have that for brands, movies, comics and whatever else. Today people become personalities on twitter that end up with a similar cult following.
Also I mean I'm not here to spin conspiracy theories. Pulling your audience to Mastodon isn't something villainous. It's an opportunity to remove a lot of the noise on twitter and focus people on your message and community. That could be anything. Your Mastodon server could be dedicated to die hard star wars fans or it would be liberal tech folk on the west coast who want a smaller space in which to voice their thoughts without the other side of the argument. It's just human dynamics.
At the end of the day it doesn't matter whether people use Twitter or Mastodon or whatever else. We're transition between platforms every decade, some people stick it out for the relationships and other people move on to new things. That's life.
Only one Star Wars film "flopped" and that was Solo. The sequel trilogy each grossed more than a billion dollars at the box office.
The films and series that have been produced since the Disney acquisition a decade ago have created an entire new generation of fans and spawned theme parks, hotels, cruises, merchandise, and spinoffs... it's been an amazing success for the franchise.
> We have a million Star Wars series and movies
Star Wars is an interesting case.
It went from a franchise making money on every movie to a mix of ok movies and flops. I know a lot of people (including me) just tuned out with the latest trilogy.
It's the same for sci-fi. We have a million Star Wars series and movies, a billion Star Trek series and movies. But we can't get anything else that is out there that could be so much better. Dune was a good start, but really, each of those books is a series on its own.
The Culture series by Iain Banks would be amazing, especially considering that the world is way more accepting of race/ethnicity, sexuality, and gender issues than it has been historically (not even to mention that we could use some hope for the future in our media instead of dystopia constantly). But instead we get baby yoda series 3. (for reference, I do like The Mandalorian, I just felt like being snarky).
If you look carefully in the endless credits scroll you can see the credits for the orchestrator(s), if the composer doesn't do the orchestration themselves. Herbert Spencer, for instance, is credited for orchestration of Star Wars Ep. 4, A New Hope. He worked as orchestrator on a lot of other John Williams movies and was a film composer in his own right as well.
and owns so much cultural IP
No. That's not cultural IP, that's Disney IP. Disney made a habit of taking stuff that was in the public domain, changing a few things around (even the whole story line) and copyrighted that.
Next time you have the inclination, compare a Disney movie/story/comic that purports to be the same as one of the public domain tales with the original tale. You'll find that the "Disney Creation (c)" is nothing at all like the original.
As an example, compare the original 'Star Wars' franchise from the 1970s with the later Disney knock-offs and see for yourself. As further examples, compare Disney's 'Cinderella' with the original book version, or maybe Disney's 'Alice in Wonderland' that is a weird hodge-podge of TWO of Lewis Carroll's books, 'Alice in Wonderland' and 'Alice Through the Looking-Glass'.
I'm only some ten years older. The films I spoke of were released before I was born. Yet most of my generation is familiar with some of them. Star Wars, then. Or Schindler's List. Maybe I'm Spielberg biased. The Exorcist.
My point is that there was such a thing -- a common film canon -- that people who were interested in film, could be expected to be somewhat familiar with. No longer true?
Yes. Lowest common denominator. Some common point of reference gives a common vocabulary. Even if it sucks.
As MTV some 20 years ago said: "Once it's not enough, recycle."
Sarcastic, of course.
Just look at Hollywood. Every now and then they reboot some movies or they make a follow up: Cinderella, Pinnocchio, Mad Max, Avatar, Star Wars etc.
Exactly.
You'll get one Kubrick/Spielberg/George Lucas every decade. But the vast majority of what's produced is another dumb Star Wars movie or another Marvel cash grab.
> half the joy for most people
You should talk to the average Netflix user and see if they can name any of the writers/director/producers.
They might be able to name a couple of the main actors/actresses.
No one cares about the producers/director for the vast majority of media.
Some small % of people care (who are interested in the production or whatever) and I'm sure they'll continue to watch purely human generated content.
The vast majority of people will move on because AI generated media will be 100x better than the garbage scripts that hollywood writers put out.
I agree that there are a few directors who are incredibly high quality (your tarantino, kubrick, etc.) and people of those caliber will continue to be successful.
But yeah, I'd much rather have an AI generate me a movie than watch Disney's next cash grab star wars movie (that has almost comically bad writing).
+ Is there a post 2010 popular film where a violent boyfriend husband hits his wife? Wherein that woman antagonised the man, making the audience 'feel' her 'culpability' in some ways, wherein both characters are presented as mostly bad, but also had elements of humanity? Wherein bad characters call each other (trigger warning / vulgar language) 'jew k*ke' and other terrible slurs? Maybe it was just an artifact of that era, or maybe I'm watching too much Netflix because even 'noir' is not 'noir'.
+ 'Barnie kids' villains, not Barnie's villains.
Villains are barely disagreeable. Aside from maybe 'Hans Landa' here hasn't been a dark villain in a very long time. They are at best, sad charicatures of 'bad people'. 'Grand Moff Tarkin' from Star Wars is scarier than most bad guys, merely with his presence.
Imdb can be quite innaccurate; an ex colleague of mine is listed as some minor production staff in one of the Star Wars movies, but he never was involved whatsoever. He told me but I can't remember how he got listed.
Technology like this has blown up on Twitch/Twitch circles within the past couple of days (I won't link to it due to the sexual nature, but you can find references on /r/livestreamfail). Men taking women's [Twitch streamers] faces and use your imagination from there.
Completely inappropriate and unethical.
What value does this technology add? Bringing Princess Leia back to another Star Wars movie? Anything more than that?
Yes, Star Wars seems to be a good fit. The first Harry Potter is also a good example of both "preconditions" being there.
Originally, when I was trying to think about stories, the following came to mind - Revenge movies like John Wick (the first one), and video games like The Last of Us 2, where the protagonist originally just wants to go about his affairs, but bad things happen to them and they want revenge. - "Catastrophe" movies like Alien, Predator, Terminator 2, where the protagonist needs to act to stay alive.
Lucas made 6 Star Wars movies in 30 years. That’s not even close to what Disney is doing.
Let me introduce you to the Star Wars Customizable Card Game by Decipher. It lasted from 1995 until 2001 when Lucasfilm sold toy rights to… Hasbro. Hasbro made a terrible card game to replace it for Episode 2 that has fallen into obscurity. The original game still lives on with a Players Committee and new virtual sets. Compared to Magic the game was a niche of a niche and still exists. If magic ever ‘dies’ I am sure there will be a huge community that steps up to keep it alive.
> Much like Star Wars fans have learned to put up with Disney's attempts to wring every last dollar out of the franchise.
They're just continuing in George Lucas' footsteps. IMHO, either you accept the money grabs, or your acknowledge only the two films, Star Wars and the Empire Strikes Back; even Return was money grubbing.
I can watch Disney shows for a month, cancel for 4 months, and then come back and maybe have enough content for another month. We're talking one or two movies and a TV show. It's simply not enough.
Disney+ is also a very specific fan-oriented service. Don't like Star Wars or comic books? Not a child? Good luck finding something worth watching that isn't a documentary.
I knew I was done with Star Wars movies when I caught myself looking at my watch about a half hour in.
Marvel seems like it'd be even worse since A) the storylines all intertwine, so you feel like you have "homework" to watch before seeing the latest one, and B) they're all pretty much superhero movies.
With Star Wars, creators can ignore the tired Skywalker storyline, plus there's no genre expectations tying creators down (IMO sci-fi is not a genre so much as a meta-genre or motif). At least in theory--they've been pretty reluctant to spread their wings until recently.
Even if you are, there's the chance that the glut of the content coming out causes fatigue. I used to really look forward to new Star Wars things because it didn't come out super frequently (a new trilogy of movies every few decades, a TV show here and there), but it was enjoyable. Then they started coming out with a new movie and multiple TV shows year after year, and it just wasn't good enough to justify going out of my way to consume all of it. Marvel stuff seems the same way; I'd generally go to the movies maybe once or twice a year, so when there are half a dozen of them coming out for a single franchise within a year or two, it feels more like work than entertainment to keep up with it all. At this point, I'm not sure I'll _ever_ go to see a Star Wars movie in a theater again, which is extraordinary since even 5 or 6 years ago that would have seemed ludicrous to me.
Yeah, this is my family. We don't have kids, but we probably wouldn't have D+ if it didn't come bundled with our Verizon bill. I don't know how everyone else is managing, but I'm suuuuuuuper burned out on superhero and star wars movies. It really feels like Disney in particular but Hollywood more generally need to branch out more and not rely so much on stamping out franchise films--they're good for an occasional flick, but there needs to be more substance on offer (if the market doesn't already agree with me on this, I suspect they will in time).
Yeah I think there’s a big Marvel and Star Wars fatigue factor that isn’t talked about enough. Only the hardest of the hardcore fans can keep up with all that stuff. Regular people and casual fans pretty much only see the big blockbuster movies and maybe watch the Mandalorian to see what all the baby Yoda memes are all about.
Marketing. I also suspect that alot of Disney's most core userbase don't make up enough volume to make this profitable.
I consider myself an ardent Star Wars & Marvel fan and I just couldn't keep up anymore, so I axed Disney+.
Netflix still drops enough documentaries that I keep it around.
Besides being pulled from streaming, what if they altered the movie or show, to add on to it or censorship past views to fit modern views. I don't like original content being altered, especially the original star wars. :)
The day 2001: A Space Odyssey opened in a theatre where I live the prac physics class at my university was almost empty much to the chagrin of the physics tutor. He didn't need to be told why his class had disappeared such was the film's publicly.
Next day we all cropped it especially me because I'd also just written a critical piece in the student rag about how badly science was being taught—right, it didn't go unnoticed (sometimes one loses one's presence of mind and that was just such an occasion).
I recall leaving the theatre with my mates in complete silence, we were essentially struck dumb while trying to understand or explain the film's unusual ending. Eventually we stammered out what we thought were explanations whilst trying to find the right adjectives. I cannot ever recall leaving another film in such a strange emotional state.
I am not and never have been a science fiction movie fan - Star Wars and such leave me bored to tears, I find science itself far more intesting, it's actually real and not just make believe. However, 2001 is in a different league altogether and for me the film remains one of the truly great film masterpieces. Much has been written about it so there's nothing I can add except to say it has stood the test of time—over a half century later it still thrills and entertains.
Only two weeks ago I saw the film again on TV and it still has retained much of its original aura. Yes, time and technology has partially caught up with it but only just—and I wish the film would be fully restored or digitally remastered to its former glory.
(I recall seeing a re-release of the film some seven or eight years after its first screening, this time in 70mm and not in its original Super Panavision format and I was somewhat disappointed as the print had lost some of its original lustre, the fantastic kaleidoscopic colours that appeared towards the end of the film were less intense and less saturated than the original (none of the copies I've seen since have equalled the truly excellent quality of that original Super Panavision print I saw back in 1968.)
The milestones (from the source code):
//<10 seconds 'A single frame of a film': 100ms, 'It would take light to go around the Earth': 133ms, 'A blink of an eye': 400ms, 'The time it takes light to reach Earth from the moon': 1255ms, 'The fastest Formula 1 pit stop': 1820ms, 'The fastest 1/4 mile drag race time': 3580ms, 'The fastest Rubik\'s cube solve': 4221ms, 'The fastest 40-yard time at the NFL Combine': 4240ms, 'The fastest 1 liter beer chug': 4370ms, 'A skippable Youtube ad': 5000ms, 'A full bull ride': 8000ms, 'The fastest 100m sprint': 9580ms, //10 Seconds 'The Wright Brothers first flight': 12000ms, 'The fastest 200m sprint': 19190ms, 'The fastest 50m freestyle swim lap': 21300ms, 'The Westminster Kennel Club dog agility record': 28440ms, 'A typical television ad': 30000ms, 'The fastest NASCAR lap at Daytona': 40364ms, 'The fastest 400m sprint': 43030ms, 'The fastest NASCAR lap at Talladega': 44270ms, 'The fastest 100m freestyle swim lap': 47050ms, //1 Minute '"Just a minute"': 60000ms, 'The fastest Formula 1 lap at Monaco': 74260ms, 'The fastest Formula 1 lap at Monza': 81046ms, 'The fastest 800m sprint': 100910ms, 'The fastest 200m freestyle swim lap': 102960ms, 'The fastest Kentucky Derby time': 119400ms, 'An NHL penalty box time for slashing, tripping, or holding': 120000ms, 'How long it takes to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge (without traffic)': 135000ms, 'The duration of the "Millenium Force" roller coaster': 140000ms, 'The longest Super Bowl national anthem': 156000ms, 'One round of a boxing match': 180000ms, 'The average song length on Spotify': 183000ms, 'The fastest 1,500m run': 206000ms, 'The song "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley': 215000ms, 'The fastest 400m freestyle swim lap': 220140ms, 'The fastest 1 mile run': 223130ms, 'The duration of the "Steel Dragon" roller coaster': 240000ms, 'The duration of "The Beast" roller coaster': 250000ms, 'The song "4:33" by John Cage': 273000ms, 'The longest sky diving freefall': 276000ms, 'The Any% speedrun of Super Mario Bros for NES': 294948ms, //5 Minutes 'An NHL penalty box time for fighting': 300000ms, 'The average duration of a typical sky dive': 330000ms, 'The average time for a drive-thru order': 356800ms, 'The time it takes Jeff Bezos to make $1 million': 402000ms, 'The fastest race car lap around the Nurburgring': 403300ms, 'The time it takes light to reach Earth from the sun': 500000ms, 'The time it takes a rocket ship to reach outer space': 510000ms, 'A typical marching band show': 515000ms, //10 Minutes 'The length of the first space walk': 600000ms, 'The longest a human has held their breath (non-oxygen assisted)': 695000ms, 'The average duration of popular Youtube videos': 702000ms, 'The time it takes an average human to walk 1km': 710000ms, 'The fastest 5K run': 757350ms, 'The average time to bake a pizza': 810000ms, '1% of the entire day': 864000ms, //15 Minutes 'A typical commute in the United States': 960000ms, 'The fastest superbike lap of the Isle of Man TT': 1002778ms, "MLK's \"I Have A Dream\" Speech": 1020000ms, 'An average baseball inning': 1200000ms, 'The song "2112" by Rush': 1233000ms, 'The first angels to appear in the movie "Angels in the Outfield" (1994)': 1275000ms, 'An episode of The Office, Seinfeld, or Rick & Morty': 1320000ms, 'The time it takes to drive the entire Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel': 1380000ms, 'The song "Octavarium" by Dream Theater': 1440000ms, 'A typical Super Bowl halftime show': 1500000ms, 'The fastest 10K run': 1584000ms, 'It takes for Bobby Boucher to get his first game snap in the movie "The Waterboy" (1998)': 1719000ms, //30 Minutes 'The average time to bake a cake': 1950000ms, 'The time it takes until the launch in the movie Apollo 13 (1995)': 2081000ms, 'It takes WALL-E to arrive at the Axiom in the movie "WALL-E" (2008)': 2164000ms, 'The shortest war in history (Anglo-Zanzibar War)': 2280000ms, 'It takes Harry Potter to arrive at Hogwarts in "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer\'s Stone" (2001)': 2381000ms, 'The album "Thriller" by Michael Jackson': 2539000ms, 'The album "Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd': 2589000ms, 'An episode of Breaking Bad, House, or Firefly': 2640000ms, 'The boot camp sequence in the movie "Full Metal Jacket" (1987)': 2730000ms, 'The album "Abbey Road" by The Beatles': 2823000ms, 'It takes Simba to become an adult in the movie "The Lion King" (1994)': 2849000ms, '10% of a typical work day in the United States': 2880000ms, 'The album "Kid A" by Radiohead': 2996000ms, 'The time limit for the essay portion of the SATs': 3000000ms, 'The time it takes a standard ice cube to melt at room temperature': 3150000ms, '0.01% of an entire year': 3155692ms, 'The album "Fearless" by Taylor Swift': 3221000ms, 'The time it takes for the basketball game to start in the movie "Space Jam"': 3222000ms, 'An episode of Game of Thrones, True Detective, or The Sopranos': 3300000ms, 'It takes Harry and Lloyd arrive in Aspen in the movie "Dumb and Dumber" (1994)': 3394000ms, 'The album "Jagged Little Pill" by Alanis Morissette': 3443000ms, 'The fastest half-marathon': 3451000ms, //1 Hour 'An episode of Top Gear': 3600000ms, 'The inception of Robert Fischer begins in the movie "Inception" (2010)': 3847000ms, 'Riding the longest subway line in NYC from Queens to Inwood': 3900000ms, 'The time it takes Jeff Bezos to make $10 million': 4017600ms, 'It takes before Sean Connery says "Welcome to the Rock" in the movie "The Rock" (1996)': 4022000ms, 'A flight from Syracuse to New York City': 4140000ms, '5% of the entire day': 4320000ms, 'The album "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" by Elton John': 4580000ms, 'The album "Scenes From A Memory" by Dream Theater': 4626000ms, 'The movie "Primer" (2004)': 4740000ms, 'It takes to fully charge a Tesla (at 440V)': 4788000ms, 'The ferry duration from Long Island, NY to New London, CT': 4800000ms, 'The movie "Toy Story" (1995)': 4860000ms, 'A drive from Syracuse, NY to Rochester, NY (87.5 miles)': 4920000ms, 'The movie "The Lion King" (1994)': 5280000ms, 'The longest State of the Union address': 5280000, //Duplicate time... //1.5 Hours 'The movie "Mony Python and the Holy Grail" (1975)': 5460000ms, 'The movie "Monsters, Inc." (2001)': 5520000ms, 'An average duration of a soccer game': 5700000ms, 'The movie "Reservoir Dogs" (1992)': 5940000ms, 'The longest Innaugural address': 6300000ms, 'A drive from Orlando, FL to Tampa, FL (84.6 miles)': 6660000ms, 'An SR-71 flight from New York City to London': 6896400ms, 'The movie "Alien" (1979)': 7020000ms, //2 Hours //'25% of a typical work day in the United States': 7200000ms, 'The average duration of an NCAA basketball game': 7200000ms, 'The movie "Star Wars: A New Hope" (1977)': 7260000ms, 'The fastest marathon time ever ran': 7299000ms, 'The time it takes to listen to every studio album by Nirvana': 7667000ms, 'The movie "Dogma" (1999)': 7680000ms, 'The average duration of an NBA basketball game': 7860000ms, 'The movie "The Matrix" (1999)': 8160000ms, 'The movie "Fight Club" (1999)': 8340000ms, 'The movie "The Shawshank Redemption" (1994)': 8520000ms, 'The movie "Forrest Gump" (1994)': 8520000ms, 'A drive from New York City to Philadelphia (94.6 miles)': 8520000ms, '10% of the entire day': 8640000ms, 'The movie "Inception" (2010)': 8880000ms, 'The movie "Avengers: Infinity War" (2018)': 8940000ms, 'The movie "Pulp Fiction" (1994)': 9240000ms, 'It takes Voyager 1 to travel 100,000 miles': 9360000ms, 'The movie "Avatar" (2009)': 9720000ms, 'The average duration of an NHL hockey game': 9750000ms, 'The movie "Saving Private Ryan" (1998)': 10140000ms, 'The movie "The Godfather" (1972)': 10500000ms, 'The movie "Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" (2001)': 10680000ms, //3 Hours 'The average duration of an NFL football game': 10800000ms, 'The total time limit of the SATs': 10800000ms, 'The movie "Avengers: Endgame" (2019)': 10860000ms, 'The average duration of an MLB baseball game': 11280000ms, 'The time it takes for a standard ice cube to freeze in a freezer': 11700000ms, 'The movie "Titanic" (1997)': 12600000ms, 'A drive from Boston to New York City (215.9 miles)': 13560000ms, 'Alex Honnold\'s free solo climb of El Capitan': 14160000ms, //4 Hours 'Half of a typical work day in the United States': 14400000ms, 'The flight time from New York City to Los Angeles': 19800000ms, 'The time limit of one session of the Bar exam': 21600000ms, 'It takes Voyager 1 to travel 250,000 miles': 23400000ms, 'The fastest swimmer to cross the English Channel': 24900000ms, //>8 Hours 'A full typical work day in the United States': 28800000ms, '0.1% of an entire year': 31536000ms, 'The time it takes Jeff Bezos to make $100 million': 40173000ms, 'The time it takes to assemble a car': 57600000ms, '1% of an entire year': 315360000ms, 'It takes for the Lōʻihi volcano to rise above the surface of the ocean becoming a new Hawaiian island': Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER //285,616 years
Or even better, a way of reproducing the work of Harmy's Despecialized Edition of Star Wars. You have a lot of frames of video in the blu-ray reissues that didn't really differ in content from the frames of video in the old laser disc, VHS, bad interlaced DVD transfers. I imagine it wouldn't be hard for AI to fill in the gaps to produce despecialized high-definition frames from the old Star Wars transfers.
In other cases, I'd imagine you could use old post production NTSC broadcast and the OG 35mm films to do something much more akin to how Star Trek TNG was updated, than a simple interpolated upsampling.
Every TV show/Movie franchise has two endings, when the story ends and when the money ends. Just stop watching when you're done. It might even send a signal. There is no prize for watching it all. We don't need to watch every Star Wars movie ever made.
Yeah, it's a bit strange.
Example: I'm a huge Star Wars fan.
But I don't much like RotJ.
Or Episodes 1-3.
Or Episodes 7-9.
Or a lot of their other properties.
(Clone Wars is amazing, there are major exceptions)
So, if I don't like the majority of the stuff out there, then how am I still identifying as a huge fan?
HN: pop culture references bad
Also HN: it's not a spoiler if it's about a Star Wars movie that was released before yesterday
Just because a movie looks better doesn’t mean it is a better movie. There has been trash made during all eras, but today is about volume, not quality, so finding the gems is much harder and frustrating.
Do we really need to have another movie about super heroes or another movie about rescuing some retiring tough guy’s kid from a bad guy? Or another movie that spends the first half rotating between character building scenes filled with silly, rote dialogue and no story line? Or another movie that takes an old, tired story and simply replaces the characters with a new set of characters intended to signal the importance of a particular demographic group? Or another Jurassic Park, Hangover, Rocky, Transformer, Terminator, Star Wars clone? Yawn.
Interesting, I didn't love the new Avatar but I thought it was much better paced and directed than a Marvel or superhero movie. Shots lingered and showed more emotion than the current crop of action / fantasy movies (Star Wars, Marvel, Transformers).
I do appreciate the effort, but Big reveals reframe the films narrative in some important way. The recent Marvel and Star Wars films have been such a mess they didn’t have much to hide this way.
Ray’s family doesn’t really matter narratively, while Luke’s father killing / becoming Darth Vader shifts it away from a story of revenge. Contact is a great example of how subtle this can be with static on the recording vs hours of static on the recording.
In addition to Marvel, the last decade of Star Wars movies applies too. The trailers feel like they're spoiling things, but then you watch the movie and realize they're only showing things from the first ~1/3 of the movie, or entirely removed from context. I try to avoid trailers these days, but I've never regretted watching too many Marvel or Star Wars trailers.
> An analog impression directly mirrors reality
A clay impression directly mirrors your hand by directly mirroring reality... but its a terrible storage mechanism in practice. In practice, a picture of your hand, or a 3d-model of your hand, stored on a reliable hard drive or USB stick, will hold the information more reliably.
Analog impressions, be they clay, or vinyl, are destroyed little-by-little each time you read from it. Simply measuring / reading from film, vinyl, and even tape, causes the magnetic fields to break, or the vinyl to warp and change shape.
Digital impressions of course have the same issue. Except we have these things called "error correction codes" that can reset / wipe-out any such accumulation of errors (to a point). So long as the digital record is reread, and rewritten, before the error-correction codes wear out, you can perpetually store data without any loss. CDROMs and DVD-ROMs are written with absurdly huge amounts of error-correction codes, ensuring that they'll almost never wear out under reasonable circumstances. (Hard drives, and Flash drives have different error correction codes, but the process is the same. Modern filesystems, like ZFS, can even read, analyze, and rewrite data as it degrades automatically)
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In contrast, I watched Star Wars maybe... 20 times? Before the tape started to significantly degrade on my old VHS player. These are technologies that can only be read dozens of times before wearing out.
Not only that, but "copying" tapes, trying to preserve them, doesn't work. The act of reading innately damages the tape, so its not like you actually are "gaining more reads" by copying them.
Only digital has the benefit of error correction codes that _PERFECTLY_ replicate data within a given time frame.
It seems like it should trend more and more that way as time goes on. I like new things, variety is the spice of life after all. However, a natural part of that journey is disappointment and lots of middling enjoyable experiences, be it food, movies, or anything else.
That said, once I have found a good thing (Star Wars) I want more of that good thing in addition to new experiences. I am enjoying the new take on Game of Thrones, the new take on Lord of the Rings, and really looking forward to the upcoming new take on Harry Potter (hog warts legacy). As more time passes the tried and true franchises should continue to produce while new things are tried on the side in an attempt to build new franchises.
As Geoduck put it, PBS stands for Public Broadcasting Service, which is a publicly-funded and viewer-supported network of highbrow and foreign content that's been around for my whole life, not sure if or how much longer than that. It's also the primary way that North Americans have consumed British culture for my whole life, until the internet brought widespread, umm, "availability".
So all through my Canadian youth I would flip through channels and periodically happen upon a Dr Who episode, or a British sport like Cricket, and wonder at the strangeness of my ancestral line (I'm extremely British, genetically speaking, and my family were both heavy socialists and also kind of cryptically proud of being part of the Empire. But they never admitted that, even to themselves I think...).
It's no surprise that it was hard to key into why Dr Who - for one example of a show I came to love as an adult - is so cool. I would read about it in Starlog, here and there, and the doctor sounded like a real badass on paper, but when I came across Tom Baker for the first time, he was no Han Solo, shall we say. Which is great, cause there are aspects of Star Wars that I kinda hate now (mostly the fans), but maybe not so much when you're 8 years old and have been watching laser blasts and ships exploding and whatnot. Even godawful tripe like Jason Of Star Command was more captivating at the time.
> The First Order showed that it was serious business by blowing up Coruscant, capital of the New Republic (as well as the Old Republic and the Galactic Empire).
No, it's just comically bad writing. A city-planet that has existed for thousands of years is blown up by the remnants of the "evil empire" which was anihillated 20 years before?
Star Wars in general is pretty poorly written and always has been. It made sense for the first film to be so successful, it was pretty nice for 1977. But I don't get how people can become immersed in this as an extended universe; the worldbuilding is atrocious.
Obviously not literally everything was there, but for example Disney stuff was and now it's on Disney+, NBC stuff is now on Peacock, CBS stuff is now on Paramount+, etc. etc.
I'm sure it's true in quantitative terms that new streaming services are net new content, but there's a very long list of popular movies and shows that used to be on Netflix and no longer are, and a very long list of publishers that use to make new content available on Netflix and no longer do.
A very abridged list of existing content that Netflix lost: Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, Disney movies, The Office, Parks and Rec, The West Wing, Lionsgate movies, Doctor Who, 20th Century Fox movies like X-Men, ABC Shows like Scandal, Naruto, most Star Trek shows, and on and on
All of this is regionally dependent I think, some things are probably still available outside the US.
I'm not fully convinced 20 years is the right answer. Things made 20 years ago are still often in pop-culture (The Matrix Trilogy, the first 7 seasons of South Park, the first 5 Harry Potter books), and these entering the public domain would create significant pressure to avoid the names of these series becoming legally generic. Managing the rights of these also feels like it would create significant stress on platforms trying to stem off piracy - is that 5 min clip from the Simpsons from seasons 1-15 (legal), or 15-34 (illegal)?
Somewhere between the two feels more significant. Few series will run that long, and anything that does enter the public domain will be unambiguous due to its look, feel, and sound. Something like the original Star Wars (45 years old) is clearly older and is distinct from modern media in its look and feel. Something like The Lord of the Rings on the otherhand is hard to differentiate.
I avoid anything by Abrams or Lindelof at this point because they are emblematic of this writing formula. You can see it in Lindelof's The Leftovers, Abrams' Star Wars, and of course LOST. It's also present in any pilot they help create, for example Once Upon A Time.
I agree with your deconstruction: these shows are optimized for selling an engaging pilot episode with only a back of the napkin roadmap for the rest of the show. The finale comes only when there's no more money to be made.
I'm very excited by writers like Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese who are able to write interwoven plots comparable to LOST, but with cohesive endings. Check out Dark for an example.
Not even thinking about whether the rip is bit perfect there's no expectation Apple even keeps serving up the version of the master you originally bought and want to keep. It's not even about the rip, it's that they might swap in a rip taken from a different version of the recording.
Many albums get remastered.. most of these cloud services will just drop in the new version and the old one is gone. IIRC Apple might be pretty good about this, but you still don't want to surrender control.
In any case there have been many albums where the remaster has worse audio quality than the original. If you bought the original you might really want to hang onto that version.
The most egregious form of that kind of thing is things like movies like Star Wars where the later editions are different edits of the movie. If you wanted the original you wouldn't be happy your copy was swapped out with the new edit.
In the case of music this is often just remasters having a lot more dynamic range compression and heavily boosted levels, but that can still be very objectionable.
In a sense, I agree with you. But in another sense, I think it’s important to remember that copyright is a restriction on people’s behavior that does not naturally exist, but has been created by law.
It’s easier to see the moral case for this if we think about cases other than the simple “pirating” of a show. For example, preservation. Doctor Who is a popular show that predates the practice of saving the original tapes. There are several episodes that have been lost forever because the BBC did not routinely record (or routinely recorded over) their own broadcasts. Many other episodes were thought to be lost, but thanks to enterprising individuals who made unauthorized copies, have since been preserved. Is the world worse off or better off with those people?
Or take Star Wars. George Lucas famously hated that anyone could prefer the pre‐Special Editions of the original trilogy, and only grudgingly allowed it to be released once afterward, in a highly compressed anamorphic format on one set of DVDs. No other version has been released since. People who like the original special effects, dialogue, and editing have since done 4k scans of original theater prints from the 70s and 80s. People don’t deserve to be able to watch copies of those—legally speaking, the copyright holder Lucas (and now Disney) is the arbiter of that. But would a world without the option be better than our world today?
And remember, laws are capricious. The movie industry was terrified of home video. They thought it would materially damage them by removing the desire to watch movies in theater, where they made their money. (Remember MPAA president Jack Valenti testifying before Congress? “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.”) The VCR came within one vote of being outlawed as a piracy tool by the Supreme Court. A 5–4 decision. Because it survived, though, the people received a huge benefit from the new capabilities (like time shifting and media shifting) provided by this technology. And the movie industry benefited too, earning billions of dollars by embracing this new market… after they had tried to murder it in its crib.
How would today’s world look if one justice had voted the other way?
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.
A key litmus test: can an AI produce output that can substitute for a copyrighted work, to the extent that the commercial value of that copyrighted work is diminished? e.g. if a future hypothetical DALL-E-for-video can diffuse a mkv file containing something that plays very much like Star Wars, then surely possessing the model would be treated as possessing a copy of the movie.
As an aside, it makes me very uneasy to see grown adults be so infatuated with Disney IPs.
The quote from Alec Guinness about Star Wars in his autobiography:
“A refurbished Star Wars is on somewhere or everywhere. I have no intention of revisiting any galaxy. I shrivel inside each time it is mentioned. Twenty years ago, when the film was first shown, it had a freshness, also a sense of moral good and fun. Then I began to be uneasy at the influence it might be having. The first bad penny dropped in San Francisco when a sweet-faced boy of twelve told me proudly that he had seen Star Wars over a hundred times. His elegant mother nodded with approval. Looking into the boy's eyes I thought I detected little star-shells of madness beginning to form and I guessed that one day they would explode.
'I would love you to do something for me,' I said.
'Anything! Anything!' the boy said rapturously.
'You won't like what I'm going to ask you to do,' I said.
'Anything, sir, anything!'
'Well,' I said, 'do you think you could promise never to see Star Wars again?'
He burst into tears. His mother drew herself up to an immense height. 'What a dreadful thing to say to a child!' she barked, and dragged the poor kid away. Maybe she was right but I just hope the lad, now in his thirties, is not living in a fantasy world of secondhand, childish banalities.”
I think about that a lot when seeing the lengths many adults go to immersing themselves into these "cinematic universes" `
There are some good paragraphs here but this is mostly overwrought. The piece buries what I think the essential truth of the series is: most of the mature relationship and political context Andor pulls in is just texture and good storytelling.
What Andor does well is make the various cartoony facets of the Star Wars universe seem real. The "Empire" in Andor isn't just evil in the abstract, it's evil in a familiar way. Andor grapples directly with genocide as a real thing, it tries to render the banality of that evil on screen, and then you realize that Lucas portrayed genocide on an even grander scale in the first movie and it was hard to even notice it for what it was? ANH's genocide was literally a Bond villain trope.
But that doesn't make Andor coherently political; it just makes it more grounded. The blasters in Andor are the first in any Star Wars IP that seemed lethal; the TIE fighter that buzzes pseudo-Trotsky and pseudo-Lenin on Aldhani actually felt dangerous; the economy of the mining world seemed like it produced something other than pod races and cantinas; Cassian actually might hook up with people, &c &c &c. It's just decent storytelling. Like, this is one of the very few bits of Star Wars IP where it's clear that goal #1 was "make a good movie".
The rest of Star Wars has been utterly cursed with fan service since the first showing of ANH.
So anyways this review has me when it uses Andor to shine a light on just how stupid the rest of Star Wars is, and loses me when it tries to draw extra meaning out of Andor itself.
Andor is good, by the way, definitely watch it.
Totally understandable. Star Wars might have been created only because Lucas couldn't get the rights to adapt Flash Gordon. Spielberg signed on to Indiana Jones after Lucas told him he had a better idea than simply making a James Bond movie.
Seems to be caused by the author's somewhat arbitrary selection of films from those recent years. Many are neither Best Picture winners, nor Oscar bait, nor even top grossing movies. Using Rotten Tomatoes' Top Movies seems to be a choice fraught with issues; what does most popular even mean for them, based on the user-submitted audience scores for that site? Why RT and not IMDB? Why not just use top grossing for everything?
Yes, the MCU-ification of everything is not great, but if one was to complain about popcorn blockbusters, that's a trend that's existed since Jaws/Star Wars, and there were far worse fare from the '80s-'00s.
I think that even if you stick with a purely economic analysis, looking at the print market size might not be at all right? There's so much money in secondary goods (well, for the publishers). People have mentioned movies of course, but just general merchandising is a huge win (see Star Wars as a good US example of "the primary material isn't the point")
Having said that I don't know anything about the Korean market on this front, and I can totally see a legitimate decline from Japanese publishing just like in many other media spaces over the past couple of decades.
you're omitting "the" when using capitalized nouns. except when prepending "new"
in a way, I understand that the function of "the" is some kind of emphasis (or something). The answer you seek is not syntactic, but semantic.
I liked the movie... But which one?
I liked Movie-Title. Now there's no doubt which one was it.
My point is that to say "I installed THE python 3" could be understood as a sort of emphasis... I installed THE python 3 could signal (in the appropriate context) that you did not install python 3 from the conda foundation but the one from THE PSF (this is a shoddy example, but this is a random comment on the internet)
I watched Star Wars. I watched THE ('complete', or 'original', or 'new') Star Wars trilogy
Think of it this way: props from the original Star Wars films fetch millions of dollars at auction. Most movie fans and even most Star Wars fans would never pay that much for a prop. But you can understand wanting to own part of a piece of history. Now, consider these paintings are props for a movie you haven't seen yet, a movie called 'the history of art'. Perhaps if these pieces had a significance to you beyond their visual appearance, it would make more sense why they could be so valuable (to a very small minority).
Hm.
"My plots are fantastic, while being often based upon truth. They go wildly beyond the probable but not, I think, beyond the possible. . . . Even so, they would stick in the gullet of the reader and make him throw the book angrily aside—for a reader particularly hates feeling he is being hoaxed—but for two further technical devices, if you like to call them that. First of all, the aforesaid speed of the narrative, which hustles the reader quickly beyond each danger point of mockery and, secondly, the constant use of familiar household names and objects which reassure him that he and the writer have still got their feet on the ground."
That's what makes action-adventure movies work. It keeps people from realizing that all someone needed to do was some simple thing, instead of the adventurous thing. That Fleming did this in his writing made the move to the screen easier.
"Above all there must never be those maddening recaps where the hero maunders about his unhappy fate, goes over in his mind a list of suspects, or reflects what he might have done or what he proposes to do next."
Much "great literature", and wannabe great literature, is full of such introspection. Ayn Rand takes it to an extreme. The other big vice for writers is the info-dump, where there's a long description of the setting. Read anything self-published, and you'll probably find both of these problems. "Show, don't tell".
There are major action movies with voice-overs or explicit scene-setting at the very beginning, from Star Wars to Kick-Ass. But if it's in the middle, you're doing it wrong.
> I mean jesus christ, you'd have to be born under a rock to not know that Star Wars is a cross between a spaghetti western and a samurai flick.
And WWII movies (633 Squadron and The Dam Busters, most prominently) and a splash of sword-and-sorcery fiction (the "magic exists but is rare to the point of being near-mythical and not really thaaaaat powerful" thing is some straight Conan shit, as are some other elements and flavors in the setting—from the stories, that is, not the movies, which came too late to influence Star Wars, though, fittingly, James Earl Jones is in both).
Star Wars' greatest contribution to cinema—and it's a big one—is pioneering the multi-genre pastiche. That thing Tarantino does? Like, his whole career basically? Star Wars cleared the way for that. Proved it could work and result in a good film, proved it could make money. The most successful later entries understand that formula and lean hard into the genre-mashup and freely ripping off other works thing. Mandalorian's full of that, for instance (to the point that you can make a meta-game of watching it, playing "name what they ripped off")
I've watched a bunch of the films said to influence Star Wars, and I'd say the main influence of Hidden Fortress was the R2-D2 and C-3PO characters. There are some plot similarities and of course Lucas has a character almost say the words "hidden fortress" but the only part that made me go "oh, wow, that's exactly where that came from" was the two sidekick buddy-characters.
> The nearest thing you might find today .. maybe Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets? Luc Besson has some of the same pulp influences.
Yes. Valérian is on the mainstream side of that 1980s sci-fi movement. One of the authors also was an artist for the Fifh Element. And a heavy influence on George Lucas (several Star Wars scenes are straight out of Valérian).
> Maybe we just skip the middle steps and have the AI make the film.
Several of these artists would have loved to have AIs to use back in the day. Very fitting in the whole artistic project.
Same. I was lucky to see it on film once, and the theater projected it without masking, so you could see one of its most brilliant touches, that it has two aspect ratios (1.66:1 and 1.33:1) [0] depending on the scene, which enhances the "rewsreel" effect, as if unrelated stock footage were spliced together. i believe the only home video version that faithfully reproduces this is the criterion dvd, done so at kubrick's explicit demand.
The cinematography overall is brilliant, which is a hallmark of his movies of course, the most famous examples maybe being 2001, and Barry Lyndon, in which he used astrophotographical lenses to capture scenes lit only by candlelight.
Gil Taylor, Strangelove's DP, was a wartime aerial photographer for the RAF, and went on to shoot Star Wars. [1] Just so many fascinating levels of unique brilliance went into the creation of that film.
[0] http://www.film-tech.com/ubb/f3/t000289.html
[1] https://ascmag.com/articles/wrap-shot-strangelove
I dislike the marvel movies for the same reason I dislike comic books: The focus is on making sure there is a next episode in the series, which means status quo above all else. This prevents pretty much anything interesting from happening, because significant changes have to be reverted, or previously interesting stories in the extended universe become retconned when a big budget version is made that removes any interesting elements and replaces it with generic action for "mainstream" audiences.
It's remarkable that the most controversial thing disney has done in decades is making main characters not white.
For example, in star wars, instead of doing something interesting or different, they just magicked the "first order" or whatever into existence so they could have big bad empire again, before eventually just saying "fuck it palpatine is back". They also took a back story that was left untold (getting the death star plans), rejected the expanded universe version that was about a usually ignored population having a big impact and sacrificing much for the good of the universe, and replaced it with a super generic "one important ideologically pure character plus one clearly ideologically evil villain" story with basic action.
Meanwhile in the marvel universe, they've adapted the comic book tactic of saying "multiverse and time travel and alternate realities exist" because then they can keep using popular avatar characters. This of course also means nothing freaking matters, because you can literally retcon in universe. It's so boring, nothing matters.
For my money, 720p is more than enough for any movie except visually compelling movies. For things like LOTR, Star Wars, and some of the super-hero series I really appreciate that 1080p. My eyesight isn't good enough to discern 4k.
> how Top Gun is both entertainment and propaganda
The recent conscription of Mr. Cruise to showcase air superiority is an insight tactically granted at the behest of American government as a reaction to international upheaval. A reminder. After the success of "Star Wars", Mr. Ford fulfilled a similar role in a film about infrastructure sabotage (hydroelectric dam and bridge - Force 10 from Navarone).
I always appreciated the Top Gun franchise because there are many scenes showing a large group of people enjoying each other's company.
I’ve been to Lanza a few times and, like another commenter, Fuertaventura even more times
Great island for a holiday for sure. Lanza is more bio diverse with lot of greenery in the north and then just barren rock desert in the south. I’ve mountain biked around the south quite a lot, it’s fun but go prepared, the rocks destroys bike components like nowhere else I’ve ridden (including the French Alps).
There is a sports resort over towards El Golfo in the south west that looks pretty great and I’ve heard good things about.
The surfing in the west is good but if you want surf then Fuerta is the island to go to.
FV is just pure rock desert everywhere and it’s a surf and kite surf paradise for sure. Corralejo in the north is a nice town and easy access to flag and glass beach for surf and also the north shore via the dirt track to El Cottilo. I have mountain biked in FV but it’s a boring cross country struggle fest and the wind is killer.
Clearly the production crew of Star Wars agreed about the Canaries as the North of FV was used as a location for some of the Star Wars movies as well.
It is an interesting topic why those markets are separate. My assumption is that music is way more casual and affiliation to labels and distributors is a lot smaller than with video. Some big stars aside there is lots of interchangeability ... that song not available, well then I listen to something else, but if a Star Trek movie isn't there I won't watch Star Wars. But that's speculation.
As a consumer I very much prefer the Spotify/Apple Music model. I don't want to have 20 subscriptions. I want to go into Blockbuster or some other video retailer and get any movie and pick what I want. I don't want to think about studios and distributors and rely on external services to even figure out what to use (in Germany: https://werstreamt.es which tells me where I can watch/download)
Best guess is that the business model in music has moved to live performance. It's important for stars to get their music heard by the most people so that they can have the greatest demand for concert tickets.
There's no parallel in movies. But it would be interesting to see the actors of star wars in a play that tries to recreate the movie.
> the writing was on the wall
I really hope not. It’s possible the 2010s will be seen as a golden of the TV shows where there was so much competition for eyeballs that many shows were made which otherwise might not have been. Niche demographics seemed catered to which otherwise might not have.
Moving back to Disney owning everything and other channels not being able to compete… that’d be sad. Some people aren’t really excited about super hero shows or Star Wars anymore.
Disney also owns awesome legacy IP; superheros, star wars, pixar and disney movies. It's also a lot cheaper and indeed less bloated. Netflix has zero such legacy content and it's more expensive; soon even harder to use with them locking down sharing!
I believe it's unfair to call Williams' music a rip-off; film music, as enjoyable as it can be, has a commercial purpose and is created to stand behind the action and dialog of a film, not stand alone as music of the Romantic masters was. His score to Star Wars: A New Hope was a deliberate call-back to the music of Korngold, Steiner, Newman and others who defined film music in the 1930s and 1940s. Korngold was both a legitimate composer of late-Romantic music and a film composer.
Derivative work isn't permitted under current copyright though, you know that?
Like I can't release a sequel to a Star Wars movie without getting a license to do so by Disney, because they own the original work's copyright, I'm not allowed to produce a derivative of it.
Similarly this is why there needs to be an explicit open source license that allows you to produce derivative work from it.
That's the crux of it, the trained model is a derivative work, literally it's mathematically derived almost deterministically (ignoring SDG being stochastic).
The question is, even though it's derivative, is it still fair use to use it without permission?
If you prefer shell for simple, solo services, over docker-compose:
#!/bin/sh docker run -d \ --volume /opt/docker/data/jellyfin/config:/config \ --volume /opt/docker/data/jellyfin/cache:/cache \ --volume /mnt/Movies:/media/Movies \ --volume /mnt/TV:/media/TV \ --volume /mnt/Music:/media/Music \ --net=host \ --restart=unless-stopped \ jellyfin/jellyfin:10.8.5-amd64
Add and remove "--volume" entries as needed. You can have more than one movie or TV library or whatever, which is super-handy if you have kids because you can restrict their accounts to certain libraries. Consider using links from the main libraries to create the kids' libraries, if you want to have everything available, including kid stuff, on your adult account(s), as it's a little cleaner than adding both the adult and kid libraries to a single account. Left side is the host machine where the files actually live, right side is where it's mounted in the container. Replace the left side with whatever's right for your system. Names within the "media" directory in the container are arbitrary, but you will have to add each library in the web UI to make them show up, so it's worth giving them decent names.
Replace the "/opt/docker/...." bits with wherever you want to store the config and cache on the host machine. It'll survive restarts/reboots with everything intact with just those two config-related mounts.
the "--restart=unless-stopped" means you probably don't need to do anything else to get it to come back up on reboots. No messing with systemd or whatever, at least on many distros. Docker will take care of it.
Version number's the latest release, I like to handle that manually so there are no surprises. I think they have a "latest" tag or similar that you can use if you don't care about that and just want it to always run the newest thing.
Pro-tip: the youtube metadata plugin (not included by default) is far less smoothly-functioning than the rest of the system is (and also won't run on that docker image without some light modification—it needs youtube-dlp present) BUT many of the things from Youtube that you might want to watch on a real TV have entries on IMDB or thetvdb, so you can add them as TV shows, which is all-around a much better experience.
For smoothest operation, organize movies like:
/The Matrix (1999)/The Matrix (1999).mp4 /The Matrix (1999)/The Matrix (1999).en.srt /Star Wars (1977)/Star Wars (1977) - Special Edition.mkv /Star Wars (1977)/Star Wars (1977) - 4K77.mkv /Star Wars (1977)/Star Wars (1977) - Raw 35MM scan.mkv /Star Wars (1977)/Extras/From Star Wars to Jedi.avi
I think you can define what you want the "Extras" directory to be called when you set up the library, and that's what it'll look for. "Featurettes" is another common name for that.
If you do this, it'll automatically grab the right metadata like 99% of the time with no intervention.
For TV:
/King of the Hill (1997)/Season 1/S01E01.mkv /King of the Hill (1997)/Season 1/S01E02.mkv (et cetera) /King of the Hill 1997)/Season 0/S00E05 - The Making of King of the Hill.mp4
You can actually put almost anything you want in the actual episode file names, as long as it has that "SxxExx" pattern in it somewhere.
Again, I think you can use other names for the "specials" folders if you configure it when setting up the library, but they're "S00E01" and so on in thetvdb, so I use "Season 0"
If anything gets the wrong metadata, find its ID on imdb or thetvdb or tmdb or whatever, hit the hamburger menu on the thumbnail for it, click "identify", and enter your id in the matching field. That'll fix it. But this will very rarely happen if your naming is all correct.
[EDIT] Nb. this may not be a great config for transcoding, I'm not sure it'll have access to hardware decode/encode with this. I avoid that by only using frontend devices that can handle all the codecs I have (AppleTV FTW) so nothing's ever transcoded, since my server can't transcode for shit in the best of circumstances, but that may matter to some people.
I did like Expanse, but I tried to watch a few of the older Star Trek and/or Star Wars movies (don't remember the difference), and I didn't like them at all.
As a Star Wars fan, having Luke's actual face and synthesized voice would be the least interesting thing about a fan film.
What I would value much more is the writing, directing, editing, and acting... and you can't yet get very good quality of any of that through AI yet.
Maybe someday, but not today.
It’s interesting how we already are at a point where home users can in theory make a Star Wars fan film with Luke’s actual face and synthesized voice.
I used to argue that the rise of popularity of children literature and movies among adults is a sign of an increased infantilization of our society. Star Wars, Harry Potter, super hero movies (and many, many other examples in between).
But over time I changed this view: I don't think it's such a new phenomenon anymore. The mainstream always consisted mostly of simple stories with almost no emotional and philosophical ambiguity. In the 80s we had action movies with "super-heroes" saving the world. In the 90s we had a mix of love stories and blockbusters with a clear cut boundary between good and evil.
Furthermore, cinema attendance in the US has not changed much in decades. It could be argued, perhaps, that movies play a bigger cultural role today, but that could just be the result of recency bias.
My point is... the percentage of people who continue their intellectual and emotional development past adolescence has always been small. It could be that in some ways this phenomenon is more apparent today due to social media. But that doesn't mean that the rate of infantilization among adults has increased.
The answer to all of the questions is: "Who the f* knows and why should I care?".
The problem is people are concerning themselves, committing huge parts of their cognitive abilities, to topics that are completely irrelevant to them. The media (traditional and social) bombards us with a constant stream of new issues every day. However knowing about or forming a opinion about these things is pointless for the individual.
You might as well form strong opinions about the latest Star Wars movie and go rant about it, it'll have just about the same impact on your life.
Lord of the Rings drinks from European mythology, and Star Wars toke more than a few clues from a particular film of Kurosawa. Both evolved in interesting histories, innovated a lot and add their own work and merit, of course. This happened in part because they were not sued by former authors.
Star Wars is a particularly salient example because the original cuts that made the films such cultural icons are completely unavailable from anyone other than third‐party sellers, due to the wishes of the (former) rights holder. After the Special Editions were released, the theatrical editions made it onto DVD one time, and never did again. J.J. Abrams has indicated that there are difficulties behind the scenes (perhaps some clause in the Disney purchase) that prevent the originals from being made available for sale. So people who want to avoid the CGI and bad redubs of the Special Editions are stuck scrounging eBay, or more likely, grabbing an “unofficial” scan of the theatrical editions.
I think the best example to work with is Star Wars, or maybe The Lord of the Rings. The harm of eternal copyright is probably best demonstrated with these. They've both entered popular understanding, becoming casually referenced all over the place. "We need to make a little stop in Mordor first" is probably more widely-understood than most references to Greek mythology at this point.
The people who grew up in the culture permeated with such stories are stunted expressively. Because they're denied the use of an ever-growing share of the tropes and characters of the common culture. Many Disney films themselves are retellings of classic stories in the public domain. If you want to reference the original Cindarella, or Greek mythology, or Oliver Twist, you're free to do so.
You cannot do that with Luke Skywalker, or Aragorn. Now, maybe you shouldn't be able to within the author's life. But how many centuries should we keep this privilege? Would you or I (or Disney) be able to tell a new story about Hercules if copyright had been around 2000 years ago? Imagine Shakespeare still under copyright! No Hamlet or Macbeth characters in any other works without permission. We can strike several important 20th century books right there. In the future, the equivalent of Shakespeare will still be under copyright long, long after they are dead. Derivation and reuse are normal in art. Disney can borrow from the public domain to make Cindarella, but it in turn will never become public domain.
I currently "own" 493 movies on iTunes. I don't use any streaming servies because my experience with them has been horrible--a couple dozen movies I want to watch with hundreds or thousands of filler movies that I have no interest in. When I started buying, I went into it with my eyes open. Apple seemed to be the safest option for companies that would be around for some time and unlikely to pull the plug on a service that wasn't doing as well as hoped. I've never had content pulled.
I'm the sort of person that like to rewatch things. As a kid I rewatched Star Wars so many times that I knew the lines in the entire movie by heart, these days the Big Lebowski is comfort food that I'll throw on when I'm bored. So the "rent" option on iTunes never made sense to me. And my concern with something like Netflix is--will it be there when I want to rewatch it?
If Apple ever gets out of the game I hope they give an out for people who have bought things, but I'm not optimistic. I'm less worried about them pulling content they lost a license to because I hope that licensing for purchase is a different world than licensing for free streaming.
(Also, remember that this is exactly the same for app stores. I did have an app pulled that I paid for. So it does happen, I'm just hopeful that it doesn't very often.)
EDIT: I just looked and I own two copies of David Lynch's "Lost Highway" (a mistake since I already owned it, and later saw it on sale and bought it without checking my list. It had changed hands and was being sold by a different distributor.) I searched for it on a non-logged-in computer and its not available to purchase at all. While this is a guarantee of nothing, it suggests that Apple's licensing with the movie rights owners may retain rights beyond the termination of the license.
>the people who own movie IP rights are truly evil.
That is wildly overstated. The worst they can do to you is not let you watch their entertaining movie. Possibly even after you've paid for it (the subject of the OP) - and in that case the culprit isn't even the IP owner, it's the distributor! And honestly it sounds like the problem with digital ownership is simple fraud that is a) covered by existing law and b) too expensive for anyone to litigate. Maybe a class action could do it.
Here's the really interesting part - you're railing against artificial scarcity. Someone has a good that they could give away, and they aren't, and you're calling them evil for doing that, but I ask you, in all honesty, how else do you make money from movies? If you can't make money from it, how will you convince investors to fund your next movie? (Now substitute "album book software" for movie and ask the same question.)
That's not to say that IP owners can't be "evil". George Lucas believed it was his right to keep changing Star Wars over time, and it's impossible to find a legit copy of Star Wars that is the original theatrical release. That's some 1984-level memory hole bullshit and although the stakes are low, it's evil. Disney is arguably quite evil for a variety of reasons, e.g. it's unholy influence over Congress, it's unhealthy consolidation of huge chunks of the American movie market. But neither of them are evil for using artificial scarcity to profit from their work, because that's the only way to profit from data goods.
(Professional open source tries to square the circle by giving away the data goods but charging for (actually scarce) knowledge. It's a good model but cannot apply to entertainment goods, since viewers don't need scarce knowledge to enjoy a movie.)
> for everyone else streaming is enough and you accept stuff will eventually go away e.g I don't care too much that a tv show goes missing.
Streaming is constantly asking a provider to give you a copy of that media, and the provider can always reply with a flat "no", or give you a "remastered" version that doesn't capture the charm that first made you like the media (see Star Wars - not in my personal opinion, but it is a controversy online IIUI). As such, I consider streaming a convenience that's great when it's available, but not something I'd like to be on the mercy of. The digital era gave us the ability to enjoy what we want, when we want it, and I refuse to let copyright dinosaurs ruin my fun.
Mail in a Box comes with support for Sieve filtering, but it's unpleasant at best for programmatic processing of email as you described it. I actually built an email server precisely with programmatic processing/sorting/transformation of messages in mind, but other projects took priority and I wasn't able to finish it.
> This is something I want to know more about. VPN to the service itself through an open source client?
Nope, I mean in the sense that the data is only ever decrypted and encrypted on the endpoints themselves. If the provider ever stores or forwards anything, it's encrypted blobs of data with no added metadata to even hint as to what's inside.
> we lose all that convenience because we can't trust services enough to host for us, instead we have to do it ourselves.
This mirrors my own reflections. The prevalence of centralised, gatekept systems is the trend of the day. I would greatly prefer a web of peered "communal" servers that each serve between 100 and 10,000 people each, to make sure that no one server dominates while also not putting the burden of server maintenance on each and every person who wants to participate in this. I guess the Fediverse is a shadow of this, but that's just for communication and not say, compute or serious storage.
> every piece of the cloud infrastructure and all the services running on top were open source
That wouldn't be a bad start. Some degree of transparency as to how you build and configure the control plane of such a cloud to not give yourselves undue power over machines would also be appreciated.
I agree in principle, but this is going to sound to younger folks about as silly as Quentin Tarantino's insistence that only flickering 24fps celluloid counts as real cinema. We are doomed to live in a constantly shifting media-scape in which directors and studio heads alike get their fondest wish: to go back and change movies that have already been released and ensure the old ones are never seen again. And this will be normal and preferred by those who are to be born into this world. Gen Alpha won't brook anything but a version of Star Wars in which the Empire wins because they provide free gender-affirming care to trans stormtroopers.
> detonation and compression waves at extremely high frequencies (1 to 100 kHz)
Finally spacecraft will be able to produce the characteristic "vvvzzzhzhzh" sound we know from movies like Star Wars. Heard only inside the ship, of course, but likely it will permeate the whole ship while the engine is on.
People love their nostalgia and will consume derivatives of their childhood favorites for that reason. It wasn't always like that, in the past when you got older you had to develop new tastes, so producers had to keep innovating. But the way we consume media now, people are content to binge watch a bunch of derivative Star Wars series so why do anything different? And they even get their kids to join in with them so you have the next generation covered to some extent too
My guess is because the younger generation does not go to the movies that much. So the films are being produced for people who still do - the generation that likes Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Ghost Busters, etc. What is the best way to get most of them go see your new movie? - a remake of an old classic.
Films today require institutional capital. There are less than a thousand directors a year that get greenlit. There isn't enough conceptual or directorial diversity, and it sucks.
In the future, kids will be making their own Star Wars movies from home. All kinds of people from all kinds of backgrounds will make novel films that would ordinarily never be made, such as "Steampunk Vampires of Venus", starring John Wayne, a young Betty White, and Samuel L. Jackson. This is absolutely the future.
I'm working on building this. I'm sure lots of others are too.
Star Wars (the original trilogy) is also a classic example of this. The studio added drastic CGI changes for the 1997 release and still continues to make small fixes in subsequent releases. I believe the only way to watch it now in its original state is via old VHS tapes or bootleg scans of the original 35mm film.
Counter argument: I disagree with most of what you say here.
I think what impacts all people, regardless of age, is much less about the medium and much more about message. I disagree with the "medium is the message" idea being applied universally. Zelda Breath of the Wild has the same spirit as the Gameboy games, and the NES games. And before that, the same spirit of the games and fantasy books about knights, and forts with secret passageways made out of sticks and renaissance fairs. Super Mario Odyssey is a digital evolutions of the same kind of playgrounds and energy like jungle gyms, or tag, and running around and collecting things like hide and go seek or a scavenger hunt. Splatoon is like a soccer game, or an airsoft game, or any kind of childhood battle/skirmish game. Each of those types of games I think map to styles of play that are really, really old.
I do think there is a message in the medium, though, and that the message is "we think this game/story is important enough to convey properly that we'll invest cutting edge technology to enable the best possible experience". I think each generation actually does in fact experience the same impact when that message is received. They way it is conveyed changes, because the cutting edge changes.
You can tell when media hits that Goldilocks zone; it's not something frozen in any particular time. It moves and evolves. The Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings holds up. The original Star Wars holds up. The first James Bond holds up. The Wizard of Oz holds up. Metropolis holds up. Shakespeare holds up. Etc etc. You can trace stories back eons, and the ones that convey core messages about human experience in a time/era appropriate way are an essential part of how we think of ourselves. People who feel rooted and secure in their cultural context don't find the past contemptible, they are reassured and feel connected to an evolving set of stories.
You can still see that with modern media. It will vary person to person, each cultural niche and personality type has a different Goldilocks zone preference.
I don't think variety and saturation with more different forms of expression than we could dream of is actual sophistication. In a lot of ways it's actually more difficult than I think it's ever been to really convey a compelling story in a cutting edge manner. The army of people and resources needed to make a modern movie is insane, as it is for a cutting edge video game. I think that's leading to less sophistication, because the inevitable bureaucratic behemoths that are needed to create cutting edge story telling tends to kill off a lot of the best storytellers. The best story tellers should be more discoverable than ever, but it's increasingly difficult to plug them into these incredibly expensive projects.
It becomes reified and it can enter the public consciousness tutti dissemination.
I can fantasise about an intergalactic space war, and I can even make a screen play and produce Star Wars. If i make the movie or not it's still fantasy, still something I just imagined. But making a representation of it and distributing it vastly alters the power it has to affect public consciousness.
Fantasy doesn't equate to harmlessness.
I would take a more nuanced approach. I saw Star Wars as a kid (but not in the US), and I thought it was novel and interesting. But I was in my late teens when I saw the prequels. They didn’t strike me as being more sophisticated than the originals. The world was not made more believable by making it feel larger. Instead it still felt like a kids movie(s) but now attempting to be more than that and failing at it. In other words, it failed at staying a great kids movie that adults can enjoy (and before you say that’s impossible, there are plenty of examples of it, from Pixar movies to live action ones). At the same time it failed to become a really sophisticated movie for adults: the world building was half assed, the characters still not multi-dimensional, the story was full of plot holes.
I think this is the problem with dual purposing movies for both kids and adults: you can’t have intricate politics in kids movies and you can’t have simplistic world building in adult movies.
A leak?!? Oh my! Butler, fetch me my fainting couch post haste -- I do think I am becoming overwhelmed with a case of the vapours!
The original Star Wars wouldn't be Star Wars without all the behind-the-scenes photos and film they "leaked". As I a kid, and still now, I cherish that stuff, and it makes the franchise so much more valuable.
https://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/star-wars-behind-scenes/
The choice of "Star Wars" as an example is pretty ironic. There has been so much discussion about how Star Wars was a result of the work of so many people. And how George Lucas, who would be the candidate for "single person", when left to his own devices made worse quality Star Wars films.
In particular, there was: - Marcia Lucas, credited for "saving Star Wars in the editing" - John Williams
Not to mention all the people working on the special effects, the sound designer Ben Burtt, the list goes on.
The reality is that a "single person" doesn't create things like that. The "visionary/great man" ideal is just good PR.
> if half the staff left a nursing home, it would be forced to shut down
This is only true when the rank and file employees have a relationship with the clients. National nursing home chains will be just fine if they churn through 50% of their staff. A local mom-n-pop business that runs because each of the employees has a strong relationship with the entire community will not survive the damage to reputation. Rank and file programmers are replaceable.
On the other hand, an artistic endeavor without the creative source will fail (see new Metal Gear games or new Star wars movies). A field that needs technical breakthroughs will fail unless you have the 1 of the 10 people capable of making that breakthrough happen. A small-ish company that relies solely on visionaries as their identity will die without the visionary (Jobs 1.0)
I can't think of many other companies where the rank-n-file are not replaceable. Slow death is always possible, but the above scenarios practically guarantee failure.
It isn't that movies like The Deer Hunter are slow, necessarily. It's that the scenes are doing things other than advancing "the plot". Things like revealing a hidden character trait or depicting the quality of the protagonist's world. I remember someone telling me that The Zero Effect (1997) was "too slow", when I thought it was moving along at a fast clip; I finally realized it was the difference in what we were getting out of (or looking to get out of) the movie that accounted for our differing perceptions.
Not that that can't be done poorly, either. But The Deer Hunter never struck me as slow, and I'm a kid who grew up with Star Wars as my template. But I got really into what we might call (erroneously) "character-driven" movies in the '80s.
(Dammit, I liked Chariots of Fire, but there was no way it should have taken Best Picture over Reds. Same with Ordinary People and Raging Bull.)
I'm sorry, but the top US movies any better? Between Star Wars and Avengers, there's not much left in the way of believability. It's better when they don't take themselves as seriously.
Marvel has become worse these days, it peaked at Infinity War, then a slow decline since then. I'm looking forward to a franchise or a movie that's entertaining as the first Star Wars trilogy.
That being said, if you like the story you'd really appreciate the movie RRR. I was pleasantly surprised when I went there without any expectation.
Star Wars hasn't collapsed, but it isn't cool among the kids anymore. There is much better stuff out there for kids and young teenagers. Take the Star wars Battlefield games as an example - those games were contentless, badly designed crap and quickly went to available-for-free. Even for free I could barely play it for an hour. Another example, when the new movies came H&M had star wars t-shirts in their stores, I never saw a single person with that new storm trooper helmet on their chest in my city.
Star Wars huge size and market came from all the toys it sold, now that is pretty much over.
I think they also buy these IPs for the cultural impact. With these massive brands like Star Wars/Marvel/Game of Thrones, people get a strong sense of FOMO because they know everyone else will be talking about the new show or movie and they don't want to be the only one who hasn't seen it. These names are so big that they influence pop culture, and that's why media companies are paying huge sums for them.
Because the AI doesn't have "experience", it has training data that it's deriving the work from.
People have shown fairly convincing examples of this in the more general sense: e.g., they've had well-known stock image (e.g., iStockPhoto) watermarks get produced in the output from the AI models (when not prompted). An artist with "experience" would not reproduce a watermark. Or in this article[1], where an AI was requests to mimic another artists style, and the output was (attempting to) reproduce the artist's signature.
(IANAL.) If you make a film that directly incorporates aspects from Star Wars (what I believe to be the more accurate version of what these models do), then yes, I would expect that you will be handed a C&D. "Glowing space swords" aren't copyrighted, but if you include something indistinguishable from a lightsaber & call it a lightsaber? I bet Disney would have something to say about that.
[1]: https://kotaku.com/ai-art-dall-e-midjourney-stable-diffusion-copyright-1849388060
All art is derivative and there's no such thing as originality. Every human artist draws inspiration from their visual and emotional experiences, copyrighted or otherwise, how is this different? If I watch Star Wars and then make a space opera film that's aesthetically similar to Star Wars, that's not copyright laundering, it's inspiration! Same principle applies here.
See also films outside of established properties--which, of course, is why you end up with the Marvel and Star Wars universes.
well, you never know how something you do today could be useful tomorrow, a la first star wars movie...
anyway, motto in our house is "it seemed like a good idea at the time", and if it did, it probably was, or at least best choice you knew to make.
"Don't look back in anger"- Oasis.
I recall seeing something similar a while back, you'd traceroute to some IP address and the output was the opening text of a star wars movie https://www.theregister.com/2013/02/15/star_wars_traceroute/
I've got a long set of thoughts on all of this.
I come from the position that AI cannot be like human intelligence. I don't believe it can function like a human being, I don't believe it's actually intelligent, just a more complex machine. We can go into whether people are just complex machines and all that, but I don't really want to.
I always thought that human generated art would have some quality that machine generated art could not, and perhaps that's true but there reaches a point where the average person cannot distinguish them. My girlfriend showed me an AI art generator on Discord called midjourney (referenced in the article I believe) and I was blown away. I've seen pictures I'd hang in my wall generated by the thing.
How long before the vast majority of paintings, drawings and the like that people enjoy are generated by machines? What about music? Then, without human input at all? Then even without human curation? It's a neural net model after all, can't it be trained on its successes and keep spitting out wonderful art pieces?
What about movies? Look at the Marvel movies, Star Wars, they're mostly CGI. At what point do we stop needing people to make them? At what point do we stop needing actors?
Video games... It's beginning to look like any form of artistic content can be generated by machines, and be very, very good, and by good I mean pleasant to people who interact with them. Eventually these things will be better than anything a human can make, if our yardstick is how much people like them and how many. And there will be a near endless supply. Imagine every person you know having absolutely unique pieces of absolutely gorgeous art that cost them absolutely nothing. Imagine a thousand top notch feature films a week being released for peanuts.
And what sort of information environment are our minds swimming in in a world like this? What effect do all these things have on us? We see how algorithms ranking content available to us causes massive behavioral changes throughout our societies (the most off cited being political polarization), what happens when the content itself is generated by machines?
Anime is a very broad genre, aiming at small kids, teenager to young adults; and since some decades more and more also older adults. Ghibli for example is more family-orientated than just children. So it highly depends on which anime you enjoy and for what reasons, and what you make of it. Comparable here are Harry Potter-, Marvel- or Star Wars-Movies. Nobody would say liking these makes you unattractive, but most people would also not say it makes you attractive (fans of those franchises/genre are the obvious exception).
The actual thing is, you probably got it the wrong way. Not anime makes you unattractive, the lack of anything attractive makes you unattractive.
Star Wars and Lord of the Rings are one of the few movie series that truly have an "epic" feeling of an "saga", a "greater than life" adventure.
Another example for me is the anime Legend Of the Galactic Heroes.
Does anyone know of any good additional articles that explore these topics of what makes for these good "saga" feeling?
For Netflix, I know what he means, but the article has a hard time describing it. It's kinda like you know what a tiktok video looks like, even when the logo is absent.
But here is a better phenomenon. Star wars tv series are all shot in a circular room. Everything is arranged in a virtual circle even when they are outdoors. When you see it, you can't unsee it.
Ps: having a hard time finding images from the shows. But here is the set.
[1] https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/forging-new-paths-for-filmmakers-on-the-mandalorian
[2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bErPsq5kPzE
Ah, yeah, SG-1 is a good example. The 100 is another (post-apocalyptic earth). And Battlestar Galatica.
In retrospect I realized I grew up with a few major styles, including "shot in a back lot in LA" (Back to the Future), "shot on a ranch outside LA" (Little House on the Prairie), "movie set in city actually shot in city by director who loved the city" (the Conversation), and "shot at Elmstree" (Star Wars interiors).
Ultimately I want to watch a movie where I can't tell what forest it was shot it, especially if it's off-planet.
Every single Star Wars movie was always like that
I am also curious how this period in movies will hold over time. Older movies with more practical effects (such as Star Wars) still have a very crisp look to them while newer movies look blurry and bloomy due to the heavy post processing.
They are two different governments. If I wrote a negative review for the movie "Argo" would you reply "Imagine if this review was about Star Wars"
Uh, i already felt like star wars is slowly starting for real. I am not into (pop) sci-fi movies, but i‘m up for some sci-no.
Going to disagree on Star Wars. The prequels at least had a somewhat coherent story line (aside from the great Darth Jar Jar conspiracy) and artistic direction, the new sequels are... just WTF? It's still blowing my mind what went wrong there. It seems like they didn't have any sort of plan beforehand and just went with whatever they came up with, completely ditching decades of Expanded Universe lore.
In contrast, the MCU is the perfect execution of "how to make a movie out of a boatload of source material". IMHO, them sticking to the lore well enough that the die-hard nerds don't have much to whine was the key decision that made the MCU what it is... but now that the MCU has gotten so absurdly large, it's going to be interesting if they can keep up with that attention to detail.
> You pretty much cannot get the theatrical release of the star wars episode 4. I think the best we have are the laser disc rips.
There is the "Silver screen edition" of Star Wars (first of the first, even before it got the "Episode IV"), but it only happened due to enormous efforts of fans who got an original print that should have been destroyed, digitized it with a homebrew machine, and painstakingly restored it frame by frame. That's a really fascinating story.
At least with TV shows this isn't a problem. Everything is dumped on day 0 so the original releases are preserved. It wouldn't surprise me if there are hundreds of thousands of copies of the original releases floating out there due to torrents.
It was actually a much bigger issue in the past. You pretty much cannot get the theatrical release of the star wars episode 4. I think the best we have are the laser disc rips. To me, that's a a bigger "memory hole", happening way before big tech.
There are claims this is untrue but even if it’s true it’sa non-story and nothing new. Famously there’s Star Wars (as the article mentions) but there are plenty of others.
TV shows and movies have removed episodes from circulation (eg Seinfeld), removed scenes (eg 13 Reasons Why), added scenes (pick any Director’s Cut), enhanced scenes, enhanced or changed audio, etc.
Content as originally published isn’t untouchable. It’s only really a problem when the changes are bad. I mean fans of Star Wars have been clamoring for a release of the original theatrical version for 25+ years in large part because the changes are worse.
The article even mentions Star Wars and George Lucas, something that happened 20 years ago, yet pretends this is the start of a dangerous trend. Cause it's TV (or streaming) instead of a movie / home video release I guess?
It invented a lot of common cliches and tropes that are frequently used in other movies so in many ways it's a victim of its own success. For example in Star Wars the planet of Tatooine is Casablanca and the Cantina is Rick's Cafe.
Too much exposure. I'm thinking instead about a dozen more young Sean Connery 007 movies, ten more young Harrison Ford Indiana Jones and Star Wars movies, etc. diluted in the next 30 years. Replace with any other star and repeat for the next century. I guess that copyright could be extended to faces and the usual 75 years after the death of the actor. Studios will take care of that.
some people just care about their work more than money.
Now imagine that the whole star wars franchising made more money by selling merchandise than everything else combined.
That's why new movies and shows are being produced ever more often: to sell toys and merch.
And that's also why the quality and the creativity went down compared to the original movies.
There's a price to pay when you start thinking your business is not the art itself anymore, but selling or licensing it.
I’ve always been a little skeptical of letting creators have so much control, because that’s how you end up with things like the Star Wars Special Editions or Jo Rowling claiming she should’ve killed off Ron so Harry and Hermione could get together. If enough time passes, creators can lose touch with what makes their work so special in the first place.
i don't follow this argument. the author claims that everyone should have a right to modify someones creations to their liking, but they criticize the original creators if they do that?
that seems kind of hypocritical to me. i am all for shortening the copyright, but that won't protect us from any star wars special editions.
we don't need a shortening of copyright to allow fan-fiction or even fan films. star trek is a good example of that. there are thousands of fan films out there. star trek creators have given explicit permission for these works, while other creators are much more restrictive, and it would be nice if what star trek fans are doing was actually explicitly allowed by copyright law. in other words, loosen the control a bit, without needing to abolish control completely.
Blockbuster carried the latest movies from all the studios. Everything newest and most desirable. They had a smattering of classics and art house and older genre films, but mostly it was about everything latest and greatest.
Netflix streaming seemed like that at first, but better! Now, they have a tiny slice of content. And as a content-producer, they seem willing to throw money at anything B-list.
Meanwhile, the studios became more risk averse as people started preferring to watch at home. Then theaters shut down and studios became more risk averse. And Netflix and Amazon arose and started playing studio games and studios became even more risk averse.
That trajectory of fear is mirrored in the content. The 1970s were known for directorial freedom and risk-taking. The 70s gave us Apocalypse Now, Taxi Driver, The Godfather, Star Wars, Animal House, Annie Hall, Rocky, Halloween, Smokey and the Bandit, Deliverance, MASH, and more - not all high art but all complete gems. Every decade since, we've seen a gradual progression toward samey-ness.
Like you said, Laserdisc was way better than either tape format. But if you watched it on a Trinitron television, you noticed all the same artifacts you have.
The best reason for owning a Laserdisc player in 2022 has decreased somewhat with the availability of the de-specialized versions of Star Wars. For decades that format was the only way to see the first 3 films as they were originally shown in the theater. Many thanks to the talented fans for putting the de-specialized versions together.
I'm wondering with the resurgence in popularity of the LP, and with media stores re-configuring their store fixtures to sell them, if we'll get Bluray films being distributed in the large 12" size with large photos and booklets.
The classics generally aren't as good. There are exceptions (e.g. Star Wars) but old films generally have terrible pacing. Film making skills have not stood still.
The only thing that hasn't got better is speech clarity which is often terrible in modern films.
It's not that Star Wars was the first movie to use science-fiction for mythological or religious themes but Star Wars is the first I know of famous for being inspired by Joseph Campbell. Joseph Campbell claimed all myths follow the same formula which he called the monomyth.
You look at the poster of Tron and it's Luke Skywalker imagined as a computer program with the pose and lightsaber glow from the Star Wars poster.
If you buy Joseph's Campbell's claims that all myth follows a formula then adventure film making is about casting a Luke Skywalker Monomyth figure in a difference setting (wild west setting, computer setting, crime ridden urban setting, samurai setting etc.) and just telling the same story over and over and claiming you are doing something spiritual.
I don't particularly buy that view of filmmaking but I see the director's comment about Shamanism in that context seeing as Tron seems to borrow a bit of inspiration from Star Wars.
I kind of like Tron but that statement from the director isn't something I buy.
There's no spirit world in Tron's plot- the plot is literally about a guy getting zapped into a machine. If it was the director's intent to depict a "spirit world" or "shaman" , he did a poor job of conveying it. Other movies like "Return to OZ" do a much better job of opening themselves up to non literal interpretations by having ambiguity between the "real" world and the "fantasy" world.
What I really get from Tron is it is basically Star Wars with "galaxy far far away" replaced with "CGI computer world". The Tron poster is heavily copied from this famous Star Wars poster:
https://www.starwars.com/news/7-things-you-didnt-know-about-the-original-star-wars-poster
Joseph Campbell's "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" influenced Star Wars. So calling your Hollywood formula "mythic" in some fashion was presumably fashionable on account of the success of Star Wars.
I kind of like Tron but the plot is very simple, and very literal. It doesn't really come to life the way Star Wars does, or open itself up to interpretation like more symbolic films.
If the director really wanted us to see the film as shamanic, he probably shouldn't have used such a clunky plot device as a laser beam that makes someone enter a computer.
I don’t agree with that. Having my grown up in that era there is t any shortage of content in popular culture that have smart or sentient AI:
- Asimov novels (as you’ve referenced yourself)
- 2001 (Hal)
- Star Wars (R2D2 & C3PO for example)
- Buck Rogers in the 25th C (Twiki & Theopolis)
- Battlestar Galactica (Cylons)
- Alien (Ash)
- Star Trek TOS (I forget the episode names but there’s a few with smart AI)
- Star Trek: The Motion Picture (V’Ger)
…All from either the same era as 2XL or before.
The problem with “AI” as a term is that it can mean multiple things (like “HD”, “smart”, etc) so it will be used and abused by whoever feels it might sell a few copies of something.
An example of this is computer games. AI has never been used to refer sentience but rather the programmed logic of a computer opponent.
Then you have AI in the research sense; which are the technologies another poster described.
You have AI in stories, TV and movies which are often depicted as human-like intelligence, complex reasoning, or even outright sentient.
It was never a term that had one definitive technical definition.
Now you do see researchers retrofitting different classifications of “AI” in a hope to clear up the confusion around the use of the term “AI”. But that’s a more recent (in comparison) development and certainly isn’t something the general populous are aware of.
This is why I actually own all our movies on Blu-ray. These days they are cheap online and locally (I averaged $6 per movie with the most common ones being cheapest and rare ones the most expensive - $8 for the entire original Star Wars trilogy in Good box condition, and players are $7 on average at Goodwill), they are easily ripped if that is your thing into 1080p streams that still look better in some circumstances than highly compressed 4K streams, and they can be resold later and never taken away.
Even though it cost quite a bit to get the collection - after you do the math of the cost of HBO Max, Netflix, Disney+, and [insert typical random streaming service here]... it might pay off in only a few years while retaining some resale value. It is also super fun to go bargain hunting - $2.99 for the first 4 Pirates of the Caribbean movies [literally, for me at a thrift shop]? Score!
Disney got Star Wars for 4B, Star Wars merch is pretty much one of the most iconic and most sought out merch out there, the movies with some exceptions have been financial hits, they have had some good video games on console/PCs and they also have some mobile games that I believe would be raking in the sweet lootcrate money, the theme park attractions no doubt attract many, the Mandalorian was a critical and commercially sucessful show, and it seems despite the dip in quality in their other live action shows, the viewership has only increased.
https://collider.com/obi-wan-kenobi-finale-audience-disney-plus/#:~:text=When%20Obi%2DWan%20Kenobi%20premiered,million%20to%20the%20top%20spot.
Yes, some of the best titles have none or just 1 top tier actor at the time: Star Wars (Alec Guinness), West World (Anthony Hopkins), Game of Thrones (Sean Bean), Breaking Bad, The Wire. I'm sure there's other's I can't remember.
Some directors prefer fresh actors for some movies. It s not necessarily a red flag, but it could be. Time will tell.
But then Star Wars was envisaged as a series of films and the sequels and prequels are part of a directly related story with overlapping characters and pacing, with the original creators around to give it their blessing and the occasional bit of creative input. Fans can overlook a lot of shoddiness to see C3PO again or how Darth became Darth. The forging of rings or founding of Rivendell, not so much, and I think the story of how Gollum became Gollum is off limits to the series too.
The Amazon LOTR proposal is basically some new fantasy stories set in a different millennium from the LOTR world which loosely tie in with some chronologies Tolkien wrote as lore rather than narrative, with a license which prevents them from reinterpreting events from the LOTR/Hobbit books from a Tolkien Estate that isn't exactly keen on giving the series canonical status. Instead of hobbits from the Shire and kingdoms of Rohan and Gondor under threat - all places that don't exist, never mind the characters - we've got a blank slate fantasy civilisations called Numenor and Eregion (which will resemble LOTR in the same way most high fantasy civilisations tend to) and a pretty loose narrative arc which implies the bad guy eventually destroying them.
The output might be very good stories in their own right, or it might be bland as hell, but the hardcore Tolkien fanbase is going to be hard to please. Create a series of episodes purporting to show the full history of the Second Age and it'll be [probably correctly] accused of being disjointed and completely lacking Tolkien's epic storytelling skill; create a compelling quest narrative involving dwarves and hobbits and it'll be accused of discarding Tolkien's actual histories in favour of a cheap knockoff of his plot structure.
I mean, a licensee could probably randomly choose a third rate LOTR fanfic plot and sell millions of tickets to watch it, but that doesn't necessary mean its a good idea from a creative standpoint.
It's a bit of a different story, right?
Hollywood live-action movies and animation have been mainstream entertainment in Japan for a very very very long time. It's almost so obvious and overt that it can be difficult to discuss. With movies like Terminator and Star Wars playing to packed theater audiences in Japan, it would be more of a story if a Japanese animator was somehow not influenced by such imported media!
It's quite a contrast to how anime infiltrated the minds of American artists. Anime (at least in original and uncut form) was far from mainstream. For decades it was traded peer-to-peer on VHS tapes and such. It was far from a given that any particular person knew about it. It was quite a niche interest even among geeks and artists.
(Not that I wouldn't love an article full of Japanese animators discussing the topic!)
Cremation, burial, they sound like you are assuming some colonization. Well, there won't be any colonization -- humans just can't hope to be in space very long without serious harm from low gravity and high energy cosmic rays.
You just are nearly totally missing just how hostile space is for humans. F'get the science fiction movies and TV shows, all of StarTrek, all of Star Wars, all of Armageddon, etc. and just look at the simple facts, e.g., low gravity, cosmic rays, the distances and energies involved, the lack of resources, etc.
Again, people on the moon or Mars will be in dangerous situations, and there will be a relatively high death rate. Due to the cold, the bodies will quickly freeze. Then in practice, due to the high cost in energy from any alternative, the frozen, dead bodies will be just piled up. There won't be any burials or cremations -- any such implies WAY more in colonization than is at all feasible in practice within the currently visible horizon.
All those artists' sketches of domes of settlements on the moon or Mars are just absurd, for now unscientific nonsense. In fact, now, for a human, any significant time on the moon or Mars or out in space is a death sentence from the medical problems caused by the time in low gravity and exposed to high energy cosmic rays. You seem to be having a just super hard time appreciating these simple, real facts and situations.
Beyond the horizon, assume some new sources of gravity, faster than light travel, warp drives, new sources of energy, etc., and maybe okay, but for now all that is not at all about reality but only fantasy.
Since there won't be any colonization and since the humans won't be very productive, the projects of the moon or Mars bases will be over quickly, and then the observation will be that a huge pile of money killed some people and created some plainly visible on the surfaces piles of frozen dead bodies, and little of any value.
So, the whole effort of humans on the moon or Mars will be seen as just piles of frozen dead bodies as evidence of human folly and will be offensive ethically, morally, politically, etc. and, thus, embarrassing, as I first stated.
Solution: As in the current Mars robots, have some clear scientific objectives, develop some good instruments, and fire the rockets. Develop the robots along with the instruments so that it will be easy for the robots to work with the instruments. If we can have self-driving cars on some city streets, then we should be able to develop some robots effective in space.
How would that work? From earth, send some orders for some work we know the robots are able to do. Then the robot executes as ordered, keeps records, and, within a few hours, sends back the records.
Net, for now and all the way to as far as we can see to a horizon, there is just no significant role for humans in space. Robots? Yes. Humans? No.
In simple, blunt terms, for any human to attempt to do anything significantly productive in space is, from the medical effects of low gravity and cosmic rays, just a death sentence. Sorry 'bout that.
I'm surprised the HN audience won't jump on the opportunity to have a big push in the associated robotics, automation, artificial intelligence, etc.
I agree there's nothing ridiculous about reading lines from Star Wars in class. I never had that in class but I remember English classes where we'd read parts of the script of other TV shows (an episode of Party of Five, I seem to recall) and I know some Star Trek episodes were used in that way even decades ago.
> Imagine if we forced children to experience Star Wars as a screenplay, read aloud in class? It’s ridiculous.
Wait, is that ridiculous? I honestly think it's beneficial to let young students get a better sense of how all the media they consume is actually created. Seeing how a screen play differs from a film, discussing how subtle changes in reading a line might influence the interpretation of a scene, understanding the nature of improvisation and just knowing where movies come from sounds like it would be both very interesting and very educational.
The equivalent for video games would be understanding how a PC works and walking through some of the actual code that goes into making a game, maybe building a simple mod. I imagine that would also be a useful class and enjoyed by quite a few HS students.
Lovely, but kind of an overwrought interface for what can be found in other places also completely and freely.
Also hot take: we need to stop making kids read Shakespeare in School.
Shakespeare wrote plays. They were meant to be heard and seen. Filled with drama and comedy (lots of poop and sex jokes). Imagine if we forced children to experience Star Wars as a screenplay, read aloud in class? It’s ridiculous.
The plays themselves had a runtime of approximately only 2.5 - 3 hours. No need to stretch out Romeo and Juliet for weeks reading through passage by painful passage. Let them watch the movie version and then discuss certain parts or re-enact it themselves. Shakespeare was entertainment. And we now treat him like some kind of biblical text. It’s crazy!
edit: and to reinforce that last point, Shakespeare was put his plays in the Globe theater, across the River Thames, which at the time was not considered London proper. He was also not a court playwright and considered at best, midbrow. The “high art” playwright of the time who did play in London proper was Ben Johnson.
There is even a theory that Shakespeare was Ben Johnson’s secret identity so he could write freely away from the stuffy conventions of high society and the court. Like, Shakespeare was not high art. We must stop treating him that way and kill the love of literature in children by forcing them dryly read “To be or not to be.”
Blade Runner is one of those movies that are remembered more for introducing interesting questions and world-building than presenting a truly engaging and highly efficient narrative.
Like Star Wars and Robocop, it is not flawless and hardly a masterpiece. But, like the above, it also has a significant place in the history of film.
This article get Star Trek, barely right.
First of all, they're based on the Horatio Hornblower novels-- they're basically those in space.
Second of all, Star Trek, the core before it lost its way (Enterprise and anything after it) is about aging. Either intentionally or unintentionally.
TOS, and TNG, both have a space alien telling humanity to stay home. In "The Cage" which is literally called The Cage (metaphor for not advancing), the telepathic aliens warn humanity about the dangers of space, while sheltering (parenting) a disfigured human woman. In my theory, this is the adolescent humanity.
In TNG, literally, a race called the Q warns humanity to stay home, we defy him and suffer through our teenage years straining against a well meaning but no longer welcome parental figure.
DS9 and Voyager, to me doubly so since they ran concurrently, are about middle to late age. DS9 a younger middle age where you're still in your prime but you have children now you have to think about and there are hard decisions to be made.
Voyager, because it starts with literally, "The Caretaker" dying (parents) and deals mostly with spirituality and ethics, and in my theory is placed later in life.
*This is my theory and my theory alone. I will take all shit :-)
So what's wrong with the new Star Trek? It's not liberalism, it's not lack of liberalism it's the same thing wrong with Star Wars and a lot of other entertainment out there-- its not GOOD.
The entertainment industry has lost and idea of subtlety or complexity. If TNG offered me loving viewpoints that were beyond their time ad now and then preachy (the trans episode for instance--where Riker falls for an alien who doesn't have a clear sex)... things like Discovery and Brave New Worlds just bludgeon you with bullshit, and then when you don't like the mess they're serving you-- they blame you for that.
I'd point to the Captain America debacle as the exemplar of this-- Brie Larson tells everyone the movie is for little girls (this was a deeply narcissistic, cynical and most of all dishonest viewpoint) and literally said she didn't care what 40 year old men thought about her movie and it "wasn't for them." Then she demonizes the same demographic for not showing up to see the movie she told them not to see.
We're in a weird growing-pains stages of society. I am a card carrying, Bernie Sanders progressive, and I can't tolerate most of this bullshit.
Even without leaving Scott, Alien seems to have been at least as visually influential as Blade Runner. Plus of course Star Wars and Star Trek...
Blade Runner is fairly distinctive even today (outside of Cyberpunk, most other post-82 sci fi that I can think of is definitely more influenced by other things) which IMO is a sign that it isn't as universally influential as other 70s/80s sci-fi films.
Off the top of my head, do any of BSG, Babylon 5, Mass Effect, Jurassic Park, Inception, Terminator, The Expanse, Interstellar, Independence Day, or The Matrix have particularly strong ties to Blade Runner's aesthetic compared to their ties to other early film sci-fi?
That's very closed minded of you to say that. Because I never said this.
Probably a better way to put it is this. If you like Blade Runner AND the MCU, or at least understand why from a mainstream perspective the MCU is a work of art that stands on the same level as blade runner, then I don't despise you.
If you like Blade runner and you hate all forms of movies that are mainstream blockbusters like star wars, MCU, or all the other stuff and think those things are beneath you... then yes... in that case I despise you. I actually think you don't have the sophistication to see why mainstream cinema is just as great if not often greater then the obscure stuff.
It's easy to hate the mainstream. It's enlightenment to like the mainstream after hating it. Those elitest people are just at level 2. They don't realize there's a third level that brings you back full circle.
I would know I watched hundreds and hundreds of movies. More then your average person and I started at a very young age.
Me too, I can almost quote the movie.
But I wouldn't call it 'great'. A great movie has some weight to it, it establishes a world, has a deeper story. It's original and exceptionally well executed.
Spaceballs was great fun, good gags but it was still a parody lifting on the success of star wars. Without star wars it would not have been very funny at all.
Fun and entertaining and great are not necessarily the same IMO.
That's a fair assessment. I like them, I don't like the mythology of star wars movies. And not even the originals, people actually think the prequels are some misunderstood masterpieces...
I agree, and Blade Runner is very dated (80s fashion and music). Alien on the other hand hasn’t aged a bit, and along 2001 and Star Wars really defined scifi movies. The same guy reinvented peplums with Gladiator, and war movies with Black Hawk Down. I think it’s enough to justify all the misses.
You can download IMDB’s database as flat files. It is interesting to see the evolution of imdb ratings over a director’s career. Some are remarkably stable like Woody Allen or Martin Scorsese. Some others falter like Brian de Palma. Ridley Scott has some ups and down but is fairly stable over a long career.
> The originals are good movies but only empire is truly great and even then it's just a good flick. It asks almost no questions of the audience.
Star Wars (as in, "Episode IV: A New Hope") gets a lot of points on the greatness scale for basically inventing the multi-genre pastiche film, and for being a pretty good example of the practice. Empire's a better movie in a lot of ways, but less ground-breaking as far as the storytelling goes.
But yeah, no Star Wars films are high art. The first two, especially, though, get a lot of basic stuff right and have fairly straightforward plots, so they make for excellent examples for illustrating many of aspects of film story-telling: mood, plotting, characterization, foreshadowing, setup/payoff in general, et c.
What is star wars actually about though.
There's probably no blade runner without star wars but it's just childish/shallow if you don't buy into George Lucas.
The originals are good movies but only empire is truly great and even then it's just a good flick. It asks almost no questions of the audience.
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.
People keep showing up to spend a billion dollars at the box office for Star Wars movies. Internet discourse isn’t necessarily a good indicator for the success of mainstream movies.
> Derivative works don't change the originals.
Often repeated as a mantra, but do they actually not?
Classic example: The plummeting of the rewatchability of Game of Thrones Seasons 1-4. Also, Star Wars.
Don't people argue that basically all Star Wars movies and recuts post-1983 have basically just served to dilute the brand? I guess it's a bit more murky when you start arguing about the whole expanded universe of novels, video games, TV shows, theme park attractions, and whatever else.
But it does feel different when you invite new creators to step up to the plate and create new chapters in a story and then explicitly elevate those new chapters to the same level of canon as the original. This could even be said to apply to Lucas and the prequel trilogy, since Lucas did not direct Empire or Jedi, so the prequels were being made essentially be a completely different team than the originals (other than him).
All that to say— this could be done, but it would be really important to manage the branding of it. It's not an "LOTR sequel", it's "LOTR Legends — new stories set in Tolkien's beloved world", with the clear implication that canon 0 is LOTR, canon 1 is the Christopher Tolkien-edited works like the Silmarillion, and the "Legends" are canon 2. Anything not associated with the estate is canon 3, and the movies, video games, and TV show are not canon at all.
The issue isn't sample size (nor many of the other things people are pointing out).
First off we're ultimately talking about ordinal data here and even the Evan Miller post in another comment misses that ordinal data is fundamentally tricky. Everyone is talking about the p("most loved") but that makes assumptions that "most loved" has a consistent meaning.
The problem with ordinal data is that the only thing that's known about it is an ordering of the values, but the distance between values is undefined. That is the difference between a 5 star and a 4 star review is not necessarily that same a between a 2 and 1 star review. This means that you can't meaningfully average these.
However there is an even bigger problem, which is what I think parent is feeling here, and that is selection bias. It's very hard to compare the average rating of a film such as Star Wars and a film like Cannibal Holocaust. The first is a general audience film and the later is an extremely niche subset of gore horror. If you show Cannibal Holocaust to the general population it will receive wildly lower rating than Star Wars. However if you were to do a survey of all people who have a DVD of Star Wars and a DVD of Cannibal Holocaust, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Cannibal Holocaust was more loved. There are plenty of people that have Star Wars on their shelf and feel 'meh' about it, but almost no one who owns Cannibal Holocaust on DVD that doesn't feel like it is an essential horror classic.
The annoying truth is, there's really no statistical way to solve this. There are some solutions to better modeling ordinal data (you could for example, transform this problem into an ordinal regression problem). But ultimately "loved" is not really a measurable thing, so we're always looking for imperfect proxies.
Not just TV shows, but movies too. I saw Star Wars in the theater. I didn’t see it again (there was no way to see it again) until years later when it was shown on TV.
Classic movie music seems to be doing well - like the Star Wars music, and the Lord of the Rings music. The Game of Thrones theme music is very good, too.
What I complain about is the decline of the trumpet. Modern music has completely abandoned it in favor of terrible synthesized horns.
If you want to hear how incredibly good horn playing can be, Maurice Andre and Herb Alpert's horn playing are just sublime.
Chicago was a horn band, and I like their tunes, but the horn skill was rather pedestrian.
I completely disagree. I think these are taking it a step further than your examples. Dalle2 is not just using the existing Kermit and pasting it in different environments, it's modifying Kermit to fit in that world.
For example, your Star Wars example...
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/6MebZx-4950/maxresdefault.jpg
It's clearly just an existing photo of Kermit pasted over an image from the film. There are even two sets of arms. I could Photoshop that in a few minutes.
Then, the Dalle2 image...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FUEDDm2UEAAO8yb?format=jpg&name=small
I think it's impressive. It looks like Kermit is a character in the Star Wars universe. There are a few issues with the eyes and feet, and it's also hard to tell if it's a creature or a person in a frog suit. However, it gets 90% of the way there, and the pose is great for a frog/human hybrid.
The most exciting thing is how this could be used as a starting point for design. I could take the Dalle2 Kermit image above, fix the eyes/feet, add a few distinctive Kermit features, and have a great piece of concept art in an hour, rather than taking a day or two to create something from scratch. Obviously it can't be applied to all workflows, but for those it's suited for, it'll save vast amounts of time and costs. For that reason, it's already something of real value in its current state. The same can't be said about the Star Wars examples you provided.
Our EV (a Hyundai Ioniq 5) emits an artifical sound, presumably to warn pedestrians, which I find interesting.
It's an attention grabbing electronic hum, swelling, but not overtly threatening. Sounds something like a well tuned very resonant transformer. It's also not too annoying to the car owner. I'd love to know the backstory of how these sounds are created and what sort of testing goes into it.
On the same note, the light saber noise from Star Wars was allegedly inspired by an idle video projector.
“Immediately something went off in my mind and I had a feeling for what they would sound like,” Burtt said. “In the booth where we projected the films, those projectors made a hum…the motors would sit there with this magical, mysterious humming sound… I thought ‘that’s probably what a lightsaber would sound like.’”
The top grossing films of the 1970s? The original Star Wars, Jaws, The Exorcist, Alien, The Godfather? Rocky 2 and Jaws 2 are also on the list so it's not like there weren't any sequels at all, but that group of films really _wasn't_ dominated by remakes and franchise films:
https://www.imdb.com/list/ls026560159/
By comparison, entries for the 2010s include MCU franchise films, Star Wars Sequels, Jurassic World (a sequel), The Lion King (Remake), etc:
https://www.imdb.com/list/ls026040906/
Going year-by-year doesn't really change things very much: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films#High-grossing_films_by_year
A space trading and combat game (like Elite or Wing Commander: Privateer), but set in the Star Wars galaxy. An addition thing you can do is search for new hyperspace lanes.
The same thing, but in the setting of The Expanse books and TV series.
As a child, I remember telnetting into an instance of blinkenlights to watch a fairly faithful ASCII rendition of Star Wars Episode IV. I never really looked into what sort of software blinkenlights was. Very interesting!
If I recall correctly, the command was: "Telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl"
I wonder if its still active.
I don't know that I necessarily agree with this, some of the more mature shows are also simultaneously their most popular offerings. (Squid game, black mirror, the Witcher, etc.)
And I for one am glad when a show is rated TV-MA because it means that they can be more authentic and unfettered in terms of the vision for the show instead of watering it down to appeal to a broader demographic. "Television is for families" is purely your subjective anecdotal experience. There is a reason the expression is "Netflix and chill", not "Disney and chill".
Conversely, if you're not interested in yet another marvel show or movie, Star Wars or old animated movies, Disney+ is a desert.
> US-unfriendly countries have no leverage over it
"Star Wars Episode 10: The one that's not fiction."
And my point is that over the last 20 years or so, I found myself spending a lot of time wishing there was more cyberpunk content out there.
Also I'm pretty sure Star Wars and Star Trek were as big, if not bigger.
Yes, The Matrix had a huge impact -- I was there for it. But that was as much about the revolution in VFX and cool shots than it was about having a cyberpunk setting. Besides, all of the followups (save for the Animatrix) have been duds.
CP2077 came to be because CDPR likes to take unknown franchises and elevate them to greatness; this is true for both The Witcher polish novels and the Cyberpunk TTRPG. While I think the demand for cyberpunk is certainly there, as evidenced by the folks' enthusiastic support for CP2077, I would not consider cyberpunk to be the dominant force in sci-fi. (The lukewarm reception for both the modern Blade Runner remake and the new Matrix confirm this opinion for me) I would suggest you consider your thoughts in a wider context.
> two most inflential sci fi movies of all time
Can you qualify this statement a bit more? I don't really agree here. The Matrix doesn't even appear in this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films and the numbers here aren't worthy of the kind of praise you're heaping on it: https://www.the-numbers.com/movies/franchise/Matrix#tab=summary
It wasn't even the highest grossing film the year it came out, as it was eclipsed by Star Wars: Episode 1.
Quality is subjective. What you presumably mean is "fewer, but more expensive" originals.
You have to remember that a lot of cheap TV makes money. Sure, not many people may watch it, but that doesn't matter if it's cheap enough to make. That's the premise of a lot of the terrible reality TV you see.
The same principle applies to movies. The ideal film isn't another Star Wars or Avatar; it's the Blair Witch Project. It cost tens of thousands to make, but grossed almost $250 million globally.
You may notice that Netflix has a bunch of zombie movies and things. Horror films are generally cheap to make, and horror fans are a reliable audience.
> A shift in the competitive landscape might encourage distributors to integrate better with aggregators or meta-interfaces of various sorts. Or directly with one another, in some fashion.
That's a big "might" there, isn't it equally possible that eventually distribution will converge on a single platform? It's much easier for that kind of thing to happen with streaming than with, say, theaters.
> I think the strongest argument in favor of the current arrangement is that monopolies yield rents, which (might!) mean more money for production.
But there is no monopoly right now. I don't think you can slice an industry as thinly as "Star Wars TV shows" and say Disney has a monopoly there. Disney does not have a monopoly in the streaming market, no-one does. They have a monopoly in the same way Walmart has a monopoly on Walmart brand toothpaste, I guess.
At most you can say it's an oligopoly, which I somewhat agree with and yes, it seems like it could be improved.
> However, I think in a world where no production companies could own streaming platforms, production companies would probably... you know, still produce lots of content, since selling content would be their main way of making money, and you can't sell what you don't have.
If the government bans production companies from distributing their shows, mandating middle men and lower profit margins for the producers, that decreases the incentive to spend as much on production. And it's not clear that forcing a distribution middleman into the transaction is going to lower prices. After all, when Netflix raised prices, people left despite Netflix's "monopoly" on Netflix Original content.
Either of us could be right, it would be great if we could find some data, or some example from another industry to get a clearer picture.
I think people object to the bad faith with which these actions are done:
- sharply criticizing the US on race, but hiding black characters in Chinese movie posters (eg, Star Wars)
- sharply criticizing the US on sexuality, but removing gay scenes from Chinese and ME versions (eg, Harry Potter)
To me, it’s like men who beat their wife because they’re angry someone at the bar was rude — but are too cowardly to confront him, so they take out that aggression at home.
Similarly, movie companies aren’t standing up to real bigotry in China or the ME — they’re coming home to abuse us domestically, over things we don’t even do.
I think that abuser mentality is abundant among the “Wokerati”.
Roughly, people who liked movies you liked, also liked that movie.
If you like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, but you haven't seen Ghostbusters, and 94% of people who have seen all three movies and liked the first two also liked Ghostbusters, then it's 94% likely that you'll also like Ghostbusters.
I'm sure it's much more complicated and nuanced, but that's the general idea.
> competition is worse for consumers in some respects here
The implicit assumption here is that without competition, we'd have all (or most) of the same shows, just on a single service.
I don't think that's true. I think competition between streaming services largely on the basis of original content has produced a lot of good shows that we wouldn't have seen otherwise. It seems to me like there's a lot more variety in things to watch these days, and it's not like I have to pay for every streaming service every month...
Would all of the Star Wars content on Disney+ even have been made if Disney couldn't put it on Disney+, for example? Netflix has started and cancelled a ton of original series, but would they have even been tried at all back when cable TV was king? I don't know, maybe there are some statistics on the variety of TV shows being watched and I'm wrong, but I can't find them.
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It was definitely a shared mythology (meaning both the East&West) but it's true that its "force of attraction" (for lack of a better expression) has somewhat faded in the last 15-20 years, I'd say the 1980s was the pinnacle of it all.
We don't have Star Wars-like movie phenomenons about computers and vaccines, and we especially don't have music like this [1] that would make us dream about computers the same way it makes us dream about space.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMoCM_FgLP8
Later edit: I'll just blatantly copy-paste a high-voted comment from that YT link which better explains it:
"""
I was born in the USSR, and in the 80s we thought about space, other planets, stars. We read good science fiction. We dreamed of participating in all this. We wanted to be pilots, build rockets, explore space. We listened to news about cosmonauts, without distinction of Soviet or American. We thought that space was a place for cooperation of all mankind. We wanted peace and development.
But, everything collapsed in one moment. Now children do not want to go into space. They don't want to be like Gagarin or Armstrong. They want to be like Kardashian or Deripaska. This is a tragedy for many of us.
And this music is just a reminder of what we have lost.
"""
My first impression was the same, but later I came to the conclusion that it was just way more deep.
The first star wars was glorifying rebellious david against goliath setting and fun adventures. A young nobody becomes a hero for the good side. People identified with luke skywalker.
The later was way more about politics, intrigues and corruption of power. Not a bad story, but much more heavy (and depressing). A young nobody becomes a dark lord. Identifying with a dark lord? A bit harder.
(And the disney movies try to be simple again, but are too shallow for my taste, but are well shot)
> I really dislike the fan mob that it's starting the hate because RTMI is not going to be a throwback and retro-game.
That is the same blow-back that George Lucas caught when he made the Star Wars prequels. When George Lucas made the original Star Wars he set out to make a state-of-art sci-fi movie, and in fact he pushed the state-of-art ahead by a huge leap in that movie. A decade or two later, with the evolution of cinema effects, the original trilogy stopped being seen as state-of-art, but kept its cultural influence now under a new lens, it started being seen as a type of retro-futurism. So when George Lucas set out to make the prequels, he again intended to make state-of-art sci-fi movies*, as is his right, and as he should, but many of the fans instead wanted the new trilogy to match the retro-futurism feel they now assigned to the original ones, hence the many complaints at the time.
Interestingly enough, later when Disney made the sequels they went the other way completely, and bet heavily on the retro-futurism feel (down even to the story arcs), so they got blow-back from the fans that instead wanted a state-of-art sci-fi.
* If he achieved that state-of-art goal is debatable, my personal opinion he did, but just barely, failing to leap forward like the original did on its time, so they do feel a bit like "generic late 90s/early 00s sci-fi".*
The paper complains that some of the answers are not perfect but half the humans I know would have gotten them wrong… (thinking about the octopus one). I just find this technology fascinating. Imagine once you can extend this to video (“Star wars but the Jedis are the bad guys”, “breaking bad but an 80s sitcom” … Netflix should be investing in this…)
>Do you mean female lead characters, or female leadership on the movie project itself?
Female leadership on movie projects isn't an issue. Female lead characters aren't an issue. I think girl-boss is a type of narrative in a film where they write unlikeable women that don't register as real people for the purpose of creating "powerful" female characters that aren't interesting or successful.
Examples - Rey/Admiral Holdo/ from Disney Star Wars, Wonder Woman 1984, Captain Marvel, the female terminator reboot, the female ghostbusters reboot, the ocean's 8 female reboot, etc etc etc
I fully expect the newest Thor movie with new female thor to be another girl-boss film, and from the trailer same thing with the upcoming Miss Marvel movie. The new Indiana Jones movie is at risk since it seems to be about Indy passing the torch to a young woman and Kathleen Kennedy is involved - we've seen her record on star wars. We'll see if any of that happens.
>Apart from that, I'm not sure Disney really cares about social policies themselves one way or another. I think it's much more mercenary than that
I disagree. The leadership and many of the creatives in Disney are the people who want to push particular political opinions on to other people.
https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1508912865293619202
>Unfortunately for Disney, a different part of their audience doesn't want to see them take a stand on issues. Or if they do, that it should be a different stand. Disney is finding out right now that it simply can't satisfy everybody.
Disney thought there was nothing anyone could do about it - since they're a private company and they can do what they want. They forgot the government they were picking a fight with also had the ability to take back privileges disney had that allowed them to be their own government in their district.
They don't need to satisfy everyone, but they want to be political activists with a direct line to your kids eyes and ears in your home. Disney is a platform for their politics.
It's almost that legacy industries actually do know things disruptors don't, and sometimes these things can come back at the disruptors. Like the way episodes of TV series used to be aired, weekly with defined timeslots. We went from that to making whole seasons available at once, and now back to weekly airings without a fixed timeslot for blockbuster series like everything Star Wars or Picard. It's almost like broadcasters had reason to air episodes weekly.
There is actually a functional purpose to futuristic UIs in film which is to help drive the story. For example, in Star Trek if a ship is damaged the UI will go red and start flashing to help convey to the audience that something really bad happened. One of the newer Star Wars movie did something similar to show an entire fleet of ships being wiped out.
> I feel there are plenty of good shows on Netflix.
Not sure who else feels this but for me:
There's a lack of "regular tv shows". I knew it was over when they got rid of The Office, that was pretty much the only reason I kept Netflix.
HBO Max, Disney Plus, Prime Video, AMC (temporary) all have the shows we regularly go to. Sopranos/Frasier, Simpsons/Star Wars/National Geography, The Office/Friends, Breaking Bad/Better call Saul (just need to see how it all ends).
Heck even Prime managed to bag many of the shows that used to be on Netflix. Aliens, Tora Tora Tora and even Independence Day is on Disney Plus. Lot of movies outside Netflix.
Netflix just has these one off good shows that frankly doesn't attract across the demographic. Sure there's something for everyone but its lacking those "must have and easy to access binge reruns".
There was a time where each month showed something new…ICQ, Pointcast, CuSeeMe…there was lots of new things to play with. Now, there’s still amazing new things, they’re just harder to pull out (I can now use AI to make a title in a video follow my head around. That’s pretty amazing)
There’s also 4 Star Trek pipelines, 5 Marvel pipelines, 3 Star Wars Pipelines and all movies of a certain range have been completely wrapped up in rental fees.
More and more people are all doing more and more at the same time, and very little of it is really new.
This could be useful to reduce Disney’s bandwidth costs. Marvel and Star Wars productions are highly repetitive anyway, so maybe they could ship a preloaded Marvel neural network in the player app and design new movies to take maximum advantage of the clichés already encoded there.
Of course. The value of this (as in any RPG set in a universe based on an existing property) is that the rule book and supplements will provide lots of additional background for the universe that wasn't already defined. I remember playing the West End Games Star Wars RPG in the 1990s before the prequels and I loved how the books expanded upon that universe beyond the original three movies.
To me I think it's the opposite -- the fact that Neuromancer's technology isn't just a version of what we have makes is what makes it timeless. Kind of how Star Wars tech from 1977 seems less dated than in most SF movies because it wasn't based on real tech. Snow Crash is so obviously just 1992 technology with a coat of paint -- Stephenson obviously played MUDs and that's all his virtual world is -- a MUD. And so it hasn't aged well as MUDs weren't the future.
To my youngest son (born in 1994), The Phantom Menace was his favorite Star Wars movie for years. Many of our feelings about "the best" of something depends on how it coincides with our formative years. For me the original Star Wars was highly influential(I saw it on its first run, between junior and senior year in college), but the most formative science fiction movie for me was 2001: A Space Odyssey (seen on first run in a Cinerama theater).
(My son has evolved somewhat in his view of Star Wars films. I'm just glad his older brother didn't regard The Barney Movie t00 highly.)
> Can you elaborate a little about what you thought the public wanted, and what you found they actually want?
Sure I'll give it a shot, its over a decade ago now and I'm getting old at this. It was circa 2010 IIRC, and we had a a bunch of trailblazers, one Last.fm founder, a Second Life veteran, a top girl from Eve Online, me (procedural audio), and a vision for the delivery of "interactive" pop music - at the point of delivery, using loads of synthesis, but crucially using all the sensors to shape the music. So each "Reactive music" (coined by Michael Breidenbruecker) piece basically used the gyro, temperature, time of day, microphone, light levels and all that jazz... to create parameters for the music. We pioneered all kinds of stuff, like music that adapts to your running speed, driving, location (through GPS or other context awareness), sounds in the environment etcetera. I put a lot into the DSP and philosophy of "deferred form" as an artistic concept.
What we thought people wanted was basically "co-creation". We moved legal mountains over licensing stems, derivative works, sharing of UGC by audiences... and working with artists/producers to "capture" their workflow, reduce it to a rule set and stuff it into a smartphone (which they really didn't like for the same good reasons Aboriginal Aussies have around photography).
<Skip really complex psychological and philosophical stuff about identity, identification, art, attribution and social participation>
What people _actually_ want is "definitive form" (deferred form only works in dietetic contexts like video games =- thus procedural audio is a thing, whereas reactive music is not - although Kent Jolly and the Spore guys almost proved that wrong, and games still seems the natural home of algorithmic music).
Put it this way... everyone likes the idea of a "write your own story" game - games have infinite outcomes depending on what the user (player) does. Deferred form works there. But you can't make that work with film. I don't want a Star Wars where each time I watch it I get surprised: maybe Darth Vader and Luke _do_ rule galaxy as father and son, or Luke does a paternity test and it turns out "You're NOT my father!".
I want a Star Wars where everything in the universe is as I remember and like it, so I can watch it over and get satisfaction. I want my psychological "noo-noo" to play with. That's how people listen to music, and ultimately it's what they want - even if they say they want interactive smartphone music. This is why market research is a waste of money unless you grok the culture. You can ask them. You can build it. And they still don't come.
(BTW, I think this may be first and only post-mortem of RJDJ)
It reminded me a bit of the Star Wars Special Edition fiasco - puttng 90's CGI into a 70's movie looked bad at the time and terrible now. The footage I saw of this gave me a similar mismatched feeling though I agree it's technically impressive.
Was born in 1973 and grew up in the Redwoods of Northern California, near what would eventually become Silicon Valley.
In that place and time, the 80's were mostly a very fun and exciting bunch of years to be a child, with the crazy hippie 60's/70's mentality of the adults crossing over into a new "cleaner" era of exploding fresh technology and intelligent comic vision.
Records became cassettes. Being able to record our own sounds and listen to music on mobile devices for the very first time was totally amazing. The first personal computers arrived, which were equally incredible, although quite mysterious and complex.
Atari 2600 and the video game revolution hit, with all of us hooking up our new joystick machines to parents big Zenith televisions, while dumping quarters into arcades.
The arrival of the VCR was a breakthrough in being able to watch movies at home, GOOD movies such as Star Wars, Breakfast Club, Blade Runner, Dark Crystal and countless other great films from the time, many of which we saw in theater.
Really cool new music was coming out regularly, from bands like Depeche Mode and Oingo Boingo. MTV arrived and was extremely bizarre and brilliant, at first.
The environment was less toxic and people were far less paranoid in general. We spent endless sunny days riding bikes, swimming in rivers, climbing trees, building forts, go-carts, and causing silly mischief, without any threat of watching cameras. We could make prank phone calls in the middle of the night without any worry about "Caller ID." ;)
We were afraid of the "nuclear war" propaganda constantly pouring out of the 3 mainstream TV channels (PBS was relaxing) and some young friends committed suicide. Yet, the Space Shuttle launches were inspiring and we felt that America was genuinely dedicated to freedom, democracy, and justice. This illusion was eventually crushed, for me.
The 80's officially died in a wave of hip-hop, rap, awful "butt rock," bad films, and a sudden appreciation for general stupidity. The inspiring momentum of what felt like a positive movement seemed to fall apart suddenly with corporate consolidation of media, commercialization of everything, and a darker, harsher, lifeless cultural attitude.
Been missing that bright 80's era, ever since.
Tarantino's whole thing goes back to Star Wars, which cribbed heavily from films from ~4 genres—sci-fi serials, samurai films, war (mainly WWII) films, and westerns. Its great innovation and enduring legacy in film isn't just its groundbreaking special effects, but the assembly of a film almost entirely from pastiche.
[EDIT] Incidentally, when later Star Wars media gets this fundamental aspect of Star Wars and leans into it, is when it's at its best IMO. You could practically play "spot the rip-off" with The Mandalorian, it borrowed so heavily from other film and TV—and, though perhaps overrated, it's certainly one of the best Star Wars things since the original trilogy. The Last Jedi stood out to me among the Disney-era films for doing a lot more cribbing from sources of the kind that Star Wars used, rather than cribbing just from... Star Wars itself (though it also did that, heavily re-mixing Empire, especially).
Talking about sound design and engineering: One of the best introductions to film sound design that I've found is the extra material found on the DVD for THX 1138, where Walter Murch talks about his work on the movie. Some of the work he did there was also used or reworked for Star Wars.
There are also some very interesting interviews of him on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIRX26iyyvc&list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzCodipONmNiROhYCUWyz_U&index=1
From Wikipedia:
> 1985: The original Star Wars film was re-released on VHS, LaserDisc, and Capacitance Electronic Disc (CED) with an improved audio mix. The LaserDisc and CED sped the film up by 3% to fit onto a single disc.[10][b]
> 1993: The original trilogy was released on LaserDisc as "The Definitive Collection". With the exception of a new THX audio mix, scratch and dirt removal, and color balance changes, it matched the original theatrical releases.[10]
> 1995: The original trilogy was re-released on VHS with THX audio, advertised as the final release of the theatrical versions.[12][13][14]
I'm guessing the '93 LaserDisc (like the '95 VHS) lacked those obvious matting artifacts on some of the space shots, but the '85 release still had them.
> In the future, media will move faster than copyright. I imagine telling a machine, "make me a new Star Wars film, but with dragons", and out streams the result.
That sounds like a dystopia of stagnation and solipsism. Imagine each person becoming a super-fan their own Marvel Cinematic Universe™ that's both utterly derivative and incapable of being a point of connection with others.
Except the very idea of a "franchise" will also come under attack when computers can develop narrative, character development, plot devices, world build, etc.
Nobody will want Star Wars when a computer can make Galaxy Dragons and turn it into an epic 100 episode saga. Like your Count Dooku memes? Wait until you hear about Lord Drago Starstream.
And if the concept of a computer developing all of this still seems as far off as "Level 5 autonomous driving", note that with media there will be lots of intermediate steps with humans still in the loop. Just give humans knobs and dials and a "reset" button. Plot the story on a graph, drag the nodes. Nobody dies with this. Human editors can control for quality. There's plenty of automation opportunity until computers become outright storytellers.
Disney and their IP war chest are gonna be toast.
> profit massively by selling them
You don't need copyright to sell them.
In the future, media will move faster than copyright. I imagine telling a machine, "make me a new Star Wars film, but with dragons", and out streams the result.
The future isn't going to fit our existing laws or paradigms very well. The laws were written for a different time with totally different expectations.
> Star Wars is suddenly not about defeating totalitarianism and tyranny,
It's a massive universe and there's been six movies about this theme already. Why retread old themes instead of trying something new? By the way, I am NOT defending the new trilogy - it is absolutely awful, but it's not awful BECAUSE it's about feminism and animal rights (also, it isn't, it's still about totalitarianism and tyranny).
> Batman become a medic rather than do what Batmam does: beat up bad guys.
Again, there have been anywhere between 9-10 batman movies depending on how you count of him beating up bad guys. Why do you need more? Why not try something new and really interrogate the psychopathy of the character, and the realization he might go through which is that beating up bad guys isn't the best use of time for a billionaire.
> Catwoman must be with the times and complain about the attention paid to "rich white men"
Did you miss the part where her mother and her best friend were both essentially sex slaves that got choked to death by the italian mafia? If anyone has a case and a grudge against "rich white men", it's probably her.
Also, the whole movie, is about how rich corrupt people let the whole city down.
I haven't seen the new Bond movie, but if they actually had the balls to kill him, that's tremendous progress.
Why are you so resistant to any change?
I meant that as general dig at "princesses" in film and history, not the specific weird Star Wars geneaology.
Star Wars is basically old War Movies, Flash Gordon serials and Errol Flynn swashbuckling movies spliced together, as such it draws on the long history of storytelling that, in turn reflecting their own 'good old days', often revolves around the beautiful and genetically superior children of heriditary dictators who murdererd their way into power and how they deserve to be the rightful ruler and basically owner of the populace.
This is not a good lesson and is exactly the kind of thing Terry Pratchett satirizes with Lance Constable Carrot Ironfoundersson in Discworld, or George RR Martin in Game of Thrones.
Completely agree with this guy. New movies inevitably seem to teach strange lessons that make you uneasy and kind of feel bad when you leave the cinema or turn of the screen.
Superhero movies used to be about growth. Yet now it's more often than not the case that the hero was simply born awesome. Completely uninteresting.
Politics also creeps into movies in a disconcerted way. Star Wars is suddenly not about defeating totalitarianism and tyranny, but about some strange mix of feminism and animal rights. I think. Batman has to see Batman become a medic rather than do what Batmam does: beat up bad guys. And of course Catwoman must be with the times and complain about the attention paid to "rich white men" when they get horribly assassinated in gruesome ways by a psychopath - as if murdering the mayor such that his now fatherless son finds him should receive equal attention to some drug deal gone wrong.
The latest Bond movie of course had to kill Bond. Something that should just never happen. And then we have to watch this extremely annoying supposed new 007 get an insane amount of screen time even though she is a transparent, vapid character.
> His reasoning for why movies are more boring was simple: money.
If you look back at the best movies throughout history, a lot of them were made outside the Hollywood system. It's easy to think that movies today are worse than Apocalypse Now or Star Wars, while forgetting that those movies also couldn't get made in their day.
Was "Star Wars" a AAA film though? I don't know what typical budgets were for films from that studio at that time were but in so many other regards it feels like it was a B-movie that over-achieved.
I mean just one aging star (sorry, Alec) in the film's credits.... That doesn't sound like a AAA studio effort.
> George Lucas definitely didn't have the name or history necessary when Alan Ladd gave the go ahead to make Star Wars that you would need these days for a comparably ambitious film.
I don't know if that's entirely true. George Lucas had come off the back of American Graffiti, which was an incredible commercial success. It had made 50x its budget, and in 1977 was the 13th highest grossing film of all time.
The question was really whether Lucas could turn his hand to a completely different genre. It's down to American Graffiti's success that Lucas was able to re-negotiate a deal for Star Wars that gave him merchandising rights.
What a great video!
On Star Wars in particular, in the original trilogy, it's about coming from nothing, and overcoming your challenges. Luke fails, he makes numerous mistakes throughout the series.
Ray never makes any mistakes, in fact in Episode 9 she clearly kills Chewbacca, but 30 seconds later they backtrack that decision.
The new Star Wars movies are absolutely god awful, except for Episode 8. I liked it for a fairly unique reason. Back when I lived in LA I basically went out with this girl who knew she was a model and I wasted a ton of time and money on her.
When I moved to Chicago, I met a dorky awkward girl, who became my first real girlfriend. This is priceless dating advice, go for that dorky awkward girl that actually likes you.
Of course this really pissed a lot of people off, so they basically got rid of that story arc for the last movie. Looking at the entire series, I really think someone at Disney got uncomfortable with interracial dating, and thus Finn ends up making no sense as his two previous love arcs need to be eliminated by the last movie. This is understandable because even in America I've met people who are very uncomfortable with it, and Disney needs to distribute these movies to a global audience.
That might actually be the root of the problem, you have to make a movie that goes out of its way to keep everybody comfortable. In various countries showing LGBT plotlines are a big no-no, so you have reports coming out of Disney that they've cut these at the last moment from various movies.
The moment you have to make a movie that's okay for every single person, you end up creating these devoid visual spectacles. As in, most action movies are just a bunch of explosions and music. You can replace all the dialogue with gibberish and still get the idea of what happened.
I was trying to watch Free Guy and had to turn it off 10 minutes in. Stop with the freaking music for a second and let people speak.
However, other countries are still making real movies. I think a big part of the Korean wave is you don't have as much pandering to every single possible audience in K-pop dramas. Even then, I've had friends post that the subtitles are often toned down. Edit: Language Reactor is a great Chrome plugin which offers alternative subtitles as well as context. It's a great tool for language learning as well
I can't imagine ever going to a movie theater again, congratulations Disney You've ruined cinema.
Maybe I'll put one of these mediocre movies on in the background while I do other things, but they're not worthy of my undivided attention.
This just doesn't ring true to me, at all.
Is the Youtube algorithm directing people to make vaguely fascist feeling, "bring back the good old days", 'kids today', 'civilization is doomed' content aimed at young males? Or is that just a natural cycle that repeats throughout history?
The biggest film in history was "Birth of a Nation" until it was replaced by "Gone with the Wind", "Star Wars" may have been a rebellion against a vaguely Nazi empire, but it was still about hereditary rulers that are related to each other starting wars.
Overall, the trajectory seems fairly positive. The good old days were pretty crappy and that was reflected in their books, films and songs. Though I suppose if you're young enough that Mulan 1998 is a classic film from the good old days you might simply be ignorant of a lot of the crazy shit that went on.
Look up parents re-watching films from their youth with their children, to realise, horrified, what passed as entertainment in their youth that is now shocking to them and stuff they don't want their kids to emulate or look up to.
No, think about Star Wars. Luke doesn't believe in the Force, doesn't believe Obi Wan is anything but a crazy old man. He has to come to his realization himself and then find the Force in himself. He isn't gifted with it. That truly is a big difference between the classic hero's journey and the newer 2010s films where people just have a magic power.
And people are sort of sick of it. It's why Watchmen or Guardians of the Galaxy stand out against so many boring superhero movies. Because a hero needs to be unwilling, unable, and unbelieving... and possibly not even a very good candidate for heroism. Hollywood shortened the journey with the classic stupid "karate montage to music" thing in the 80s. But now it's just like, oh jeez wow I have a superpower! Cool! So ultimately, who cares? Who can relate to that?
Look at Greek mythology. No one could understand why Zeus got all pissed off, but he was Zeus. He was kind of inscrutable. Man related to demigods who carried our emotions and message as envoys. Or, take Star Trek. Spock is half-human. He serves as a bridge between the alien logic and the emotional, rational part of our nature. We know we should eventually evolve to be like Vulcans, but we value our dirty humanity. So Spock, by occasionally regressing to his human side, is our proof that our humanity itself has value.
There's no humanity in a superhero who's just born with superpowers. That's Zeus. A great hero is like Spock, or Luke Skywalker, someone fighting their inner nature. Otherwise all conflicts are just eye candy, external, and ultimately CGI bullshit.
Knew this was Critical Drinker before I clicked on it. Mate introduced me to it and he is absolutely spot on for the most part.
Modern movies (and TV for that matter) have become so commercialized and expensive that the series they are now rehashing (Star Wars for instance) wouldn't be possible to create today. George Lucas definitely didn't have the name or history necessary when Alan Ladd gave the go ahead to make Star Wars that you would need these days for a comparably ambitious film.
It's weird because I feel like some other forms of media, namely games and music have gone in the opposite direction because of the availability and power of tools for independent production. However movies just need so much more resources the same indie competition hasn't been able to come in and shake things up sadly.
The main criticism of this YouTube video is that the main character doesn't really have to put in any effort and has all those skills from the very beginning.
While I agree that this trope can make kids think they're special without trying in life (and that they will be a hero in the future), I think there have been similar tropes in the past.
Just take basic story writing of many old movies: There is always a hero that is living a boring or even sad life, often unsuccessful and unhappy. Suddenly, a "mentor" appears who takes our hero into this new magical world and teaches him the most amazing things in no time. Matrix, Star Wars, Harry Potter, basically all Disney movies, even Sailor Moon.
That doesn't teach kids very positive things either: just wait for a mentor to come along and show you the way to become a hero, don't worry, you will be a hero because someone shows you the way.
So I don't see the development described in the YouTube video as dramatically, it has existed forever.
> I think a lot of us who were 80s kids who can practically recite Star Wars got that way cause we had a very small collection of movies cause they were so expensive. We had the 3 SW movies and Superman 2 and I watched those over and over.
Yeah, 80s/90s kid here and I think by the end of the VHS era we owned about a dozen movies on VHS, including the Star Wars trilogy and maybe half a dozen animated kids' movies, plus three or four movies taped off TV. Anything else had to be a rental (and we almost never rented new movies because they were super expensive to rent, and nb that "new" might mean "was in theaters within the last 5 years")
I watched those ~15 total movies (commercial and recorded-off-TV combined) a lot of times.
I think a lot of us who were 80s kids who can practically recite Star Wars got that way cause we had a very small collection of movies cause they were so expensive.
Or you had parents like mine. They used a lot of blank tapes, which held 6 hours worth of stuff. 3 movies each, that was. I think my parents saved up for it in the mid-80s.
Back then, the cable companies used to run weekends with free HBO, Showtime, Disney (which was a premium channel back then) and so on. Hours of movies. Hours of looney tunes cartoons. Hours of old TV from Nick at Night, Nickelodeon's nighttime programming for adults. (So much I love Lucy and Dick van Dyke shows). Some still had commercials, but we didn't care. It was really nice during times without cable. I thnk they finally got rid of a lot of them about 15 years ago when their final VCR broke.
For years, "Star Wars" was one of the "big movies" that wasn't available on home video. The documentary "The Making of Star Wars," on the other hand, was released on VHS (and Betamax?) very early on, and I recall as being prominently displayed in seemingly every video rental store.
Ironically, "The Making of Star Wars" doesn't currently appear to be available for streaming on any of the services, at least according to JustWatch.com.
The first time I saw Star Wars was at a drive-in. The second time I saw it was on laserdisc(!) at someone’s house years later. The third time was when it was broadcast on TV. The fourth time was on VCR tape. The fact that our family could watch a movie in our home just by going to the rental store was mind blowing.
In the early ($99) days of VHS movies though, I don't believe MacroVision was a thing.
I recall frequenting the only video rental store in Homer, Alaska (ma-and-pa, of course, this was pre-Blockbuster and a small town in Alaska, of course) and I believe they would rent multiple copies of a popular title but dubbed onto blank VHS tapes.
I also had friends and relatives that had a few pirated films. The sci-fi nerds I knew all had "Star Wars" and "Empire" on VHS long before it was either possible or affordable to (probably picked up at a booth at a sci-fi convention).
I know, not the majority though by any means.
I think the more general point here is that, because LEO is a place, people tend to think of it as being kind of like Central Park or Spain, giving them misleading intuitions about what kinds of interactions to expect. A good starting point for your intuition pump is to remember that the surface area of LEO is basically the same as the surface area of Earth. It's slightly larger, because the radius is larger, but the radius is only about 8% larger in this case.
Now consider that we're talking about, in this case, satellites distributed over 30 km of altitude (thickness). This gives you a volume that's roughly ten times the volume of the Earth's oceans. (You can throw in the crust too if you find it helpful.) So instead of thinking about shrapnel from a barrel bomb trying to hit a microwave oven in Central Park, think about trying to hit a microwave oven somewhere in the oceans of ten Earth-sized planets. Even with a 7-km-per-second supertorpedo with two months of fuel, it's not going to be easy without guidance.
Space, in short, is big.
I'd like to blame stupid movies like Star Wars and Gravity for this, but I think it's just the kind of cognitive error the humans are unavoidably prone to. It's easy to get results that are off by nine orders of magnitude like this when you just rely on your untutored intuition.
The other counterintuitive thing about LEO is that, though for hypervelocity collisions it's a three-dimensional space, for things like rendezvous or getting from your launch trajectory to your desired orbit, it's a six-dimensional space of orbital elements. For understanding the results of a barrel bomb in orbit, it may be more useful to think of the nails as being distributed across a small ball of this six-dimensional space in the six-dimensional point occupied by the barrel, rather than gradually spreading out in a complicated way in three-dimensional space. The humans are not good at intuitively reasoning about six-dimensional spaces either.
Hmm, mine was a movie not a book. The movie was the original Star Wars. Had the insight that we will only be able to settle other planets when computers control everything when watching Star Wars.
A lot of things that are commonplace in software are curiously absent in other areas.
How about just upgradable versions? Say an author puts out a novel, and then over the next year, does some further edits, better character development, whatever. Why not put out a version 2 of the novel?
Same question with music. Especially now, with so much music worked on in software rather than recorded to tape, it would be easy to spin out a version 2 of a single or an album.
We do see this in some other areas; textbooks, for example, routinely have multiple editions with various updates.
It seems really odd to me that we don't make updates to all sorts of media.
But then, lots of folks were perturbed at the updates to the original Star Wars movies...
I found it quite compelling. It’s common for sci-fi films to violate our current understanding of physics, but to just explain it away as a new discovery in physics (think star trek’s warp drive). Others like Star Wars don’t even bother to explain anything about how their ships fly, enter atmospheres, etc.
What was unique about Gravity was that it was sci-if but set it our universe and in our contemporary time period. It at least tried to operate within the constraints of current inventory of space hardware. You are non-space-enthusiast it was amazing.
> Eventually teenage kids will be making Star Wars at home.
Perhaps, but the same was promised when camera and editing equipment became commodities. There are a few examples like the Blair Witch Project, or Tangerine, a great movie which was filmed with two iPhones. But in general successful movies are still expensively made by professional teams.
The problem is: Even if the technical equipment is cheap, successful movies still require time and talent and lots of hard work.
Care to look up the top grossing movie of that year? There is plenty of successful sci-fi including Star Wars, Jurassic Park, The Matrix, Transformers, The Hunger Games, and Avatar. Every genre can produce flops, but many of the most profitable movie franchises have been sci-fi movies.
Oh, movies are startups too. Often you see a production company established to make a single movie. And they spawn clones -- Star Wars gave rise to perhaps hundreds of space movies -- many of them really bad.
I think two things are going on, everyone remembers movies they watched as a kid/teen and thinks they where unusually good. It’s not that there was a golden age of movies, it’s that you personally had seen fewer movies.
That said, the ratio of original movies to sequels/franchises changed. Fast forward 20 years from Star Wars to 1997 and sure yet another Titanic, Jurassic Park 2, and a James Bond film but also, Men in Black, The Fifth Element, Liar Liar, As Good as It Gets etc so still mostly original movies.
But fast forward to 2017 and the top 10 movies included: Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Harry Potter 5, Spider-Man 3, Shrek 3, National Treasure 2, The Simpsons Movie, and Transformers. I Am Legend based on a book and 300 based on a comic. So only Ratatouille was actually new.
Not sure others, but Netflix is the Apple in streaming. They are able to churn out mega hits like Squid Games. Look at Apple TV, reminds me of Steve Jobs effort in Ping the Apple Fecebook years ago. Bezos got other interest in space for now. Google isn't famous for ability to create hits....ahem G+ and G-glass. Disney+ has built-in goodwill from their past. I see many kids these days not into Mickey Mouse stuff compare to 20yrs ago. Disney is trying to build more legacy by buying Marvel and Star Wars. Reminds me a lot of their effort of securing Pixar back then. Problem with this franchises are that they tend to fizzle out years later. See what happen to last few Star Wars movies. However if you have consistency in generating hits like Netflix in the pasts decades, that sounds a lot like Apple. That means they will be able to survive to adapt with new stuff. Unlike those milking the pasts like Star Trek, Bobba Fett, adsense, prime, etc.
One of the things we watch movies for are the characters. And Star Wars has good characters.
Star Wars was borrowing heavily from Seven Samurai not just western films. Thus swords vs blasters works the same way swords vs arrows do in those films etc.
There are basically infinite ways to remix old stories like that. Hell even just the editing significantly improved Star Wars over the original script.
Film is ridiculously expensive and time consuming, and at the end of a film you throw everything away just to do it all again later. (I painfully know this as I've made films.)
With the GPU and ML revolution, this entire industry is ripe for automation and disruption. Everything from scripting, camera work, location scouting, set dec, editing, and effects. 2D animation, 3D animation, and live action.
In the future, kids will be making their own Star Wars films in their basement over the weekend. This will put a big dent into IP as well.
(I'm working on this.)
At the height of a loneliness epidemic, it's hard to get a personality and talk to people.
Don't get me wrong, your conclusion is spot on. Getting there is the hard part.
Another factor is we live in a period in time where we have so much choice on how to spend our time, products that are personalized to each of our own tastes, that creates sparsity of shared experiences.
No longer is there a movie like Star Wars, that you could throw a stick and find someone who shares that experience. Now unless you're suckling from the teat of mainstream media, you need to go out of your way to find someone who shares your taste in film, music, art, games and ideas.
I'm honestly surprised there hasn't been an experiment adding a social component to Netflix.
I think the author makes some good points. I've been a customer of Netflix way back when it was DVDs-in-envelopes and that was awesome because you could get just about any new movie as soon as it was released. The current Netflix is irritating by comparison. I can hardly find anything to watch, especially the stuff I search for. Instead, I'm railroaded into things Netflix created instead, by the algorithm that suggests similar alternatives, all of which feel like cheap knock-offs. I want to watch Star Wars. I want to watch Back to the Future. I want to watch Donnie Darko. And not just when Netflix happens to have them on the catalog.
There's bad, poor, ok, good, and great CGI just like every other aspect. There's probably far more CGI in movies than the poster thinks. There is weightiness in plenty of CGI. Thanos was one of the best villains and he was basically all CGI. Tons of weight and feeling in almost all of the MCU movies. There was a lot of cheezy, bad puppets in old movies - I was there and it's usually pretty painful to rewatch them. I used to love watching the Star Wars trilogy every year, but hadn't done so for about 7 years. I watched it this year with my son and ... it's a bit rough at times. Some parts are brilliant, others don't hold the shine they used to.
There was a period up to, maybe 5 years ago or so, where CGI was generally pretty awful, as it was just actors pretending in front of nothing but green screens, and the CGI was crazily complex and perfect. That was my least favorite era.
But filmmakers have learned to do clever things with CGI.
If you haven't watch the series by Corridor Crew about Good and Bad CGI, I highly recommend it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4WrKeoeZhk&list=PLwVUbPpIRn1QspuvMVVfQvO7RPWnMJ1aA
There's lots of great descriptions of what makes good CGI good and bad CGI bad.
> But Dune is barely out for a few months - it's a blockbuster, for sure, with enormous production budget, lots of public interest, etc. But so was Jurassic World, the Star Wars sequels or the Hobbit trilogy. Whether Dune will become an all-time classic like Laurence of Arabia remains to be seen.
Those movies have worse visuals than Dune imo.
These are still not fair comparisons.
Legend and Justice League are both mediocre movies, but Legend won a ton of technical awards, including being nominated for Oscars for Makeup, BAFTAs for visual effects, and won an award for cinematography [0]. Justice League's list of awards is much more meager, and nothing for technical achievements. [1]
The Dune and Lawrence of Arabia comparison is also flawed. Sure they're both "acclaimed", But Dune is acclaimed as "One of the best films of the year", and Lawrence of Arabia is acclaimed as "One of the best films OF ALL TIME."
Also, Lawrence of Arabia is a real story of a real person set in the real world. So realism is bound to be important. Dune is a fictional story set thousands of years in the future in a different part of the universe. And specifically deals with a bit of mysticism and fantastical elements closer to fantasy than science fiction. Comparing the "reality" of their effects is apples and oranges.
I'll give you Star Wars for sure. Star Wars most assuredly did NOT benefit from "improved" technology.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089469/awards/?ref_=tt_awd [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0974015/awards/
When I first watched Star Wars in 1977, I knew that the spaceships weren't real, that Luke didn't live on Tatooine with a landspeeder, or that lightsabers worked. I didn't care because of the "willing suspension of disbelief." We all know that the movies we watch are fake, Potemkin villages. We don't care if they use the film-making arts to help us suspend our disbelief. Doesn't matter if they use CGI, stop-motion animation, matte paintings, shoot on soundstage or in real locations.
I think this is correct, but it's also what the article says between the lines.
A problem with a lot of movies these days is that they got this great new toy, CGI, and then they don't when to stop. Whether the CGI is good or bad, perhaps because you don't have to work around limitation you follow the formula that whenever you want to add some action or don't know what to say, or don't know how to get the main protagonist out of a sticky situtation, you just add a bunch of CGI, and solve it that way. It ends up spilling into lazy storytelling and lazy film making in general, as opposed to when you had to work along side limitations to tell a story.
I think to me this seems most evident in the Star Wars films, where as technology progressed, the lack of imagination in the creators when not forced became increasingly evident.
Do we? Or is that just nostalgia. I'm in the younger generation but as a kid watching Star Wars, it didn't care. Now watching it I see janky models on sticks and wires and a puppet for yoda barely moving his arms.
I think it's the suspension of disbelief. Star Wars at its time was phenomenal for its VFX and SFX, but CGI in movies nowadays is saturated, so it feels less impactful to us
> A common and worthwhile counterpoint to that is that people only notice bad or rushed CGI.
And similarly, people don't bring up the vast amounts of bad or rushed practical effects being produced at the same time films like Star Wars and Lawrence of Arabia were produced.
I mean, maybe? But I don't really think so. Here's a list from IMDB:
https://www.imdb.com/list/ls009003184/
Let's take a look at a few of the entry's from the 1970's that actually had practical effects:
Logan's Run - Here's Logan fighting a robot: https://youtu.be/USADM5Gk9Gs?t=106 Star Wars - : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1g3_CFmnU7k Soylent Green - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Z2txLk0ybo Invasion of the Body Snatchers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc_0dlmSq7I Alien - here's the chest buster scene - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPQ7om598OM
I don't think these hold up as well as nostalgia would suggest, the exception being the alien chest buster scene, which is amazing. The others are much less ambitious and simply don't look as good as modern movies. Many of the practical effects look small or toy like. Maybe there's a sweet spot in the 90's?
I disagree on the author's definition of "real". I see two ways they can be defined in the context of movies: Real could mean that the objects portraid look like they were actually filmed through a camera; but it could also mean that the objects portraid look like the objects they're intended to portay. The former is easily achievable with practical effects. But the latter is in many cases ONLY achiavable with CGI, which in many cases already starkly outperforms any practical effects (admittably, to the detrement of realness according to the former definion in some cases).
Which of the two you prefer depends on what it is you're looking for in movies. One motivation might be to see humans acting realistically, reacting to their environment and struggles. If that's all you're looking for, practical effects almost always win, because they allow budget to be allocated on actors and scripts, and actors have an easier time imagining to be in the situation they're acting to be in. Many blockbuster movies, however, are made with a different goal in mind. Marvel, Jurassic Park, Star Wars all don't have realistic human interactions and struggles as a primary value proposition, but interesting fantasy worlds and fights, with "sufficiently" realistic characters. I for one enjoy both types of movies, deeply, and I don't think that CGI ruins movies today. In particular, I don't think that CGI ruins movies like Jurassic Park or Star Wars, which in my view are great movies for the year they came out in, but by todays standard's are clearly objectively worse in almost any respect. Imagine something like the first star wars movie coming out today! Nobody would know about it, even fewer would care. Nostalgia is a powerful force.
The author is not saying that modern movies are artistically worse than old movies. He's saying that CGI, despite decades of progress, seem _fake_ in a way that subtly destroys our sense of immersion:
"Consider Ridley Scott’s 1985 Legend, wherein Tim Curry’s onscreen presence as a horned devil is heavy, weighty—despite playing a fantastical devil, his clopping around in hooves comes across as ontologically solid. Your eyes are not deceived. And moreover, under the slathered makeup and prothestics, he is still acting—when his lip curls, that’s a real lip. Compare that to Steppenwolf, from the 2017 Justice League. After almost a quarter-century of “progress” in cinema he comes across as digital dust, a void where physicality should be. His superstrength is unthreatening, because deep in our occipital lobes we know Steppenwolf weighs nothing, impacts nothing. Therefore the entire movie has no stakes. Of course the bad guy will be defeated, he’s a hologram."
Yes, of course the article ignores the hundreds of old movies with terrible prosthetics and costumes. I think the author tries his best to compare similar things. For example, when he discusses the latest Dune with Lawrence of Arabia - both acclaimed movies. Specifically, he discusses how the desert scenes _look_ to our eyes:
"Lawrence of Arabia from 1962 looks so much more real than Dune, even when just comparing the shots of people in Bedouin costumes hanging out in a desert ... For instance, the shadows both characters cast to their right. In the 2021 Dune, it is a monochrome chunk, despite the billowing fabric around the character. In the 1962 Lawrence of Arabia, the shadow of the fabric is actually see-through. It has dimensionality, thinness and thickness. Because it’s a real shadow. So despite both being filmed in similar locations, one scene unconsciously triggers more belief in the ontology of the fictional world—the directionality of the light, the blue above the dune—while the other comes across as an ersatz reality."
I felt this coming out of the latest Star Wars movies: the space battle scenes felt so... flat, despite being technically amazing. There's something to be said for actually shooting on location and using physical props.
While I agree with his premise, the author's entire argument is: <amazing old film> is better than <terrible new film>, so CGI is bad.
- Is there any reason to believe that the Lord of the Rings trilogy used less CGI than the Hobbit trilogy?
- Same for the Matrix trilogy vs Matrix Revolutions?
- The CGI in the newer Star Wars films is actually fantastic. It was everything else that was a letdown and caused it to be an inferior product over the originals.
What we really should be blaming is the paint-by-numbers formula for film production used by all big studios nowadays. There are no original properties, no risks taken. Using practical effects vs CGI isn't going to change this fact or dramatically make a bad movie good.
I still find original Alien movies as the most impressing movies on effect side. Or old Star Wars movies.
Even the old Dunes movie managed to make one.
New CGI movies just feels so fake. Some feeling is totally missing.
Movie with CGI such as Star Wars = lying?
This does seem like every one falling into the trope.
I didn’t listen to music as a sheltered kid. Once I began listening to music in my late teens, I started with Velvet Underground and Joy Division. From there it was all modern music. Like say “indie music” of the times of the 00s was abundant for me. I’m almost 20 years into listening to music now and nothing has changed for me. I still don’t like most of the the top charting songs, but I didn’t like them 15 years ago either. I might actually like popular music more now as I used to not like most of it. While now I enjoy artists like Lil Uzi Vert and especially Playboi Carti.
Similarly, Star Wars films appear to be completely mediocre films. I didn’t watch them [properly] until I was older.
Some semblance of me not being pushed into the normal popular stuff as an easily influenced young person makes it very easy for me not to yearn for older stuff being better.
I just checked the billboard top 100. It appears to mostly be your basic standard pop culture popular music. It seems like what would be at the top decades ago too if zooming out and seeing things as a whole.
I haven't read the linked article, and I don't like Star Wars. But as for people using JEDI or other Star Wars, Harry Potter, LoTR, GoT acronyms, I'm OK with all that. This is just how culture adopts new mythology, new symbolisms and new customs. Quite a lot of ideas, words and phrases from Orwell's 1984 are an integral part of current English communication.
Of course, when it comes to adoption of Star Wars and Harry Potter expressions, Disney and WB are likely to throw all their might at preventing it.
You mentioned "gaslighting". That's from a movie too.
You're not buying new games if you're enjoying nine-year-old games.
Did you know that before The Phantom Menace, then-20-year-old Star Wars would compete with new movies at rental shops? I personally believe that this is why Star Wars was "updated": it was too resilient to being replaced. The rental place didn't need to buy so many new copies of new movies when they could keep making money on old Star Wars. So the studios needed a way to make Star Wars less appealing.
Generally Harry Potter and Star Wars (and recently Marvel movies) are the biggest culprits. There's a subreddit dedicated to making fun of the phenomenon: https://www.reddit.com/r/readanotherbook/
You know what, you mention something that has pissed me off with a recent evolution of American culture by citing two examples I find relevant, so I'll expand.
Star Wars is a 1977 movie. It actually consciously uses the codes (and copies some scenes!) of WWII war movies. What are the heroes doing in it? They are helping a big organization (the rebellion) fight a formidable enemy. Just managing to flee from such an enemy is a heroic endeavor.
Compare it to today. In most, if not all, blockbuster movies, organizations that the heroes belong to are either incompetent, corrupt, are a hindrance when they are not the main antagonist. There is a total loss of the idea that belonging to an organization can make sense and can help a personal journey.
Sheriffs, policemen, journalists, they used to be the heroes of various fictions. Now we seem to refuse to believe that these can be heroes. We refuse to believe that collaboration with a team can be effective. Actually, now it is a trope that if the hero has a trustworthy associate, treason will happen some time in the storyline.
And somehow I understand what it is about: people are disgruntled with their work. They realize the company they are working in is not helping their personal hero's journey and hindering it. But really, the reaction that "therefore I shall do it all alone" is really bad.
I remember when Serenity came out. It was one of the first movies (that I had seen) that had bright, colorful, sunshiny days, with lots of visual effects.
I know that it wasn't the first, but I hadn't really seen much, before that. Star Wars had effects in color, but there wasn't any actual CGI involved.
I think Tenet could stand on its own regardless (plus Star Wars is really more in the Fantasy genre).
But I whole heartedly agree that the new Star Wars films are an absolute travesty.
I also thing that the maybe the reason why Star Wars wins today has to do with the age of the fanbase but also with dilution of movies ability to attract due to TV series.
Even if both of them started in almost the same period, it seems to be that Star Trek was more active (in the sense of promoting it) early (11 movies launched before 2010, only 2 launched after) so it probably has a fan base older.
Also somehow Star Wars seems more modern, in the sense that watching Star Wars seems more 2020 than watching Star Trek even if both of them launches movies (2 Star Trek and 3 Star Wars) in the last 10 years or so (2010-2020).
I know a lot of young people who saw Star Wars, but not many that watched Star Trek.
I am not saying Star Trek is better, but I am saying that maybe a lot of the fan base is not active or does not care enough to vote or contribute to this debate :)
Also even if I am a big fan of Star Trek I also really enjoy Star Wars. Both of them brings me different things like for example: Star Trek is exploring more what humans can become while Star Wars explores more the effects of human flaws on politics, culture and societies.
I think both of them explore current events or are influenced by current geo-political events or cultural shifts.
I also think that Star Trek should try to be back to its visionary origin and not try to compete with Star Wars on apocalyptical events.
Let me paraphrase OP: Star Trek is mainly a TV show but also made some movies. A Star Wars fan will tell you there are 4 good Star Wars movies. A Star Trek fan will tell you there are 6 good Star Trek movies. For Star Wars to not even be the better movie franchise (and definitely not the TV franchise) means these responses are just... inexplicable.
I voted Trek, but there are some good Star Wars TV shows.
It's just because those first couple of Star Wars movies were just so exciting/imaginative etc. The universe was so lived-in and fantastic.
Trek has its moments, but it's just more boring. A lot of talky talky and slow and/or repetitive sequences. Even if it's more intellectually interesting as a whole, story-wise.
Even Star Wars was kind of slow by modern standards but the audiovisual design was just monumental.
lol, now listen to this alternative perspective that may match an actual objective crowd
Despite the better and more coherent world of star trek, the original show is preachy. Its too preachy. Almost every episode was to be an allegory to a real world issue at that time and its slow, and awkward. Die hards appreciate it more so for the “bold exploration” than what actually happened!
Later on the themes began self referencing and evolving into their own lore, while largely retaining a self-contained episodic format.
The movie are just fan service or the dream conflict.
But remember the human in the audience. They dont want to be preached to, they dont want the origin story of a particular character to be anything more than scifi, instead of the plot piece for now contrived bigotry.
Star Wars provides this desired entertainment. A heros tale, over and over again. The classic formula for the acceptance of the masses. Star Wars is not a satisfactory chronicle when completed, but the world building in all of its other shows and actual tv series is more engaging.
The original lore in star wars is fantasy and audiences want that.
The original lore in star trek is allegories to a real world social issue, and audiences dont always want that.
The most stunning outcome here is the apparent internet consensus that Star Wars is better than Star Trek.
This is indefensible.
A Star Wars fan will tell you there are, at most, four good Star Wars movies. A Star Trek fan will tell you there are 6-7 good Star Trek movies, depending on whether you count Galaxy Quest. This might leave us with some room for debate about whether the cultural impact of Star Wars episodes 4 and 5 outweigh Star Trek's larger amount of quality material.
Except that Star Trek is a TV show.
For the movie franchise to not even be the better movie franchise is just... there's... it's not even a question.
So long with "shoot your next movie on iPhone". I was hoping for Canon EOS, but it is $5.5k "cinema" one.
Gotta re-read Rodriguez' "Rebel without a crew" (and try to forget his way subpar episode of the next Disney Star Wars humiliation).
> Hell, they shot 35mm film for SD for decades
I'm not sure this is the case. Low-ISO cinema 35mm film (like Kodak VisionT 50D/250D) far exceeds SD resolution. How do you think Star Wars was ever scanned into 4k? Or 2001: A Space Odyssey? Film captures highlight detail logarithmically as well, while digital sensors still haven't really figured out how to render highlights well. This allows greater shadow detail with a skilled cinematographer with no loss of quality in brightly lit scenes. Theoretically, a single 35mm still can be scanned into 4k with no loss in detail, and higher-resolution scans won't lose quality -- there's just dimishing returns and in the end you might just be getting higher-res grain, but it is a far cry from standard definition.
Even 16mm can do HD scans just fine.
There's a reason Tarantino, Wes Anderson, PTA, Nolan, Sam Raimi, Scorsese, Spielberg, and David Lynch still swear by film (even though many of these directors have dabbled with digital). The idea that film is inherently "low-res" is a really frustrating and common misconception among younger generations unfamiliar with the technology. I find it kind of unbelievable that DPs would shoot 35mm just for an SD scan. That type of use case seems better suited for mini-DV or other contemporary video formats.
Yeah. I remember displaying these on ASCII terminals in 1200 bps connected to a DEC Vax 4000 or a Sun 3.
Digital porn was around even before graphics were common.
Same thing with movies, there's an ASCII art animated star wars somewhere, too.
I live in Hungary. Disney+ hasn't launched here, which means you cannot watch stuff like the new Star Wars shows legally, you can only pirate them. (Yeah, I know VPN exists.) My point is it seems Disney has decided this market is too small for them to lift a finger. There are other movies that you simply cannot watch on any platform legally.
> Let’s not pretend that Star Wars is as important as the Polio vaccine
Then surely the protection for silly Western-in-space films should be shorter than that for important medical breakthroughs, not considerably longer as it is now?
I agree with the author. The cut scenes would have provided better character development for both Morpheus and Cypher, as well as some more motivating additional doubt for Neo and perhaps a better payoff when he realizes he is the One.
However, I think the whole discussion about canon is nonsense. For this, for Star Wars, and for everything.
Is anything Star Wars watchable after 1983? No. So why even talk about canon? Just watch the good stuff and ignore the rest. Is any Matrix movie after 1999 worth watching? Of course not. So why even talk about it?
In both cases, the original writers didn't respect their own material; why should you respect their idea of what the "real" story is? Life is too short for bad art.
I've always suspected that the Matrix trilogy was pre-planned in the same sense as Star Wars had a planned 9 episode arc as George Lucas always claimed.
That is, sure, they had a general sense of the surrounding world and events and what might happen next. But when someone actually said "here's an unfathomably large amount of money, please make these movies" they had to actually come up with all the concrete details and probably moved a lot of things around while doing so.
A key point being that both versions are available with the same quality of image and are both remastered with equal care on re-releases. By contrast, something resembling the theatrical versions of Star Wars not been available since laserdisc.
I say change whatever you want about your movie; but please make available the version of the movie we fell in love with.
There was a hasty and poorly implemented transfer of the LD's included as a bonus feature on a DVD release. No up-res so LD is the latest version according to moi.
But that's not how copyright works, you don't need to pay anything to the original author if you're merely borrowing their ideas even if the original work is not in the public domain. You're free to make a movie 'inspired' by Star Wars as long as you don't actually copy anything directly, use any character names etc.
> Why shouldn’t I have the right to take my work to my grave and never have someone else profit from it?
Because Mickey mouse is just a mouse and Frankenstein is "the modern Prometheus" and Star Wars is a western movie where "Lucas has said that the plot and characters in the 1958 Japanese film The Hidden Fortress, directed by Akira Kurosawa, was a major inspiration" (Star Wars came out only 19 years later, in 1977)
nothing we create is "ours" let alone forever...
There's an argument on incentives, if copyright ends after say 20 years, media companies could simply wait 20 years to use the content for free, it's possible, but I don't think it's probable.
I imagine a system where if the publisher makes a lot more money (with a lot to be defined) than the original author made before the creation went public domain, then they could be forced to compensate the original author.
Adding to what the others have said, the real money in those is merchandising, which is protected more or less perpetually via trademark law. According to the books, Star Wars never made a dime, and those who were intendeding to be paid by film royalties (like the actor who played Darth Vader) never saw a dime.
Disney made big budget Star Wars movies separate from the established universe. Something like that happens to all decades long series. Even with 1 owner.
Of course they do,
But I would assume that once some of these mega franchises hit the public domain, we could see Sony (just a random non disney example) make a big budget Star Wars movie and try to create their own Star Wars universe that is separate.
This may or may not actually be a thing since by the time Star Wars hits public domain it may be irreverent. But if we had a shorter period, I would assume that could happen?
> Now it’s big biz holding our culture for ransom.
I hope we’re not talking about big-biz created works like Star Wars or Marvel movies being the culture that’s ransomed. We the people do have the power to create our own culture and commit any/all works to the public domain. A few people do this, but since we don’t have basic income or even great healthcare for people who spend months or years writing music, books, code, etc., a lot of creators do need the economic incentive and protection in order to commit their time.
Sometimes I wonder how many amazing movies, series and videogames we would have if everyone could use popular franchises for their creations (think MCU, Star Wars, LOTR, but also more niche franchises).
Instead we only get the safe and family friendly cookie-cutter versions tuned for mass consumption. Big media corporations want to play it safe to ensure profitability, but other creators would be free to experiment in all other sort of narrative and stylistic directions.
I own the first 6 Star Wars films on Apple TV. They’re still there.
The future is kids using Unreal Engine (or similar) and making a high definition "retelling" of the new Spiderman movie hours after its release, injecting their own humor and style into the process.
Just as kids now watch other people playing games, they'll soon watch other people acting out movies. Kids make Star Wars at home. Kids make Star Wars meets Godzilla at home. The possibilities are endless, and Hollywood won't be able to keep up.
>We never have a movie series where people pay extra money to remove scenes.
Star Wars fans keep asking though.
Until about a third of the movie, I was thinking "This is how they should have made a Star Wars film! Why couldn't they make one like this?"
...and then of course I stopped thinking of Star Wars altogether. :)
To a certain extent it's supposed to be a a little bit teen superhero-y, so you get dragged along with the myth of Paul Adreides too i.e. he wants you too like Paul, so you get dragged along by/with him.
For what it's worth I see Dune as much more of a space opera than a avant-garde sci-fi book. For me I basically view it as star wars but as if George Lucas wasn't a hack. When I saw the new movie open with "dreams are just messages from the deep", I was just totally in love with the iconography of dune and was genuinely kind of miffed we don't get this kind of film more often versus whatever star wars is.
The thing with Dune's world building isn't that it's realistic, it's not very realistic, but rather that it's still blindingly original, to my western eyes at least - the way Herbert approaches religion and culture is a really good balance between wow-factor, critique, and avoiding pretense.
All in all I guess it's in the eye of the beholder so my comment contains no insight ;)
Yup. FMA: Brotherhood just hits the classic hero tropes and tells it to you straight.
I don't think its a bad thing. The Hero's Journey / Monomyth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey) has been told again and again in almost all media across all cultures.
Its just a storytelling style that's somehow got permanent, widespread appeal. Since its a "familiar story", I definitely think it plays to the advantage as a "starter anime". It gives a sense of familiarity to the audience, especially if they aren't used to anime yet.
Since the Hero's Journey / Monomyth is so popular, of course there's tons of animes that follow that style (and most "starter" animes IMO are a large-scale hero's journey).
Given the shear number of choices: Naruto, FMA, My Hero Academia, Demon Slayer, Bleach, Dragonball Z, Soul Eater, Sailor Moon, etc. etc... there's a lot to choose from. FMA: Brotherhood just so happens to be the one I think is best.
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I'm mean... we're into what? The 14 year of Marvel movies following the Monomyth formula? This Monomyth / Hero's Journey is hardly unique to anime. The few other mainstream shows that come out with widespread appeal (John Wick, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, etc. etc.) are just more of the Hero's Journey formula.
Its not a bad formula, not by any stretch of the imagination.
I tried watching this, and put up with the insufferable tone thanks to your warning, but I still don't think it's any good! I'd say the first video stands.
The rebuttal makes some exceptionally pedantic complaints at exceptional length (and sometimes they're technically correct! sounds like they resolved some minor confusion around the opening crawl, at least) but never seems to engage with the overall thrust of the first video. For example, the first video makes some great points about the flow of the early scenes; this rebuttal just sneers sarcastically that it's a matter of opinion and maybe it was fine the other way. I know which edit I prefer!
In fact, it misrepresents the thesis of the first video. It says the thesis was "Lucas made a rough cut and showed it to his friends; they all said it was terrible; he hired a team of editors and they saved it". The rebuttal says no, that team of editors was already in place, so the initial bad edit was already their work, not Lucas's; and every film is "saved in the edit" so it's unfair to single out Star Wars.
Now, the title of the first video is admittedly clickbait-y, but that's not actually what it claims. It says Lucas turned to his team of editors to improve the rough cut, not that he hired them at that point; and if we're being pedantic, it never claims that Star Wars was uniquely bad before editing. It's more about how Star Wars became uniquely good due to great editing.
It never even singles out Lucas for direct criticism, apart from some veiled remarks about the later "special edition" reworks. I happen to agree that those later changes were almost entirely for the worse, so possibly I'm biased...?
I wouldn't describe that video as "balanced" given the tone. In fact there's a few places where the debunking video is making straw man arguments about the author of first video and places where they are just presenting anecdote or opinion as fact. To me the first video felt far more balanced, even if it may have gotten a few details wrong (the second video does at least add some interesting additional context and new citations).
The ironic thing is that debunking video generally agrees with the overall point of the first video, namely that Star Wars did undergo heavy editing and was better for it. I don't think that's an unreasonable claim either because most movies do (a point also made in the first video).
Maybe if the author of the debunking video softened their tone massively it would feel more credible. Unfortunately they come across more like a bruised fanboy (despite the first video not being overly critical) rather than an impartial observer.
Copyright on a movie doesn't start until it's registered. The component parts are copyrighted upon creation but the entire work is a separate copyright. For example the Star Wars re-release is copyright 1997, even thought the bulk of it was created in 1975-76.
I understand that in one sense, digital products can be infinitely reproduced, so it's not like someone is deprived of the product when it's pirated. What I can't reconcile is the entitlement that one deserves to be able to view a specific movie or TV show. I've often heard the argument that there's no harm done, because the pirate wouldn't pay to watch it anyway. Yet the only reason the show is there to pirate is because others are willing to pay for the privilege of viewing it. If everyone took the "pirate" attitude, then there simply wouldn't be any shows to pirate. Now in reality that seems unlikely to actually transpire, so there likely is no harm done. But why does the pirate deserve to watch for free?
We're not talking about access to food or clean water. If I had no legal way to obtain food, I'd steal it in a heartbeat. If I can't find a legal way to watch the latest uninspired Star Wars spin-off, I'm just not going to watch it and do something else. I'm all for civil disobedience when warranted, but I have a hard time justifying it for watching a TV show.
Disney+ in France is reasonably priced. I think the first year it was about €65 and it is now expanded with Star and costs €90 a year. That's €7.50 a month which is great value in a house with a kid mad about Star Wars, a toddler who needs occasional distraction, and a couple of adults who find things on Star to re-watch from years ago. We also get some Hulu shows on our Disney+ stream here, too, which can be good.
We do not have Disney+ 'special' films here for a one-time €20-30 fee, a result of film release regulations in this country (I think). Still, considering it is about €13 an adult ticket at the cinema here, if there are a few of us watching a new release I can see how it might make sense. Sure, not the cinema experience, but comparable in price, improved comfort, the chance to pause if needed, and no babysitter to pay for.
Do they love Star Trek, or are they just skilled at poking fun at the silly previously unacknowledged parts of the Star Trek universe? For example, the holodeck cum filters joke.
I like the show so-so, but I feel like the non-humorous writing is a bit lazy.
Tangential: Have you noticed in the new Star Wars movies, where a character will quote a line from a previous movie in an attempted nod to fans who eat up that sort of stuff. For me, it elicits an eye-roll, like when my dad keeps recycling the same corny jokes.
In my younger days, I used to spend hours and hours playing with trackers on the Commodore Amiga. Over the years, I've always toyed with the idea of firing one up again but the one thing that's keeping me from doing that is the lack of sample banks.
Admittedly, I've never spent too much time looking into it, so I might be wrong (I actually kind of hope it), but it seems to me that getting hold of a tracker program is not an issue, but getting a hold of any useful samples is. Typically, it involves either spending money (which is fine, I guess, but maybe not if you really just want to appeal to your nostalgia) or painfully wading through online archives of single sound samples in the hope of eventually gathering enough to create your own sample bank. That's a cumbersome process though, that would take toooo long for someone who just wants to casually try out a tracker again.
In the olden days, and maybe that was just because the Amiga trackers I had came from less than official sources, always came with at least one substantial sample bank included. Probably not the greatest samples, but you got a decent amount of bass sounds, some drums (kicks, snares, hihats) and some lead instruments. Granted, there were also many garbage sounds that you could probably never use (I remember samples from Star Wars movies, etc...) but besides those, there were enough actual musical sounds/instruments that you could use to make your own songs.
Like I said above, maybe it's just that I'm not looking in the right places, and I really hope that I'm just doing it wrong. So if you know how where to get samples for any tracker program (like, a comprehensive mixed set, not just single samples and not just a bank of 1024 bass sounds or so), please post a link.
I'm about to cancel my Netflix (Canada) I find myself going to it scrolling around and leaving finding nothing interesting. On top of that like most streaming services shows I like take nearly 2 years for the next episode to be made. And it's only eight shows for a "season". By that time I've lost interest in any of the shows.
I have been watching more Amazon Prime lately. It seems to have older shows that I find more interesting plus some new ones I like too, but the same thing of 18 to 24 months for season 2 of eight shows. But this paying to rent inside a streaming service you are already paying for is incredibly stupid.
Disney+ was so easy, I accidentally signed up it! For one month at $1.99 then jumps to $11.99. Worth it I watched Free Guy which Amazon wanted $25 to rent while paying for Amazon Prime already. now I'm going through all the Star Wars and Marvel movies and shows.
I tried to sign up for Apple TV holy what a mess. I have an Apple ID, I had a Mac but it died. Try to sign into my AppleID and my password is rejected. Try to recover my password "check your Mac" no, it died. Use your new Apple device, nope. Use someone's iPhone, no again. Make a new apple ID, nope my gmail is already in use. Recover? Text is sent (Samsung phone) but the recovery page kicked me off when I read the text. Finally got it to work and was told 7 days to recover. Got an email and was told 14 it's days to recover my AppleID password. So Nov 27 I may make some progress.
It’s all about perspective.
Some people find original Star Wars to be a truly great movie. Those same people may find the movies that inspired Star Wars, like Kurosawa’s “Hidden Fortress” or Midway boring or solely on technical factors like color vs black and white. In a mass market product those technical factors make the work less approachable.
I spent several years walking through a pretty good collection of mid-20th century modern art. Most of it made no impression on me at all, but one installation’s aesthetic appealed to me for reasons that I cannot really describe. Part of it was the absurdity of what the facility did to that space — they literally dropped a random howitzer in the room. But if I nerded out and studied the artists and their art, I’d develop a more nuanced understanding and appreciation.
None of the original movies used CGI. It was insane what they did to produce the effects in the original Star Wars movies.
if we do a naive inflation adjustment to 2021 dollars:
star wars ANH: $50 million
star wars ESB: $100 million
star wars RoTJ: $90 million
lawrence of arabia: $137 million
ben hur: $144 million
so yeah, the movies you mentioned had significantly larger budgets, but not massively so (at least compared to ESB and RoTJ). I'd argue the bigger difference is the subject matter. you can do a large 1930's battle without CGI just by throwing money at the problem. there isn't an amount of money you could spend in 1970 to do any of the prequel trilogy coruscant scenes. they probably could have done most of the naboo scenes, though.
I'm also not arguing that huge CGI renders are always a good thing. most stories are really just about the interactions between a few people. I do think it's a significant value add for the scifi genre especially, where the world itself is often a character.
CGI can be beneficial, it just can't carry a film or show by itself. think about star wars OT. for a trilogy that's ostensibly about a galaxy-wide struggle for freedom, we spend an awful lot of time following a few people around in small rooms and remote earth biomes. as a product of the time, they hold up just fine, but like, where are all the normal people? are the rebels fighting for the freedom of a few dozen moisture farmers on tatooine and some small bears? the crew of a single star destroyer must be larger than the combined population of every world we see in the original trilogy (note: we don't actually "see" alderaan). the prequels (for all their faults) show that there was a very large part of the star wars universe that george lucas simply couldn't depict in the early 80s. I suppose some might argue it would have been better if he hadn't, but I digress.
I don't often agree with articles from The Guardian, but this take is spot on, and it's rare that you see this opinion since 99% of news is literally owned by megacorps.
Having these massive corporations control entire sectors of the economy is turning out horribly. It's suffering from the same issues as centrally planned economies. I mean look at megacorp products nowadays - they are all so bland, so soulless, always getting more expensive, always shoveling blatant far-left crap into your face. I'm talking about Marvel movies, Star Wars, Netflix originals, Youtube removing the dislike button, Coca Cola going woke, etc. If the free market was working, then I would absolutely move to alternative products, but instead we are just stuck accepting the decrees of what have basically become authoritarian mini-governments.
I don't know if antitrust is the answer to this. It's messed up to say so, but I think a major recession and/or depression might be required to wash away all the ideological rot and laziness that has seeped into US big business in the past 13 years.
That is indeed what Krugman is saying. It's pretty clear:
> "How does the Apple TV series (of Foundation) turn this (the novel, Foundation) into a visually compelling tale? It doesn’t. What it does instead is remake "Star Wars"
And having seen the Foundation show, having read the Foundation book and seen the Star Wars movie, I think he (Krugman) has a point.
> So how does the Apple TV series turn this into a visually compelling tale? It doesn’t. What it does instead is remake “Star Wars” under another name. There are indispensable heroes, mystical powers, even a Death Star. These aren’t necessarily bad things to include in a TV series, but they’re completely antithetical to the spirit of Asimov’s writing. Pretending that this series has anything to do with the “Foundation” novels is fraudulent marketing, and I’ve stopped watching.
This translates to an assessment of too emotionally invested?
Name calling and gas lighting seem to be the natural way of some people's narrative approach of discredit the person without offering counter point to the statement (or rather, not able to).
> If the show is not called foundation, he will probably enjoy it.
It wasn't about Foundation, then why call it "Foundation"?
It's like that Will Smith movie called I, Robot: why did they bother calling it that?
You can create a new sci-fi show or movie without the 'false marketing' of referencing previous source material: that's what the original Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars did in the 1970s. Or you can try to faithfully use the source material as much as possible as The Expanse show has done, and what Villeneuve has generally done with his Dune.
There are plenty of both sci-fi and fantasy works available for adaptation into shows and movies. And if (general) audiences expect action-y stuff in their sci-fi/fantasy, then pick one in which the source material is more action-y.
Don't try adapting Waiting for Godot into the next Die Hard.
The economist Paul Krugman of all people wrote a 'review' of Foundation versus Dune:
> “Foundation” might seem unfilmable. It mostly involves people talking, and its narrative inverts the hero-saves-the-universe theme that burns many acres of CGI every year. The story spans centuries; in each episode everything appears to be on the brink, and it seems as if only desperate efforts by the protagonists can save the day. But after each crisis, Seldon’s prerecorded hologram appears to explain to everyone what just happened and why the successful resolution was inevitable given the laws of history.
> So how does the Apple TV series turn this into a visually compelling tale? It doesn’t. What it does instead is remake “Star Wars” under another name. There are indispensable heroes, mystical powers, even a Death Star. These aren’t necessarily bad things to include in a TV series, but they’re completely antithetical to the spirit of Asimov’s writing. Pretending that this series has anything to do with the “Foundation” novels is fraudulent marketing, and I’ve stopped watching.
* https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/opinion/dune-movie-foundation-series.html
* https://archive.md/YFxVi
I think the more apt analogy to NFTs was if George Lucas shot Star Wars, and then sold a single copy of it to a wealthy patron for a large sum of money (see: Martin Shkreli buying the only copy of the Wu-Tang album), and from there on out the film passes through a successive chain of wealthy collectors, only occasionally shown at exclusive parties for the aggrandizement of their owners. The only chance for the general public to see the film would be occasional exhibitions held in conjunction with museums.
I don't think it'd be controversial to say that the world would've been poorer for it - and George Lucas too. If the goal is financial success for artists, mass distribution always beats selective exclusion, and if the goal is broad cultural impact the case for mass distribution is even clearer.
It could be that our pop culture has been frozen in time as "THE pop culture" for 50 years now. Rehashed, rebooted, remade, and reimagined over and over again to become your pop culture too.
How am I supposed to NOT feel "stuck in the past", when the The Matrix is coming out next month? When there's a bunch of Star Wars and Star Trek and Indiana Jones (!) next year. We're on our third or fourth Spiderman franchise, and every other teenager that I walk past is wearing an Iron Maiden or Metallica t-shirt? The most exciting new video game on the horizon is Knights of the Old Republic. Geeze, Tom Brady is the defending Super Bowl MVP!
Sure, somehow I went from "liberal" to "bigot" without actually changing my social views, and somehow we determined that comic book movies never exist before Robert Downey Jr. But otherwise, I look around... and this really DOESN'T look all that different from the 90's, you know?
I suppose it wasn't a cliffhanger, but it just felt a bit like the start of a movie rather than the end. Star Wars has done that a bit, but I felt like Dune did it in more of a suave, almost perfect way, which kind of made me sad there wasn't another 2 and a half hours to watch. I suppose I'll wait for the sequel.
Reflecting back on the movie, I really like the aspect of surviving in a desert, and flowing, becoming one with the Dao, the energy of the universe. It was really well done, and even if that's the only thing the movie provided, that is a sage adage that I will hold in my heart for years to come.
I took my son to see the movie who didn't know anything about Dune but is really into Star Wars. After, I told him Dune heavily influenced Star Wars, he said "I could tell!" but at first he thought I meant it was heavily influenced by Star Wars, he's been rethinking his entire childhood ever since :)
Dune's influence on science fiction and storytelling afterwards is undisputed, but it doesn't mean it can actually compete with a franchise like Star Wars. Dune was written with a goal in mind - world building, politics, I'm not going to try and analyze it - whereas Star Wars is a pure entertainment product with a fairly straightforward "good vs evil" plotline - at least that was the initial product at the time. The sequel added plot twists, by the 3rd film it started to become formulaic, and the threequel made it kinda ridiculous.
Anyway, there's a few stories and books that had the impact and that influenced a lot of things to follow, but which are difficult to actually translate to a successful movie franchise. I mean one of the advertising slogans or quotes they used in Dune's promotional material was that it would go toe-to-toe with Lord of the Rings and Star Wars both. I think everyone that has read the books knows it wouldn't be able to.
Is it really that ridiculous to put minorities in the spotlight for a few years? Try watching a "popular" movie from the 70s, 80s, 90s, or early 00s (e.g. Star Wars or Lords of the Rings). It is very depressing how blatantly they are excluded.
Featuring minorities for a while isn't that big of a deal. It would be an incredible moral failing if we pretended racial representation is all fine now.
[disclaimer: manager] To echo Humbledrone's note:
> If anything, my "big shot" factor is higher remotely than it is in person. Physically, I'm just a normal person, made of meat and vulnerable like anyone else.
This truth has been caricatured in many movies and TV shows, where the boss speaks from some large screen on the wall. Or think of Star Wars, when the bad guy is talking to the Dark Lord, who shows up as this massive 3-d projects.
I am also a Star Wars fan, and Battletech. Star Wars wise, I loved TIE Fighter. So I guess I always had a leaning towards darker, less otimistic SiFi. Still watch TNG, DS9 and ENT so. Even VOY from time to time. Not sure I'll do that with PIC once I've seen the episodes once. Not sure if that is due to the episodic story telling of the former or nostalgia.
That's not really true historically. There's the whole Wild West ethos that still makes its way into pop culture (Star Wars, Breaking Bad, Clint Eastwood, Toy Story 2, Back to the Future Part 2, etc), which glorifies outlaw life and people making it through their wits rather than the support of authorities. There are cities like San Francisco and Las Vegas, basically built on criminals building a local civilization. Prison movies like Shawshank Redemption, the Green Mile, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest have us rooting for the inmates. We keep electing Kennedy clan members, even though the family fortune is built on Scottish distilleries and securities manipulation. American history includes bomb-throwing anarchists, 3 revolutions, massacres by private security forces, hippie communes, the KKK, police forces bombing their own citizens, and plenty of extrajudicial lynchings.
I think that the time period where this is true is the post-WW2 prosperity. There was a large premium on order and social stability here, along with creating institutions that kept (white, suburban, middle-class, male) Americans safe and gave them a stable upwards trajectory. Much of the support for law & order comes out of the demographic that grew up in this time period, with subsequent generations being much more skeptical of law enforcement and sympathetic to criminals. You don't see 20-somethings flying thin-blue-line flags, but you do see them calling to defund the police.
But I enjoy Dynasty Warriors / Wuxia / Dragonball Z!! (Or 300 if you prefer American)
Heck, I enjoy watching Yu-gi-oh with my nieces. It turns out that full fantasy fights with completely different sets of rules is certainly a genre. Sure, its a cartoon, but the entire point is that the fights progress by a completely different set of rules on purpose.
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> There's fake made with human actors, and there's "f--k it, just cut and paste 1000 zombies or robots in the next scene and make the heroes cut through them like butter" fake.
You mean like Star Wars stormtroopers? In something like 3 movies, they only ever land ~2 or 3-shots off on the main characters (R2D2 and Leia in the 3rd film IIRC).
I think about some older movies I've enjoyed: Star Trek, Flash Gordon, etc. etc. Plenty of "1000-to-1 odds" going on and yet I still enjoyed the film. Or Indiana Jones. The 1000-to-1 odds thing is basically an ancient trope: found in old epics / stories, and even movies from decades ago.
I too am an adult. One of those that saw Star Wars New Hope in the cinema. I gave up on Mandalorian after 4 episodes. Cancelling Gina Carano will make it hard for me return for whatever else they do.
Star Wars is my biggest cinematic disappointment. Empire will always rate as one of the best movies I've ever seen. But making I to III look like a Lego set and making 7, 8 and 9 rehashes of 3, 4 and 5 was... disaster.
> The Mandalorian episodes that Jon Favreau directed are definitely top tier Star Wars. Great writing, great acting, great storylines.
> But there are so many lower-quality episodes in that series from less experienced directors with bad acting and weaker storylines.
I feel the same way with “pre-Disney Star Wars films” in place of “Mandalorian” and “Irvin Kershner” in place of “Jon Favreau”.
I'm waiting for the day (not in a good way) when they announce the Star Wars/MCU crossover trilogy movies.
I came to say this and also gripe about the fact that this franchise of franchises has gobbled up cinema and contributed in lowering the quality of mainstream film across the board. I personally cannot stand any of the Disney properties, particularly marvel and star wars, or their competitors anymore who are basically copying them to compete and also making their products mediocre.
I believe that nothing is illegal about the vast majority of these projects. They are using legally-obtained source material and performing legal alterations of it.
You could argue that redistribution of the material violates copyright. However, so far as I remember the distribution channels insist that this is material for license-holders only (those who have bought the original DVDs or other media). And honestly, the people interested in these projects really do already have at least one copy of Star Wars on legal media, and sometimes far more than one! I'll even take it a step further and state that with merchandising ties (toys, video games, new films) that the market of people willing to throw money at Disney (I cry) only increases when exposing people who don't have licensed media to this material.
If they have the ability to create something like Star Wars, my own personal plan is that they don't sit on their ass for twenty+ years reaping the benefits of a single achievement.
Really, given all the need there is in the world, this is a genuine concern of yours?
EDIT: And I should also note, the people who actually created the film are not the ones who reap those benefits for twenty+ years. It's only the people who control the IP.
Star Wars has lost me. I loved 4,5,6, and I found 1,2,3 at least exciting to see the story arc closed up. But what came afterwards was pretty much unwatchable. I went to the cinema for Rogue One even, but dont remember a single plot-line. Thats pretty unusual for me, since I uslally remember storylines from movies I watched many years ago. But this stuff just didnt leave any impression at all.
The one that always gets me is Luke's lightsaber in the original Star Wars. It's introduced as a connection to the father he never knew, making it hugely significant. There's a whole scene on the Falcon of Ben training him to use it. And then he never takes it out again for the remainder of the movie.
It is a trippy experience because many objects don't make sense, it's like solving a puzzle without having the reference image. I haven't watched about half of those movies, but of those I could instantly recognize Mad Max, Bill & Ted, Black Swan and Star Wars. The rest were enigmas. Maybe bigger images would make things easier.
I have seen maybe half of these films. I was able to correctly name some of them immediately upon looking at them: Wizard of Oz, The Matrix, The Big Lebowski.
Some were obvious after reading the title: Star Wars, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (never saw it), Being John Malkovich, Space Jam (never saw it), Miami Vice (never saw it), Office Space.
Some that I half guessed or felt like I knew the name of the film but could not immediately recall the name: Castaway, Mad Max: Fury Road, Edward Scissorhands (Thought it was The Nightmare Before Christmas but Tim Burton so close enough)
Obvious ones: Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
I could see Ocean's Eleven and Wizard of Oz, but anyway the other movies felt a bit obscure so nothing else.
The last one, Star Wars, I think needs some deep inspection to get it and is missing the Vader ( which I think anyone with identify with the movie)
Wouldn't the most obvious explanation be a description which mentions Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, which doesn't really turn up anywhere in the training data except the original film media?
Star Wars is an interesting example because it appears to include elements lofted directly from the film (bits of stormtroopers body) alongside a princess who definitely isn't Leia. The algorithm might be creating things from scratch at a high level, but the constituent elements are pretty clearly close reproductions of parts of the source material
It's interesting that you're citing a film made 60 years before the 21st century as an example of a 21st century trend. If anything, we seem to be moving in the opposite direction. Star Wars tried to explain where the force comes from. Christopher Nolan includes ridiculously detailed exposition dumps explaining everything (in spite of the ambiguous ending of Inception, everything about how the world worked was explained in meticulous detail). Even the canonical mystery box master himself, Damon Lindelof, took to heart all the backlash about the non-explanation ending of Lost. Nobody expected The Leftovers would ever give an explanation of what caused the Sudden Departure, but it did.
Heck, even David Lynch himself gave Laura Palmer an origin story in Twin Peaks: The Return! And even where he tried to preserve some mystery, the companion book by Mark Frost explained all of it.
> comic books and star wars no longer considered nerdy now that nerd culture is mainstream?
Star Wars was never considered nerdy, it was mainstream even when it released 44 years ago. Same thing with the superman movie, it was released around then as well and was a huge mainstream success. So I'm not sure what you are talking about.
I can't think of a time when I've been fooled by CGI (though, of course, I wouldn't be aware of being fooled if I was, so it's a catch-22).
I really hate when movies throw in a CGI character expecting it to come off as real. It pulls you out of the movie in a way that normal over-the-top action CGI doesn't. I remember watching the recent Star Wars movies and being jerked out of the flow by CGI Princess Leah and some other characters (whoever the villainous old man was in that movie).
I'd be interested to see any videos of CGI faces that can fool experts.
> This progress is also why new films look so badly lit.
I'm pretty sure it's the exact opposite.
Watch old films and the nighttime scenes are... almost cartoonishly lit. Like there are hidden floodlights everywhere, or just filmed in straight-out daytime but underexposed.
Whereas modern film and TV looks far closer to reality. I don't know what you mean at all that the "state of the art is still stuck with habits and techniques". If you've been on the set of a modern film or TV production, the state of the art is, well, state of the art. The lighting would be unrecognizable to someone from 30 years ago.
Can you give an example of a scene in a new movie you consider to be badly lit because of old "habits and techniques"?
Green-screen is a totally different situation, because it didn't exist before. But even there I think you're making a mistake with comparison to Star Wars. Have you watched The Mandalorian? Because that's current state of the art, and it's stunning. The environmental lighting is real, and the technology they use to achieve it is utterly amazing.
This progress is also why new films look so badly lit. The state of the art is still stuck with habits and techniques built for times when you had to do a whole lot to get your vision across. The same things with cameras that have much better dynamic range and low light performance and you can easily notice (and not unsee) “oh look it’s a bunch of actors on a soundstage in front of a green screen” or “where is that light coming from”.
The original star wars looks so much better now than the rest of the films because it was real people in real places and you’ll find that theme all over. Green screen looks bad because you just can’t believably light people in many environments any more without painstakingly painting every frame but very talented artists. (gollum in lotr was done quite well most of the time)
Babette's Feast is also Danish, one of the most well-known and highly regarded Danish films of all time. The other 2 are Dreyer films—I've only seen Ordet so far, and I thought it was just amazing. Johannes is an unforgettable character.
It's a pretty great list, far as I can tell. Dersu Uzala (1975, not 1978) must be in my all-time top 5.[0] I loved Bicycle Thieves—The Bicycle Thief is a bad translation. Yes, it's important to the story!—but much preferred Umberto D. Liked On the Waterfront but vastly preferred A Face in the Crowd.
[0] It's my pet theory that Yoda in Star Wars is based on Dersu. There are many similarities. Seems very obvious to me but I've never heard or read anyone else mention the connection. The plot of the original Star Wars was after all based on that of another Kurosawa movie, Hidden Fortress. See e.g. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20160104-the-film-star-wars-stole-from
Haven't seen Black Widow yet (I'm getting "wait 'till it's free" vibes), but opinions of Loki are... not universally good. I, for one, was skeptical about the other two shows and ended up loving both except for the last episodes (which was still OK for Wandavision, but outright bad in F&WS), while Loki was the one I was most interested in, but I've spent almost the whole time furrow-browed thinking "how is this so bad? How? Why did they make that choice? Why is this scene still going on?"
What's best and what's worst in Marvel tends to draw opinions that are all over the place, excepting that rarely does anyone rank the two Guardians movies near the bottom. Like Star Wars, I guess. You can get rankings that are wildly different, except for a few things (almost no-one is going to rank Empire very low, and almost no-one is going to rank AOTC higher than the middle, for instance).
You ask a good question, and to be honest: I don't have a good answer to it yet. I'm still trying to work out a consistent position on the whole topic. Therefore I'm going to give you a rather tentative view.
I currently feel there's a spectrum of cultural importance on media. On the one end, you have your sonnet, that few people even know exists. On the other end, you have Game of Thrones.
At some point a piece of media becomes so widespread that it becomes a part of shared culture. It could meaningfully affect everyone[0], like Harry Potter or even Game of Thrones (I'd expect everyone to be at least aware of its existence). Or a subculture, like Star Trek or Star Wars for people with even passing interest in science fiction (or STEM), or StarCraft for people into PC video games. These works weave themselves into the fabric of society - people lift phrases from them, make metaphors referencing them. Hogwarts is the modern Troy. Being unable to access these works - especially at the same time everyone else around you is perusing them and talking about them - becomes cultural isolation.
With books, we have it solved, thanks to libraries. Almost anyone can get legal access to almost any written work - where they don't have the money, they can substitute it with effort, to get to a library (and possibly convince the library to buy the work, or fetch it through inter-library loan, etc.).
With music and movies, we had it solved in the past too. You could be exposed to popular works through radio and TV, both private and public. This worked better pre-Internet, because while media distribution was regional, the culture was also regional. Not so today - with the spread of the Internet, the culture became international almost overnight. With Internet, enough of us in Poland can enjoy Game of Thrones simultaneously with the rest of the world that it becomes expected of everyone to enjoy it in lockstep with the whole planet.
Videogames gained mainstream popularity around the same time Internet did, so there was never an equivalent of a library, or public broadcasting, for games. You either buy one or pirate it. If a game suddenly gains worldwide popularity[1] and every one of your friends is playing it, you'll either buy it or pirate it, just so you can feel included in their conversation.
And that's ultimately the main justifying factor I'm currently exploring: entertainment media are social objects. One of their most important roles is to glue communities together, by giving people shared experiences to talk about. Once a work becomes popular enough, I can't really blame people who pirate it because they too want to be a part of the conversation.
The sonnet from your example? It isn't popular at all, it isn't part of culture, so I'd consider pirating it as an act of malice. My view would change if I suddenly started seeing it mentioned on the news.
--
[0] - Not everyone everyone, as there are plenty of people with little to no access to Western media. It's much less than 50% of the planet, but much more than "the West", so I don't feel writing the latter would be right either - so where I say "everyone" in this thread, it is to mean "everyone within the broadly understood sphere of influence of the Western culture".
[1] - Which doesn't happen by accident; a lot of money and effort goes into marketing, in order to make this happen. And piracy was historically a part of it, too: few people actually bought originals of Diablo or StarCraft or Red Alert in Central and Eastern Europe, and yet they were hugely influential there, all thanks to folks with CD burners in their trucks.
I'll go further than this, and say that this is practically the only use case I would have for a movie theater.
As-is, movies air in theaters for only a couple months, and then they're gone. Like, what the hell. Every time in recent memory that I've ever suggested to someone that we go see a movie, I've had to find out that the movie was no longer in theaters, or was even already available for streaming. That's basically a non-starter for people with jobs. Not that I haven't also gone to a theater with no particular movie in mind and just watched whatever was playing, but if anything that seems way more niche to me.
The last times I went to the movies were March 2019 and October 2017, and both of those were special cases (the latest installments in a series I was heavily invested in, Fate/stay night, each with a limited one-day release and a long expected wait before it would be available for illegal download via Blu-Ray rip). I haven't been to the movies with any kind of regularity since I was a teenager.
Anyway, point being, I think movie theaters would actually be more compelling for more people if they included a revolving door of well regarded classics, rather than only whatever films happen to be the latest releases. I'm unlikely to wander into a theater with no idea what's playing or whether any of it is worth watching*, but if I could rely on them also having one or two that were known great and/or on my bucket list (Citizen Kane, Fight Club, Matrix trilogy, Dark Knight trilogy, Star Wars, Pulp Fiction, Schindler's List, Shawshank Redemption, etc.) then I might just take the gamble that something playing will be worth the time.
*: I suspect that this is also a generational gap in play. Older folks who primarily watch traditional TV with ads probably have a much better idea of current and upcoming movies.
There are theaters that are dedicated to playing older movies, and they apparently turn enough profit to subsist in some locations. I think that makes this a top comment on HN with a profitable use case complaining that there's not enough around.
Also, I would watch the shit out of the Good the Bad and the Ugly in a theater. Same with original Star Wars (which I think happened during extra trilogy releases occasionally), The Matrix, the Princess Bride, and anything in that vein which either has a cult following, is a different/better experience to watch in a theater, or both.
At their root core, sure we could generalize that. But I would say like any art, the expression of the story is what matters. I have a hard time connecting films like The Lives of Others, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Les Innocentes, Star Wars, and Austin Powers as "just the same story." In essence all films are either a comedy or tragedy if you really want to get down to it.
At no time in history has there been so much "art" as a result of about measuring the audience and seeking please it, or at least extract money from it. We're now already at the point where fans think in term of "franchises" and applaud "smart moves" made by "brands", i.e. even large swaths of consumers are now marketing drones, too.
Of course that doesn't mean it was ever "pure" at any point in time, just that it got worse. I've seen so much regression and dumbing down in just the last 20 years, that I don't care if that guy is a hypocrite, I think he happens to be correct anyway. I see what I see, and I can only imagine how it would seem if I had overview of 50 years of that shit.
> When books or pictures in reproduction are thrown on the market cheaply and attain huge sales, this does not affect the nature of the objects in question. But their nature is affected when these objects themselves are changed rewritten, condensed, digested, reduced to kitsch in reproduction, or in preparation for the movies. This does not mean that culture spreads to the masses, but that culture is being destroyed in order to yield entertainment.
> The result of this is not disintegration but decay, and those who actively promote it are not the Tin Pan Alley composers but a special kind of intellectuals, often well read and well informed, whose sole function is to organize, disseminate, and change cultural objects in order to persuade the masses that Hamlet can be as entertaining as My Fair Lady, and perhaps educational as well. There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.
-- Hannah Arendt
^ Good luck making movies (with a budget, and an audience) that are not entertaining, because they have something serious to say that doesn't happen to be funny. They do exist, and in absolute numbers I bet there's more of them made each year than ever before, just because of accessibility of the technology. But it would be dishonest to focus on those and ignore the fact that, say, three The Hobbit movies exist, or how people break out in tears over Star Wars movies -- and all that insane, infantile, extremely commercialized utter crap.
Again, Barry Diller may have been just as guilty of that stuff. I don't know and I don't care, because he doesn't matter. The world matters, the human species matters. How cool a specific individual is or isn't doesn't matter, they and anyone who remembered anyone who remembered them will be gone in a few centuries.
> The arrogance is in being able to convince yourself it was different in the old days without risk of being contradicted.
That would be nostalgia. And I'm not even convinced the assessment is wrong. And calling someone "arrogant" isn't contradicting them anyway, it's avoiding the argument if anything.
It's more like, the spotlight has shifted away from the medium and creative people have left. Old movies, like old books, are by definition more important. Looking at the highest grossing movies of the past 2 decades almost all are based on older stories/franchises, from star wars to marvel , to LOTR, to harry potter (newest one).
There has been huge trend from the audience towards overanalysing plots and story details. Specifically, to analyse them independently from the emotional and storytelling aspects. Jump onto reddit and you see everyone ripping apart the details of Star Wars, the Marvel Universe, Chris Nolan films, etc.
I think that this is a mistake. The point of the plot is to support the story. It doesn't matter if it's logical if it makes you feel something powerful. The plot needs to be strong enough to hold up during the running of the film when the viewer immersed in the story.
Novelizations and (less commonly) comic-adaptations of films filled this role generally, before home video releases were common & affordable. The Star Wars novelization, for example, didn't sell well because it was a great book, but because most kids couldn't re-watch the movie every single day like they could when the VHS releases came out, so they'd instead read a $1.25 mass-market paperback until it fell apart. They were chiefly memory-refreshers for the actual film. There was even a brief span of time in which audio versions (often of the film itself, not necessarily of the novelization, so, not exactly an "audio book") helped filled this role for some films, because audio cassettes & stereos/walkmans were more widely available & affordable than video decks.
Maybe I'm imagining it, but I wanna say there were things like re-cap books for seasons of shows like The X-Files, even, because home-video copies of entire shows were prohibitively expensive for all but the craziest fans. That's also part of what coffee-table type books about shows & movies were for—lore & encyclopedic content mixed with stills and what were effectively plot and episode summaries.
I'm jealous of sooo many of you. I didn't like so many mainstream hits. Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, the Bourne and Bond series, all the Marvel / DC movies probably a lot more I've forgotten to mention.
I used to think that movie reviewers were out of touch with the common man. The fact that they would give movies like Transformers a low score but rave about obscure boring movies would always annoy me.
But several years ago I worked on a side project where I reviewed a movie every week for two years, and when it was over I became much more sympathetic towards movie critics.
I agree with this blog post when he says that movies are repetitive. The same gimmicks and tropes are used over and over. It really does become boring and annoying to see different shades of the same thing again and again.
This is why critics rave about the obscure weird movies that you never heard of. They have to sit through thousands of hours of generic crap and anything that is different is like a breath of fresh air to them.
Something really exasperates this problem of generic movie making that wasn’t touched on in the article is the soulless Hollywood factory system that is currently cranking out worthless junk that was designed by committee.
Look no further than the recent Star Wars trilogy for evidence of this.
Very rarely to we see movies that a result of a singular vision, directors are now just replaceable cogs that have to bend completely to the will of the studio or they will be replaced during production (like the Han Solo movie) Ok
> Disney has said they have the resources to pump out star wars movies every week but the chimp troupe doesn't have the finanical and cognitive capacities to handle it.
Source?
That is true. Also? The Star Wars universe at the time felt open & surprising, like anything could happen. By the end of the newest prequels, it felt like the movies were highly constrained by everyone’s expectations. They were Marvel-ified by Abrams, and then they handed over the franchise to a more controversial film maker who couldn’t quite pull it off either, and then you had an impossible situation that Abrams made the best he could of, but was ultimately a mess.
Whatever. Nowadays, I will watch scifi movies simply for the visual aspect, and there were some nice scenes in the new trilogy. But the surprise and novelty of the original trilogy could never really be satisfied, in part because I’m not 12. :)
My family saw the Star Wars that came out in 2016 for Christmas. I was shocked to find myself bored out of my skull. I thought, "How can Star Wars be so popular among my friends if I hate it?" A year later I told the story to someone and they helped me realize that it's not Star Wars in particular, it's action movies in general that I hate.
They can be fun in 10-minute snippets, though. And pretty.
One of the cool things about having kids is that you get to go through all the movies again from the start.
I got to get all excited about Star Wars again. And Indiana Jones. And Back to the Future. One day soon they’ll be old enough for The Matrix. How cool will that be? I’m gonna get to watch Terminator with these guys for the first time one day.
You also get all the old TV. We’re 4 seasons into The A-Team, and have watched every episode of The original Battlestar Galactica and a bunch of other series from the time when television was suitable for children.
There’s tons of stuff out there. It’s cool too get a fresh start on it all.
Hmmm.... I guess it is when you grew up? I thought the 70's were king for U.S. filmmakers. And 70's sci-fi was some of the best. Until "Star Wars" came along and killed it.
I loved "Star Wars" when it came out, was blown away. But in hindsight I am sad to see it was marked the end of 70's sci-fi.
And then "Raiders of the Lost Ark", which I loved, was more or less the modern blueprint for all the crap that has come out since. It represents a storyboard approach to the screenplay/film: basically action sequences tied together with a thin thread of plot.
The various "Pirates of the Caribbean" are classic examples of the rot that followed as are every superhero film, every "Fast and Furious" film, "Transformers", etc.
I don't have the cycles to spend on all the "streamed content" that HBO, Netflix, etc. are cranking out now so I can't comment on whether "TV" is better these days.
My parents were not movie people- never went to the theater, rarely rented movies. So my introduction to Star Wars was the Expanded Universe novels at the local library.
Network effects are breaking down. Reeds Law and Metcalfe law are already showing signs they don't hold for various reasons such as the Dunbar number, error rates in the 6 inch chimp brain we have increasing from info overload etc.
Therefore I'd say the era of non linear scaling taking advantage of network effects has already peaked. Disney has said they have the resources to pump out star wars movies every week but the chimp troupe doesn't have the finanical and cognitive capacities to handle it.
Out of curiosity, can you also not hear "vivid" music in your mind? My friend can't, at best he can "hear" himself mumbling something resembling the original piece.
I however can hear passages of music I remember well: the opening from Star Wars, parts of Kind of Blue or songs from Pink Floyd, the intro song of many TV shows, etc. I probably cannot pass a test equivalent to the crossword puzzle either, but I definitely can hear the music and it's not just me mumbling in my head.
It's a problem across the artistic genres. Authors who become too famous to be edited often have a bad decline in their later years, because they really need to be edited. (One of the things I respect Larry Niven for is his insistence that he be edited, even though within his niche he reached the point where he could have done the same thing.) Movie directors that become too big to say no to often turn out to not quite have been the raging individual talents they thought they were, but instead have been the front person for a talented team; I think there's good reason to believe that this is what happened to Star Wars, for instance, that George Lucas is in fact not on his own a supreme talent but instead turned out to be a good person to have on the team. A whole HN thread could be filled naming the flabby, overcomplicated, self-indulgent movies that directors have made when they got large enough to be allowed to do whatever they wanted. It would be a much smaller thread naming such movies that ended up good in the end. I think there's a few. But in my opinion, as much as we complain about studio meddling and such, the track record on just writing a blank check to a creative isn't actually that good either.
I'm not sure it's possible, no matter how good you are, to ever get to the point that you don't need someone else assessing what you're doing and willing to be critical, at times even harsh if necessary. You will always be too close to your own work. Cultivating a dispassionate attitude can help, but you'll still be too close to your own work.
Also Star Wars was considered the ca last movies in the series. Different management will always have new vision.
> Are we on the right track here?
You probably mean on an intellectual level, not in terms of user adoption.
The lack of specificity about who your audience is the toughest part, intellectually, about what you’re doing. First let’s assume it’s the Everyman.
Why do people like a 680x680 picture / selfie of themselves? One reason Instagram has demographics much closer to the real world than Medium does: people already know how to express themselves and define an identity using their bodies. The average person - who might have a 2 year college education, or read fewer than 10 books a year, or who uses fewer than 4 third party apps and websites on their phone - has a more intuitive grasp of fashion, makeup, what their hair color and race and jewelry and the setting and etc. says about them than if they tried to write something down.
What about people who like internet nostalgia? Nostalgia is kind of toxic for trying new things. That same audience also would pick a Star Wars movie over an indie movie every time. Nostalgia is the antagonist of new voices, not the friend. People think nostalgia is superficial, that it’s GIFs in the frame, but it’s defining an audience that wants the same stories, the same characters, and to stay in a middle to high school comfort zone. Kind of the opposite of what you want for someone’s crunchy blogs or wonky essays.
Otherwise, can someone have an argument about what’s the best visual design language? It’s very subjective. Websites had their moment as a medium, and now they’re out of the way in terms of delivering what a visitor came to see. People who express themselves outside their bodies, like writers, musicians, political activists, etc get a lot from the gwalb getting out of the way. Because so much is just getting your voice heard, weird websites turn off visitors far more often than it entices them. Not a very exciting opinion though.
Yes, SW is much more conducive to video games. Lucas told grand, albeit imperfect, stories in a world he built. He was an auteur in every sense of the word. The prequels are rough, but they still feel like Star Wars.
Whereas the Disney movies are safe, soulless, designed-by-committee comic book action movies set in the Star Wars universe.
Hardcore Star Wars fans decided George Lucas went senile because they can't fathom that he doesn't like them and didn't make the movies for their sake.
I think you'd be wrong. There is far more to star wars than the movies. Decades of books, video games, comic books, and lore.
>>It has everything, except the first Star Wars?
They have all movies, including first. I've watched it there like a month ago.
I think it's a whole genre that was finally allowed into mainstream. For a long time we had very black/white view on the superheroes in movies. Only relatively recently Batman got a bit interesting, Star Wars had someone turn "bad", Ironman was a good jerk, Starlord... was a good jerk, Loki and Deadpool are pretty chaotic, now Sandman is soon coming out. We have a number of "that bad character had reasons" movies like Cruella.
Those existed for ages in comic books, but I don't think mainstream / Disney would touch them.
I could come up with a dozen forward-leaning SF and technology narratives off the cuff, and I bet you can too. In fact, many authors have already done this and continue to publish great speculative fiction.
I think the problem -- and I speculate here -- is that the US media machine enjoys the downtrodden narrative. There's limited room at the top, and they're funding what they like. Not always necessarily what sells.
I don't think science fiction would fail to sell. I would certainly consume it. You would. Look at Star Wars and other popular science fiction. Dune. The problem is that nobody seems to want to film this stuff at volume. We're in a supply side drought.
I blame Hollywood for not funding their dreamers. They'd rather make depressing shit that tells people they can't reach the stars. Today's films are more gritty and human, but they're so stifling and boxed in.
(fwiw, I'm personally trying to change this, but it's a tough road ahead. I can't stand the lack of good fantasy and science fiction.)
The stronger implication missed in the headline is from the key word I emphasize here: "no more mediocre and schlocky Star Wars." The judge was clearly judging at least some subset the films Lucas himself released to be mediocre and schlocky.
In fact, the judge could still claim he was reserving judgment on the quality of the Disney films. After all, he was only calling the promise of a future improvement in quality illusory. But even that claim depends on some of Lucas' own output being mediocre and schlocky in the first place.
In either case the ruling is against Lucas here. :)
It looks to me like it is suggested that all Disney Star Wars movies are mediocre.
‘The judge then made a comparison to the two Star Wars sequel trilogy films produced by Disney. He wrote, “That is like George Lucas promising no more mediocre and schlocky Star Wars sequels shortly after selling the franchise to Disney. Such a promise would be illusory.”’
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Any fantasy movie in a futuristic setting (even one that's technically in the past, like Star Wars) would be widely considered science fiction. Granted, that is a common definition of science fiction.
But science fiction can also be something like The Twilight Zone: a genre that explores "what-if" scenarios. A genre that takes some fictional premise and attempts to explore the consequences logically. An example premise could be, how might modern society have evolved if the Greek gods were real? A sci-fi story would try to approach that question in a scientific and logical way. Star Trek often followed this pattern. Star Wars doesn't.
A weakness of defining sci-fi by a futuristic setting is that you can change the genre with only superficial changes to the story. Other major genres - comedy, horror, mystery, romance, action - are defined by the feeling or thought process they try to evoke. But take Star Wars and replace the planets with kingdoms, the Jedi with wizards, and the force with.. well, that's fine as it is.. and you can create a story with the exact same plot points but without a futuristic setting. There's no actual science in Star Wars; only a futuristic setting.
Setting doesn't feel like it should be the feature that defines a genre. You should be able to have a comedy, horror or mystery take place in a futuristic setting and a sci-fi that takes place in the present (and we often do, eg, The Handmaid's Tale).
I'll note that there aren't many movies that stick to just sci-fi; most incorporate a lot of action (like The Matrix). This is probably because filmmakers feel 2+ hours of science fiction would be boring. The movie The Martian heavily cut from the science of the book and focused on the action (while the book had little action and a lot of science). You see a strong sci-fi focus more often in literature and TV.
Three movies were referenced in the comment I responded to: Return of the Jedi, Star Trek: Into Darkness, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Two of those movies are definitely not focused on future technologies.
Many people call Star Wars "science fantasy", but I'm extremely confident that this is used less frequently than "science fiction" to describe it and I am absolutely confident that I'd be able to find marketing copy by LucasFilm or distributors describing it as science fiction, even if that aggravates people who are really into more cerebral sci-fi.
True but Lucas doesn't have final say on classifying his movies. People who make things have an incentive to claim that their work is somehow special.
I'd just say Star Wars is science fiction with lots of fantasy elements, as well as lots of influence from different genres (Earth-based war films, adventure serials, etc.)
I see the fact that humans in Star Wars seem to be the "same species" as Homo sapiens to be similar to the fact that movies that take place in ancient Greece have the characters speak modern English. We are expected to understand that humans in Star Wars evolved there, not in Africa on Earth. It would be more realistic to have the main characters look very different from us, but it probably wouldn't make for as enjoyable a movie.
Seems disingenuous to lump a science fiction movie where the focus is future technologies to an action movie with exaggerated physics and lack of real damage. In action movies, bad guys die with one bullet while the hero finds his way to safety (and survives!) despite having 10 or more lethal bullet wounds.
For the record, Star Wars is not science fiction nor has it ever been portrayed as such. It's very much an action adventure set in space.
Grossly increasing the factor of safety is a subtle way that science fiction stories connote a feeling of very advanced technology.
For example in the JJ Abrams movie Star Trek Into Darkness we see the Enterprise operating at depth in an ocean, then dramatically zooming away into space. Then later another ship falls from orbital height and plows through San Francisco without losing its hull shape.
In Star Wars the Millenium Falcon is constantly doing things that would seem to be outside a normal design for a spacecraft, and it survives (aside from the radar dish).
Even as far back as the movie 2001, the monolith is made out of a material that humans can’t dent or cut. Why so strong? It’s basically just an automated radio.
The idea is: this advanced civilization has such command over physical technology, that they can effortlessly engineer unnecessary strength without losing any of their designed performance.
SCP is the opposite of say, the Star Wars franchise where George Lucas (now Disney) gets to say what's canon even if all the fans disagree. In the SCP-verse, everything is licensed Creative Commons (I think), so your own headcanon is equally valid as anyone else's, and fanfic doesn't exist because it's all fanfic.
That also means it's popular to make live action movies like this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVx2jyDPinw)
>Why there is no light on space Sci Fi series or movies?.
Besides artistic choices, for the same reason many devs prefer to work in near darkness with dark mode UIs.
I for one wouldn't be letting bright light anywhere near my spaceship's interior...
That said, many sci-fi movies/series have plenty of light internally: Star Trek and Star Wars for two big ones...
>We know that we need strong light exposure in order not the develop illnesses like myopia. Mood is affected badly by lack of light.
Not a problem in 2520 A.D.
All the wonderful unauthorized sequels, medium-conversions, re-makes, re-mixes, et c., that would have come to be seen as on par with or better than the originals, and possibly even more commercially successful, that aren't being made. Inherently multi-media works (film, games, that kind of thing) not being able to choose freely from non-super-old popular media to include, without having to both beg permission and pay someone else (as with soundtrack music, for example).
Disney shouldn't own Star Wars now, to pick one example. Everyone should own it. Any person or company who wants to try to make a go at financing and selling a new entry, or a re-make, should be free to. Film-makers who grew up on it and want to put their spin on it without having to get permission first, should be able to try.
Companies still making sequels to or remakes of 80s games should have to face competition from others trying to make better sequels or remakes of those games.
The best recorded version of the Beatles' oeuvre might well be one that won't ever exist now, because the person who'd have made it couldn't have made made any money at it, and died or will die of old age before the copyright expires, even though they weren't born when Let it Be was released.
I hesitate to name a number (14 seems fine, though, and 28 not catastrophic if you want a longer duration that covers a large portion of a normal person's working adult life) but what we've got now is way too long.
My main problem at this point is that I'll need to manage some disk & backups, one way or another, to keep hold of a few things that are really hard/impossible to come by[0], or really inconvenient to use[1], if purchased legitimately.
So I've gotta either give up on 100% of those things forever, or manage a bunch of files & either local disks or a couple cloud storage providers (and, ugh, that extra expense), plus keep whatever I need to actually use those files working... indefinitely. If I choose the latter option, that's easiest on a Real Computer.
I wish someone would hurry up and get us nigh-indestructible, 100+ year lifespan, non-rewritable data crystals or something, so I can stop screwing around with storage and its ongoing costs and constant risk of failure or destruction-by-user-error, for anything that I want to keep long-term. Write two crystals, keep one to use and have a friend store the other in case of a fire. Done. Spend zero time worrying about it or spending more money on it unless one of the crystals (or whatever they are) is destroyed, which may very well never happen.
Oh, and then there's family photos and videos. Sure I can stick mine in iCloud and Dropbox easily enough, but what about ones coming in from family? That's a pain to manage all on iOS devices and stick in the same cloud storage as my auto-uploaded phone backups. So I'm back to managing disks or redundant bulk cloud file storage of some kind.
Sometimes I think I need to get some more Buddhism in my life and just accept not keeping all this stuff, and never experiencing any of it again. Let it all go. Everything dies, nothing's permanent.
[0] Example: Certain TV shows with the original music, that's been replaced in home/streaming releases over rights issues (similar things have happened too some games, too). Cuts/versions of movies that essentially don't exist outside the world of piracy (e.g. anything very close to the original theatrical version of Star Wars)
[1] Example: Any older console video game that's only available on used, physical media for the original, rapidly-aging-and-increasingly-annoying/expensive-to-keep-working-and-hooked-up-to-a-TV console. Say, Goldeneye on the N64, to pick a fairly famous example.
> I realize that I don't really have any right to complain about this. I don't contribute to either project
This is a strange mindset. Do Star Wars fans not have a right to complain about bad movies just because they weren't part of the cast or crew?
"Buck Rogers is a science fiction (and later, particularly space opera) character created by Philip Francis Nowlan in the novella Armageddon 2419 A.D., subsequently appearing in multiple media".
Star Wars is basically that, as a movie, tuned and optimized. It's a complicated question, but I think it's quite possible Star Wars would not and could not exist in the absence of the original, pre-Star-Wars, novella.
Which became all sorts of things such as comic strips… but started as a book.
You enter a movie title, and it picks an even older movie such that your movie's release date is the midpoint. For example:
Today <-- 22 years --> The Matrix (input) <-- 22 years --> Star Wars (output)
In other words, today "The Matrix" is as old as "Star Wars" was when "The Matrix" came out.
Two quick thoughts:
1. The results don't load for me in Firefox unless I reload the page. I can see from the network tab that the ###.json file is received, but nothing is shown. (Tested on both desktop and Firefox for Android.)
2. I think the request "Name an old movie..." undercuts the surprise factor of discovering how old the movie you picked is, which is presumably the point of the site. My first pick for an old movie was Casablanca, which is too old to even generate results. I picked Lawrence of Arabia and then Star Wars, but the comparison films (some French thing from 1903 I'd never heard of, and King Kong) only confirmed that my choices are, indeed, old. I think some other prompt would be better able to create surprise. You want people to be entering films like Avatar or Men in Black, not films they consider "old".
Catch Me if You Can is still a great movie, even if Abagnale lied about the whole thing. I mean, "inspired by a true story" or "based on a true story" movies already deviate pretty severely from history in many cases.
Here's a question though: did the writers feel they had to stick somewhat close to the "truth?" Did it cause them to make some choices they might not have if they were writing about a totally fictitious conman? And, if indeed those things happened, would the movie have been even better if they had total freedom? Or did the movie thrive in part due to its constraints? All unanswerables of course but an interesting train of thought. Reminds me of how the first three Star Wars films are the best despite their limited budget and Lucas' relatively constrained freedom of direction.
Nerds conquered the Earth when IBM enabled WW2 (including the Holocaust) using automation. Neither US nor German war efforts could have scaled to that degree without them.
If you want to disagree with that example, I would also offer Star Wars, Star Trek, Steve Jobs, or the X-Men movies as examples of nerd culture becoming mainstream, dominant culture.
Recently my kids had to suffer through 4 Star Wars movies with their parents complaining every time any "spaceship in space" scene appeared, and learned more than they wanted about orbital mechanics, WWII war movies, and why explosions are not heard in space.
Good times.
Some funny metaphors and descriptions in the article. Seems like the author is grasping a bit to make programming relatable.
"The coding and the analytical skills on display at such events were like the Force in the “Star Wars” movies: it could be used for the light side, or for the dark."
"He spoke about the Stuxnet code in the way that an art historian might discuss “The Night Watch”: it was “elegant,” “precise,” “sophisticated.”"
"The malware consisted of rows of seemingly random letters and numbers flowing down a page, in pairs. In the margins were some recognizable English-language words—“Windows,” “everyone”—connected by cryptic punctuation. Choi could fluently and sensitively parse all this."
If you want the good one, the title should just be Star Wars. The episode number and subtitle were added later; at that point who cares who provided the blue milk.
Star.Wars.Episode.IV.A.New.Hope.1977.2160p.x265.DTS-HD.MA.5.1-NO-COKE-AD.torrent
For those HNers wondering the significance of this page, a leitmotif is a "ringtone" for every character or event accompanied on a staged drama. Wagner's usage of leitmotifs in the Ring was very influential to the development of stage music, later film music.
The influence is especially present in the Star Wars score. You know how Darth Vader's theme plays when he enters the scene? John Williams took hint from Wagner to assign tunes to each character.
Not a great analogy. People aren't looking to make "interoperable movies". But let's play that out for a moment. Would a copy of star wars with different actors, different scenic design, different music be much of a salable product? I don't think so.
While I think it would be GREAT to see what Nick Nolte (Lucas was considering him) would have done with Han Solo over the wooden Harrison Ford, I'm not sure I care enough to sit through it all again to find out. Blech.
Not necessarily. For example, for about $4,000,000,000, Disney bought Star Wars: the Complete Collection, including all rights and trademarks. Not just copies of the movies, but actual ownership of the concept of "Star Wars", in exchange for nothing more than (a whole lot of) money.
For the last time, just go listen to Kathleen Kennedy talk about Star Wars. She makes her motives clear. I really don't know what else to say to you. The fact that she has worked on other films does not impact what her goal with Star Wars was when she took the helm. It's not an imaginary version of her in my head, it's the version of her in my head which is entirely based on her public comments. Not sure how else you want me to form opinions of people. I have quoted her saying something to the effect of "wow this is great because we can have non-white-male directors" – if you want to provide a single instance where she says something like "our goal here is just to tell a good story", then have at it.
This entire post is about diversity and gender issues, so, um, what else would we be talking about? In fact, I think the intersection of gender with the new Star Wars films is hugely relevant to the OP.
Perhaps the reason Rey was a Mary Sue is because nobody felt comfortable saying "hey, maybe this character should have some like, flaws she needs to overcome or something", because they were worried people would see that as wanting the female lead to be weak, and get pilloried for the suggestion. Sure, maybe gender had absolutely nothing to do with this poor storytelling decision, but based on the actual comments of the creatives involved, that definitely seems like the less likely reality.
You do know Kathleen Kennedy has worked on many successful, beloved movies and was hired for that reason by George Lucas, right? Whatever imaginary version of Kennedy lives in your head strikes me as not particularly plausible.
It doesn't even matter if the characters in Star Wars are white or black or brown- they appear to live in a society with no human concept of race- so I don't even know why you keep bring up the topic of diversity? Human races have zero to do with the plot of any Star Wars ever.
From what i've seen of it Mandalorian depicts a color blind, gender blind social world just like the sequal trilogy, they are sort of the same, so why go on about it?
I don't know why you keep bringing up diversity? It has nothing to do with the characters or why Mandorian is different from the movies so who cares?
The fact you enjoy Mandolorian but not the films just suggests you like one thing and don't like another. It says nothing about gender, diversity, artistic intent (artists tend to try to make good art even if they fail at it. Business people tend to try to make money.) so I don't know how else to explain your posts other than reactionary.
It's cool you like the Mandalorian but you don't actually know the motives of anyone involved, you just know you like the art they made.
You might be projecting a bit here. I'm neither angry nor upset. Nobody told me to feel any which way. I also don't think you can point to anything I've actually said and honestly categorize it as "reactionary", unless to you "reactionary" just means... reacting to the behavior and words of others. And if you want to talk about facts, I'm the only one that has presented any in this conversation: box office results and Kathleen Kennedy's own words. What have you provided?
And no, I don't think hiring a diverse group of people and making good product are opposites or at all mutually exclusive. I never said that, so please don't misrepresent me (as you seem very keen to do). What I do think is that people have priorities and if your priorities are out of whack then that is going to have an effect on your outcomes.
If Apple says that their goal is to have phones be made with as (racial and gender, not neuro) diverse a group as possible, rather than "we want to make the best phones", then yes, I absolutely would be concerned about the future quality of their phones. I don't care who designs/makes my iPhone, and so my priorities and Apple's priorities would be misaligned. In fact, probably the best signal for the future of Apple design recently (for me) was when they parted ways with Jony Ive, a white man. But that was not a good signal to me because of his race or gender, but rather because I think Jony Ive without Steve Jobs to curb his worst impulses was bad for Apple products.
Likewise, I don't care if Star Wars is directed by a straight white man or a pansexual black woman (my two favorite episodes of The Mandalorian S2 were directed by a woman and a black man) – I just want the focus to be on quality storytelling, which is clearly not Kathleen Kennedy's primary concern, if you (again) look at any of her public comments on the subject. Luckily it is Jon Favreau's concern, which is why with The Mandalorian we got both: compelling storytelling with strong characters (of all types), directed by a diverse set of directors.
There had not been a Star Wars movie starring Harrison Ford, Carie Fisher, Mark Hamil and the rest for over 30 years. Perhaps people were excited at seeing these characters again and not so exited about every movie being about killing them off?
It doesn't have much to do with wokeness, though, killing parent figures (Uncle Ben, Obie Wan, Yoda, etc.) is what the original trilogy did too. It just wasn't very original.
There's a small cottage industry of Youtubers making up "fake" news about how Star Wars movies and Star Trek shows are all getting cancelled and going out of business for "being too woke" and losing the audience. These Youtubers invent secret inside scoops about how the executives at Disney and other companies are constantly in turmoil and losing money.
My guess is the person you replied to doesn't realize these shows are fiction and doesn't' realize he or she is in a information bubble. However I know nothing about that poster so could easily be mistaken.
You're wrong.
For me, Ikiru and Dersu Uzala are the best, but the usual ones mentioned are great too. Some I didn't see mentioned on this page yet that I also really like: One Wonderful Sunday (1947), Red Beard (1965), Dodesukaden (Clickety-Clack, 1970). First one I saw was The Hidden Fortress (1958), remade in the west as Star Wars – and Yoda, it seems to me, is Dersu Uzala.
I think his movies seem so good because everything about them is good. Screenplay, camera angles, editing, actors, music..etc.
It's commonly claimed that the reason the original Star Wars films were so much better than the prequels was the work of Marcia Lucas in the editing suite.
When Darth Vader tells Luke that one day Luke will call him master, is he also committing a microagression?
Maybe the writers were, but I doubt it. To most English speakers master just means person in control or source of truth.
Or we should retcon Star Wars. Time to ban some more books and film I guess. Yay?
That doesn't seem too awful. It basically means everything from the 80's or early 90's goes into the public domain.
After that much time, it's a crime keeping the copyright monopoly: it's either exhausted all possible profit, so there's no point, or it's been around long enough that everything after it is influenced by it, like season 4 and earlier of The Simpsons, and the original Star Wars movies.
In other words, that seems like a decent cut-off point to say that if you still want to hold copyright on them, then you're rent-seeking off of stuff that has kinda become "cultural identity" stuff, specifically because it's what people grew up watching and influenced by.
I think much of the hate towards Prometheus was unwarranted and overblown although it was flawed. You could easily point to plot holes and dumb decisions by characters in Star Wars or any other classic sci fi.
And it was still better than 95% of films released that year or since.
So what am i supposed to do, love those things?
I hate Twilight and 50 Shades and the current crop of superhero movies that I can't even remember the name of.
Let whoever enjoys them enjoy them but... don't force ME to enjoy them.
Edit: Oops forgot. Hate Disney Star Wars too. It makes me miss Jar Jar Binks.
I think Blender is the most exciting software being developed today. I really think we are on the cusp of an indie cg film/show golden age like what Hollywood has in the 70s and 90s.
The possibilities with CG are sky high but the barrier to entry has been equally so. Lots of money and man hours. But I truly think the next ten years will be exciting and that something like on the level of Star Wars will be made by a small team collaborating remotely.
I think Blender is really user friendly.
In ten years more content will be produced per year than in the past 50 years combined. New methods will make this dead simple for people to create at home. It will achieve the same photo realism that today's high budgeted, high production value projects have.
Clutching onto franchises doesn't work in this new paradigm when kids can make their own Star Wars movies in their basement.
Will we? I laugh at how poor CGI looks compared to the models in the first Star Wars movies.
>it's almost never the case that some creative person has a brilliant story come out perfect in the first draft.
I've got a book i ended up getting in a free box of books. It's some fantasy novel.
It's probably the worst book i've ever seen in print. Everything from the description on the back to the font choices, sometimes four or five in different sizes on one page, to the actual writing reads like something a child would write.
Curious about how such a thing could exist, i looked into it more. Turns out it was a self published book edited by the author's wife.
Now this next part is speculation...
But you can almost picture his wife trying to edit this thing and the author just being like, nope we'll keep it my way.
Like, basic spelling and grammar mistakes, terribly worded sentences, a story that made absolutely no sense.
The thing is, getting past it all, there were some good ideas in there and likely, in the hands of a good editor and publisher, it could maybe have been turned into an alright, if still not that great of a book rather than, i'm not actually exaggerating here, literally the worst book i've ever seen.
Another example that just kind of popped into my head while writing this, the original drafts of star wars.
https://old.reddit.com/r/StarWarsCantina/comments/afvlzk/links_to_every_scanned_star_wars_screenplay_that/
I've read some of them and honestly, they were pretty bad, like scyfy movie bad. Without the team of screenwriters and editors that worked through those drafts, we'd probably have no idea what 'Star Killers' was other than some weird cult scifi b-movie with a dedicated fan base of a few hundred people that get together once a year, get drunk, dress up as their favourite characters and complain about how nobody understands just how great George Lucas and Star Killers is.
And then Spaceballs would never have been made and that just woulda sucked a whole lot.
This seems pretty crazy to me - you're saying that if I happen to enjoy anything that also happens to be enjoyed by racists/sexists, you would be concerned? Guess what? Racists and sexists like Harry Potter, and Star Wars, and Marvel movies, and Coca-Cola, and everything else that people who aren't racists and sexists like. I guarantee that you enjoy many, many things that are also enjoyed by people who have detestable beliefs, because people with detestable beliefs sometimes like things that have nothing to do with those detestable beliefs. Racists don't spend all their time reading Mein Kampf and watching Birth of a Nation, they also read the same books you read, watch the same movies and television shows you watch, and, yes, read the same blogs you read.
If the blog has sexist/racist content that attracts sexists and racists, sure, that's a problem, but if the blog had such content, the NYT article wouldn't have resorted to pointing out the commenters, they would have linked the content.
> As to the feminism issue, in the full context, he criticizes feminism with respect to specific points and texts from feminists (which he is 100% entitled to), but then ends with the sentence in question that to me whichever angle you look at it from says, feminism and pure evil are not too distant. As I noted, he could have backed away from the statement easily by saying his statement is wrong (if he thinks so), but claiming it's out of context is dishonest and a diversion.
Specifically, in context, he said "People who go out of their way to be horrifically mean to other people who are pretty unfortunate and unhappy and don't understand why, just for asking why, are pretty much pure evil", it wasn't an attack on all feminists ever, it was an attack on people who he specifically thinks are doing something extremely terrible. That's the context.
Not sure I agree with your disagreement; I'm thinking the biggest practical differences in youth would be non-computing and a generation or two earlier - indoor light, central heating, hot water on demand, electric washing machines and vacuum cleaners and motor cars and so on. I don't know which generation it would be but my mom's upbringing in a house with only fires for heating the house and water, and my grandma spending most of her life on cooking and cleaning and my other grandma being from the "make do and mend" tradition of making their own clothes and adjusting hand-me-down clothes, to a world now where sewing is a hobby and household chores much less effort seems a much more significant change than having a TV or not.
Or the other way, a generation later; your dad - TVs did exist in the 1950s; Richard Feynman was born in 1918 and his memoirs include fixing radios as a young lad around 1930; that your dad had no radio in the 1950s isn't because they didn't exist, and he could have raised you with no TV and no radio too. My grandad, my dad, and to a small extent myself, grew up in a world where electronics and radios were things made of discrete components which you could build and repair, where chemicals (including explosive things) were things you used in everyday life, could buy from the chemist, played with if you wanted. We all grew up with schooling based on books and paper. At least my dad and I used cassette tapes, film cameras, clockwork oven timers, digital and analogue watches, push-button TVs and radios, microscopes, Meccano, and a world where going down the street left you completely uncontactable.
I don't have children, but if I did they would grow up in a world where the only device is a computer, the computer works by magic and is not repairable. By that I mean all the light and sound bleeping toys of the 1980s, audio tape players, CD players, VCRs, film cameras, timers, are all subsumed into computers. Drawing is a thing you do on a cheap tablet, constructing is something you do on Minecraft, research is something you do on Google, and you always have cellphone signal and there's always a world on the other end of it never a ring and no answer. Games are computerised, drones exist mostly to bring a video image back to a smartphone, everything is or has a camera, all storage for audio, video, pictures is digital and copious and portable, all communication is wireless, cellular and ubiquitous. And we grew up in a world where talking to someone else outside the local area was rare - a phonecall was a reasonably expensive luxury, and you would only phone people you knew or companies.
Your son watches star wars, but he doesn't exist in a world where if he misses Star Wars at the movie theatre he has literally no way to watch it until it's out on tape. In the 1980s and 1990s only my cousins had a VCR and they only had a handful of films, many recorded from TV. Now films are everywhere - in second hand shops, on Amazon to be delivered next day for $2, on download sites, on YouTube, on NetFlix and Prime and Hulu; he lives in a world where Star Wars is roughly indistinguishable from any other moving picture available on a screen - that it's a movie isn't anything special. Recipes no longer come in books they come in Google results. Games no longer come on boards and cards they come on screens. They don't have to, but in our youths they almost couldn't. Now they do by default.
I say the biggest impact of computers to date is always on communication, which I understand was earlier in the USA than in the UK, but for me dates to 2000 exactly; that's the time when talking to other people outside the local area on forums and IRC became normal and commonplace, the time when downloading information took over from other forms of obtaining it. It didn't have to be fast, it only had to be unmetred and not disrupt others using the phoneline. After that, smartphones and always-on-data from circa 2012, always on became always on you.
In the early 1980s George Lucas asked Mark Hamill if he wanted to reprise his role in 30 years to "hand excalibur down to the next generation": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UGV7WVB-bA
The original 1977 movie was titled 'Star Wars' (without any subtitles). The temporal ambition started with titling the next movie "Episode V: Empire Strikes Back" and renaming the original movie "Episode IV: A New Hope". I agree maximizing profits plays a big part, he made things up as he went along and in interviews over the years he switched between saying it's a 6/9/12 movie saga. But whatever his motivations, he still had the temporal ambition to "start from the middle" and leveraged that idea to build a lasting franchise. And that really impresses me.
> Another "temporally ambitious" series was George Lucas' Star Wars films
“temporally ambitious” implies some sort of forethought. With Star Wars it was just a series of profit maximizing attempts. George Lucas released Episode IV. Then he saw a bunch of demand and made V and VI. Then later made I-III since there was more money to be made. Disney bought the franchise and decided there was still more money and nostalgia is a powerful factor and made VII - IX using a lot of the same actors.
In the same vein, I guess Indiana Jones is temporally ambitious as it shows an aging Harrison Ford.
But unlike the other examples, I there really wasn’t an artistic vision. It was more financially ambitious which accidentally ended up looking like temporally ambitious.
The Up Series is what I call "temporally ambitious". It was very impressive that Michael Apted started the series at age 23 and producing a new episode every 7 years until last year, when he was SEVENTY EIGHT years old.
Another "temporally ambitious" series was George Lucas' Star Wars films, which used the real-life ageing of the actors to tell a multi-generational story that (whether you think it's highbrow or lowbrow) has massively influenced multiple generations.
I wish more visionary film makers produce such "temporally ambitious" works. Even something as "simple" as taking a photo of yourself everyday for 60+ years and make a 60 second timelapse video yields impressive results.
Most people are understandably focused on the present and near-future, but there are some visionary artists who build really cool things over a much longer timescales.
> I sort of assumed that uniforms were the primary mechanism, but obviously they can be spoofed, and with "tacticool" fashion as prevalent as it is they can be trivially spoofed.
This has been a plot point in various movies. See also dressing up as troopers in Star Wars.
There's a 'what to do if you're an evil genius' guide floating around, and one of the recommendations is to make sure that helmets had clear masks so people's faces could be seen—at least in the Evil HQ.
Wait did I say I enjoy Marvel movies? If your defense of the Star Wars Universe is to belittle the Marvel Universe (Another "large" but tiny universe) I think you are grasping at straws.
I don't enjoy Star Wars or Marvel movies. I only watch them with friends/family who really love them since they seem to be important to them.
This is quite unfair to Lucas. Star Wars was a groundbreaking achievement at the time, and it was due to unique vision of Lucas. He should get credit for that, even if he later made some mediocre movies and angered some fans.
I know Star Wars is said to have been "saved in the editing", but it is quite normal for movies going through many edits and to correct issues in postproduction. Many successful movies need re-shoots after scheduled shooting ends. How many reshoots did Lord of the Rings need?
More fundamentally, the director does not just direct the actors, he direct all roles like editor, cinematographer, sound designer. If he select great people and get them to do their best work to realize his vision, it shows he is a good director. It doesn't mean that a successful result is "because of others". At least not any more for George Lucas than for say Orson Welles.
Sure the prequels were underwhelming, but the newest trilogy was just as bad without the involvement of Lucas. This just shows how well the original trilogy was written - we don't really need to know the prehistory of Darth Vader or Han Solo and we don't need to see the characters return again. The original story arch was perfectly told and satisfyingly resolved.
I don't think the size of the universe matters. Marvel has a huge universe but it's mostly derivate, trite, n-th repeatitions of same-old under different names and guises. Star Wars had a cultural significance in a way that Marvel movies never had (but Marvel comics, in their heyday, did, albeit for a smaller niche).
Plus, the Star Wars world was such a good fit for building upon, that it was expanded vastly by hundreds of comics, books, and so expanding "the canon".
>and constantly just microwave and serve the leftovers of the old movies
Funny coming from someone who enjoys Marvel.
And if you dig into Star Wars you’ll find the it’s success is really a result of others. First edits were laughable until a new edit came aboard to give the movie its trademark style. I’d say SW movies were a success in spite of Lucas not because of Lucas.
The prequels prove the point as those movies were 100% him and quite unwatchable IMO.
I'm really curious how Episode IV would have ended. Maybe just rescue Leia and get away, skip the final battle?
It seems possible that a scaled-back Star Wars would have been less popular.
I read that in the Star Wars IV movie, the actors refused to read his lines and made up their own ones. Then later for episode one he was so famous nobody dared to refuse his wishes... result is known.
To be fair, how many non-film buffs know a lot of films from the early 70s today? Star Wars is an exception mostly because it became such a franchise.
It is incredible to me that GL could best be celebrated as a world builder yet the Star Wars cannon might be the smallest universe out of any mainstream film series. Part of the reason I lost interest is that they refuse to create something new in the SW universe and constantly just microwave and serve the leftovers of the old movies.
It would almost certainly be on my Top 100 list as well. I think it stands up pretty well. Those other two are pretty classic too--although I'm not really a horror film fan.
(That said, I could see people not being able to identify with the where/when the movie was set. I certainly wasn't part of that either but I still really enjoyed it.)
But, yeah, the films Lucas directed go way downhill after American Graffiti and Star Wars.
George Lucas post 1976 is a mediocre director, and a worse writer. Even before 1976 he wasn't that great either - American Graffiti is a forgetable coming of age movie. If it wasn't made by Lucas of later 'Star Wars' fame nobody would remember it today.
What he is actually known for is being great at worldbuilding once, with Star Wars (beginner's luck?). Middle age took that ability away though after the eighties, like a punk band trying to be relevant in their 40s: only for hardcore fans.
And I say it regretably. I'd too wanted a great Star Wars 1, 2, and 3. That said, most modern S.W. movies are also crap. The J.A. ones were so much a blatant copy of the original story plots as to be useless, whereas Han Solo bordered on camp. Rogue One was somewhat decent though, and I hear good things about the Mandalorean...
Spielberg on the other hand is a true master...
I think the above comment was implying that the most recent star wars movie(s) is fan fiction quality story wise... Which it was .
How I started was I got interested in 3D modeling because I wanted to make a Star Wars fan film in 1996 with my 8mm. I bought a DVD set on how to do modeling and texturing in 3D Studio Max from the Gnomon School. It was amazing. Film level quality secrets and techniques. I got pretty good. This lead me down a rabbit hole of how do I take this and apply it towards games. 3D modeling and texturing for games. Then I started working on coding and realized that OpenGL/DirectX used similar concepts to what I learned in 3D studio max. There’s a scene, a camera, a mesh, a light, materials, textures, shaders (SM1.0), and all these things combined give you your lit scene using some advanced but cookie-cutter math.
Yes, I talk about stuff that bothers me. I feel rather well (thankfully I'm one of those who have options - I feel bad for poorer people though), but there isn't much to say about that here, this forum's audience doesn't like people posting things like "I like that" or "Thank you" (I tried, got downvoted to hell). I treat people just alright, don't worry about that - different viewpoint is not treating people badly.
I don't see how that's relevant to Star Trek and Star Wars not being a useful model of reality. As I said, I like these TV shows (I love Star Trek! Just rewatching DS9...), but it's entertainment and nothing more. These TV shows made people believe computers will never be creative, and look what happened - computers are more creative than logical. Check out some real life AI-focused philosophers, e.g. I like this institution: https://www.cevast.org/.
Star Wars (1977).
I suspect most people who read HN weren't around when this movie came out, but I was around then.
There was tremendous hype -- the excitement that this film generated led to lines of people waiting outside movie theaters just to get their chance to see it. People would watch it and then get back into line to watch it again. I remember hearing of people who watched it 15, 20, 25 times.
Star Wars substantially advanced special effects. If you want to get an idea of what the state of special effects were in that era, watch Star Trek (the original series).
"Star Wars" felt _real_. Lightsabers, the use of a "Force" where you could physically moves things from a distance, the glissando effect when a starship goes into hyperspace-- these were all incredibly credible and mind-blowing to people back then.
Star Wars didn't just live up to its hype-- it has exceeded it, becoming a fixture in American culture, and becoming a franchise that continues to generate interest and income today.
This isn't my experience at all. On certain subjects, YouTube will start relentlessly pushing an agenda. If I watch some videos where people talk about sci-fi movies or TV, my recommendations become flooded with videos about how SJWs are ruining Star Wars, Star Trek, and Doctor Who, etc. It's gotten to the point that I now only watch such videos in Incognito Mode.
> When you buy a DVD, you don't expect hundreds of hours of unedited footage to come along with the film so you can cut together your own version.
instead of accepting this as a fact of life, it should definitely be discussed and debated. What are good reasons for not having this right by default ?
For instance, Star Wars fans have made the despecialized edition from footage from the various movie - the result is pretty good. People remix music all the time; there have been plenty of initiatives over the years to provide songs as separated tracks to allow for more advanced remixes. etc etc...
> Star Wars is supposed to be ancient history
Star Wars is quite a clever setting because it's both vague and incredibly distant, which allows the film makers huge latitude to include tropes from cowboy, ronin, WW2 films etc without the worry of historical inaccuracy.
The studio system is shut down and blockbusters aren't coming back. Movies are going straight to streaming. Disney and Warner are doing far-reaching reorgs to see to it. Look also at directors like Nolan and Villeneuve complaining - they know their familiar way of life is coming to an end, and they're struggling to cope with the new reality.
Low-budget is something we'll get schooled on. International studios are just as good as we are.
China owns a number of US studios outright, and they also own a lot of the tooling (eg 40% of Epic Games, which is being used for Star Wars). They're cultivating our tech and using it themselves.
Most of the deep fake research amenable to use in films is coming out of China.
I'm not saying it's a sure thing, but China is in a very good position to attempt a takeover of the movie market if they want to.
edit: I'm now being greeted by "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." on all messages I've attempted to post.
It appears my account got flagged for this thread. I've never seen this before in my ten year history of using HN. Not sure if this is automatic or manually added. Does anybody else know what this is about? [1]
[1] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/issues/21
It's easy to see a way it could not work: just take the example of the Star Wars movies
The writing for especially the last season baffled me. They had 6 episodes to tie off a vast array of plot lines and they spent so much of that on nonsense. I think one whole episode was just mindless, irrelevant chatter between characters with no plot advancement at all. It really felt like the writers were phoning it in so they could focus on ruining star wars.
It'll be interesting to see how this effects a culture/mindset shift among large movie producers and directors. Putting aside their artistic concerns that their films are best experienced on the massive widescreen, having a big box office haul seems to be a key part of Hollywood braqfests.
If simultaneous theater+streaming becomes the norm, it would seem the days of multi-hundred-million box office gross will be past. In 2020, the highest grossing film (domestically) so far is the Bad Boys sequel, which released in January and got $204M. The only other 2020 release to break $100M is the Sonic the Hedgehog movie. And many of 2020's top grossing movies were released in late 2019, e.g. "1917" and Star Wars. Even worse, Christopher Nolan's "Tenet" – released in September by Warner Bros – basically bombed at under $60M [0].
Given the huge movies that WB is planning to put on HBO (Matrix 4, Wonder Woman, Dune), I wonder if that'll spur Disney to throw Black Widow onto streaming. Apparently its Mulan release (which required a premium subscription) didn't do so well, but seems risky for Disney to sit on its hands while WB goes all in.
[0] https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/2020/?grossesOption=calendarGrosses
Star Wars (and probably the Marvel/DC superheroes) is effectively the new Iliad. Its heroes, themes, and aesthetics, will likely self-replicate for centuries and be used by historians as a reference for cultural values of these times. It is already much bigger than Mickey Mouse, in practice, and has now enough material to be enjoyed throughout one's entire life (it's actually becoming difficult to be a completionist, with all these TV series).
I fully expect, in about 100 years time, to get statues of Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa erected not-ironically.
The law should be changed so that copyright reverts to the original author in cases like this.
In this case, Foster was apparently involved in the Star Wars movies as well. Disney should be forced to renegotiate any copyrights and contracts he’s involved with across the franchise.
If that happened, I guarantee you that this would be the last time a big corporation would try to pull this sort of thing off.
[edit: I wonder if the current law would support this. Disney’s in violation of the contract that assigned them copyright in the first place; surely invalidating the entire contract is a reasonable remedy.]
I read the Star Wars book before the film was released in the UK. An interesting experience, given that novelisation of film usually goes "the other way" experientally. Film-of-novel is of course far more common.
In some ways, the book was better than the film.
(I read Abyss after the film, which I think was Orson Scott Card. I think the film is better than the book)
What a great article and comments :) Since I was a kid I would "replay" events. In grade school I could (and would) recite the Star Wars movies on the playground. I was a freak.
At 35 I haven't lost it yet but for at least 50% of my life have been a HEAVY marijuana user because it helps dull this problem.
School was easy but dreaming is a nightmare. Again, drugs are the the only thing that helps. I hate having such vivid dreams and remembering all the awful details. I remember dreams from decades ago like I had them last night. It's horrible mostly, again, marijuana was a God send.
Killing my memory with drugs and alcohol isn't great but I've found it better than the alternative and often discuss with my therapist how jealous I am of people that waltz through life confidently forgetting all their screw up and mistakes.
Well I would argue that holograms are always a projection, that is you need a reference beam to reconstruct your image beam.
But I agree the star wars "holograms" were never holograms but more 3D point cloud projections. Now you could say they do exist, see e.g. laser light shows, they are just by far not as impressive as the star wars movies.
To me, it just sounds like a special pleading argument; nerds like Star Wars, believe it should be free, and so dub it "shared culture". What film or album isn't "shared culture"? By some definitions of the (very loose) word "culture", it's all "culture".
The Expanse did a great job showing space battles on screen with a rather approriate distance. Star Wars and others, and I am a full blown Star Wars freak, did a good job with space battles. After the Expaense, it became little bit ridiculous, so. I resembles the problem films like Top Gun have with modern aerial combat. Already in that case, distances are so great that on-screen, the viewer is seeing nothing. For space battle, the enemy would maybe show as a small blip, if at all on screen. Especially with all the hyper advanced tech from Star Wars and Star Trek. This is also the reason why I igonre any stab at estimating weapon ranges based on on-screen scenes.
If you haven't read the books or watched the show, The Expanse does a great job at working in a world with realistic physics.
A lot of combat takes place from extremely far distances, using telescopes, rail guns and missiles, and it can sometimes take days for a missile to reach the target (the TV series doesn't play this up as much though, for obvious reasons).
When there is closer combat battles, they are constrained by the G forces humans can tolerate, wear full helmets and de-pressurize their ships, so when the inevitable shots do go through (usually in and out the other side) it's not catastrophic.
There are no force shields, magic gravity generators, lasers (well, except used for point-to-point communications). I found it to be very refreshing mainstream sci-fi.
One warning: after watching The Expanse, the battles in things like Star Wars, Star Trek or Battlestar just look ridiculous by comparison - even with that technology they'd never fight like that.
> You seem to have forgotten that it's entirely possible for "fantasy" to have more complex themes than "evil space wizards vs. good space wizards," or that something must be only one or the other. Star Wars is solidly both, and as far as its sci-fi aesthetic goes, it's more grounded than Star Trek, which runs entirely on nonsensoleum sometimes.
Not really. I mean, yes, fantasy as a genre can obviously explore deeper themes and does so all the time. But Star Wars is a morally unambiguous universe. It really, truly, does not fit to try and have a nuanced discussion of morality while other more important characters literally commune with the universe and draw power from the sides of light vs. dark. Whatever themes you draw out are just not supported by the environment around them.
Nobody cares about greedy capitalist when evil space wizard is standing next to him.
> I mean, the actress is American born, of Vietnamese descent, but sure, Chinese is basically the same thing, right?
As a mixed Asian, shrug, whatever. I am willing to bet a substantial amount of money she existed only to appeal to chinese audiences. If she's actually vietnamese, sure, good to know.
> And that was one of the best themes of the Last Jedi. Of course there would be war profiteers - we already know this because the OT gave us Mos Eisley and Jabba the Hutt and bounty hunters. "greedy war profiteers and evil capitalists" aren't at all unknown to the franchise. The problem here is this sudden dump of complexity should have been a throughline with Rose for the entire trilogy. It certainly would have been better than "This time the Empire is even more fascist and the Death Star is huge."
If you're saying it wouldn't have been dumb if it was just an entirely different story, then sure.
> The "faction" doesn't identify itself as the Dark Side. It identifies itself as the Sith.
The leader of the Sith is called "Dark Lord of the Sith". They identify as as ON the dark side all the time if you really think that's an important distinction.
> Also the Sith and the Dark Side weren't known for "destroying planets at a time." The Death Star was built by the Empire, and yes, while Palpatine turned out to be a Sith (as a retcon) they even made a point of having Darth Vader point out how insignificant the "technological terror" of the Death Star was compared to the Force - not the Dark Side specifically, but the Force in its entirety.
I really think you're splitting hairs here. The bad guys are the ones who destroy planets. The good guys are the ones who try to prevent the bad guys from destroying planets.
> But Rose wasn't, she was just badly misused as a character.
Meh. I was happy when her first appearance in the final movie is basically. She seems like a boring character to me.
"Wanna come on the main adventure?"
"Nah too busy"
I like westerns. The action sequences are generally low quality, the writing leans on gritty tropes and they’re often just not that good but I like them. I like Star Wars. It’s action scenes are generally poor and the writing is stereotyped and the movies, more often than not, are bad but I like them.
I like Star Wars the Western. It’s exactly what I want out of the loner ambiguous good guy narrative crossed with space monk/wizard galaxy.
The counter-culture of 'rebellion' doesnt stay the same. The most recent star wars films focused on 'resistance' instead. It's an opposing force to a current trend.
I don't care that no-one was interested or not, the key part is that the content of the discussion centred around money.
If people weren't interested in the subject of artistic comdy and they expressed that, there would be evidence art still matters. Wrapping up people's disinterest with a conversation around money, shows it's dead art. Shallow or deep, interpreted or not.
The fact that you guys are still deflecting from the idea that art is less potent, is in itself a sorrowful confirmation of the idea.
> Star Wars franchise also provides frequent scenes of characters taking a posture and saying some short sentence that becomes a meme you can share with friends.
Or you can cram a movie full of it and call it Star Wars IX...
There was a Star Trek Experience in Las Vegas that shut down because it didn't get enough numbers. So I'd be wary of assuming a project like this would be a huge success.
I'm a fan of Star Trek but I have to admit it doesn't have anywhere near the level of cultural force as something like Star Wars, or Marvel movies. For shame.
I think one of the most noticeable examples of this is the original Star Wars trilogy versus the prequels. With the original trilogy, people were constantly telling George Lucas that an idea was dumb, or that he should tweak or change something, remove characters, etc. Marcia Lucas, his now ex-wife, won an Academy Award for Best Film Editing in the 70s, and edited the original Star Wars trilogies.
However, twenty years later when the legendary Lucas walked out on set with the script for Episode 1, he was met with raucous applause, after all this was THE George Lucas, he could do no wrong. Not having anyone to point out that your ideas aren’t good is what gets us the Star Wars prequels and their ponderous, meandering political plot lines and lameness.
Well, most modern fans of Star Wars are far more, if not exclusively, familiar with the movies post Phantom Menace. Many have never even seen the OT.
It feels like a bit of a false dichotomy to me. I love watching old shows and movies, including Mulholland Drive which I've seen a dozen times. But I also enjoy new things. Isn't that normal?
Now, that said I haven't gone to see a summer blockbuster in a decade. I don't like Marvel movies or Star wars sequels. There was only one good star wars movie in the original trilogy anyway.
>Might the cultural sensibility that came to be referred to as postmodernism best be seen as a prolonged meditation on all the technological changes that never happened? The question struck me as I watched one of the recent Star Wars movies. The movie was terrible, but I couldn’t help but feel impressed by the quality of the special effects. Recalling the clumsy special effects typical of fifties sci-fi films, I kept thinking how impressed a fifties audience would have been if they’d known what we could do by now—only to realize, “Actually, no. They wouldn’t be impressed at all, would they? They thought we’d be doing this kind of thing by now. Not just figuring out more sophisticated ways to simulate it.”
>That last word—simulate—is key. The technologies that have advanced since the seventies are mainly either medical technologies or information technologies—largely, technologies of simulation. They are technologies of what Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco called the “hyper-real,” the ability to make imitations that are more realistic than originals. The postmodern sensibility, the feeling that we had somehow broken into an unprecedented new historical period in which we understood that there is nothing new; that grand historical narratives of progress and liberation were meaningless; that everything now was simulation, ironic repetition, fragmentation, and pastiche—all this makes sense in a technological environment in which the only breakthroughs were those that made it easier to create, transfer, and rearrange virtual projections of things that either already existed, or, we came to realize, never would. Surely, if we were vacationing in geodesic domes on Mars or toting about pocket-size nuclear fusion plants or telekinetic mind-reading devices no one would ever have been talking like this. The postmodern moment was a desperate way to take what could otherwise only be felt as a bitter disappointment and to dress it up as something epochal, exciting, and new.
This occasionally strikes me as true when reading some of the comments in this thread about how it's easier than ever to deploy because of a new tool, easier to create a website or app because of a new framework, easier to order a car, easier to buy an airplane ticket..
I can't help but consider that we expected so, so much more.
I was seriously excited when I heard they were rebooting Dune. It is one of my favorite books and movies. Modern graphics, sound, music, actors would have been wonderful. Then I found it was may have fallen victim to being "woke". All of my favorite franchises are being wrecked. Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who and now Dune. In this case, Liet Kynes has changed gender and ethnicity. It doesn't even make any sense. The original Dune already had plenty of diversity and arguably some of the most powerful female characters in all of SciFi. I wish I knew how to fix this.
Competition is good for the customer when the goods are commodities. Media - books, songs, videogames - are mostly non-substitutable goods: if you want to watch Star Wars, you won't settle for an episode of Friends instead. As soon as exclusive releases are allowed, customer benefits from competition evaporate.
Given that:
1. Some of those 37 situations are more interesting than others
2. You need more than one of them for a good screenplay
3. Some situations do not mix well in one story
You will come to conlusion that there is limited number of possible stories.
Now, Hollywood has been producing dozens of movies every year for over a century it becomes clear that it is slowly running out of stories to tell. That's why you see so many remakes/sequels: Star Wars, Rambo, Die Hard, etc. Or remakes with a twist: let's make main characters black/women/gay/trans and pretend that we created a brand new, original story.
Hollywood is eating its own tail.
Actually, this[1] is the original concept. Pretty close! I coincidentally saw it in a documentary yesterday. They changed the design so they could easily make the prop based on an existing small car.
[1] https://www.originalprop.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Star-Wars-Colin-Cantwell-Landspeeder-Prototype-Model-A.jpg
Your assessment is the most astute observation I've ever read about what a child means to you. wow.
For me, it's the former where the child will bring me more/higher purpose to my life.
I am a father to a 1yr. I've never felt (never having a pet) unconditional love. My boy (currently ;-) does not care how much I have or make, what I look like or my personality outside of not mistreating him. In return, he gives me a look, a hug, and a kiss that is undeniable unconditional love. My wife's look, hug and kiss are "conditional." ;-)
Before going any further, let me preface with my thoughts about family; I've never experienced a family. I grew up in a broken one where I was physically abused and I ran away at 18. Before having my child in my 40's, I did not want to be a father incase I became what my father was.....resentful, hate filled, neglecting asswipe. Having grown up in that environment, I wanted to make a difference to children who may be in the same or worse situation. So I volunteered to became Big Brother to 3 fatherless boys in my 20's. I grew up...fast. Kids are special and found out just being there for them is good enough to make you Superman. That's all it took. No need to lecture or do psycho analysis to make the "better", but instead just being there was all they needed. PS> the 3 boys became my grooms men.
Does my child make me happier? yes and no. Happiness with a child is a weighted question. Does my child make me happy? yes. Does he make me happier? difficult to answer but I lean towards no.
I think the answers to your question will be weighted by: what age you had the child, where are you in your career, are you happy with yourself and your life, do you love your wife and extended family? Will your child be a trophy you craft or someone you mentor allowing them to grow based on your influences?
Am I happy right this minute? Well, it's 2am, I just got finished cleaning his playarea of dried up breast milk and food, cleaned all of his bottles and toys, prepared meals for him for next few days and to top all that off, he just woke up crying in the middle unexpectedly. No reason why. FYI I'm a fulltime dad.
Is the happiness so strong it can overcome the hardship of doing something that doesn't come with instructions? this very minute; no. Tomorrow morning when he wakes up cooing at you? yes.
Lastly.. omg. Can't wait for him to turn at least 5 if not 7ish for this first Disney World trip and start on the Star Wars series of films :) Having high expectations that he will like the same...I'm over the moon about my potential happiness. I can only hope but never force. He needs to lead the way to his happiness...not mine.
Disney reduced John Boyega’s role in the Star Wars movies they released in China to appease racist attitudes towards blacks in China. Seems like we thought capitalism would co-opt China but really it’s been the other way around.
I worry when I see movies like Star Wars which preach believe your instincts (aka trust the "force"). In reality vast majority of our instincts are either flatout wrong and works only in very narrow situations. In fact, virtually every scientific law is a statement of how our instinct was so wrong. Does Sun rotates around Earth? Is Earth flat? Can an object move endlessly when applied a force? Can two objects of different mass hit the surface at same time? Science is essentially a bandaid to fix our instincts. Vast majority of people will fail at basic probability questions. This is why there are so few people who finally managed to become quantum physicists. They had to break pretty much every single instinct about how world works. So I've always looked at Star Wars's "May the force be with you" slogan with dose of irony. If force is actually with you, you are probably not using your mammalian instincts :).
Interesting, I was of the other side. I often had space battles with the space sets (White vs Blue) as well as my pirates sets (often colored blue or red based on their sails). Both sets came with weapons of sorts with pirates having over guns, cannons, etc. But I also built giant dinosaurs, volcanos, and everything else. I was a kid and I was playing.
As an adult I build giant battle scense from Star wars. Recently I build a Pirate combat moc with the re-released Pirate bay set (one assembled as the boat, the other as the cove).
None of these have made me more or less violent, just as I assume you playing with GI Joe didn't you. Playing with things is a healthy way for the mind to work through right and wrong, to conceptualize thoughts in your mind. I would argue repression of these behaviors is far worse.
Lego has never made modern war items, I totally get that and am fine by it. They do however make toys that allow you to play out violence. Jurasic Park, Marvel, DC, Star Wars, hell even Minecraft, all have components of violence. I don't believe in the slightest that any child playing with these toys is predisposed to turn out violent. Just as I wouldn't expect a kid playing with a VTOL craft too.
I would argue part of our problem over the past 15 years has been the result of too much limitation of how we raise children and allow them to interact with the world around them. It's why every thing is blown into a huge issue, because to them it is, when the reality of it is that it just isn't.
I will say being of similar ages, our experiences may have been different than the more younger HN crowd, but I'm glad you had legos and enjoyed them the way you saw fit. I would imagine the creativity and ability to be rewarded for solving challenges played a great impact on you.
Maybe i'm misplaced in thinking that proper parenting is a key to everything. Besides, I would argue kids are exposed to way harsher or riskier things on television / movies / the internet, than they ever would be by building the Osprey.
Star-wars is kindof an exceptional case. The original was the highest grossing film of all time when it was released. Return of the Jedi came out years before I was born but the toys were still popular when I was a kid, despite them having not made any movies recently.
Star Wars, Harry Potter, any Disney or Pixar movie, etc etc
While this is generally true, I distinctly remember from my childhood asking for and playing with Star Wars toys for the better part of a decade. (Yeah, there was an on-going franchise, but the toys sold for much, much longer than a year per episode.)
I wonder if there was something fundamentally different about that property or if there were just fewer options?
Star Wars leans on Nazi symbolism and fascist themes, it doesn't wade neck deep in them. People don't try to defend the weaknesses of Star Wars by saying "But it's such a great satire", they don't have to because the franchise stands alone.
Whenever I point out the fact that Starship Troopers makes zero sense and is just a plain bad movie, the singular response I get is that "It's great political satire". Again, maybe it is. That's not the genre of movie I was interested in watching, it still isn't.
Also, for what it's worth, the only Star Wars movie released in the 90s was The Phantom Menace which was nearly as bad as Starship Troopers.
Not just movies, normal photography too.
For Star Wars there is a 4k version: https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/
Modern 35mm yes, and even then if the lens you put in front of it resolves 1mpx it doesn't really matter.
A 4k remaster of the first star wars still look worse than a modern movie shot on film with modern glass and cameras. Let alone early 1900s 35mm film.
Yes! Star Wars was a SINGLE movie. No subtitle. And originally no "Episode IV", which, when it appeared, was VERY confusing...
And there are only two Star Wars films (trust me)
That author is all over the place. It's a general rant about the obvious.
At the beginning, he's on to something. Fiction has a plot shortage. "Across TV, movies, and novels it is increasingly difficult to find a compelling story that doesn’t rely on gimmicks." Movies are stuck in the Star [Wars|Trek|Gate] ditch, and the Marvel Overextended Universe. The 25th James Bond movie is supposed to come out this year, if anybody cares.
Some of this is simply the entertainment glut. Everyone has seen all the possible plot twists. Go back in history and read some of the Canterbury Tales from around 1400. Read a story half way through, then ask yourself how it will end. You'll be right. There are no plot twists. Back then, entertainment was so scarce that they weren't needed.
A more serious problem is that there's no shared vision of a better world. Fiction doesn't help us get to a better place. This hit science fiction first. Science fiction of the 1930s to the 1960s was quite upbeat, showing a picture of a marvelous future. It's been downhill since the 1970s. Today SF is mostly space opera. Dystopian visions used to be rare. Now most SF is dystopian. Even much non-SF is dystopian. From The Wire to Game of Thrones, the world sucks.
Its a shame of your bankrupcy, but I do wonder what all the other ideas really are, Tupac on Coachella, Carrie Fisher in star wars, Trump's face on a baby, and maybe like in the old movie Simone true virtual stars (sim one, get it), what the real ramifications are. Maybe I don't get it but it is not anything different than those Elvis lookalikes on Times Square.
As a massive Disney fan, the parks would be very different! Almost all new rides in the parks are based on Pixar / Marvel / Fox properties.
Firstly Pixar - The Pixar brand pretty much turned around the failing 'California Adventure' after the 'Pixar Pier' conversion. Toy Story alone has more rides than any other movie with Midway Mania, Slinky Dog Dash, RC Racer, Toy Soldiers Parachutes and Slinky Dog Zig-Zag Spin. The French pavilion in Epcot is getting Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure (which is already in Paris). There would be no crush coaster, no Radiator Springs Racers...
Disney probably wouldn't have entire areas of their park dedicated to Pandora and Star Wars, both of which were after the aquisitions of Fox (Avatar) and Lucasfilm (Star wars). Both Florida and California have Guardians of the Galaxy rides enabled by the acquisition of Marvel, and are planning more Marvel based attractions.
Bob Iger realised that just licencing these properties wasn't good enough - only ownership of the brand can protect Disney's long term interests ('What if pixar decides just to stop making Toy Story? Or refuses to licence their next hot property? Or gets acquired by our competitor?').
You also said you wrote the asset management system that was used by Lucasfilm on Star Wars, which was released in 1977. Are you sure you don't mean one of the later J. J. Abrams films, and not the film whose title was actually "Star Wars"?
Mistakes about dates and context aside, I still can't believe you're actually trying to make excuses for mysql_real_escape_string. It has the word "real" in it. I mean, come on, who would ever name a function "real", and why?
That implies the existance of a not-so-real mysql escape string function. Why didn't they simply FIX the gaping security hole in the not-so-real mysql escape string function, instead of maintaining one that was real that you should use, and one that was not so real that you should definitely not use, in the name of backwards compatibility?
Or were there actually people out there using the non-real mysql escape string function, and they didn't want to ruffle their feathers by forcing those people with code that had a security hole so big you could fly a space shuttle through to fix their gaping security holes?
The name of the function "mysql_real_escape_string" says all you need to know about the culture and carelessness and lack of security consciousness of the not-so-recent PHP community.
And you shouldn't be making excuses for it, or blaming it on the wrong people for using it, instead of the right people for creating it then evangelizing it then not fixing it. It was a TERRIBLE mistake.
The crappy code was PHP itself, and the code was crappy because the culture was crappy. I'm not going to start linking to all the anti-intellectual Rasmus quotes, or to the bug report about the time he checked in huge security regression to the crypto code that would have been caught by the tests, and then CUT A RELEASE, but didn't bother running the tests first because they produced so many errors. But you can google that debacle yourself.
Star Wars used painstakingly crafted models and photography effects to produce the film. Now, people using modern tools can do much more, with considerably less work. The 'jobs' analysis wouldn't necessarily reveal that.
Sit through the credits at the end of an effects-heavy movie and look at the thousand or so people involved. The physical effects operations were never that big. I visited Kerner Optical, the physical effects end of Lucasfilm, once, and they had maybe 100 people. (They're gone now, spun off and didn't make it as a standalone company.) Overall, the number of people involved in a major movie seems to be up, not down. Much to the annoyance of some people in the industry, who, 20 years ago, thought they'd be able to make major films with 30 people.
Star Wars used painstakingly crafted models and photography effects to produce the film. Now, people using modern tools can do much more, with considerably less work. The 'jobs' analysis wouldn't necessarily reveal that.
Taking inventory in a retail store used to be a paper and pencil mass bureaucracy - it's now streamlined.
We don't stand at the line anymore to withdraw or deposit money.
Secretaries don't type memos.
Many newspapers are dropping photographers in lieu of training journalists on how to use their iPhones.
We don't manage a lot of paper records anymore.
So a lot of things have accelerated, it might not show up in the job market, it may not even show up in the GDP if consumers are in fact getting all the surplus. Life can get a lot better in many ways without a hint of GDP growth. GDP growth usually only happens (all things being equal) if there is either more cost (edit: 'maybe' bad for consumers but not necessarily), more profit taking (also bad for consumers), or more government spending (neutral for the citizenry - depends on the efficiency of spending).
The implication of what you're saying is silly. Yes, making a marginal copy of the latest Star Wars film is nearly zero. However, the first instance cost $275,000,000 to create. We split the cost across each unit because if we didn't, the movie wouldn't exist, because nobody would buy the first unit.
You are getting too caught up on the fact that some things have low marginal costs to produce that you're entirely neglecting that overhead costs are a thing that also exist.
Even for something like Linux, there are gigantic overhead costs. The vast majority of Linux commits are made by people sitting at their paid job. Those lines of code are not free, they are financed by the companies who are willing to pay Intel/IBM/RedHat etc for their products and services.
Thank you for your point of view. Maybe I have just been lucky, but in my travels, I've found most people wherever in the world appreciate looking for win-win situations, just like your countrymen.
However, in the "Star Wars" franchise, there is the concept of the antagonistic Sith. These always come in pairs — "one to embody power, one to crave it". When one runs across people who believe in zero sum games (or worse yet: seek a bigger slice of a smaller pie), I guess they are attempting to apply the movie concept of a Sith lord to real life.
PS. I enjoyed the 1961 大鬧天宮. Orwell's "Animal Farm" starts out similarly, being a story about animals vs elites, but ends much more cynically. It is depressing, but provides wonderful insight into anglophone politics.
In one of the Star Wars movies, there was a hooded and cloaked figure who, in response to that very same question, said, "I will make it legal."
There's no proof that figure wasn't Larry Ellison.
/s
I'm not sure how TIE Fighter's mechanics would translate to modern sensibilities, and I say this as someone who loved the LucasArts games (at least part of the reason I'm a graphics programmer today!) and currently has, well, a not-insubstantial investment in flight simulation hardware for modern titles like DCS/Falcon BMS/various IL-2 things.
House of the Dying Sun (https://store.steampowered.com/app/283160/House_of_the_Dying_Sun/) might be the closest thing going I'm aware of on the current market, as an arcade space fighter game in VR. Doesn't have the same theming, but it's at least space fighters doing space fighter things in space!
For me, the question of how you'd do a modern TIE Fighter remake becomes "how do you make assumptions about how space combat works in your game-universe that line up with the Star Wars films, and also lead to fun gameplay?" Since the space combat from Star Wars (at least ANH) was basically "Dambusters, in space!" you can draw lots of inspiration from World War 2-era aviation and combat. However, given an environment where gravity doesn't play and everything has ridiculous thrust-to-mass ratios, you lose some of the interesting bits re: altitude/energy trades and everything just turns into a "Pull as hard as you can" circle fight in the within-visual-range (WVR) / basic fighter maneuvers (BFM) space, which is where most of the iconic Star Wars dogfights-in-space happen. Beyond Visual Range (BVR) combat isn't really a thing in Star Wars, because Rule of Cool indicates that dogfights are cooler than slinging missiles at each other based on sensors. In the films, the writers/VFX people created the scenes they wanted by creative fiat -- in a game you need the mechanics to drive to the experience you want, and that's a challenge given Star Wars' apparent assumptions about how space combat works.
Of course there's all sorts of interesting assumptions you could make instead, but then you're just making a space arcade-sim game, not a Star Wars game.
Nope, I've clearly never thought about this. At all. Clearly.
The entertainment industry in a globalized market will act according to demands (and regulations if any left) in the market and nothing else. It is fascinating to watch as popcultures "values" slowly shift towards the bigger market that is China and create an awkward set of synthesized values (most recent and talked about being new Star Wars movies).
I once heard a game critic say that he had never played DOOM. DOOM's impact on the medium is so significant that this statement is roughly equivalent to a film critic saying they never saw Citizen Cane or Star Wars. DOOM set the bar for what games could be in a way that's difficult to appreciate from the perspective of inhabiting the medium it helped define.
Historically story in games has been, as Carmack himself once put it, "like story in a porn movie". It can be good or bad, and that can affect the end product's quality, but it isn't what people show up for.
The next Star Wars movie will probably be as big a disaster as the last one.
I don't think it's Netflix that needs to be worried.
I see Disney+ ads on FB. They are advertising some Star Wars movie is now on Disney+. Smart approach: I can pay for their streaming service for $7/mo, or rent it on Prime Video for $6.
> Nothing can ever change how great the first (first-made) three movies were. Well, nothing other than destroying all original copies and only making available ones with bad Xbox-graphics 3d model aliens walking around directly in front of all the best shots.
I've heard that a lot of it was done to exclude George Lucas's ex-wife from the editing credits, and possibly royalties: https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/6b290m/the_sad_story_of_star_wars_unsung_hero_marcia/
Star Wars is more advanced and had this. How do you think R2D2 wasn’t cut from that film? He had an advanced case of Tourette’s so everything had to be beeped out.
Imagine if they’d run out of beeps during filming!
> So...you're upset to see space opera played straight in your space opera?
No, I like space opera too. I'm upset that ST has become Buffy the Vampire Slayer in Space. (Don't get the wrong idea, I like Buffy too.)
> Have you forgotten entirely about S1 of TNG, or just chosen to ignore it?
You'll have to clue me in to what specifically you're referring to, I re-watched it last year but I don't want to guess at what you mean.
> DS9 is "not Roddenberry"
I agree. DS9 was, in part, created specifically to explore "not Roddenberry" directions in the ST universe.
There's a book, I can't find it at the moment, and I don't remember the title, but it's all excerpts from interviews with cast and crew. That's it. It's amazing.
Anyhow, I bring it up because, reading it, it became clear what, for me anyway, is the crucial defining aspect of ST that differentiates it from other sci-fi franchises: In ST, people in the future have gotten over their bullshit. They are emotionally mature, guided by reason and rationality and their higher values. That's the key difference (from say, Star Wars or Farscape or Firefly...) People in the future pretty much have their shit together.
Now this is something that some of the writers don't get. You find them complaining in their own words that Gene won't let them write an episode involving interpersonal drama between bridge crew. (Apparently this is really hard for some writers. No judgement intended.) It wasn't until after he died that Berman/Braga started to relax that.
Now to me, this is wrong (for ST) for two reasons:
First, it makes sense to me that these folks who fly around the galaxy in machines that can destroy worlds would have to be level-headed to use them w/o destroying themselves.
Second, and more importantly, that's a huge part of what made ST so endearing and appealing in the first place: the deep and abiding love that Kirk/Spock/McCoy (most obviously) and the rest of the crew (less obviously) feel for each other.
I mean, when Spock tells McCoy that he would also wish him to be present at his Pon farr, oh man, my eyes well up with tears.
When it comes down to it, the characters in the "real" ST (if I may) treat each other like members of a healthy family do, and that's wonderful to see (in any context, not just space operatic sci-fi.)
That's also the source of the "moral" superiority of Star Fleet: they actually are good guys. (And Vulcans don't lie.) You erode that and you've got Spaceballs.
> To be honest, I don't get the mockery angle at all. I mean, you're talking about a show whose first season not only has antimilitarism as a major through-line in the way Lorca's story plays out, but concludes with a war being ended by a couple of people having a conversation about why more fighting sucks for everyone, and implementing a clever technobabble-driven plan to bring about peace. There's a lot I don't love about Discovery - most of its second season, for a start - but come on, what could possibly be more Star Trek than that?
I've only seen ~4 minutes so I can't speak to the good things about the show, feeling mocked was my subjective response (I don't think the ST:D folks sat down and twirled their mustaches while contemplating how much they despise ST fans, hey?)
It was things like how the Klingons are space orcs; the Romulan guy looks like space Legolas the elf. The people wearing hoodies (why does everyone in space wear hoodies these days?) The gay guys are the only ones married? Why does the female lead have a masculine name? It seems like they're trying to tick the diversity boxes without actually rattling anybody's cages (and I say that as a SJW, pro-diversity.) The rolling spaceship is ridiculous, the flash illuminating the nebula was just idiotic. The whole thing feels superficial and lazy despite obviously being the result of a lot of hard work by a lot of skilled, talented people. Maybe they're just pandering to the tastes of a younger audience (with whom I am out of touch.)
Let me see if I can sum it up... Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones seem similar, yeah? But LotR is about Good vs. Evil whereas GoT is about aristocrats being really really shitty to each other. They are both entertaining, but I wouldn't let my kids watch the latter.
Cheers!
I have Rift not a Quest so I don't know if they're the same but you can pull your desktop and every window in your desktop up in VR on the default Rift OS, even in the middle of running another VR app. I had a browser open in the middle of playing Half Life: Alyx. Did the same on No Man's Sky VR
Someone asked if I could watch all the Star Wars movies at the same time. I got 6 trailers running at once in 6 separate virtual monitors with the default built in OS feature.
Books, like movies, videogames and often software tools, aren't substitutable. If I like Photoshop, or want to use it because it's popular, I'm unlikely to accept GIMP as a free alternative. If I want to read or watch The Expanse, I'm 100% not going to read some random free e-book or dollar paperback, because that's a different book. You can't substitute Shrek for Star Wars, nor Slime Rancher for Call of Duty.
Commodities don't get pirated. Commodities get market competition.
Would it? Could a movie include a 10 second clip from Star Wars without trouble? Even something iconic like the title card?
>There's a Star Wars episode all in ASCII.
You can have it in your terminal too:
telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
Yet you would struggle to find the original movie, even if it was public domain. I'm pretty sure they keep updating Star Wars so that no available copy will ever fall out of copyright.
Renewables are also extremely limited in practical use.
- The sun only shines so many hours a day and only certain latitudes are good candidates.
- Wind is quite noisy (sorry but it is, we've got a lot of wind here in Indiana that I've driven by going from Indy to Chicago. Absolutely not something I'd want near me. Much smaller scale vertical wind turbines are also quite loud and just plain annoying at higher speeds) and is ineffective at slow and high wind speeds, the wind also only blows at certain times.
- Hydroelectric generally requires dams, constructing dams often floods large areas of land which completely destroys ecosystems in that flooded land and often poses a considerable risk to downstream human settlements in the event of a catastrophic failure. They also rely heavily on obscene amounts of concrete which will build in a large amount of CO2 production into the construction.
- Hydroelectric relying on waves has varying level of impact on coastal ecosystems.
With sun and wind you can only implement it so far before you hit a wall, the wall being the need for huge amounts of grid storage to serve dark/not windy times.
Without drastic developments in battery technology, and PV efficiency, renewable aren't going to be a singular solution. They're going to remain a small percentage of the solution.
Renewables are also something that aren't really an option at a consumer level. You often have one power company that serves your home/apartment, if you do have a home and you live in an area where PV makes sense from a light availability then it is often more expensive than most people can afford and can take decades to be break even. Tesla announced something like $21.85 per square foot for their solar roof which comes to $43,700 for a 2,000 square foot home while in large parts of the country you can get a decent 2,000 square foot home for $100-200k and the median household income in the United States is only $63,688.
However adjusting your thermostat 1F warmer in the summer and 1F cooler in the winter, going to a local museum instead of taking that roadtrip or flight, eating hamburger once every other week instead of a few times a week etc are all far more practical changes people can implement in their lives than say installing PV and battery systems at their home or instead of buying an EV that costs thousands (if not tens of thousands) more than the ICE vehicle they'd otherwise purchase.
It's awesome, legitimately awesome, to pursue technology to help us solve the problem but thinking technology will be our savior is foolish at best. We have to radically change our lives if we want to even significantly slow those annual CO2 emissions. Food, clothing, recreation, convenience all needs to change.
It's not even that difficult. In the past year or so I've:
- Gone 90-95% whole food plant based with my eating
- Stopped going to the movies every other week and now only go for big films like the most recent Star Wars
- Stopped buying printed books if a digital copy is available for purchase
- Buy in bulk, with as little packaging as possible, when I can.
- Stopped driving 25-40 miles roundtrip every weekend to go sit in the living rooms of friends when we're just going to have the same conversations we do via text messages and instead only go see them once every couple of months each to eat together and actually have quality conversation
- Stopped driving to the fancy grocery 10 miles away and use the one a block from my apartment complex entrance, doing my groceries on the way home from work when I'm passing it anyway
- I pretty much only drive to work and church now instead of getting in my car on the weekend and driving around looking for something to do
- Video content I stream, I stream at lower quality now. Every gigabyte of data transfer saved is potentially several hundred of grams less CO2 generated. Podcasts, where available, I stream via their lower bitrate feed (unfortunately of the podcasts I listen to, only Mysterious Universe has a lower/higher quality feed).
If even 10% of the population adapted similar practices, you'd create much more of an impact than selling a few solar roofs to the wealthy or designing a piece of software for a regional power plant to use to make some process a fraction of a percent more efficient.
I might be a minority, but I always considered plot of original Star Wars extremely underwhelming and the only interesting parts of all movies when I was a kid were space flight/another planets and sci-fi action scenes like X-wing vs Tie fighter battles, speeder bike chase, taking down star destroyer, the destruction of a planet by Death Star and lightsaber fights. The rest was just a boring filler. I frankly see no point in Star Wars these days as computer games are way more elaborate (e.g. Mass Effect, Elite, Prey, Borderlands Pre-sequel etc.), both in story and technical arrangement.
I also remember some original Star Wars actors despised the movies, doing them only for money, and then were surprised by the popularity and disgusted by the fact those movies represented their "life's work" they were best known for.
My exact sentiments. When Disney Plus came out, I actually attempted to watch the entire star wars lineup from start to finish, the prequels (episodes 4-6) were unwatchable, couldn't even get through those, but watching (more like sitting through) the last 2 reminded me of exactly why I wouldn't be seeing the latest one ...
The first movie I remember ever seeing was the first star wars movie at a drive-in when I was 5 years old. I love the Star Wars movies. But, I haven't even bothered to see the one that came out this past December. I'm not even sure of it's name. I was severely underwhelmed by the previous ones in the most recent trilogy. They weren't as bad as the prequels, but bad enough that I honestly don't care whether I see the most recent one or not.
The movies have generally underperformed and hasn't hit internationally like they hoped. They've had to revise a lot of their long term plans of Star Wars. It hasn't been great.
Regardless, I don't think they're that upset. Star Wars hasn't been a home run, but it's been a solid double and net positive to Disney.
As a former Disney employee and someone who's kept up with internal politics, even though his contract was up at the end of next year this feels sudden and not in line with how Disney tends to do things. Disney has quite a number of disparate businesses, from theme parks to streaming services to movies. Chapek is a business guy that has done consumer products and parks (parts of the business that aren't huge growth areas), and hasn't even been president of parks for that long. He has no experience on the creative side. Usually the future CEO is appointed to a COO/President role in order to help them learn the parts of the business they don't have experience in. It also helps vet if they'll be capable of leading all those business heads, which is how they determined not to go with Tom Staggs after he was made COO. Not doing this is pretty irregular, especially with all the shakeup that occurred with Fox. They're still working through a lot of that.
Similarly, I don't buy the story that Iger is moving into a creative leadership role. It's true there's been a vacuum there since Lasseter left, but unless there's long term tenure planned, Iger won't be very influential. Anyone who's worked at a large company knows that no one listens to the guy whose only responsibility is to have creative ideas if they have no other real responsibility and will be out in a few months. Iger put himself into a meaningless, insignificant role, and no one has satisfactorily explained why.
I don't think there's a scandal. If there was, the narrative around his departure would be different and he wouldn't be sticking out to the end of his contract. He wouldn't still be chairman of the board. I've heard a rumor the board is upset about Star Wars, but Q1 2020 was pretty solid and Mandalorian was well received. I'm actually worried he's sick, though I hope not because I admire him a lot. Regardless, I do feel like there's another shoe. I guess we'll have to wait to find out what it is.
One of the details from the article is that using anamorphic lenses essentially treats the camera sensor as if it is larger than it actually is, which reduces the effective depth of field.
If you look carefully at the backgrounds in Mandalorian scenes, a lot of the time, they are slightly soft (out of focus)--which hides the pitch of the LED wall by expanding each LED point into larger, overlapping circles of confusion. To be clear, that softness is a physical effect of the camera lens, not a digital effect on the wall, so it can be captured by the camera sensor up to any resolution you want.
> Also, how do they cope with the scan rate of the background video being played back to sync with the camera recording the footage?
In the article they say the latency is about half a frame, which they handled by using slow camera moves--which conveniently is similar to how the original Star Wars films were shot.
If you're talking about the refresh rate of the LEDs, I believe those can be cranked up way higher than the frame rate of the camera, which was likely 24 or maybe 30 frames per second to give that cinematic feel.
I've seen all of them, and loved all of them.
To me, most of the criticism feels like it comes from people who have had time to rationalize the old plots and settings, but who see the new ones with a more jaded mind or a set idea of what they "should" be like instead of approaching them with an open mind. They have flaws, but so does the original trilogy.
Star Wars from the beginning were silly westerns set in space with all kinds of ridiculous aliens thrown in. Taking them too seriously and applying that as a constraint on the following trilogies would never end well.
When people complained about Jar Jar, for example, all I could think about was how people could take issue with Jar Jar but take no issue with Chewbacca, or the ewoks, or R2D2 and C3PO. They're also incredibly cheesy in other ways in a way that was common in the 80's, but that is really dated today (e.g. the Ewok celebration scene).
I think seeing e.g. Spaceballs is a good way of having it driven home how just how ridiculous Star Wars really is and looked at the time if you don't let yourself be immersed in it. Spaceballs crosses the line from "serious" space opera to comedy very clearly, but it to me it also illustrates just how ridiculous lengths they had to go to in order to clearly be a send-up instead of a cheap Star Wars knockoff. They'd not had to cut that many jokes and toned back that many things before it'd have seemed like an attempt at being serious.
Star Wars is fun in part because it manages to "sell" a setting that is on the face of it so crazy and not taking itself too seriously. But it seems a lot of the fans of the original trilogy bought into that and then decided to take it all very seriously instead of seeing them as light adventure movies and "space westerns".
The challenge is also in no large part a question of changing tastes in other ways as well - my son finds the original trilogy horribly slow moving to the point of boredom, for example, and I can understand that. Tastes have changed. Pacing has changed. Composition and cinematography has changed. But that also means that the modern trilogies had to be very different or fall flat with younger audiences in ways that would always annoy the die hard fans; they're trying to reflect how we remember them more than how they are, but different people remember them in different ways.
[I tend to treat criticism of the last Indiana Jones in much the same way; people venerate the original movies, but they were extremely cheesy and contrived, involving literal deus ex machina, but surviving a test explosion in a fridge and interdimensional aliens is suddenly over the top]
As for Rogue One, to me it's one of the most enjoyable movies of the franchise. In no small part because they were allowed to explore the setting with much more freedom (ok to let characters more central to the plot die for example).
I think a James Bond in the past may end up becoming a Mr Bean in the future if we are not careful.
I am not naive, there are problems in big organizations.
To keep the movies methaphor, the biggest fears I have come from movie like Star Wars in which the empire turns to the dark side.
I have no idea what systems are in place to prevent things like this to happen. I hope they are VERY good.
My experience as software engineer teaches me that as things become more and more complex in a system the risk of a bug increase. And opacity is a double edge sword.
Even if you have a buggy system, you do not say "Let get rid of it" without talking about the alternatives. Other thing to consider is: "full rewrites are generally a bad idea".
I would like to open this to constructive suggestions but I am afraid that without an inside view we are just shouting the breeze.
I'm surprised you would call a genuine pursuit of authentic truth a fetish, and admit to enjoying an illusion. But I guess I shouldn't be. That's why people pass on the Santa Claus tradition, and those who enjoyed it when they were kids now enjoy MCU and Star Wars movies in their place, even reading and writing fan fiction about it. Every shred of evidence throughout my life has convinced me that anybody who loves truth will eventually hear it in Jesus's voice, and those who don't will scoff at the idea exactly as Pontius Pilate did.
Indeed.
As someone that likely has more experience as a psychonaut than anyone that reads this thread, I would never ever recommend someone dip their toe into the waters of psychotropics and to be honest I wish I'd never have dabbled with them for the several years that I did. Being introduced to them in high school and continue that on into my early 20's is something I absolutely wish I could undo.
People like to go "I microdosed and had a great day of work!" or "man I did some acid/shrooms/dmt and felt connected to everything, my depression is gone!"
Not so much the bad experiences though. In 'another life' I did lots of things... LSD, DMT, MDMA, some synthetic tryptamines that not a lot of people have used, mushrooms, salvinorian a extracts...
Was I Santa once on a heroic dose of LSD? Sure and it was awesome, I was also a dragon on some alien planet in that trip, I was gouging bedrock with my talons and it felt so real and satisfying. Cool, right?
Did I have some alien head with octopus tentacles for a beard fondle my face and make me laugh and feel loved while on DMT? Sure.
Did I feel music on a subatomic level and taste electric happiness while on mushrooms, you bet.
Did I have tons of good times just hanging out with friends while we were on this or that while camping/floating down a creek or river, listening to music, hiking, hanging out at the mall, sure.
I also had some really, really, really terrible experiences back then.
Did I see my putrid, bloated, corpse that had massive bruising around it's neck staring back at me in the mirror on a DMT trip and manage to get up and stumble to the toilet and force myself to vomit because "I had to get death out of me" to the point of managing to throw up a baseball sized lump of bile trying to get death out of me because I wanted to still be alive. You bed.
Did I get stuck in a glitching 8-bit video game loop for what felt like the better part of a year while on a salvia trip one time, pleading to God that if he made it stop I'd never do anything harder than caffeine again as long as I lived only to come out of the trip and be told by my friend it had been less than 10 minutes. Oh yeah.
Did I have multiple experiences on DMT where I was a corpse in a morgue drawer, in a crematorium oven, with the feeling that I'd totally screwed up and it was my fault I was dead. Yes.
Did I have multiple experiences coming up on DMT hit hard out of proper glass where I 100% believed that I'd screwed up, that by inhaling I'd done something so incredibly wrong and I now had to suffer the consequences. That something knew I'd broken some rule and that I now had to live in 'reality' and that my prior existence had been a complete lie and I ruined it and it would never come back and everything and everyone i knew was gone and I was now fully awake in some horrible existence where malevolent entities reigned supreme and were quite unhappy with me. Oh hell yeah.
Did I watch a Star Wars film on 'penis envy' mushrooms once, watching an entire planet being destroyed, and know 100% that I was on that planet and was witnessing my own death and feel such pain and sadness like nothing I've ever felt in my entire life before or since. Yup.
Did I do DMT and salvinorin a on various occasions and have 'machine elves' tell me to kill myself so I could stay. Demand that I kill myself so they might share with me while my brain screamed "they're lying, they're lying, get out of here, snap out of it, they're lying to you, get out of the trip". Yyyyup.
Did I forget how to talk, lose the ability to even form words in my head/have an internal dialogue, for 10~ minutes on a very mild DMT dose once while showing someone how to hit the glass for their first experience, becoming quite scared at one point that it wasn't going to ware off and I'd seriously screwed up and caused brain damage? Yes, not something I'd ever want to happen again.
There's a reason I long since stopped doing these sorts of things. They can do far more harm than they can good.
Will they someday have valid medical applications that are effective and pleasant more oft than not? Maybe. Should we absolutely research them in very controlled clinical settings, sure!
Should people be randomly conducting self-experimentation in non-clinical settings without the ability to be sedated if stuff goes sideways and without trained individuals that can calm and control the situation and even restrain them if need be? No. Not at all. Not even microdosing because we have no idea what mid to long term consequences are.
That's all well and good, but if I need to make a particular effort to appreciate something, particularly if that effort includes suspending my ordinary standards of fun and quality, that something is not going to match up to the assertion "X is the best shooter you can play today." At least not by any standard definition of best.
Fwiw I don't think the og star wars movies require nearly the same suspension of standards that something like Doom does. Maybe for sfx buffs but I think most people go to movies for the human elements. That's not the same with videogames because of how the medium is interactive.
Playing Doom today needs to be approached like any other nostalgia trip — you need to go into it with a mindset of what things were like at the time (like watching the original Star Wars movies). You really won’t get much out of it if you compare it to some game you’re playing today on your Xbox, and it’s somewhat disingenuous to try to do so.
Everything has a context, and learning to understand where something came from is a skill that is not just useful in appreciating old video games, but is broadly applicable in pretty much any human interaction.
My roommate has D+ and there's almost nothing on it that's interesting to me. I like Marvel movies, too, but it feels like half the time I try to play one it says "Sorry, this won't be available until x date". I started watching the new Star Wars show and didn't find it that entertaining. I'd much rather spend the money on Netflix or ad-free Hulu (also owned by Disney).
Asimov's three types of sci-fi:
* Adventure Fiction/Space Opera - The technology and science are secondary to the plot, which is often very grandiose, much like operas and horse operas that were popular at the time (the root of the latter name).
* Gadget Fiction - The technology/science and the struggle of the inventor to create/discover/explain it are the source of the conflict in the story.
* Social Science Fiction - The effect of the technology/science on society is the source of the conflict in the story.
Star Wars is a 1 and 3 type of story, though you could hone in a bit more and say, for example, that Episode IV is also gadget fiction given the focus on the Death Star.
Not defending them, but it seems like a lot of online websites have kickbacks. I mean hell, you can set up an amazon referral link for your youtube channel in like 2 seconds. The intensives of the review "industry" are fucked... it's not like movie reviewers make 10 cents if I see Star Wars
6 million pages! A quick look at their distribution:
3.6M of these pages got less than 10 views during December. 4.3M pages got less than 100 views each. 2.3M got less than 1000 views. That's the long tail. On the other side 680K pages got more than 1,000 views, 111K pages got more than 10k views, only 6k pages got more than 100k views, and 90 pages were able to gather more than 1M views (Star Wars, The Mandalorian, The Witcher...).
In summary: The top 7.2% of Wikipedia pages earn 87% of all the monthly views.
Yesterday I posted a deeper analysis on how these pages get their daily views:
- https://towardsdatascience.com/interactive-the-top-2019-wikipedia-pages-d3b96335b6ae
Apparently the most popular pages are all related to movies (Avengers, Joker, ...), series (Ted Bundy, Chernobyl, Game of Thrones), and deaths.
Uh, No. Derivative works must be transformative in order to qualify for their own copyright. But simply being transformative doesn't give the owner of the new work rights to do anything with it.
Ex: I write and produce a new SW film, and attempt to sell it without a license from Disney. I'm going to get sued into oblivion, because their copyright still applies, in terms of setting up the setting and characters.
Fair use can apply with derivative works (ex: I make a parody version of Star Wars, such as "Troops"), in which case you may succeed in being able to do stuff with your new SW parody, but you're likely to have to pay a bunch of lawyers a lot of money first if they don't like it. But being derivative doesn't guarantee it's Fair Use.
Local to me at least, the Cincinnati Pops has done this for quite a few movies, including the original Star Wars trilogy, some Harry Potter films, etc.
They get the film from the studio with the soundtrack removed, which makes me think this is a thing other orchestras have available to them as well.
Nailed it. This is why the most recent Star Trek movies don't count as actual Star Trek to me. We had the 'pretty' and 'explosiony' action sci-fi movies in the form of Star Wars. Star Trek was supposed to wrestle with just a little bit deeper themes.
But now they've devolved into beautiful looking action movies which exist just for the sake of action, with the story being secondary.
I am saying that running your own show or a show with other people you value working with does not need to be under the thumb of union rules or overarching corporate pressure.
There is no scenario in entertainment where unions "keep to themselves". A union started will soak up the entire industry and now my show with people I respect, admire and fair equity shares now has time limits and controls none of us decided or agreed to because a union(s) can excommunicate us from the entire working industry.
The industry should self-regulate under threat. Implementing a union will benefit few but the union leaders. The film industry is a prime example of what happens and films like Star Wars barely exist in the face of union pressure. George Lucas hired Irvine Kershner to direct because he knew all about Hollywood, but was 'not Hollywood'. Gary Oldman turned down a SW role due to union rules. The public has no idea how cliquey and regulated the film industry is, thanks in part to the studio model and union rules.
I'd sooner call for a tech union and see a whole bunch of engineers get a proper cut of the $100 million+ companies that get sold without them seeing a dime.
Game industry artists are very skilled and can get work elsewhere for much easier conditions. They choose to stay and work hard and can choose to negotiate better salaries. I can't comment on mega-corps that there are limits to negotiations, in the independent part there is a lot more leeway. The conditions will always be difficult, timing is the difficulty that we can't control.
Here is a direct example of unions slowing down the little guy in the entertainment industry:
https://youtu.be/LRVwlif6th0?t=171
Niko has to cut costs to make low budget films and the union mandates someone watch the camera feed for the director, completely unnecessarily in the modern era. The film industry is notorious for the boundaries around union and non-union work. Gary Oldman's decline of a role in Star Wars used union rules as an answer:
>Oldman's spokesman is reported to have told the newspaper: "Gary was excited and looking forward to working on the film. The snag is that the movie is being made without members of the Screen Actors Guild. It means Gary would have been working illegally overseas. Out of respect and solidarity with the other members, he could not and would not consider violating the rules of his union."
Unions bring many complications and seeing them as a universal good is a problematic perspective.
If I could suggest one thing, I would consider nuking your 1000-long list of 'must reads', and then find one book you really like the sound of. Find some good fiction that fits into a genre you enjoy; maybe even try graphic novels if superhero-style stuff is your thing.
Then, make it a habit to read out of enjoyment and not as an info gathering exercise, or reading for the sake of reading. Take the book to bed with you and read a few pages or a chapter before you doze off; read a few pages when you've got downtime instead of browsing the internet. At the end of the day, you're just choosing to enjoy reading from a different source.
But still, nuke the epic list from orbit. You'll likely never get around to all of them due to the overwhelming size of the backlog. Your personal must-reads will return to you again, if they're important enough to you. Meanwhile, you've just reduced the scope to enjoying just a few books rather than all of them.
If you still struggle, try audiobooks or readings of public domain works.
Two personal examples:
- I don't give two hoots about Lord of The Rings. I read some of the books but it just wasn't "me", so I stopped because it wasn't really speaking to me. I saw one of the films and similarly didn't care.
- I don't care about Star Wars and haven't watched any of it. Same reason; wasn't my thing.
Popular culture would ostracise me for not enjoying these two works, but popular culture doesn't dictate what I should and shouldn't spend my time enjoying. So, do yourself the same favour and try and find what you enjoy, and take it from there.
> 2) Don't get annoyed at my significant other for wasting my time.
I mean, if your SO or anyone that you care about is talking with/to you and you could ever possibly think it's a waste of your time no matter what it is that they are saying, then I think you may need to re-evaluate a few things in the new year.
I know where it is you are coming from here, as I also had the same thought process for a long time. Honestly, you just have to find the right kinda people to be around. If you have siblings or parents, you know how it is that everything that you manage to talk about is interesting in some way and how you both know when it's not. Like, during a TV show/movie you really like, even the 'dull' parts are interesting and you are super pumped that they explored the world of the film/show just a bit more. How you want to learn everything there is to know about Star Wars, Marvel, Python 2.7, etc? Even how a Wookie sneezes or Thor shaves?
Yeah, people that you like to be around that much, those are the people to become romantically involved with. Don't become romantically involved with people that 'waste your time' when they tell you about their issues and problems.
Mate, this is nothing new... just have a look at what happened with Blade Runner, or infamously the first Star Wars trilogy: every new release tweaked this or that, and it’s now extremely hard to find the original theatrical versions.
Having it explicitly done in a transparent way would actually be an improvement. It would trigger the necessary alerts for archivists to get to work, and we’d never risk losing the historical record of a film.
> and my memory of it
If you revisit something years later, you find your memory will differ. Clearly we know Star Wars is always updated, and other films have been too (ET comes to mind), but even films that haven’t been changed will have false memories — your mindset when you first watched it, stage of life, etc will affect how you remember and how you fill in the blanks
There’s then the technical changes - speeding up a 24fps to 25fps (in Europe), or 3:2 pull down in the US, changes to colour space, changes to aspect ratio, all add to subtle changes on how you perceive a movie.
Some people I sit that Froot Loops were Fruit Loops, that curious George had a tail (or didn’t?), that Mandela died in prison, etc.
Memory is a strange thing, just revisiting a film you watched as a kid even if it’s identical will be able to “ruin your memory”
> Star Wars: A New Hope?
What is this? ;)
Star Wars, and the later Empire Strikes Back were good films, well worth seeing. I still have the "making of" souvenir from the 1977 UK premiere. Then he started the endless pissing about reinventing everything. Last time I tried to watch one, some asshole had ruined it, and my memory of it, and that dog eared magazine souvenir looks quaintly inaccurate.
Now I essentially hate the whole franchise, and actively avoid anything George Lucas. I think I've seen 5 of the 7. Or is it 8 now? Don't care or notice any more. :)
Stargate, Star Trek and those 50's B movie sci-fi and countless others like "classic" low budget Dr Who have managed to last the decades far better... I actually still like those, and still watch new productions!
As for cats, far better to accept they got entirely the worst spot on the anthropomorphising spectrum so even stills look weirdly off and the story telling failed, so it's a dud. Try again in ten years with a new approach and team...
Movies have different cuts for different regions to pass different censorship ratings the currently running star wars movies has a few scenes cut to get PG13 rating in Singapore.
Are fiction books really that updated (in terms of the words, not formatting)? I'd argue that a movie's visuals are part of the experience, but something like the font or pagination doesn't change the experience of a book in a significant way. Movies have been changed, but it's usually due to where it's being watched (like different screen shapes) or in more minor ways.
And when movies get changed, people have problems with it. People want to see the original Star Wars, but can't. Did Han shoot first? Still, the changes in Star Wars seem minor by comparison. Yes, they updated the special effects and made some edits. This sounds like they're changing the whole visual effect of the movie because it's weirding people out. Like, imagine if they updated R2D2 and C3PO to be completely different; imagine if they changed Darth Vader to David Prowse's voice after initially being released as James Earl Jones.
I think we historically haven't seen this in theaters because of the cost involved. It's not like a streaming service where you just get Netflix to encode the new version you give them.
Yea, things have always been altered, but this feels like it's breaking the shared experience of seeing Cats. Whether Han shot first is subtle and I probably wouldn't have noticed the change and I think people can ultimately share in the common experience of seeing Star Wars even if they've seen different versions. I guess it's just a matter of how drastic the changes feel and whether it will break the shared experience we generally feel. We don't know what "improved visuals" really means yet and how that will change the experience.
Incidentally, I tried to see the new Star Wars movie today. But the projector stopped working and the employees blamed it on a computer failure.
Well no, it's not the same. I love when films use scale models to create effects, and I agree that sometimes they are better. But in this case they used a piece of glass with a projector behind it to recreate one of the simplest company logos, which could've been done in photoshop and after effects for half the time (and probably a 10th of the budget).
But yes, I love the Star Wars and LOTR (Wetaworks) stuff.
> On the other hand, Star Wars is mostly free of time travel plots while they're quite common in Star Trek.
Perhaps because writers have so far only needed nine plots for Star Wars but needed 79 for Star Trek (TOS alone!) episodes.
Excellent, I signed up for his weekly newsletter.
As much as I nerded out seeing the latest Star Wars movie yesterday, and the half dozen good movies a week my wife and I watch on streaming media, my favorite way to be entertained by people’s writing, with really good conversations coming in a close second.
So this in part comes down to what novelists call a “type of conflict” that Trek makes great use of, but Wars does not. The term is usually “Man vs. Technology conflict” but if I were writing it, I would call it “people versus tools” to clarify that usually fighting off a robot counts as one of the other conflicts. Like if you have to land a plane, that is PvTool conflict.
In Star Wars, this conflict is largely but not entirely absent. In a climactic scene of A New Hope, the rebels get to blow up the Death Star, except—“It didn’t go in. Just impacted on the surface.” Very short bursts in the middle of other conflict. Similarly there is a short moment of Han Solo explaining that he needs to give his computer time to make hyperspace calculations lest they all die—it is another really tiny moment to enhance a larger existing conflict.
Whereas with Trek it is usually more pronounced, “no one has ever done those things with these tools, how do we even begin to do it?” ...
A lot of the rest of the apparent difference comes down to format. The Trek that we remember had to be rushed and crushed. The episodes were short and the TV stations reserved the right to show them out of order, so just like virtually all TV off that time, there was typically a short circular arc by which everyone at the end of the episode must more or less be however they started.
One really interesting thing someone pointed out to me about reality TV was that it was extremely cognitively complex for its time, and indeed this was its selling point. People watched Survivor because something changed as a result of every episode and there was a lot of mental stimulation of the form “ooh I wonder who would be the best strategic target for him to take out?!” . There was a little of this in other places; I like to think about how we used to debate whether a French chef should really challenge Iron Chef French Hiroyuki Sakai, or whether he should have the audacity to fight the nearly undefeatable Iron Chef Japanese Rokusaburo Michiba. But even those shows returned mostly to the same place week after week.
> There are some rare exceptions within the hard SF sub-genre -- where the science was diamond-hard and the author didn't use it as a platform for some sort of far right political agitprop -- but they're dismayingly rare; for more on this phenomenon see Michael Moorcock's seminal essay, Starship Stormtroopers:
What do Heinlein and hard science fiction have to do with each other? He's far, far out on the squishy end.
Also, I'm convinced that people who are convinced that Starship troopers is a fascist tract have only watched the movie uncritically, or have bothered to read the book, but have no concept of what military people are like. The best way to understand Starship Troopers is as Helmet for My Pillow or another of the countless WW2 memoirs, but in space. That's the narrative structure it follows.
> It says something about our desire for the fantastika that "Star Wars" (space wizards! Evil emperors!) is infinitely more popular than this stuff today
Strong counterpoint would be the Expanse. It's never going to dethrone a forty year old franchise backed by the biggest media company in the world, but it is proving more popular than I would have expected.
I don't completely agree, good quality photo editing, even in this day and age, is not that mainstream. You need a decent amount of skill to edit a good quality picture in a way that won't look obviously fake. Pre-digital-photography it was only possible for skilled people with a significant amount of resources (like the Soviet government, no doubt).
Besides it's one thing to edit a still image and a whole other to forge a long video, complete with audio. Look at those movies these past few years using 3D models to insert younger versions of actors (Terminator and Star Wars come to mind). They must have invested millions into it, they have very talented artists and it's pretty good but it's still quite easy to spot the fakeness of it.
It’s the integration and testing and support that Apple offers.
In fact, the more demanding your requirements, the more likely you need all of these fairly exotic components to work seamlessly together.
If you’re working on the next Star Wars movie, there are billions of dollars at stake; you can’t rely on some Linux box a guy you know put together, no matter how good the specs supposedly are.
Even if you could get comparable components, you’re not going to have the driver support you need. If you have downtime, you can’t wait for some guy on an email list who’s day job is not supporting this mission critical driver, to get back to you.
And you’re not going to get the performance of Apple’s APIs like Metal2, etc. which blow OpenGL, etc. away.
It doesn't really matter. Disney wants their piece of that pie, and they have the marketing to get customers. People will buy it, and Disney owns Marvel, Star Wars, ABC, NBC and all their own movies/content.
We went from cable, to paying less for only one or two streaming services, but now people are buying more services (Amazon, Disney+, HBO, Hulu, AppleTV, appleTV, AppleTV and AppleTV) .. it's almost like the a la carte channel pricing people wanted in the 90s, ... but way after people were playing less for just Netflix.
Disney+ isn't going away or going to fail any time soon. It will be interesting if one day we see Olympics only on streaming and not on broadcast at all.
> Half Life is not exactly complex or subtle in its storytelling
Agreed, but I wasn't arguing it was. It's neither complex nor subtle. It is "story heavy" or rather story-driven, or rather "cinematic". This is a game where the story propels the gameplay. Not saying it's particularly good fiction, just that the fiction matters in the game. Notice how much of what I'm saying applies to Star Wars too, where -- also -- skipping a movie can be done but is not recommended ;)
I understand what you're saying and I can see why you'd think that, but it's helpful for me to think of Half Life like the videogame equivalent of Star Wars. Not being alive during the release of the first films doesn't preclude one from entering at any point and enjoying the continuation of the story. Even if they haven't played it, kids today know of Half Life as a first person shooter that changed how we play first person shooters, so they're a warm lead for the sequel/prequel.
>The second Blade Runner is a love letter to the first that also expands on some themes and further adds to the original myth
fully agreed, but I wish it would have been as visionary and as much of a leap as the original movie. We seem to live in the age of love letters with star wars, comic book adaptions, ready player one, and soon a fourth matrix movie.
I would be really glad if we had more filmmakers work on truly new aesthetics instead of just paying homage to works of the 70s, 80s and 90s.
I agree with those examples and they annoyed me, but I think they were done to save time more than anything, which is a product of having to shove so much material into a movie that serves as a culmination for twenty-one other movies.
Still, it's a fair criticism of superhero movies, and Star Wars.
It kinda is if you think about the economics of the box office. Scorsese makes this point in depth with his NYT Op-Ed. Basically studios have become preoccupied with making purely franchise tentpoles and not funding lower budget creative movies.
Now the common response to that studios are just giving the people what they want. But A. people will tend to like what you put in front of them and B. that doesn't mean studios should starve creative, new ideas. It's a sign of the times that someone like Martin Scorsese has trouble getting money, that a film with Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci has to be made with Netflix.
Also, studios seem to forget that these franchises started as risks themselves. Iron Man was a huge risk. Star Wars was massively precarious. If executives hadn't taken the original risk, these franchises wouldn't be the cash cows they are.
Escapism isn't necessarily bad but it's a little noticeable how much escapism is being sold to us at the detriment to real, innovative, intelligent art.
Lackluster compared to Disney's expectations.
I think it's somewhat absurd too, but part of the point being made in the conversation around this article is that Disney isn't taking risks or making decisions based on creative output -- they're very, very aggressively following market trends. Their first Star Wars release was one of their highest grossing films in something like a decade, but one bad showing from Solo and suddenly Disney is cutting back on yearly releases.
They want movies that are safe and predictable. They want to know before they even start production not just that the film will break even, but that it will make a LOT of money. Clearly based on their own statements, they don't feel that confident about a yearly Star Wars release.
>Really? What cultural affinity is there for Avengers? For Force Awakens?
The Avengers is a part of a comic franchise that is almost 50 years old, and Star Wars basically invented the science fiction movie blockbuster over 40 years ago. Both have been deeply influential on generations of people and on the way their respective genres have been portrayed in all media.
To question whether there is cultural affinity for either is to fundamentally misunderstand modern Western pop culture, because these properties are more influential to it than the Bible and Shakespeare.
I don't think it's about storytelling at all. Star Wars under Disney or Marvel are not examples of good storytelling.
What Disney understands is the brand management. Disney brands are valuable because they are familiar, consistent and safe choices. Disney is the stable food producer in the entertainment business.
Using Scorsese's non-cinema as a label for what Disney does not necessarily bad. First 3 star Wars Movies were cinema. People were surprised, exited and blown away. You can't replicate that again and again. Now Star Wars is just Star Wars. People want stable diet of Star Wars that is just like they remember it with minor variations. It's watered down, but very familiar. They keep all the 'best bits' people like. "I have bad feeling about this", "something something dark side".
I disagree with this article that this is all about their ability to "tell stories", as much as management that's really good at identifying which company to acquire next so they can squeeze every last cent from consumers for whichever IP they are pushing at the time.
Most people I've talked to DON'T believe the star wars series has gotten better from a story telling perspective, as this article proposes. I don't think most people believe live-action remakes of their classic cartoons is quality story-telling. I think they are just really good at reading market trends, have enough money in their coffers to acquire whatever is becoming the next big thing, advertise and push it into becoming a cultural phenomenon, then moving onto whatever is next once they've exhausted that IP.
Edit - and to be clear, I most likely have a very jaded view here. I don't like disney as a company, nor am I a fan of superhero movies, star wars, or a lot of what the company has been pushing for the last decade or so. I respect their ability to make a ton of money, but I don't like a majority of what they create anymore, nor how they treat a majority of their employees.
I'm still waiting for the content. I had the free subscription, and it was dismal, certainly for someone who doesn't like Marvel. Producing a few chapters of a Star Wars spinoff or another "Beyond Infinity Avengers War Universe" isn't going to bind many people.
Their streaming isn't great either. The two times we watched a movie, playback was regularly interrupted, one of which proved impossible to continue that same evening. And no, that never happens when watching Netflix.
I don't have link to original talk I'd seen but if you search Ted talks for disney effect, you will find many discussing this. Saying that it just does "gender-stereotypical" portrayal grossly underestimates the impact of these movies. The message I took home was that young girls with constant exposure to Disney princess movies significantly decreases their future probability for enrollment in STEM.
However it's just not about girls, it also impacts boys negatively as well. If you have to read one great book about raising kids, make it NurtureShock. One thing I learned from it was how kids learn to value nature vs nurture. When you tell your kid "great job! you are smart" you are basically saying they have natural capability to do great things, they don't have to work for it. So when they fail, they tend to interpret that there is nothing they could do. Parents who say "great job! You worked hard for it" have much more successful kids. One simple phrasing makes huge change in their lives. NurtureShock has detailed analysis and citations.
Back to movies... Here's the thing: Do you love Star Wars? Lord of the Ring? Harry Potter? Do you know what is one common thing between all of them? The hero in the movie is born with capabilities to be great. You are Jedi because force with you since you were born. You are just that way. You didn't had to work for it. You are just destined to be the great, it's written in the stars. Story writers know this simple thing is cocaine for people and they keep creating more supply to keep us fed. We get hooked on to it right away but its not good for us. Now look back in your life and think about all the time you avoided hard work in the hope that your specialness would just do the work for you. Kids should avoid these kind of movies, at least until they are 18 or may be 21.
I meant that if I made a star wars movie, I would be sued.
It's not about costs. Regardless of budget, I can't make a star wars movie.
> When there's a Marvel movie, a Star Wars movie, and two or three Disney movies
Rephrased: "four or five Disney movies." Both the Star Wars and Marvel franchises are owned by Disney. 20 years ago I would have told you that Disney was on it's way to being a has-been. Don't bet against the mouse...
And Marvel movies are money printing machines. Aside from the forgettable Ed Norton Hulk movie, way back at the dawn of the era, they have all more than doubled up their budgets. It's reached the point where anything associated with the MCU will make a half billion at the box office, no sweat.
This kind of thing is all you see at the movie theater these days though. When there's a Marvel movie, a Star Wars movie, and two or three Disney movies out at the same time, that pretty much monopolizes all the screens at my local AMC. Except for the Oscar bait season that we are rolling into now, you have to go to Netflix or Amazon to find more adventurous mid-budget movies.
superhero movies are generally liked by capitalist types as it tick boxes the right things. good wins over bad, you work hard you succeed, and when you succeed you get all the good things. + very poor treatment of death, failure and loss. revelation and surprise are indeed missing. there are many movies that i cherish for just one scene eg., the survival scene in dersu uzala, senate hearing scene in scorsese's aviator when hughes says 'thats what i do'. these moments make me pause the movie and contemplate and play it back again etc which is easier to do on the smaller screen at home though ;)
i disagree that all movies are for the big screen. star wars yes, a jane austen drama? come on. superhero movies work well on the big screen or as he puts it audio-visual entertainment especially without audience interaction. a game would work on super small screens but not a movie. although people are putting up with anything on long commutes.
Star Wars and Marvel movies are stuffy?
> Have you ever considered simply buying an HD/4K projector, a decent-quality screen, and a surround-sound setup?
I think you're missing the point. I have a fairly decent home cinema setup and rarely go to the cinema but there are some films that deserve viewing on the big screen. For me these are films such as Casablanca, Apocalypse Now, Alien, 2001:A Space Odyssey, Star Wars (original), Close Encounters. These were movies made where the "cinematography" had the cinema in mind, not a home cinema system (because they basically didn't exist unless you were extremely well off). Seeing these films in the cinema is, for me anyway, a genuinely different experience.
Senator Ted Kennedy is credited with creating the nickname "Star Wars" to mock the project:
http://web.archive.org/web/20090227050446/https://www.smdc.army.mil/2008/Historical/Eagle/WheredowegetStarWars.pdf
The nickname does indeed refer to the movies, which were released a few years earlier.
Maybe this is a stupid question but how does the Star Wars initiative relate to the movies if at all?
I think the idolizing of "underground" themes in the hacker subculture had a lot to do with the surrounding American culture, of that era and even further back to its origins. The entertainment industry, like Hollywood films, glorify the outlaw, the rebels, from Star Wars to the Wild West, the "counter-culture", rock music, punk, heavy metal.. That climate influenced generations of adolescents, many of whom never grew out of it, carrying these values into adulthood. It spread around the world too.
This influence can clearly be seen in the startup scene, at least in earlier days: jock/locker-room culture, rebellious and "disruptive", seeing a company as a gang of pirates.. It's very American - as one of them myself, I love this attitude in some ways, but, having lived in a few other cultures, I also understand that it has aspects of teenagers' mentality and behavior.
> Every commercial product is designed for maximum ROI.
Not true with art.
> You really think movie theaters would rather show movies that don’t fill it?
Disney takes a larger cut per screen, so the theater actually makes less money on Disney films. If they don't show Disney films on their best screens, they'll lose the right to show any Disney films. It's extortion. [1] [2]
> Ever heard of Blumhouse? Their entire business model is to make low budget movies that cost under $10 million and they usually have a higher ROI than Disney movies.
These are horror films. That genre has always been cheap to film. Blumhouse is a great businessman. I don't think this model fits for every genre, eg. period pieces and art house cinema.
> Why not force other people to innovate instead of building on top of Star Wars?
I'm not saying that they shouldn't. Disney should start innovating instead of stretching its licenses over and over. Pixar has become garbage since Disney took over. They're not going to make risky films like Logan with their IP, either.
I'm doing everything I can to get into this market, and I'm terrified of having to compete with this juggernaut. If they're going to play hard ball with their IP, I'm going to lobby for looser IP protections. It's good for consumers and creatives anyway.
[1] https://mashable.com/2017/11/01/star-wars-last-jedi-theaters-disney/
[2] https://qz.com/1479408/small-theater-chains-worry-a-mid-century-rule-is-all-that-stands-between-them-and-extinction/
Disney films are generic, cookie cutter formulas designed for mass appeal and ROI. They buy everything they can and then force theaters to show their films in the most desirable weekend spots. They're soaking up all the money and pushing the smaller players out.
They're now trying to eat Netflix.
Not to mention that they follow Beijing's content directives.
We should take a serious look at balancing the scales.
If we expired Star Wars' copyright after 20 years, others could use the license and develop their own take. Disney would be forced to innovate and pursue new IP creation. It would be good for competition.
This is just my own thought on the matter. Maybe it's wrong. I happen to think it would improve the status quo and actually result in market growth as you'd need new to hire more creatives. Novel content in turn results in more interest.
>Netflix’s issue is not the quality of content - it’s their business model. They are borrowing billions to create content with the only way to recoup the cost is mostly by subscription revenue. Their initial rationale was that they were building a content library that would have value. But, they admitted during the last conference call that subscriber growth was slow expectations because they didn’t have any new big releases. No one is going to are about “House of Cards” in five years.
I think you are contradicting yourself here. If the quality was good they wouldn't have mentioned not having big releases as being the reason why their subscriber growth was slow.
>Compare that to Disney’s library. People still care about Disney’s animated movies from the 30s and even adults are nostalgic about the 90s X-men animated TV show and the original Star Wars from the 70s.
I think you are arguing in favor of what I was saying?
>Besides, Disney makes billions from their content from theatrical releases, video on demand, network and cable TV, theme parks, toy sales, etc.
Yes, and for some strange reason Disney trades at 2x the market cap of netflix with 17x p/e while netflix trades at 88x p/e. Either Disney is severely undervalued or Netflix is severely overvalued (or both).
Netflix’s issue is not the quality of content - it’s their business model. They are borrowing billions to create content with the only way to recoup the cost is mostly by subscription revenue. Their initial rationale was that they were building a content library that would have value. But, they admitted during the last conference call that subscriber growth was slow expectations because they didn’t have any new big releases. No one is going to are about “House of Cards” in five years.
Compare that to Disney’s library. People still care about Disney’s animated movies from the 30s and even adults are nostalgic about the 90s X-men animated TV show and the original Star Wars from the 70s.
Besides, Disney makes billions from their content from theatrical releases, video on demand, network and cable TV, theme parks, toy sales, etc.
AI is the perfect term for what we have now - it's artificial intelligence. It _seems_ intelligent, but the reality is that all we have now is pretty good pattern recognition coupled with an index of an incredible amount of information. That's not intelligence.
Sure, it _seems_ smart when it can tell you the volume of the moon or whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable, but ask it to explain a joke if you want to see just how unimpressive current the state of the art is.
Intelligence is the ability to observe patterns and integrate that information into abstract concepts and models that describe (and predict) reality.
You'll know when we've cracked General Intelligence when your Tesla knows to slow down tonight because it's Halloween and there was a new Star Wars movie this year so there's going to be a lot of kids running around in hard-to-see Darth Vader costumes this year...
Star Wars being a prime example. That was a stunt, to remind us of the old, bad movies that used to do that.
The viewer could figure out backstory with a few well-placed references in dialog, or from clues as the story advances. In fact, Star Wars gave us those clues anyway, so the title scrolling into the distance wasn't even useful that way.
When a director uses bad movie tropes for their own sake, that's one thing. But using them instead of directing a good narrative, that's lazy and a squandered opportunity to show us a better movie.
And yes, the radio show example is good. They needed to do lots of dialog, because that was the medium; they had one hand (both hands?) tied behind their back.
But in a movie, shutting down the visuals for a static backstory dialog is almost always a mistake. Because you can be doing so much more than that!
> The story in a movie should be propelled by visuals (instead of mostly dialog or, gad, title cards)
Obviously both radio plays (no visual-- too bad we don't have more of these lately, and we're stuck with audiobooks as a mediocre facsimile) and silent films (no sound) can work extraordinarily well.
Good film uses both to its maximal advantage.
> I'd go so far as to say, any time a movie resorts to backstory-monologues or text, the director has failed.
I disagree. You can find lots of bad examples of this, but you can also find masterful tricks of unreliable narration (Memento); you can find simple context-setting for a foreign environment (Star Wars); you have stories that leap through time that would be impractical to show all of the events and require some text or narration so the viewer knows what's up.
Basically all of the rules of thumb really mean "this is often misused" and are not prescriptive.
The computer screens graphics in 2001 have a look that is very common for hand drawn film elements of that era. The kind of blurry edges of the lines are pretty typical for this process.
Compare that to the mission briefing in Star Wars Episode 4 where the scientist shows a wireframe animation of the attack flight path. It occupies just a tiny area in the background of the final frame, but it was created by a computer. It took several seconds to draw each wireframe onto a screen, which was then recorded by a film camera triggered to advance frame by frame by the computer. There is a making of film for this sequence somehwere. This is the process you suggest, but about ten years after 2001 it was barely possible.
I think they discount the newest movies so they can get as many people to watch them as they can in order to sell them related merchandise. It is Disney Star Wars after all.
Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crap. 90% of movies from 1977 were crap, but we only remember the ones that weren't, like the original Star Wars. Comparing all movies of today to the best movies of the past is unfair.
>Film and TV editors across Los Angeles were sweating Monday evening as their workstations were refusing to reboot
The irony of something refusing to reboot in Hollywood. Hopefully the production of Star Wars 12, Rambo 8 and Terminator 9 has not been too disrupted.
Another way to read the original post's "due to age" might be the age of the content itself, rather than the age of the user downloading it.
For example, you can't get a digital copy of the original Star Wars theatrical release, but there are fan conversions of old VHS or film reels and additional reconstructions that aren't legally available, but are certainly out there. I know that when I was doing pop-culture research for a thesis on pre-WWII American Cartoons I ran into a lot of works that were only digitized by amateurs and hobbyists, and therefore not legally available anywhere.
Technology has advanced, but the product has changed little. I don't want to pay a monthly subscription and pay for all of the content on 300 channels, 280+ I will never ever watch. Despite paying $200 a month, I still don't even have the option to watch Spaceballs (substitute any particular movie here) on demand any time I want even if I am willing to pay for that privilege.
We have the technology to make the content of those 300+ channels available to me in a piecemeal a la carte fashion, but cable companies say if I want to watch ESPN I have to pay for 100 other channels. If I only want to watch Game of Thrones, I have to pay a bit under $20 a month to get a whole bunch of other stuff from HBO I will never watch.
I want to pay for only what I watch, but the cable and streaming services want me to pay for whats available to me. That is the big disconnect IMHO. There is no technical reason we can't have one service (like netflix) that has the world's digital content on it, and I can search and pick what I want to watch on it and pay for it and have the content owners get a cut of it. Netflix was kinda close for awhile, but then due to their licensing deals started pushing and pulling titles at random, and then different studios are now trying to put up Chinese walls to ensure that they have exclusive rights to content. I feel everyone loses here, and I myself can't imagine ever paying for a separate service just to watch star wars or Disney movies. There seems to be a real network effect here of just making everything available.
> There's just so many Star Wars movies, and so many Marvel movies, and while I've seen most in theaters, they are basically juvenile blockbuster cookie cutter crap.
There are at least a few of us out there who think the same as you. The one difference is I haven't watched one in the theater in years.
By definition, if people are collectively, willingly giving Disney billions of dollars a year for a Marvel and Star Wars movies, the market is jibing where it matters.
There are only one or two Marvel or Star Wars movies a year though. Is that really worth subscribing to a streaming service for?
(Not to mention that only maybe a quarter of these movies are worth seeking out, the rest are something I’d only ever watch for free on an airplane or something. But that’s just personal taste).
We live in very regressive times in that respect. As kids, we used to read and watch books and series and movies which mostly were originally intended for adults (I don't pretend that we didn't read any children literature or watch any youth program, but the former was seen as a step and the latter wasn't mass produced, so the natural way was to quickly evolve to adult literature and movies, just keeping a small regressive space for children/youth stuff). But now adults read and watch stuff that is specially designed for teenagers!
Even in a for-kids/for-youth book collection, where we used to have Jack London, Jules Vernes, James F. Cooper, Alexandre Dumas and so on mixed with more specific children's literature; I looked at the current catalogue the other day: such authors have been erased, and the whole offer is now made of novelisations of Star Wars, novelisations of cartoons and novelisations of comics... Oh you can still find them in other collections, but those are a bit more, how to put it, distinguished/smart collections (and aimed at a bit older age); so that was quite a shock to browse the catalogue of the 'standard' kids collection.
After watching the wonderful documentary Jodorowski’s Dune [1], I think we already have that film.
As others mentioned here, and as the doc drives home, it’s pretty much Star Wars.
It wasn’t necessarily a wholesale ripoff, but are there a large number of similarities? And could they have been truly just coincidences? There had to be massive pollination from that Dune version to Star Wars Episode IV.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodorowsky%27s_Dune
My point is if you look at the last 20 years you will also find a lot of good movies. If you don't like Marvel or Star Wars movies, watch something else, there is plenty to chose from.
Yeah if you look at movie marketing, the spending is focused on the big, safe "tentpole" movies. If you don't seek out movies to your own taste, it might seem like the blockbusters are the only ones getting produced.
If we reframe the discussion a tiny bit, The Matrix is a terrible example of an original story. Its almost the exact same category as Star Wars. Classic heros journey, pastiching tons of other familiar works they decided were influencial (in this case sci fi, cyberpunk, philosophy, religion, anime, hong kong action, karate..) all wrapped in a very tightly defined worldbuilding bow. These kinds of movies resonate and last precisely because of how derivative and unoriginal they are. They are giants standing on the shoulders of other giants.
None of that is intended to diminish the movie in any way.
How about the Klingon disintegrators that stop at the soles of your boots?
Star Trek is "Wagon Trail" in space. Star Wars is, I think, space opera. The Expanse gives a nod to hard science, and I respect them for trying, but e.g. the gravity is always either 1 or 0 g. i'm not complaining, I think realistic sci-fi would be kind of boring. Like the first half of "2001: A Space Odyssey", it was basically Dr. Heywood taking a plane. A freaking awesome plane to space, but still.
I have a "100 Sci-Fi Movies" DVD set with lots of old movies from a span of decades, and it's pretty clear that at least some sci-fi did start as attempts to do a kind of scenario planning, but there has always been "speculative fiction" depending on how you categorize things. Was Plato's Atlantis science fiction?
Switching frequently between service is exactly what the companies don't want. I agree that this might be where we're headed, but the idea of a subscription is to have a recurring and predictable stream of income.
The best solution for the content industry as a whole would be to set up a clearing house, that provides access to all movies and series, streaming services should then be able to purchase the content they want on their service. That would allow the services to compete on the quality of their service, not their catalog. Let's face it consumers don't care if Star Wars is created by Disney or Warner Bros or that Breaking Bad is distributed by Sony.
I like Star wars and I like Star Trek, I would never accuse SW of something so grand as 'predicting' anything though. You have reminded me of my favourite definition for Soft Sci fi though.
Soft Sci Fi: Han Solo running around around on an asteroid with only a face mask. (can't find the source right now)
Edit
>"Hard science-fiction” is defined as “stories in which Han Solo does not saunter around the surface of an asteroid wearing only an oxygen mask and a leather jacket”
https://themorningnews.org/article/mindfuck-movies
I grew up on Disneyland. At one point, my family was going nearly every weekend because my father worked for a subsidiary of Disney, so we got in for free. Even for years after he left the company, we bought annual passes and went rather frequently. Everyone I knew had annual passes.
It's probably been 5 years since I last went. Over time, annual passes became less worth it. Prices kept going up and more dates kept getting blocked out. Even ordinary tickets got pricey. Eventually, the park got so crowded that it really wasn't fun to go. Then they added premiums to a bunch of things like Fast Passes. I just kind of said screw it and chose not to go back.
I'm sure that I'll go back for some reason, but I won't make an effort to. This is coming from someone who LOVED Disneyland and wanted to build theme park rides as a dream job. It ended up feeling like they were doing everything they could to squeeze pennies, which I know theme parks are designed to do, but it used to seem like Disneyland at least partly cared about whether or not you were enjoying yourself. Cast members, at one time, were pretty damned friendly, though they're still much better than most other theme parks. When I last went, you could tell that they secretly hated their jobs. I don't want to pity lowly employees when I'm there to have fun. At least Six Flags doesn't seriously attempt to make their employees act cheery(I was once an employee there BTW).
Above all, I really don't want to give Disney money. Sure, they became an Evil MegaCorp a long time ago, and have long ago slithered their tentacles through the news and entertainment industry, but they control so much now and pretty much have no regard for artistry or the cultural significance of their films and characters. Star Wars just took the cake. Why would I pay Disney for a bizarro facsimile something I enjoyed as a child where the characters I loved are losers only to be replaced by modern ripoffs? Maybe they could have attracted a new generation, which doesn't appear to be working out much for them, but as someone who grew up with the original Star Wars, what they've done only repels me from anything to do with them. I'm not even a Star Wars fan... and I don't think one has to be to respond that way to Disney.
I'm not angry at Disney. It's just that, looking at my own behavior, it's no surprise to me why attendance to their park would be in decline.
Star Wars is a little closer IMO.
The Tahei and Matashichi sequences towards the beginning when they split up are basically exactly the same and R2D2 and C3PO in the desert. Even the musical score is very close. Ditto on the space scenes and Midway.
Personally, I didn't have a problem with it -- many of the themes are universal and influence is fine... if anything adding the SFX and different storyline really honors the influencing films. I did get a little jaded when I saw a George Lucas interview on one of the DVD releases where he downplayed the similarities in what was in my opinion a disingenuous way.
The Death Star sequence (specifically the trench run) was based on, and sometimes lifted scene for scene from the 1955 movie "The Dam Busters." [0,1].
Substitute these experimental "bouncing bombs"[2] for Luke force-bending proton torpedoes and you have the end of Star Wars.
[0]https://www.starwars.com/news/the-cinema-behind-star-wars-the-dam-busters
[1]https://youtu.be/lNdb03Hw18M
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouncing_bomb
So the original Star Wars, which has spawned so many copycat movies, is itself a copycat movie? Let's see. The formula seems to be: take two successful old movies, such as Battle of Midway and Hidden Fortress, and create a mashup set in a different genre to make it seem new. Has someone created a machine learning application that applies this mashup/genre switch on old movie scripts to make new ones?
It's always been more complicated than that, but generally 100% of ticket sales only applies to the biggest movies like Endgame or Star Wars.
For other blockbusters, somewhere between 50-75% is the norm, with the range varying based on the chain's size/leverage and the movie's expected performance.
For all other films, the cap is 50% of ticket sales for the first weekend.
With all of the above, the studio gets a smaller % of ticket sales each weekend. Somewhere around 8-12 weeks in, the studio's share drops below 10%, which is why some films will stay in theaters for months if there aren't any new big films to replace them.
Is there more information about what the Disney+ catalog will include? It says that 2019 and future releases will be exclusive to Disney+ (though of course you can still buy individual movies, just not stream them), but I wonder about the rest of their catalog. Will all Star Wars movies be available? All other Disney-owned movies?
I can't tell whether I'm surprised the price is so low (three things for the price of Netflix!) or just cynically expecting that the price will go up as the value of the Disney/Hulu catalog increases. After all, Netflix has tons more content (much of it junk, admittedly) compared to the Disney catalog. So it would be pretty surprising if Disney thought they could charge very much for just the Disney+ piece. Hulu with ads is hard to value (and they could bloat it out with even more ads...). And are there local restrictions on ESPN+? Seems like there are lots of opportunities for add-on charges, such that a family could end up paying $20 or more each month for ad-free Hulu, ESPN including local, the entire Disney catalog, and multiple simultaneous screens.
Basically, it seems like this price announcement could be primarily meant to scare NFLX investors by making it seem like the be-all, end-all price for the Disney bundle will be 13 bucks. Or perhaps I'm too cynical?
Could someone please explain that joke. For people who have watched Star Wars series it will be hard joke to understand. I have seen the more recent Star Wars movie but not the older ones in the series, so I understand few things but not deeply enough.
How many westerns are there? Star Wars films? After the second Star Wars films they all sucked and were essentially the same movie. If you like westerns or Star Wars films you're (probably) going to see a lot of them. They'll stop making them when people realise they're getting predictable; when it's too obvious that the differences between releases are extremely small. This isn't art, it's business, no matter what you might read.
> This included several whimsical stuff that wasn't research like Experience Music Project and Museum of Science Fiction.
While not research, those things can have profound impacts on people. Several years ago a Star Wars exhibit came to the Indiana State Museum here in Indianapolis, they had an entire section dedicated to both the prosthetic devices in the film and in real life, one of the video segments playing next to some props from the film and real prosthetic devices was a clip of one of the inventors of the real technology talking about how watching the film version directly led to him pursuing his career and working directly on various prosthetic devices trying to make it a reality.
These sorts of experiences could have profound impact on the creative process for one or more individuals that might have far more profound effects for society than active research.
> I'm not saying that now there isn't a more active effort around introducing more minority representation into media, it obviously is so, I'm only arguing against that being a bad thing on its own and/or saying that didn't happen before.
I did not happen before, at this scale. It's a new thing. And it's annoying.
> If this is more important to the studios than making good quality movies then obviously the quality will suffer, but that's not special in any way to the minority representation push.
Looks like it is. Look at the backslash with movies such as Star Wars, Ghostbusters, etc., where they take established characters and alienate fans by changing an established character that was a white male into a black woman (007, have you heard he's now a black woman?).
Yup. My kids are sick of what Disney has done to the Star Wars franchise. They, we, have less than zero interest of seeing any new contrived episodes and even less interest in going to Disneyland to see Star Wars land.
> You think older movies were better because of the time filter - we remember the classics and forget the crap.
No you're making excuses. I don't think they were always better, but that they took from a FAR wider selection of production styles. Hollywood has been afraid of variety for decades, inserting the cliche "family values" ending in every movie, or even demanding the neat happy end every time, or some cliche camera technique, whether the Dutch angle, or today's overhead rotating zoom-in. Habits and techniques that run in eras. Those homogenised 5 or 15% of the film, with half of that always the cliche ending.
There have been shite movies in every era, but both good and bad provided a far wider variety of production styles. Emphatically not saying that every film became crap - though they often seem tired and boring because even a good or perfectly directed and produced film feels tired when its 5th or 15th in the franchise. Everything feels like it's in the same franchise now at 70-90% homogenised.
Maybe you don't see it, but my kids and their friends seem to and regularly take the piss about movies they saw. They can't compare with earlier eras but they can, and do, come back and take the piss about the scene or idea lifted straight from the last movie they went as a group to. Not always - they can rave about some film I thought awful too. :)
> Hollywood is a business, it exists to make money. It have always been like that.
The point, that I could have expressed better, is that it always existed to make money, but didn't completely sacrifice everything else on that altar. Yet despite scifi, yes even Star Wars, usually being western in space the theme book had more than one page. Maybe there were a dozen or so common, cliched themes and production styles, but clearly more than one.
The point I suppose boils down to: every movie now has become a super-hero martial arts movie. A horror film has become a super-hero martial arts movie in a cabin in the woods etc. The book must say that's what encapsulates the perfect movie, so that's the form given to every movie.
I complained to Trekkie friend that nothing since Star Trek TOS has Star Trek been any good. He asked what evidence I had.
I said the lack of quotable lines. I know a long list of TOS quotable lines, and exactly one from after ("KKKAAAAAAHHHHHNNNNNN!"). No quotable lines means the writing is crummy and the shows are not memorable.
The same for Star Wars. Who quotes any lines from other than the first one? I stopped watching the SW new movies, too. Zzzzzz....
>But Hollywood have always done this - recycling old ideas in new wrapping.
Yes, but I think it's safe to say that there were a lot more original movies a few decades ago than there are now. Hollywood used to take more risks.
>According to Wikipedia, Aladdin grossed "$923.7 million, against a production budget of $183 million". So despite you and your nephew, Disney seem to manage OK.
Exactly. People are bemoaning the current state of Hollywood, but it's extremely profitable, and that's all that really matters to them. There's no shortage of paying customers willing to see the latest sequel/prequel/remake/reboot. Sure, they might lose a few ticket sales from people like me and this OP and his nephew, but it's more than made up for by countless others who just don't care and want entertainment. And yes, they might make more profit on a really great original movie (like the original Star Wars in 1977), but that's also a big risk and it might flop and be a giant loss, so they tend to shy away from such things now and make safer movies that have an almost guaranteed profit, even if it isn't as much.
Yep, this. I was 12 when the original Star Wars came out. The opening sequence blew my mind straight out the to the sidewalk (people invariably watched movies in theaters back then). But nowadays it doesn't look like anything particularly special.
The past few years I am finding the Avengers, Star Wars and James Bond movies hard to sit through. I really don't need 3 hours of over stimulation of all my senses. There are better things to do in life.
>Star Wars ... certainly not derivative rubbish
One of the biggest-grossing franchises in film history is rewarmed 30s SF pulp with a bigger effects budget.
>more awful movies while trying to argue that 'this is what people want.'
Moviegoers don't want the same old thing. But they also don't want this weird Lynch/Cronenberg (snobbish Godard) stuff. We should have books and films with enough cultural cachet that almost everyone should be experiencing them simultaneously (ie, there's too much fragmentation). But there should be small, independent, unique voices.
So when it comes right down to it, what we really want is something comfortable (known) that doesn't quite feel that way (but not too much) and everyone shares as a cultural touchstone, but one which is unique and special to each individual. This seems to be the real problem we're running against.
Like they've survived the past 20. Hollywood ticket sales have been declining sharply since 2002. [1] That's also the year that their inflation adjusted profits also peaked. Hollywood started making more and more awful movies while trying to argue that 'this is what people want.' Well, it clearly wasn't, isn't, and won't ever be. Nonetheless they'll continue down their current trajectory because they think they're right, as this article emphasizes.
Here's an extremely relevant article about Hollywood. [2] Hollywood has been one of the earliest adopters of active utilization and commercialization of "AI technologies". Scripts are actively analyzed using machine learning systems to try to predict profits. Guess what the AI says? Stuff that made money in the past will keep making money, and things that didn't won't. And what do we get out of Hollywood? Repetitive rubbish whose only novelty is tossing in some identity politics to, in this article's phrasing, offer a "more representative portrayal of the world in which we live."
More to the point, think about some of the all time greatest movies (as well as money makers). Here's [3] a list of the top 10 by gross. Tellingly, only 3 of the top 10 were made after 2000. But now consider the other films - Gone with the Wind, Titanic, Star Wars, The Sound of Music, ET, The Ten Commandments, etc. These films were all, if not extremely unique, certainly not derivative rubbish. Now look at the 21st century films and you'll see a whole bunch of generic superhero movies and sequels. Even if not the product of AI, it's certainly the product of a mindset that's no different than a profit oriented regression analysis of the past - the less glorified truism of what "AI analysis" is.
Maybe the biggest problem with Hollywood is summed by one sentence in the AI article I referenced: “[AI analysis] takes a lot of the risk out of what I do.” No, it just makes you comfortable releasing crap that you'd otherwise recognize as crap. Interestingly the producer that gave that quote ended up releasing two mega-flops after the article and has not released anything since. It's not like we've even scratched the surface of possible ideas, but Hollywood has become uncreative, lazy, and averse to any and all risk - to the point that they'd rather drown than try something else, so long as it happens slowly.
[1] - https://www.the-numbers.com/market/
[2] - https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/06/business/media/solving-equation-of-a-hit-film-script-with-data.html
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films#Highest-grossing_films_adjusted_for_inflation
By accepting that event cinema is the only thing the movie industry has left in its favour right now. As they say in the article itself, many people watch maybe four films a year, and usually stick to those with the highest profile.
So I think that's really what film as a medium is going to be in future. It's going to be the place you watch the next Avengers or Star Wars or James Bond or what not. The place for big picture films with million dollar budgets and rosters brimming with A listers, and nothing else beneath that.
Or okay, maybe indie cinema may exist on the fringes or something. But fact is, the industry has probably got to accept that low/medium budget films are pretty much history, and they've been replaced entirely by streaming services and sites like YouTube.
Still, it's not all bad news. No, if you want bad news, that's probably the future of television. That's on the way out right now, is probably going to completely supplanted by streaming services like Netflix in future, and as a format has pretty much no advantages over the internet whatsoever. Seriously, could you imagine trying to selling the experience of watching TV in a society that already has the internet? You couldn't. It objectively be a worse solution for most people.
So yeah, I think film is probably gonna be reduced a bunch of blockbuster films by large studios mixed with some arthouse works, and TV is probably just going to be completely replaced by streaming services and video sharing platforms.
I don't agree with your Star Wars point. Regardless of how I feel about it, George Lucas made the changes to his film. I believe that is his right as creator. Making changes to other people's work crosses a line for me.
Did anyone else start picturing the first two slides (the ones labeled "Context") in a Star Wars-movie opening crawl? Something about the voice it's written in totally had me seeing it in yellow text perspective scrolling off into the background.
We like to see big movies (Avengers, Star Wars, etc) on the big screen. Everything else, we much prefer at home.
But, I don't disagree with OP. Movies are either Nth in a series are a remake of a remake or just meh.
Explosions are fun on the big screen, but that's about all.
Are you implying that Disney movies (lol Star Wars 2929384) are less recycled than other studios' movies?
>Just maybe the democratization of film
I've been thinking about this for a while. The "despecialized" versions of the Star Wars films prove that audiences can dictate the nature of a creative work in lieu of (or in spite of) its creator(s). It became apparent that eventually fan-edits of films, and fan-remakes of films, might eventually supplant the official material in certain cases.
But beyond the concept of "superior" or more popular versions of flawed films, there would be branching iterations that eventually are so distinct from their source material that they'd essentially be different things all together. Which is exciting to me.
Where did Disney get all this delivery cred? They do seem to be taking their time and they've been gobbling things up and certainly have the content. Aren't they just an old media company though? I remember when Disney Channel was a pay channel with relatively bunk content; like it had some original stuff and then like ancient re-runs for the Mickey Mouse club and once fairly rarely they'd play a classic Disney movie. Tons of commercials too and they had like special "early access" adverts for the big next movie and toys and things like that.
Maybe it's a different company now but I'll ask, with all their content: the disney stuff, star wars, marvel, fox, etc.. If they put it all on Disney+ at $7 a month, are they not leaving money on the table? I can't imagine there won't be up-selling or limited availability of certain media properties or something. The author is right, if it's all there at $7 and the app is great and they are bold and aggressive, then I would think Prime and Netflix, etc. will be in a bit of trouble. On the other hand, if Disney acts like they always have then I expect there to be like 10% good stuff, an advertising machine for whatever movie is next in the pipe and then just some bunk filler content.
Why would I create an indie production of some kind for no money? Are you saying now if I want to make something I have to setup a gofundme and get it funded before I even make the product. That's fine for something, and ruins the artistic intent for other things. Imagine Star Wars being crowdfunded before it was made.
If we reach 100k we'll make sure Han Solo shoots first.
It doesn't make sense. People should be paid for providing a service, whether it's a hamburger or a movie. You don't pay someone before the goods are delivered. The modern system of pre-funding and patronization is absurd for many projects.
Disclaimer: I do not know who this man is, or anything about what he represents. I merely find it amusing that if "Trolls" (people, who for whatever reason, speak untruth online) exist, than so must "Elves" (people who are the reverse, and speak truth)...
Now, up until today, when I stumbled upon this video, I had never heard the term "Elves" used in this context -- thus I am submitting this link.
This whole thing (not the video, but the concept), "Elves vs. Trolls" -- has a Tolkienesque, Lord Of The Rings, "Good Vs. Evil", "Us Vs. Them", Star Wars, Epic Film, battle for the entirety of Middle-Earth feel to it... well, in my opinion... but I'm sort of an armchair, amateur aspiring screenwriter (in addition to being a programmer) so take everything I say with the proverbial "grain of salt" <g>...
Star wars isn't science fiction. Lucas tells us so in the first frame: a long time ago in a galaxy far far away: it isnt about us or where science may take us in the future. It is a samurai movie with lasers.
You also have to watch out for the degenerate cases of competition that arise when the sold products are not commodities. The less a product is substitutable by another from its category, the more meaningless the competition is. On the commodity end, you have grocery stores; for most products, you have true competition because all grocery stores sell mostly the same stuff (and from the same brands). On the "meaningless competition" end you have streaming services like Netflix and HBO. Movies, TV shows, videogames are mostly non-substitutable goods (if you want to watch Star Wars, being told to go watch Princess Bride instead isn't going to cut it). Streaming services are so full of exclusively licensed content that they don't compete - you have to subscribe to those that have content that interest you. This is kind of like a cartel, but arises organically, bottom-up, instead of from explicit collusion.
It's an arms race situation; games, or at least AAA games, have to be more complex because they have to be more complex or they won't sell like the previous complex game. I think you're picking up on the circularity there, which I fully agree with, but it doesn't stop it from existing. (Technically back in the past there is a recursion base case for all this, somewhere around when the hobbyiest-level game scene, where 1 person could create a professional-quality game, and where professional-quality games took a staff to exist at all. This would be in the late 8-bit era; by the 16-bit era, a professional game took a staff.)
I'm not sure I can Google this up, but I remember when the PS4 era was just starting up, Shamus Young (http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/ ) hypothesized that the gaming industry was going to have an even harder time justifying the expense of a "true" PS4 game because of the yet-again increased expense of the asset pipeline. Assets are technically getting cheaper to generate over time, but they're not getting cheaper faster than they're getting more expensive. The PS5 may yet make this worse again, and the continuous PC market is definitely getting crazy to build for the top end. Eventually, even microtransactions aren't going to be able to cover this, and the only games that can be made are going to be so "safe" that nobody at all will like them. This is a sort of bubble that is going to burst at some point. It's arguable that it's already starting to burst; it seems like we're seeing a slowly increasing number of very high-profile, very expensive failures, and that can't continue forever. Keep an eye on Nintendo's strategy (if they continue making boatloads of money with their Switch on the complexity foothills while the rest of market is climbing so high up the complexity mountain that they are gasping for breath, eventually people with lots of initials in their titles in other companies are going to start asking why they can't do what Nintendo is doing), and the indie market.
I do sometimes wonder if movies will see this as well. Right now, most movies that cost significant fractions of a billion dollars will make it back, but as that number goes up, it takes proportionally less and less to screw up things really quickly, even if you're profitable most of the time. Star Wars, for instance, is quite unexpectedly in a dangerous spot right now, profit-wise. If for instance the Marvel movies had the same problems, we could see a sea change in movie finances in a few years. But it doesn't seem to be happening yet.
> Star Wars is an amateur film then
Based on what? There are many unions and they have changed and stabilized over time. SAG-AFTRA https://www.sagaftra.org/about/our-history is the one that is distinguishing. The Director's Guild (which George Lucas and others, had spats with) or a writer's guild, etc have traditionally been little more than elitist extortion committees.
IMO we will see the biggest change in how books are written after copyright abolition. We sort of kind of do already, with the big titles like Harry Potter, Star Wars (I know, it started out as a movie) etc. We have the canonical, original books, but we also have a lot of fan-made titles. Some of them create a specific narrative based on the original work, i.e. Harry Potter and the Medhods of Rationality[1], and then people create other fanfiction based on that. 99% of it is fourteen-year-old girls with no writing skills, but there are nuggets that could make great money if not for copyright. I think living, breathing universes made by fans, possibly coupled with chapters released as they're being written, fan voting etc. is the future. Even post copyright, it could make authors money, think crowdfunding or "Character x will either murder y or have sex with y, depending on what option gets more money".
[1] hpmor.com [2] se [1] or https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12461030/1/The-Tinkerer
Are you suggesting that films can be classified as either “union” or “amateur”? Star Wars is an amateur film then. And saying “amateur porno” is redundant.
Amazing visualization. I didn't know that MCU > Star Wars + Harry Potter. Also thought that DC had completely messed up the movie franchise but looks like they still clawed out $2B. Not that bad in my books.
Except film produced with film. Godfather is supposed to look spectacular since it was film, Star Wars though needs a lot more work.
Check out Logan Lucky and BlackKklansman -- Driver definitely has more range than the Star Wars movie would have you believe.
I’m trying to remember which service it was on. On second thought looking over IMDB top movies. The list probably is sort of similar. It really is hard to get a conesensus for top movies. Sure my own personal list as a media geek will be different. But no one else is really going to agree with my esoteric specific films.
IMDB does have some films that stick out in the top of their list though. Star Wars being so high, LOTR being so high, Inception, Seven, Green Mile, Gladiator.
No matter though you’re right that consensus is hard to get. And most of the films that I listed as out of place are part of fanboy beloved franchises or headed by fanboy beloved directors.
Rottentomatoes is extremely biased and subject to the so called "Hype Train" effect where popular movies have massively inflated scores regardless of content (Don't mean to sound like a hater but The last star wars films have been critically acclaimed despite most of the fans disliking them for various reasons).
I can imagine this happening with news but along party line with critics upvoting sites that fit their world view regardless of actual content.
IMO this obsession with "Fact-checking" and "Journalistic Integrity" is just people still trying to deal with the fact that conservatist populism has been surging lately and the opposing sides just cant get their brain around it so they are just trying to say "No you are wrong and full of liars; See this fact-check proves it!". But neither side really cares since they are just trying to push their agendas.
That's not up for debate, really here--is it? Rather the pointed argument seems to be that for some of a certain age group, their exposure to the genre was Star Wars. It seems merely in this case, yours was a different movie.
Besides that, there's an important difference between 2001 and Star Wars: 2001 utilized existing classical scores that are excellent for their own reasons, whereas John Williams composed entirely new scores for Star Wars that were similarly excellent.
It is just my personal opinion, but I think it will be a very long time before we see another symphonic movie score that embeds itself so deep into the cultural fabric as Star Wars did. Not only was the music phenomenal and stands well on its own, so many of them are elevated because of the action taking place with them on screen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_OSeRxhGOY Still gets me as excited today as it did when I was 8.
Yes, the article is definitely overgeneralizing from a number of anecdotes, imho. While I tend to agree with the notion that classical music tends to signal a certain remoteness -- thus correlating with villainy -- that's not its only use in movies.
One example: I recall when Star Wars came out, a lot of my friends bought the soundtrack. It served as sort of a gateway to classical music. It's hard to measure, of course, but I'd bet that that had a larger positive impact on classical attendance than, say, Hannibal Lector killing people to Bach's Goldberg Variations had a negative one.
To your lack of visual stimuli hypothesis, I'd also add as other more likely drivers of classical's decline:
a) Live classical music is expensive and getting more so.
b) Sound quality in a concert hall is different than via digital means. It doesn't wash over you like it does when listening via your Bose headphones. It's less visceral and more distant. And you have to tune out the other sounds of coughing, people shifting in their seats, etc...
c) And finally, we have the best recordings of any work available on demand. In economic terms, that creates really cheap substitutes. Speaking for myself, I'd rather just listen to the Vienna Philharmonic on the couch for free than dress up, drive across town, find parking, and pay $100+ to hear the Austin Symphony play the same work.
The Author and I obviously have different definitions of classical music.
They point out a 'villain' playing Bach. But to me, the whole film score is classical music. Yes the film is about an evil thing but the music conveys other things.
He identifies A clockwork Orange as a turning point . I could point to a host of 70s and 80s film that had classical music scores, Star Wars, Indiana Jones etc, etc.
I'll admit 'pop' music has become more popular in recent films, but classical music is still really good at communicating certain moods, including but not necessarily villainy.
I loved the Star Wars prequels...
That being said, I very rarely get into series unless I'm familiar with the author / director.
I've just gotten tired of slogging through to the end when a book / movie / TV show series should have ended a long time ago.
It'd certainly be interesting to see the stats here, as well as how it breaks down when actual violence is taken into account. Gaming has seen a lot less actual violent assaults/fights than sports, and even arguably quite a bit less than film/tv/music.
There aren't any gaming hooligan groups I've heard by any means.
For online toxicity it may be a bit closer, but again, it'd be interesting to see the breakdown by hobby or interest. Stuff like the last series of Doctor Who and Ghostbusters and Star Wars have certainly seen a few controversies recently, and it seems reactions to films/online film criticism can at least as acerbic as anything said about games.
Directing has changed, too. I used to know a B-list Hollywood director. Directors used to come from a theater background. Theatrical directors make a script work by walking through it on a bare stage and making changes until it works. This doesn't work in films with lots of effects. If you try that on an effects film, you go way over budget. Which has happened more than once.
Big movies are now waterfall projects - everything is preplanned. As one ILM guy said, a Star Wars movie is three years of preproduction, three months of principal photography, and three years of postproduction. Movie directors now are more like animation directors - they storyboard, they plan, they previsualize, they have a full previz version created, and only then do they get the green light for full production. Upper management gets to see all this work, so there's more interference from above.
Star Wars is a mess for the past has tech more advanced than the future. Blade Runner is still watchable though and never laughable because it seemingly has been placed in an intentional anachronistic SciFi setting: the 1940's hairstyle and dress Rachel wears, a 1950's "Raymond Chandler" slice of life story, a computer that is more "steampunk" than plausible. The films "Brazil", Marie Antoinette", "Titus", Jesus Christ Superstar, adopt that anachronistic style as well.
Black and white movies should stay black and white. George Lucas shouldn’t have messed with Star Wars. Film movies should have film grain. You shouldn’t use a computer to remove grain and make Arnold look like a Madame Tussaud’s sculpture. You shouldn’t crop 4:3 sources to 16:9 because you think people prefer losing some image to black bars. Stop tinkering with shit to “improve” it.
I wouldn’t care, but I do care because it means I have to spend my time taking hours on the internet to find an obscure VHS rip of a version that has not been debauched by digital Dicks.
French artists have influenced modern culture through their artwork intensively. I would even say without Valerian and Laureline [1]. Star Wars and many other science fiction movies would not exist.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Val%C3%A9rian_and_Laureline#Legacy
> I wouldn't be surprised if I jumped ship to Disney later this year
Oh, man, if Disney really makes their entire catalog available for a reasonable price, I'm definitely going to pay for that. All of Star Wars, all of MCU, all of Pixar, not to mention Disney's own stuff and apparently 21st Centry Fox movies. That's enormous.
But most streamers are just too fragmented to care.
What they should do is have one universal streaming service on which content owners can offer their own content on their own terms, rather than those of Netflix.
>The comment you're replying to doesn't suggest any of that.
Uh
>The analysis ignores 99.99% of LEGO that has been sold and is now worthless.
That blanket covers 99.99% of anything Lego, combine that with what this article is about... speculating on Lego sets... my comment is fine.
"worthless" though is not the case. Individual elements absolutely have value on the secondary markets. Bricklink has more than a million mmebers, 10,499 stores and 125,105 unique elements with millions and millions of pieces for sale.
Parting a 'worthless' set out can often yield you more, if not several times more. Sure it might take you years to sell every single element of a set, but by no means is 99.99% of Lego 'worthless'.
>really obvious counterexample is Star Wars-branded stuff associated with a current feature film.
Plenty of Star Wars sets have gone on varying levels of sale/clearance (some quite drastically) via both shop.lego/Lego stores and non-Lego retail outlets in the past several years. 42 of the 97 Star Wars sets are currently on sale on shop.lego for example and almost certainly won't rocket up in value, ever. The Clone Wars sets were probably the worst failure here.
Lego also has plenty of series that just never gain traction. Most recently I'd point at Nexo Knights. Kids just weren't interested, despite the cartoon, and most of us adult fans only bought it because we wanted space and/or castle/knights to come back and this was the closest offering. We basically got 2 rounds of releases the they scrapped it.
Legends of Chima is mostly a flop.
The Minecraft series had some of the steepest discounts I've seen directly from shop.lego/lego stores.
Architecture sets are more often miss than hit and you find unopened sets fairly regularly in thrift/budget store chains.
Bionicle flopped hard and only has a small die-hard fan base not unlike the Dreamcast.
Angry Birds had pretty steep discounts direct from Lego early on.
TMNT several years ago was a pretty big bust and hasn't retained value.
Etc.
> I will agree though that speculating on any given, current production, Lego set is idiotic at best.
The comment you're replying to doesn't suggest any of that.
yukonbound's comment made me think that comparing the items whose value really popped to those whose value didn't might provide a guide to which items would become more valuable in the future.
> You never know what will be popular and what won't, you'll never know when something will be retired or won't.
The really obvious counterexample is Star Wars-branded stuff associated with a current feature film. I don't think it would be that hard to identify stuff with a limited production run. The "will be popular" part is trickier, yes.
I wanted to show my GF Star Wars... but it wasn't on it. Same for James Bond, Die hard 4, Oblivion, MI1, etc. It's a shame, really. I would gladly pay 20$/month, but in this case, I want ALL available movies, not just some cherry-picked ones.
FWIW, for watching arbitrary "not on Netflix" movies, Youtube is actually a surprisingly good option. Their "pay to rent movie" service has a pretty deep catalog, and an awful lot of their choices seem to be in the $2.99 - $7.99 or so range. It's quite often I want to watch something that's not on Netflix and find it on YT for, say, $4.99. I don't mind paying that a couple of times a month, on top of what I pay Netflix.
Frankly, I find so much netflix-shows on netflix, but rarely good movies not produced by them.
I wanted to show my GF Star Wars... but it wasn't on it. Same for James Bond, Die hard 4, Oblivion, MI1, etc. It's a shame, really. I would gladly pay 20$/month, but in this case, I want ALL available movies, not just some cherry-picked ones.
All the human originated technology seems fairly plausible in the Expanse.
All the proto-molecule derived stuff isn’t particularly plausible, but it’s not really worse than most sufficiently-advanced-technology tropes, and it tries pretty hard to express a universe with rules, just different rules.
I would give Star Wars an F for science-y-ness, Star Trek a varying score depending on the episode (ranging from A to F) but overall a C, and The Expanse a B+.
It is galling when people define sci-fi by its cinematic imitators, for sure.
Yes, but only if you count Star Wars or other American-style production "action movie but in space" movies or series (like Stargate, Firefly, ...).
When you go into the things that don't get blockbuster movies, you end up with old-school scifi. Newer like The Expanse or Blindsight, older like The Culture or Hyperion, or proper old school stuff like
In general, piece of unwanted and unrequested advice - whenever you make a huge sweeping statement about complex topic with many examples (like "In western sci-fi, the story exists to make the reader feel good about themselves.") you are inevitably wrong.
> In western sci-fi, the story exists to make the reader feel good about themselves. At least, the successful ones are like this. It makes for good movies, and good story telling. > > Think about that for a moment. All the western sci-fi that we've been used to: Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, etc.. All these stories are not really science fiction, but rather, science fantasy.
I'm not sure how much Wetern Science Fiction you know, but those are all Cinematic Franchises, not western science fiction-books. That popcorn-movies have a specific angle for being successful is not a surprise.
If you wanna compare Cixin Lui's stories with modern western writers then be more honest, and take recent books from modern western writers. Charles Stross, Alastair Reynolds, Neal Stephenson, they all come to mind in that regard.
I think it depends on what you want out of it.
In western sci-fi, the story exists to make the reader feel good about themselves. At least, the successful ones are like this. It makes for good movies, and good story telling.
Think about that for a moment. All the western sci-fi that we've been used to: Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, etc.. All these stories are not really science fiction, but rather, science fantasy.
It goes through the normal story telling, of establishing a good guy and a bad guy. And it tries to pull you in, to empathize with the challenges of the good guy, so that you can experience his trials and tribulations. And then, at the end, the good guy always wins. He always succeeds, in some way or other. And you're left with feeling a sense of joy.
But, Cixin Lui's stories, threw all that aside. He presented you with the cold hard reality, of survival in the jungle. That there are not really any good or bad sides. Just different perspectives. And everyone is just trying to survive.
And the jungle is the galaxy. Western sci-fi is all about being human-centric, as if we are the only species in the universe that matters. Whereas Cixin, presented us with a reality, where humanity is only one of billions of intelligent species. Those that had survived the jungle, or those that hide from the rest, or those that evolved into another form, or those that end up hunting, to maintain their probability of survival.
So, if you want to continue to feel good about yourself, then stick with what you know. Keep reading western sci-fi. If you want to expand your mind, then try out Cixin's novel.
Admittedly, I think something was lost in translation. The translated text was overly wordy. But the concepts behind it, was still incredible.
I especially loved the story about the human computer system, the Qin 1.0 Operating System. That was quite creative.
And the little details on those tiles are called 'greebles'!
https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/star-wars/36450/greebles-how-tiny-details-make-a-huge-star-wars-universe
I cannot speak for the parent, but I have some ideas on the matter. if one takes art to mean a narrow group of things with a narrative (specifically film, tv, novels, and radio and news stories, thus specifically excluding things like tshirts and the obama hope poster) then you can start finding examples of works designed to produce shock and contrast them with earlier works intended to invoke beauty. Star Wars is a silly, but relevant, example. the creators of the last jedi specifically wanted to "subvert audience expectations", which sounds likes "shock" to me. Whereas the first original 70s star wars just wanted to tell a good, entertaining story.
To be clear, I don't buy any of the misogynistic criticisms of the last star wars film. but I did think it was a poor story.
my instincts say that such a change in "art" matters, but I don't really have good evidence to show how it does. much less that the arrow of causality points the way I think it does.
Having had worked for Disney in Orlando I sometimes feel the same. I just don't get it, they're not bad movies, but it scares me to see just how attached people get to Disney. Now that they own Star Wars and Marvel I've lost interest in both just because I knew once they took Star Wars they would milk that cow as much as possible. I am still kinda mad they took away the awesome game studio. They really could of made amazing games, instead we've got EA making Star Wars games.
At least since Einstein's Theory Of Relativity we've known that normal human narrative will not extend to space.
Meh. Human narratives have encompassed characters who live for hundreds of billions of years and who experience time warped in any number of ways. There are even successful mainstream movies that deal with such issues. Multiple ones going back decades.
Basically, people don't want their sci-fi stories to be too accurate. And I guess that's fine. Maybe it's all just entertainment.
You could totally re-tell the entire Star Wars and Star Trek canon in such a setting. It's not that people don't want it. Most people don't know enough to know they would want it. Heck, half of everyone seems to think "there's no gravity in space."
(EDIT: By "such a setting," I mean in just several cubic light years around Sol and Alpha Centauri.)
I don't think Star Trek isn't a similar franchise. It's not centered around a single storyline like Star Wars or Harry Potter.
Star Wars is a similar franchise, but I think it shows the opposite, because the fandom was strong during the 16 year gap between movies from 1983 to 1999, which shows that once successful, a fandom like that will stay intact for years, whether or not anything new gets added to it. Harry Potter fans can ignore the new stuff that's coming out. A lot of Star Wars fans disliked or didn't pay much attention to the new movies but remained part of the fandom.
Potter is dead. It was a franchise pegged to a particular generation. The original author consciously upped the aged of the books to match the age of the fans. The movies did the same. Potter fans have now grown up. They don't relate to the material as they did as kids. They find the early material childish, silly. Marketing potter to them again is very difficult.
Similar franchises (star wars/trek etc) did not attempt to 'grow up' alongside fans. So, decades later, they can still be relevant to new people. Star Wars VIII isn't attempting to be any more mature than Star Wars IV. But compare potter's first and latest movies. They are aiming at totally different age groups.
In literature, maybe (and mostly because of Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings) but space travel themes are still big in tv, film and video games.
Of course, in real life, space travel got boring. We couldn't afford the lunar colonies or spinning orbital platforms or missions to Mars we all thought we would see in a few years. It was only in Star Trek and Star Wars that space offered endless variety and new frontiers, but reality offered nothing but dust, and the billions of dollars we were spending flying people to go stand on the dust started to seem like a wasted effort.
There are still lots of good science fiction written today. Unfortunately in the past many of the writers did it because they in turn loved science fiction.
Many (most?) writers in the past barely made a living off their writing and many had to have a second source of income to continue. In other words they did write thinking it would make them rich.
Today with science fiction movies like Blade Runner, Star Wars and Star Trek, and TV shows like West World and Doctor Who and successful books on the Best Seller list writers think there is big money to be made.
This has us ending up with a lot bad writing from people hoping to break in without learning even the basics of science fiction much less learn real science itself.
This is the first time I've ever heard Kubrick's work referred to as "accessible." If anything, the standard knock on him is that his movies are too distant and clinical for the average moviegoer; people admire 2001: A Space Odyssey, but they love Star Wars.
My experience is less extreme than that, but I became familiar with the Star Wars saga by reading the story in a weekly magazine which ran a few pages every week; it had still photos from the movies.
This was West of the Iron Curtain (Finland) but we had no movie theatres nearby.
"Best" these days is all about sensory stimulation to the max. Over-stimulation till you feel like you need to go sit some where quiet to calm yourself down.
So if I know you are going to feel pain/love/respect/fear/doubt based on certain triggers and I am competing against others who are triggering you the same way what are my options?
Turn the dials up on all the triggers. Maximize stimulation as much as possible. This is happening from porn to sports to politics to news to games. To TV.
But when everyone is doing it you start seeing the patterns. There aren't that many. The dictionary of all possible patterns is more or less complete.
The cancellation is for the same reason, they can't really keep making more Star Wars or Avengers or Harry Potter movies for too much longer because they have exhausted all possible ways in which one guy can kill another guy. The audience has seen it all.
They just have to start again with a new different looking slate to produce the same stimulation.
Perhaps the loss is a feature and not a bug.
It's been remarked that present culture is over-dominated by the recapitulation of 'baby boomer era culture' (for lack of a better word) and that youth revolutionary culture has been largely subsumed by it. (Is there anything now among 15-30 year olds that is as 'shocking' as rock and roll used to be? I can't say I can find anything. To be sure, there is plenty about which the older generations complain in relation to the younger, but that isn't the same.)
The other thing is, we're never going to stop loss (or, that is, that would be what my money would be on). We'll always be subject to the framing problem. And we might be better off to try and manage our anxiety about the world changing. Because that, to me, seems the real fear: we accept that, for us to exist as we are, the world had to change [at many points] but now we want to arrest, we are the pinnacle of humanity, the only means by which we can remain thus is for either the future never to come (change to be averted indefinitely) or for (as William Gibson pointed out) we have to imagine our future descendants as evolved to the point where their spindly legs and effete physiques barely managed to hold together beneath the crushing power of their ginormous brains[1].
Perhaps this is also connected to why so many complaints are lodged against franchises such as Star Trek and Star Wars and Doctor Who: we're no longer twelve, and we're never going to be again, and we can't get it back no matter how hard we try.
But, also, perhaps it's an idea we're going to have to get used to in a big way, because, if the state of all that currently rapidly decaying early film stock is any indicator, and I would bet that it is, the state of copyright, which will become only more oppressive as the 'knowledge economy' does more of whatever it keeps doing, half of the twentieth century and perhaps everything between now and some truly dystopian societal collapse stands likely to suffocate beneath the oily sea of private ownership where (in some cases) the only person with the rights to a given cultural artifact is the third cousin twice removed of the someone aunt's brother's half-sister's niece by a second marriage, who is currently in a vegetative state, never to emerge; whereas, on the other hand, we have cultural artifacts merely have to owner that anyone can identify at all. So I would be tempted to say that I would wonder if, looking back, future archeologists, if there is any such thing, are going to have quite (generally while imbibing large quantities of alcohol) a time hypothesizing as to why there was such a cultural dark age around this point in history.
Or maybe it's that we have reached and gone past the 'Death of God' (in the actually sense that Nietzsche meant it) and in the interregnum between that which came before and that which came after, we are trying to patch over the destruction of tradition by simply replacing it, trying to fill-in the gap. But, like cracking open someone's chest to replace a meat heart with a plastic toy replica, it just won't work. And neither can it be replaced with a heart from a corpse.
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/16/william-gibson-interview-the-peripheral
>...so good that nobody needs to do such things anymore.
There is a lot of CGI that just looks fake. I would even say most, at least to me. I go back to Star Wars (ep 4). The physical models still look good. The original Blade Runner still looks good. I've also noticed that CGI movies look okay in the theater, but once they hit the high compression formats like Blu-ray or streaming, the CGI really becomes noticeable. The practical stuff still looks good in these formats. Go back and watch Hunt For Red October, and know that during the submarine underwater scenes are just physical models in rooms of smoke to simulate underwater. I really notice when they do 100% CGI characters like Spiderman and Hulk.
On my machine, the linked 'threader' has every video as a busted icon, which defeats the entire topic. Twitter handles them correctly. Thank you.
One thing I found interesting that the author didn't seem to notice is that the text of the Star Wars opening crawl in the behind-the-scenes photo[1] is radically different from the version that saw release.
The crawl that we've all seen is only 4 sentences long: two in the first paragraph, then two 'paragraphs' of one multi-clause sentence each.
The crawl pictured in the tweet[1] is a much wordier mess, and may well be the original crawl Lucas showed to friends and executives before Brian de Palma edited the text down for him. It also features something similar to Dan Perri's semi-rejected logotype at the top (cut off unless you click in or view the image directly), the angled 'Star Wars' block logo most prominently seen on the original posters[2] for the film.
[1]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dsw_RjNUcAAgCgE.jpg
[2]: https://www.google.com/search?q=star+wars+77+poster&tbm=isch
Nope! I have missed it.
The only one I've seen is the movie with "that Twin Peaks guy". Though it is a cult film and all that, I did not think it was very good to be honest. The movie was rather confusing and made more sense after having read the books.
A new film/films would be great for many reasons, including the complexity of the plot and the sheer timescale involved. For example, at the core Star Wars is a rather template-like father-son good vs. evil monomyth, with all kinds of small (interesting) details woven around it. It also has a top-tier presentation. I like Star Wars of course but the plot itself is pretty basic, perhaps that is why it appeals to so many people from small kids to grown-ups.
The Dune trilogy could offer so much more, I believe, if someone like Jackson of the LOTR fame would pick it up.
Apparently he never actually watched 2001: A Space Odyssey. I find it pretty incredible that somebody could have such an iconic role in such an iconic movie and never actually watch the finished result.
He's apparently not the only person to have done that either. John Williams, the composer of the film score for Star Wars, has never watched any of the Star Wars movies.
I blame Joseph Campbell for ruining modern cinema with it's simplistic boring plots (like Star Wars's) where yet another hero battles some evil tyrant to save the world, universe or forest.
There are so many more interesting, surprising stories to be told that leave the viewer with unresolved things to think about and captivating cul-de-sacs along the way. The 1970s films were full of odd, interesting plots and films where it was unclear who the protagonist was (let alone a hero). Then Lucas discovered Campbell and made two pretty-good, unbelievably successful kids' films and modern cinema was born.
Now every film (especially kids' films) are a take on a James Bond plot whether they are about loveable zoo Creatures and cheeky penguins, toys in a nursery-school or talking cars: a super-villain, a secret base, a mysterious super-weapon… yawn
Grown-up films are no better: reduced to a sorry stream of infantilised garbage about super-heros who each in turn is given super-powers only to see them quickly taken away to provide some tension before a giant battle in which cities (and budgets) are destroyed for no good reason (accept perhaps to deliver a few half-decent one-liners) before a last-minute triumphant victory in a working steel-mill (if budget allows) or some disused warehouse if not.
sigh
A great book on this subject is Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. His theory of the archetypal hero and the theory of the monomyth is a great influence on anlyses like this one (and also on some artistic works - including a small film series known as Star Wars). It's fantastic to see these natural language processing techniques applied to this topic.
> Why do you feel a strong desire for ownership?
Because I don't trust the owners of the content to not destroy[1] or permanently alter[2] it in some way.
Mass distribution is necessary for preservation.
[1] 1937 Fox vault fire. 1965 MGM vault fire. BBC TV programs 1967-1978.
[2] The OCN of all three original Star Wars films.
I agree, we should ignore the gender politics of this movie and it's detractors and that whole argument entirely. That has nothing to do with whether the movie is any good.
> But "a great action flick to go see if you are bored on a Saturday night" is what a Star Wars film is supposed to be.
Yes, but it's also supposed to be a continuing story. It's a serialized, epic, swashbuckling space opera. While TLJ is still a space opera, it doesn't follow the same tone and the story doesn't follow the same beats.
It's fine if you want to tell a story like TLJ about disillusionment and being disappointed with your heroes and discovering that the real world isn't about one ship destroying the Death Star. But taking that story and putting it in the Star Wars universe as a main entry in the series doesn't work. That's not what people want to see in a Star Wars movie. People go to a Star Wars movie to see the hero destroy the Death Star! You can't take any story with any characters and any plot elements and place it in the Star War Universe and magically have a Star Wars movie. It's the same reason you can't just have a movie with a Deloran and time travel and make a Back to the Future movie. It's the same reason the Ghostbusters remake was bad. It's the same reason the Mad Max remake was good. It's the same reason Infinity War was good. It's the same reason Batman v Superman was bad. You have to have some respect for the tone, themes, and plots of what came before. TLJ disrespects it's audience's desires by disrespecting the draw of the source material.
Given the “old world” nature of it, I have to think that it’s one of those things that was really amazing at the time, but just can’t compare to modern sweets, so you can’t really get a good perspective on it. Like if you had watched a movie like Guardians of the Galaxy before ever seeing Star Wars, you’d wonder what the big deal was about Star Wars.
Having been on the receiving end of angry Star Wars fandom (I wrote a play that was basically creative fanfic about Obi-Wan Kenobi, but really was a deep dive into the motivations of various characters)... yeah, don't let fans anywhere near how a show actually works.
Heck, I experienced this last night. I finished the last few episodes of the new season of Bojack Horseman and was actually yelling at the screen in confusion and mild anger at a very meta season. Thankfully, I wasn't involved in the writing process, so they were able to take it in interesting directions I would never have gone.
and obvious political propaganda!
Yes and no. Consider Dr Who. Loved that show when I was a kid and still love the classic episodes but it’s not made for me now, it’s made for the Twilight/Harry Potter crowd. “Supernatural boyfriend with magic wand”, not the character I remember. And if you’re going do that radical a change you might as well go all in.
Similarly Star Trek and Star Wars, I just don’t watch them now.
I’m good with it.
In comedy toilet humor is easy.
In Movies, it seems shock value is the equivalent. It’s much harder to tell a great story.
There are many popular titles that don’t include shocking levels of violence or sex. Just take a look at Star Wars or lord of the rings
Honestly, I think the worries about AI taking jobs are overblown. Will AI get better? Yes. Will some jobs be doable by AI? Yes. May that eventually end up being all jobs? Guess so.
But that doesn't mean people won't be able to find work or make money. I mean, you don't have to be the 'best' at something to get rich off of it, nor to even simply earn a living at it. I mean, think about it. Objectively the majority of products, services and businesses out there now are worse than at least one competitor. If people were always rational about what they were buying, said businesses/products/services would go broke.
But they're not rational. People buy things and use products because of many things, whether that's convenience, location, price, name recognition/branding, marketing, word of mouth type marketing, social proof, quality of service/employees/whatever, pure luck or heck, without even thinking at all.
So even if every market in existence gets AI involved in, it still won't necessarily mean old fashioned human run businesses can't compete and win customers.
There's also the additional effect of branding that people never really think about here too. People don't just watch 'a' TV show or film or what not, they watch Star Wars or Game of Thrones or what not. Same with music, games, books, art, internet media and basically anything celebrity related in general. Eventually, the greats sell on their name alone, and that's one barrier that even the best use of AI may not compete with. Just look at a popular book for example, in some cases the author's name is literally more than double the size of the title!
So that may also be another area where robots won't eventually come for jobs/take all the jobs. Perhaps we'll end up in a world where the 'Patreon' style model is the norm and the standards for success are how well you market your own brand rather than the exact quality of what you do...
I'll never forget when I realized people were paying for ringtones. Why the heck would you do that? I just downloaded some and stuck them on my phone.
Then I bought Star Wars and watched it at home. VHS for the win! Then the same frickin' movie came out on DVD. I decided to buy it. Why would I do that? Because I was sold on the feature combination of DVDs. Then BluRay. I bought again. Why? The movie had new features, and BluRay was more cool.
I had become those people I was laughing at with the ringtones, spending money for stuff that either should be free or was basically worthless. I love movies. I have a lot of movies in various formats. But re-mixes of the same stupid movie? I'm being taken for a ride.
Now they keep the same movie, the same plot, the same hardware -- but re-make it with currently-popular actors. Why would people pay for this....I asked myself as I sat in the movie theater a couple of months ago.
There's less and less "new people creating new things that enriches society" and more and more "You bought X, you'll really love X1!"
Anybody that doesn't know where headphoneless-phones is going hasn't been paying attention. Ten years from now, when they've finally locked down DRM audio from the seller to the actual device you listen to it on? They'll be charging you multiple times to listen to the same sound.
Plus they make money on the hardware. Double bonus points for getting you on a hardware upgrade gravy train also locked in by vendor.
> Star Wars spacecraft fly around as if they were aircraft in an atmosphere, which isn't surprising given that older war movies were an inspiration for its battle scenes.
Indeed, the following youtube [1] shows how much the original Star Wars borrowed from old WW2 movies, in particular, from "The Dam Busters" [2], 1955.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNdb03Hw18M
[2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046889/
Yeah movies would be reduced to commercials. Commercials are free after all, so that proves it is possible. So we would probably still have movies like Transformers and Star Wars, so I guess geeks would be happy.
Movies have always been bad. Always. Look at how many movies are made in Hollywood each year. Hundreds and hundreds. Maybe 10 each year are worth the time to watch. Maybe 1 will end up having enduring value. The rest just disappear.
Tropes get recycled, new genres come and go, are rediscovered, and then fade. Formula has always been important in cranking out the volume of productions. The odds are stacked against any one movie being a success, either critically or financially. Who would have thought that Spielberg would follow up Jurassic Park with such a stinker?
The studio system was no ideal world; actors were stuck in their contracts and had horrible bargaining power. Censorship was the norm, writers were not given much leeway. Today's movie industry is far healthier, with more outlets, more customers, and more opportunities.
The problem today isn't on the distribution side, but on the production side. Creating a movie is just so expensive. Same problem facing the video game industry. Think you can create a movie for $4M? That's the inflation adjusted budget for American Graffiti. Or Star Wars at $47M. Not a chance. The FX alone would probably cost that. Rogue One was over $200M...
> If Star Wars copyright had expired
Star Wars's copyright would have only expired if we were still under copyright law from before 1909. And even then, that would technically be only for the first movie. So the characters from that movie could be used, but not any characters in the later movies. You could have Han Solo, but not Lando. Obi-Wan, but not Yoda, etc.
And you'd likely also have to deal with trademark issues, which are separate from copyright.
And there is still plenty of Star Wars content out there and being made.
The OT had plenty of plot problems[0,1]:
[0]https://www.quora.com/What-are-all-of-the-plot-holes-in-the-original-Star-Wars-trilogy
[1]https://uproxx.com/movies/what-was-lukes-plan-star-wars-return-of-the-jedi/
Face it, none of the Star Wars movies are particularly well written.
You are still comparing sales to game engagement and longevity.
You also need to shrink the amount of D3 sales to compare it to D1/D2 sales because the game market has grown wildly since they released. Then adjust that because it was a sequel a decade in the making.
It's like comparing the star wars sequels to the original films. The nominal values are way bigger, but if you adjust them for inflation they might tell a different story.
It's common to hear people complaining about gentrification. So you would think the opposite would be a GOOD thing -- but it's not. Case in point: Westwood, the district of Los Angeles that is home to UCLA. It was THE happening place in the 1970's. On our first date my wife and I went to see Star Wars at the Avco on Wilshire. Between the rise of the multiplex theatres (Westwood once had the highest concentration of movie theaters in the world) and an unfortunate gang-related incident in which a thug mowed down pedestrians on the sidewalk, Westwood has fallen on hard times. Lots of business and restaurant addresses stand vacant. It's sad -- and to me, quite baffling, because Westwood is one of the most walkable parts of LA.
There is nothing wrong with a space cowboy western, and in fact that's one of the reason people love the original trilogy: plenty of original (for the time) action, good guys on one side and BIG BAD guys on the other, so it is easy to takes sides, add some cheap mysticism (the "force" stuff) and the redemption of the baddest of the bad guys.
Not the most original of the plots [1], but good enough and simple enough that most people can enjoy it. That's not the issue with the current state of Star Wars in my opinion. Also for most people Star Wars is the movies so the issue about what is canon and whats is not is moot [2]: for them it is canon if it appears in one of the trilogies.
I have three other different issues with the current trilogy (and in general Disney's approach to Star Wars).
The first is that the current trilogy is just more of the same. The Force Awakens to me looks more like a reboot of the original movie than a sequel. The Last Jedi is a bit better but only because it looks a reboot of the whole original trilogy: I think that a better name would have been "The Empire strikes the return of the last jedi", and that would even describe the most relevant parts of the movie perfectly. In a way the prequel trilogy is better: while it is not up to par with the original trilogy, I like the contrast between a world where Jedis are available by the dozen (for example see when the jedis come to save the main characters in the arena) versus a world where there are two "bad" force users (Darth Vader and the Emperor) and two "good" force users (Luke and, for a while, Ben Kenobi).
The second issue is more general, and it is related to the fact that regardless of the quality of the content, the more movies you make about a topic or a "universe" the less value the single movie has. Even worse, after a given threshold I won't even watch any movie about the genre because I fear that if I don't see all of them I will miss something. I feel that way about the gazillion of Marvel/DC Comics movies, I feel the same about Star Trek (I only know about the original serie, but I don't have time to see _all_ the episode that I missed) and I fear one day I will feel the same about Star Wars.
[1] Also it seems Star Wars got many idea from other movies. My favorite is the one about getting inspiration for R2D2 and C3PO from the main characters of Kurosawa's "the hidden fortress", though after seeing the movies I would say the resemblance is only in "the character of the characters"
[2] I have to admit that I played to some of the games, and I think that KOTOR has a story that is much better that Star Wars original story. THAT is something I would love to see a movie about.
> Are the movies underwhelming or was Star Wars in the past more amazing because you were younger?
People say this all the time, but the people who went crazy in 1977 for the original Star Wars weren't all kids. It bowled over lots of adults, too. It was a genuine pop culture phenomenon.
> It feels empty, and I couldn't care less for most of the cast if they make it or not.
Very astute. I'm someone who was in the same boat, sharing the same beliefs you hold for the OT and prequels. I haven't watched a single one of the new movies, I just don't care. The story isn't new if you (Disney) just swap some character stats (age, ethnicity, melanin levels) and just go "it's the same but everyone looks different! check out the explosions and the lightsabers! WUMMM WUMMM KRSHHH buy merchandise PEW PEW KPOW."
I know I just implied that I think it degraded because it became about the money, but at least give me good reason to spend my money. This is why I liked the old EU and side stories in general, and why game like Republic Commando and KOTOR were appealing: there were other things going on in the universe, and these things were given time to mature and breathe. There were cool things going on and I'm pretty sure I still have the Episode III capital ship/vehicle cross section book hanging around somewhere because god help me I think that the Acclamator and Venator are some cool ship designs.
I've found that this phenomenon isn't just limited to Star Wars, either.
He lucked out there. He retained merchandising because it was considered worthless. Star Wars set the pattern for this kind of film-plus-merchandising blockbuster.
Although there was no advance merch when Star Wars came out, this quickly changed when the toy manufacturing partners realized they had a real gravy train.
I'm sorry, no. I'm a fan of both, and I've seen every Star Trek series and film, and almost everything Star Wars, but Star Trek was never philosophically deep nor did it often take scientific plausibility seriously.
The scripts for TNG often simply said "tech" when "technology" was supposed to "happen" because the production crew didn't care about the spec-fic element as anything more than a means to drive melodrama[0] which couldn't offend sponsors or the morals of American viewers. There's a good reason the term "technobabble" originated with Star Trek, and why, despite the Federation's implied diversity and progressivism, there has only ever been one openly gay character depicted in its history. Star Trek is about as deep as a saucer of milk.
The Force and hyperspace are no less plausible than a warp drive running on dilithium crystals and subspace (arguably more, since there are actually mathematical models for hyperspace, but what even is subspace?) Both franchises have alien races and cultures which consist of a few generic traits, and Klingon bat'leths make about as much sense as lightsabers, which is to say, little beyond their relative cool factors. The only difference between the two franchises that Star Trek has somehow gained pretentions of being something more highbrow than it ever really was.
[0]https://whatever.scalzi.com/2009/10/13/teching-the-tech/
They're just not the same genre, despite superficial similarities. Star Trek is (often) sci-fi, Star Wars is more like space fantasy. You could pretty much take all the characters and plot from Star Wars and move it to a Lord of the Ring-like heroic fantasy setting and 99% would still work with only minor tweaking. It's all character driven drama. Even the "a long time ago in a galaxy far away" is telling, Lucas didn't try to predict the future of humankind, he's telling an old story that doesn't really concern us. Like Tolkien and Middle Earth.
Being born in the mid 80's I think I think I "missed" Star Wars, by the time I watched the original trilogy in the mid 90's it was still enjoyable but already dated and when the prequels released I was old enough to see the many obvious flaws of the movies through the thick CGI layers. I expect younger generations might have a different relation towards the Star Wars "brand", having it fed to them almost non-stop since birth.
That Emptiness has been apparent event since the 2nd film, and is simply continued by Disney. Disney is milking a dead cow, to the delight of the Star Wars fans who have been sucked into this drivel for nearly 40 years. It's a fucking space cowboy western with Buck Rogers quality sets, acting, and direction. Beyond the metaphors lost from the original film, Star Wars has been decades of childish marketing and quality story line missed opportunity disappointments.
> "can you consume this work in lieu of the original?"
Grab some 8yo, throw them in front of the RLM reviews, and tell them it's Star Wars... are they gonna watch it and be equally satisfied?
Extensive reviews are just like in-extensive reviews... Knowing all the characters is a staple of movie reviews in all forms, as are plot synopses. Story import of character and scene does not factor in to whether it is review-able in any medium. These issues are are applicable to most written movie reviews, book reviews, and song reviews too. They are exempt from Copyright for the same reasons. Why would we want a culture where superficial critique is acceptable, but in-depth critique is rejected?
You hit the nail on the head: "it is not the same experience". If it starts providing some of the same experience, via excessive clips or music, then they infringe. Too much of a song, clips with no purpose, etc. RLM is among the better cases for meaningful reviews.
That is not even remotely close to what RedLetterMedia did...
RLM made a critique and review -- distinctly mentioned in fair use laws -- using star wars clips. Absolutely legal, 100%, explicitly protected. Movie reviews get to show bits of movies, book reviews get to mention characters, etc etc within strict guidelines (hence the re-release of the review).
What the lawyers are talking about in this case is showing almost all of Star Wars with some interviews in front of it, calling it a "documentary", and then having full usage to complete songs. Very different. They are talking about other publishers sneakily re-releasing Star Wars for profit, not reviews.
Never cared much for the original Star Wars, and certainly don't care for the new ones. Don't care for the vast majority of movies, or even traditional media. I don't consume sports, so the only ESPN I view is Five-Thirty-Eight on election cycles. Meanwhile I haven't watched TV, or ABC in 8 years. Apparently I'm (accidentally) boycotting a lot of media.
I actually didn't realize it was so hard to avoid most of those things. They're full of the same old same old, and produce nearly no satisfaction for me. It's like eating fast food, very tasty, but of no quality. Though I say that, and yet regularly consume fast food. Goes to show my opinion of most "mainstream" media I guess
I've seen very few of them since Iron Man 2. I don't particularly care for them. I have paid out of pocket for a single Star Wars film. I don't think I purchase much media they are connected to, more out of apathy than purposeful boycott, and I think it would certainly be possible to boycott them, just disappointing to some friends who enjoy their content. I took issue with "nearly impossible to boycott"
I read the book editions of the first 3 Star Wars Movie (the Luke ones) and did not see the movies for years. This was in the nineties.
"The Walt Disney Company to Acquire Majority Ownership of BAMTech" [1].
"The company's major clients include the NHL, HBO (for its HBO Now service), the PGA Tour, Riot Games, WatchESPN, PlayStation Vue, WWE Network and TheBlaze." [2]
"Marvel, Star Wars films to ditch Netflix for Disney service" [3]
I'd say they have both the content, technical expertise, and tenacity and perseverance to pull it off.
[1] https://www.thewaltdisneycompany.com/walt-disney-company-acquire-majority-ownership-bamtech/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAMTech [3] https://www.cnet.com/news/marvel-and-star-wars-films-will-ditch-netflix-for-disney/
The only stuff I watch in the theater are Star Wars movies, and occasionally MCU stuff. I have a large screen projection system at home that rivals most theaters. It's paid for itself in both $$ saved, and sanity from not killing the inconsiderate filmviewers.
You need to cross reference things like Hollywood accounting[1]. Profit can be manipulated. The original Star Wars movies have never made a profit. Let that sink in. Corporations and the rich are quite good at cooking the books for a variety of purpose in order to subvert the will of the people. So "profit" is not a good measure. They're too good at lying about it in the right way.
* [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
I tried watching a Star Wars movie the other day. The play time on TV was 7-10:30pm, 3.5 hours. The actual play time of the movie is 2.25 hours. And they cram most of the commercials towards the end. They do it so much so that I got sick of them cutting to commercial every 5 minutes and pulled out the blu ray and finished watching it. There was still 40 minutes left on the TV after I'd finished watching the blu ray.
Here I am, willing to pay for cable and watch it, and they ruin it by trying to milk every last cent out of it.
This sounds like the plot of the original Star Wars movies to me?
Counter argument: Would a movie like Star Wars lose it’s cultural value if anyone could make a star wars movie — creating so many rip-offs that the soul of the original was lost? I think Disney has been a good custodian of the franchise and might not have invested so much into it if they didn’t have that exclusivity.
On the one hand, I hate the fact that Disney owns so many franchises.
On the other hand, I trust them to make better Star Wars content than Lucas, and I enjoy the Marvel movies.
They may be evil incarnate but they do know how to tell (and sell) a good story.
They did the same to Firefly and Farscape, cancled them too soon before they could develop the characters more and close up loose ends.
I like The Expanse and I will miss it.
I've been meaning to write my own scifi books to be turned into movies.
The Expanse was no Star Trek or Star Wars but it had a realistic feel to it.
I've seen 3 movies in theaters in the past year - Star Wars, Greatest Showman, and Avengers.
My wife, a Moviepass subscriber, has been to the movies some 60 times since December. She typically goes 30-40 times a year, it's one of her and her friends' favorite hobbies. You might go to coffee or the bar, I might go to the park or the gym, she and her friends love going to the movies. It's just a thing to do for a couple hours on a weeknight.
There was no 'abuse' in the sense of sharing her pass among friends, or buying tickets and not going to the movie. She does like a frozen coke sith her movie, and she buys the $35 free refill popcorn bucket 3 times a year, so there was quite a bit of profit for the theater, but she was not profitable to Moviepass and they might feel that normal use for her was abuse.
She would not be profitable unless (a) Moviepass can negotiate <50-cent tickets with the theater with kickbacks for concessions, or (b) she convinced enough people close to her (like me) to buy a moviepass and buy fewer tickets than the subscription costs.
The problem is, it's super easy to do the math on whether or not you would have spent more on tickets than moviepass.
I do know people who go to see the latest movies (particularly Marvel ones, Star Wars, etc.) more than once. I imagine MoviePass would only encourage that behavior. (but I agree that abuse probably has something to do with it as well)
ET was a bankable director's hobby project.
The two Star Wars movies were still sequels, even if the franchise was new in the 70s. Star Wars wore many of its pulp Hollywood adventure series and World War 2 movie influences on its sleeve.
The three Indiana Jones were two bankable directors' hobby project. In turn, they were heavily based on early Hollywood adventure serials and pulp adventure novels.
Ghostbusters was bankable comedians' hobby project.
Beverly Hills Cop was a "cheap" film in a bankable genre (cop film), that was easy to franchise if successful (which it was, and did).
I won't directly harp on BTTF that much, but some combination of all the above applies to it, too.
5 of those 9 all directly involved Spielberg, in one capacity or another, which is another way for Hollywood to avoid risk by betting on the non-riskiest "risk taker" they can find. (Given Lucas' relationship with Spielberg, you can argue that Star Wars also benefited indirectly from Spielberg's "golden touch" in the 80s, bringing the count to 7 of 9.)
But looking at the Top 10 isn't particularly fair in any decade. For every ET and Ghostbusters there were six of the seven Police Academy movies and seven James Bond films, for two easy 80s examples.
In the 1980s, at least, nine of the top ten films were original. Four of those were sequels, but all in recently created franchises. Only one of the top ten was adapted from other media.
Those original films were: ET, two Star Wars movies, three Indiana Jones movies, Ghostbusters, Beverly Hills Cop, and Back to the Future.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s_in_film
As the article mentions, the issue isn't that people would watch the same movie multiple times, it's that people would buy tickets and resell them:
"we saw some people turning MoviePass into a cottage industry, standing in front of a theater selling their tickets to Star Wars, or whatever,"
This actually sounds like a pretty reasonable way of cutting down on abuse to me.
I don't differentiate long-form shows (like House of Cards or Game of Thrones) from movies because I think they hold the same place in culture. They pull in A-list actors, directors and writers. I don't think they are different markets because of that. For example, most movie studios would not release a fantasy movie (I'm including Star Wars in that) the same weekend the final episode of Game of Thrones airs. People only have so much time and head-space for the things they watch.
agree with you on alot of this, but:
> you won't find any Netflix films among them. But the cultural significance of films like La La Land, Star Wars, even the the Fast and the Furious franchise will outlive us all.
You also won't find the 'popular excitement' that is late-night tv guest appearances, supermarket checkout magazines, radio spots, entertainment news, social media 'influencers', and so on, reminding us of the 'significance' of the netflix produced items either..
when hollywood itself is determining what is culturally significant, and neflix is basically a 'rogue studio', this is hardly surprising..
also much less working class/rural/elderly people aren't plugged in to netflix, so you don't have the same level of 'total' market penetration either..
My experience is definitely different from normal because I live in Tinseltown a few blocks from one of the theaters where they hold movie premieres and from an Alamo Drafthouse, but I could never see Netflix replacing Hollywood.
The business models are fundamentally different. All Netflix cares about is eyeballs and giving customers the barest reason to continue subscribing. This means that they focus on quantity over quality, as evidenced by their last 3 years of films: each worse than the one released the week before it, with extremely rare exceptions like Beasts of No Nation and Mudbound. (It's curious that their films are so horrifically bad when their TV series are generally watchable, though Lost In Space and the recent seasons of OitNB and HoC suggest that the malaise affecting their film department has spread to the show department.)
Hollywood, for all the moaning about sequilitis and mass-market crap, at least makes crap that's good enough to draw people out of their homes, drive a few miles, and plop down a few dozen dollars for seats and maybe food. There's a strong incentive to maintain at least a minimum baseline of quality and a stronger incentive to make a commercially viable movie.
Think about the films people will remember from the last decade: you won't find any Netflix films among them. But the cultural significance of films like La La Land, Star Wars, even the the Fast and the Furious franchise will outlive us all.
I stopped going to the theater for a long time until the local theaters put in large recliners, reserved seating, and cheap-ass Tuesdays. All seats for all showings on Tuesdays are $5-7 (depending on the theater). So we have started going back to the theaters on Tuesdays for spectacle movies like Star Wars and Marvel.
> Because it's unthinkable that movies with male main characters could actually just be better than movies with female main characters
Or, more realistically, it's not unthinkable that movies with a male lead could be better reviewed than movies with female main characters, especially when you open the field up to non-professional reviewers. We've see how ape-shit people went at movies like the recent Ghostbusters remake or even the new Star Wars series just because they put women in the kinds of roles that had traditionally been played by men.
It's an interesting question of when machine learning models that reflect actual human biases are correct and when we should try to adjust them for that human bias. In the case of movie reviews, you could make the case that you'd want the models to reflect the biases of the reviewers. Just because a reviewer is being sexist doesn't mean it's wrong for the machine learning model to correctly classify the reviewer's sentiments.
For the longest time I believed that Kubrick knew exactly what he wanted before he began shooting. The finished film existed in his mind, and set pieces and actors simply had to materialize and adhere to that vision. I don't buy into that idea anymore.
An example would be that he's known for making actors do a hundred takes. Apparently he made Tom Cruise walk through a door for a hundred different takes! One interpretation of that would be that Cruise couldn't deliver what Kubrick had in his vision. The other would be that Kubrick was trying to tire Cruise out, so that Cruise be too tired to keep "acting", and bring out something neither of them expected, something "real" and "raw" and not rehearsed.
For a while, I was also obsessed with filmmakers who appeared to not adhere to a strict vision, and "discovered" their film, rather than try to construct the film to fit their rigid vision. The likes of Wong Kar Wai or Godard or Wim Wenders, who would write snippets of dialogue the same day they would shoot and improvise with actors. In particular, Wong Kar Wai was known for shooting for years on end, and discarding 95% of the film he shot. He couldn't have envisioned the final product at the beginning.
I find common in all of their approaches to include exploration. Filmmaking is expensive. It's not cheap like sketching with pen on paper, which is why I think most filmmakers "sketch" with the script, and less so while shooting on set, where every minute they are burning cash.
When I was a young teen, I'd look at the art of movies like Star Wars and I couldn't ever achieve anything like that on my own. What I didn't realize was that that art required iteration. Of course it's impossible to come up with a grand idea on the first try on a large canvas! Those concept artists didn't start by creating the final piece, but they drew hundreds of little thumbnail-sized sketches, playing with elements, this curve they like, or that feature.
I think of how much pre-visualization work went into the likes of Star Wars Episode 1, where you CAN'T stop the train once it's been moving, with hundreds of visual effects workers working on something that Lucas has decided on much earlier. In this, I think that the means of production of how people work have outsized effects on the final artistic product.
'Film' is used at 24 frames every second in the theater, 112 feet every minute. 99% of movies are recorded at that speed. 2001 & Star-Wars space shots were filmed one frame per second, Star-Wars assembled all the things in the scene later. 2001 did not have computer motor control, so Kubrick did everything N times for each thing in the final scene, within the camera. Planet; run by 10 times with 10 fresh rolls of film, then add stars with 9 of the SAME rolls, then foreground object (surface of Moon or hotel) 8 times, then spaceship 7 times, until all are recorded on the remaining single roll of film. No-One can look at the result until the film is developed (souped) so the only way to test for success is to develop one roll with each new added thing. Any thing wrong and you do it 10 times all again......at one inch of film per second. Thus is why the Star-Wars teaser on Christmas of 1976 had No space shots; the droids jumping ship was mica dust and were dropped from a forklift, the spinning Empire destroyer was a cut-out Polaroid taped to a plastic star field contraption.
>> It's fine in the context of the game, because the player is doing something, but when you put that into a non-interactive medium, the flaws become obvious.
>All forms of art are inspired by other forms of art, this is no basis to write them off. Would you dismiss Michelangelo's work because he was influenced by Giovanni? Or Giovanni because he worked under Donatello? Should we just write off all fantasy novels post Tolkien? What about D&D? Or Warhammer? The Matrix was obviously inspired by the cyberpunk universes created by authors like William Gibson, do we just dismiss it?
(I think it was) David Wong once pointed out about say the trench run in Star Wars: you fly down... and crash. You fly down and shoot the tie fighters and get shot down... You fly down shoot the ties, avoid the turrets and die... fly down and die... fly down shoot the fighters avoid the turrets and Vader kills you... fly down and die... fly down and get hit by the turrets...
Games allow you to fail, a lot, repeatedly and thus the story can't have the same tension or structure as a movie. Books, paintings (The Girl With The Pearl Earring) don't alow you to fail; they can have the same structure as a film. Interactive media IN WHICH YOU CAN FAIL however requires it's own thing.
I don't think you understand how much power Disney has. They own all popular superhero movies. Nearly all well-known children's movies are owned by them. Star Wars now is their IP. Netflix has what? House of Cards (which was discontinued)? 30 other TV shows that range from okay to "people talk about it once or twice to their friends"? 5 movies that are produced slightly higher than a TV show with mostly mediocre ratings?
Families with young children will subscribe to Disney's service almost guaranteed, and since a few years ago Disney has enough content for the parents, too. Why pay for two or three streaming services? Maybe Disney is enough. Disney's portfolio will also not shrink like Netflix' does often due to expiring licensing contracts but steadily extend over time.
Netflix might grow like crazy currently but they are massively in debt due to their movie making and their startup-like growth will eventually stop. As a Netflix subscriber I wish them the very best but I really, really hope they are aware of Disney and will be able to keep up.
Apparently, John Williams has never seen "Star Wars", and doesn't think much of his work for the movies: https://news.avclub.com/john-williams-says-his-star-wars-scores-are-not-very-m-1798255699
This reminds me of all I could think about watching the new star wars films. Why don’t all the storm troopers get to have the shiny mirrored suits. Those pesky rebels and their lasers blasters would just bounce off. check mate empire.
That is quite an interesting premise for a book. Probably in the same spirit as the subreddit /r/EmpireDidNothingWrong (or how they call it) which claims Star Wars is also a series of movies written by the victors (with a heavy dosage of memes)
> A daily podcast that lasts an hour? It's remarkable that he can keep up that pace. Could he make just as much money from having fewer podcasts? would the scarcity make the podcast more valuable to advertisers?
As a listener, you're in a good position to judge - do you think that the content suffers from being so frequently produced? So they're making $2k per episode on ads - would they make $15k if they made one podcast a week? On that time scale, is there a better monetisation model?
Scarcity really valuable to me as a listener - I don't have time to listen to an hour a day of a single show. I have an audible subscription (ca 10-30 hours per book, unabridged), shelves of real books, Netflix, Spotify, a list of TV shows and movies, a girlfriend, all vying for ear-time. Some people solve this by speeding up podcasts, but I like listening to real voices. Remvoving silences can work well though.
Consider podcasts like http://moviesbyminutes.com/ - they look fun, but who has time to listen to potentially 100 hours of content about one film? That's more than all of LOST. Would you rather watch every movie on the IMDB Top 250 or listen to people going through every Star Wars movie minute by minute? I once listened to the complete Wheel of Time - it's over 2 weeks unabridged. Took about 4 months listening to nothing else - commuting, exercise, walking to the shops, flights, trains etc.
SED at least offers listeners the chance to skip episodes they don't care about, but podcasts really have to be impressive for me to listen to them.
Some examples I've noticed personally:
* Clips of Bill Burr on Conan O'Brien > Men's Rights / anti-feminism videos
* Animal videos > Creepy channel where someone makes various mousetraps and sees how many kills they get a night
* Videogame longform critiques > Pro-Gamergate / Men's rights
* Movie analysis video essays > Video essays on how SJW's are ruining Star Wars / Marvel
* General psychology / self-help > Clip from a ho-hum Jordan Peterson psychology lecture > "Oh, you watched one thing featuring Jordan Peterson, you must agree with his more extreme views. Have some videos about that."
I listen to many things. I would liken popular music to your 30 minute sitcom. Whereas a concerto or a symphony i would liken to the entire Star Wars movie series or similar. It can take a composer 10 minutes to set up a “scene” and pop songs are lucky to be 4 minutes long and sometimes as short as 2.
In both cases “Arnie” was quickly blown off the endoskeleton revealing the robot underneath.
“Peter Cushing” had a substantial role in a recent Star Wars film. I’m still not sure how I feel about it.
> If we can just destroy entire enemy fleets by jumping to lightspeed with one ship, why are not all battles fought that way.
For the same reason naval battles in the real world weren't always fought by ramming ships into other ships. Ships are expensive, hyperdrives are expensive, and more valuable as ships than as ballistic mass. It would be a waste of resources for it to become a common tactic.
It was a lucky gamble that paid off.
>Maybe it's just that the original trilogy slipped in to me before I got old enough to where I think about such things
The OT is just as ridiculous. The trench run on the Death Star makes no sense outside of the context of the World War 2 film it was lifted from, no one in their right mind would design AT-ATs with such a high and vulnerable center of gravity, stormtrooper armor clearly does nothing against teddy bears and small rocks, spaceships bank and make noises in space, etc. Even lightsabers are just "cool laser swords" and metaphors for "space samurai" but don't make a lot of sense as weapons in a universe with telekinesis and blasters. Actual samurai weren't stupid enough to use their katanas if they had spears, bows and eventually guns available, yet I don't recall ever seeing a Jedi sniper, or the lightsaber version of a naginata.
Sound military tactics and plausible design were never really a thing in Star Wars.
They did coordinate. It does not make any sense that they wouldn’t after the ending of Empire.
Lando was not going to rescue Han. He was there just in case they needed backup.
Leia was going in to unfreeze Han. When they needed to get away quickly, they couldn’t carry him frozen, and he needed time to come to after being unfrozen. My guess is that they planned to hide out until Luke came in, or Leia planned to go “well I don’t know who unfroze him. Probably Chewy, but definitely not me, I am just a bounty hunter.” Getting caught was not a part of the plan.
The droids came in to sneak in the lightsaber. Luke knew they weren’t enough to pay for Han. Jabba would have never accepted that.
The plan for Luke was to mind trick Jabba. If that didn’t work, it was to grab his lightsaber and fuck shit up. He got caught because Leia got caught. If Leia was still set up as an undercover bounty hunter, and R2D2 was close by, he could have just started slicing and dicing. Instead he had to fight the Rancor.
In the end, it was sheer luck that Jabba was doing the typical villain thing instead of just shooting them on the spot. To be fair, he clearly had a weakness for being theatrical. That’s why he kept Han frozen.
But. Star Wars is full of ret conning by fans and by Lucas. None of this crap was thought through before filming. Well not a lot at least. I believe the basic plot was, but details were not. Like I don’t think that Lando’s character existed before ANH was filmed. Which does drive me kinda nuts because people hail SW as such a complete universe. In reality, Lucas did a lot of just random stuff in the first three movies and then it had to become canon, sometimes through really crazy explanations. See the gaffe with parsecs being a unit of distance and how what makes the Falcon so fast is it’s navigational computer (a detail that was never mentioned in any movies for any ship, including the Falcon), and not because they screwed up how measurements of space and time work to sound cool.
Obviously, everyone is entitled to enjoy what they want, but this movie was difficult for me, even by Star Wars standards. If we can just destroy entire enemy fleets by jumping to lightspeed with one ship, why are not all battles fought that way. Also, why couldn't the captain leave and have the computer pilot the ship?
Maybe it's just that the original trilogy slipped in to me before I got old enough to where I think about such things. Maybe it is a double standard. But I don't feel like it is. And that's all I have to go on.
But, I don't begrudge you enjoying the movie! Wish I felt the same.
Star Wars was just meant to be a kids’ movie and not a sacred document
I saw The Last Jedi, had a great time, and came home to find Star Wars fans apoplectic about it, picking apart all kinds of things ("how does rey know how to swim?", "how does leia survive space?", etc). The original trilogy would never survive similar scrutiny.
I went to see a kids movie about space wizards, and that's what I got. It was fun.
>But seriously, little inconsistencies like these make me think Star Wars was just meant to be a kids’ movie and not a sacred document to be handed down
i'll give you a hint: almost every piece of modern fiction is like this. look to the old masters for very very thoroughly fleshed out stories (there are hundreds of characters in war and peace and they all have full lives consistent with each other - no surprise it took tolstoy a decade to write it)
I agree with this. Disney is the real threat imo. Their IP seems really sticky and unbeatable. Netflix is basically in a race to establish beloved IP before Disney gets into the fray because the basic stories all these films/shows tell are not really all that different, but people way pay through the nose to get Star Wars / Toy Story etc.
^ this is just as bad. At least a lot of the youtube videos I watch are often sponsored by e.g. squarespace which is neutral enough. But those are unblockable ads, basically.
...just like a lot of cartoons were back when we were growing up, Transformers and He-Man and even Star Wars were all advertisements for toys (although in Star Wars' case the toys came after the movie. Still made them several times what the movies made them though).
No such thing as free content.
Keanu Reeves in the former, Willem Dafoe in the latter. I'll give both a whirl, thank you.
From what I can tell nobody brought up David Cronenberg either. I liked his works [1] when I was younger (not sure if I still would now). I especially liked eXistenZ, but also Videodrome, The Fly, and Scanners.
I just started binge watching The Man In The High Castle and it exactly underlines my statement in my previous post: great storyline (IMO), but not depending much on CGI. I think if the story lacks, all you got going for it is CGI (or not if there is none). CGI may impress you when you're still young, but as you grow older you see through the façade. Especially when its overdone. Because older movies lack it, and therefore are rather limited (take for example old Star Wars which heavily used costumes, models, and camera tricks). It might feel a bit dated, if not just from the hair models. Yet sometimes the nostalgia hits the nail (such as in Black Mirror's San Junipero episode). Not exactly sure why. While I'm thoroughly enjoying The Man In The High Castle series my partner hates anything related to WWII so thats yet another series we cannot watch together.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Cronenberg#As_director
Sure. <Intrepidly goes off-topic> .. Into The Wild was just the guy being a spoiled ignorant delusional dick, I thought, really not impressive. Jungle was far better. You almost persuaded me the guy in 127 Hours ate his arm off the first time I read that haha. (Um he didn't, did he?!) Am writing this in case you didn't see Dersu Uzala (the Kurosawa version), one of my very favourite movies. The world before cities was a different world, like you say. <Totally off topic> Incidentally, it's my theory that Yoda is taken from Dersu. (As Star Wars is a remake of Hidden Fortress)
>How did sci-fi get so disconnected from the actual future?
The original Star Wars was made in 1977, and based heavily on World War 2 combat films (much of the space combat and the trench run on the Death Star was lifted - sometimes shot for shot - from a film called "The Dam Busters.") For reasons of continuity and tone, that mechanical aesthetic can't ever change much throughout the franchise, or else it wouldn't "look" like Star Wars.
But the point is that it's exciting, it's visceral, the archetypes of the fighter pilot and joystick and of buttons that do important things make sense to the audience, and as a result those scenes can convey emotion though the use of familiar visual language.
Sci-fi was never "connected" to the future, and it was never (or at least, never explicitly) about attempting to accurately describe or predict the future. Yes, you could have replaced the ships and pilots in Star Wars with remote or AI controlled drones, not colored in the blasters, etc, and it might be more realistic, but no one would enjoy watching it.
People do enjoy dogfights (and spaceships that bank when they turn) and space wizards with laser swords doing flippy shit and punching each other with telekinesis, though.
Star Wars takes place in the distant past, not in the future.
Also, 2001: A Space Odyssey is a great movie about a great example why you do not pilot your ships with computers all the time.
Also, you do not know what the future holds. You are living in the present, not the future, where we very well may have pilots piloting ships.
Star Wars is not science fiction and it does not take place in the future. We are not living in the future either.
Star Wars is not sci-fi, it's a cross between space fantasy and space opera. The list of better sci-fi movies is long.
It's of course technically possible but it's also much more difficult. You basically have to photoshop a long series of frames and make sure that it looks natural and consistent in sequence. You have to take into account changes in lighting, focus, motion blur, things passing in front and behind the object etc...
In your example they modified a very clean source video, image is perfectly stable, very little motion and they edited a very small portion of it for a very short duration. TFA is about replacing one person by an other while they're talking and moving on a potentially lengthy video clip. Doing this convincingly by hand would be hard work.
I think a good example of the difficulty is with the infamous "moustache removal" for reshoots of Superman in the Justice League. It cost a fortune and the results were not exactly seamless. Also the re-created Princess Leia in that Star Wars movie, not bad but definitely still in the uncanny valley.
The new Star Wars movies have cemented that this is acceptable.
Darth Vader was not the one who wanted to blow up a planet. In fact, he dismissed the idea of such a weapon as futile and silly. The followup movies in the original trilogy added layers to the question of good and evil, and the most recent film in the series explicitly questioned the entire premise. So maybe opening with Star Wars is not the best example.
I also tried to let go, but couldn't ;)
Being occupied with word shapes and word plays is fine! You and several other replies to that post focused on the word-play part of it, as if that was what I was reacting to, and I understand that, since I didn't really give you a lot more to work with. What I tried to bring attention to, however, was the way in which sentences like that break immersion. To me, a sentence like this takes me away from the fantasy world that I have so far been presented, and into some kind of (sorry I keep using this example, but it's really how I feel about it) Marvel movie where our heroes are engaged in friendly banter, or to some tumblr fanfic. That could of course be a problem with what I am expecting going into his universe, but I believe it is more of a problem of Sanderson not taking the time to properly refine his ideas before committing them to paper. Which, again, as many have pointed out, is due to the prolificness of his writing. That doesn't excuse it for me, though.
I am not looking for soaring prose - Mark Twain is great partly because of his ability to maintain the illusion of a rustic backwater society and the people within it. Star Wars is similar: When they stay within the expectations set up by their own universe, it's great! Trashcan robots are part of this! But as we have seen, whenever the dialogue takes you out of the universe and reminds you this is an illusion, fans do react ("I don't like sand...").
I also recognize that this has evolved way beyond where it started and this interaction on HN has influenced my thoughts about this. So I won't pretend what I'm saying now is 'what I had in mind from the beginning'.
If you're cringing at it, I think you must be getting more from it than I am. The only thing I get out of it is the surface level pun, so I feel the same way as with pretty much all of his other puns: slightly baffled as to why they're included. With this one (though not most others), it feels like there might be a second level that English/Literature majors might get around etymology, but if so, I miss it entirely.
Sanderson also clearly gets many orders of magnitude more out of "word shape" than I do, so he might just really like puns. I've also never translated that quote to any of the various forms of sigals Sanderson defines in the series; if you do so, it might well be breathtakingly beautiful.
> But just like the Marvel movies probably won't be regarded as the masterpieces of our times, despite their popularity, Sanderson's books are not, to me, worthy of such praise either.
Forty years later Star Wars hasn't exactly fallen out of favor. Ignore the stilted dialog...it has a "robot" which is really obviously just a trashcan. Mark Twain's books contain a lot of colloquial dialog which is very much not "soaring prose", and they remain popular a century later. Which is not to say that I think Sanderson will be a hot read in eighty years, but I doubt Jordan or Martin will either. While the average library system presumably has a copy of The Dispossessed at one of its branches, the average branch has zero copies IME.
All of which is totally tangential, I just couldn't let it go (and I tried).
When I was s little kid in 1977 or thereabouts I wrote a letter to 20th century fox and asked if they could please send me a Star Wars poster and they mailed back this poster like in this page http://www.my-sf.com/2015/08/21/star-wars-film-review/ it was very exciting.
I think Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell) said it best in season 2 of Ash Vs. the Evil Dead, something along the lines of, "critics have shitty taste."
I blame mostly the mindset that a job like that can create. A critic/reviewer is often pressured to agree with pop culture in order to have their opinions validated. Movies and music are a good example of this (cough Star Wars cough). Actually look at most critics vs audience aggregations on Rotten Tomatoes or the fact that very few outfits even write music reviews anymore beyond Pitchfork.
There are very few outliers in this case and are often viewed as malicious, for example Jim Sterling.
I personally never read reviews before I ingest some entertainment I have interest in. At most I read the closing paragraph of a review which is likely to contain no spoilers and sums up the critics opinion. Scores are irrelevant to me as well, I have my own scale.
> The new Star Wars is at 91% on rotten tomatoes. That alone should raise some questions. The public did for a brief time have an unbiased avenue for assessing the entertainment being offered to us, I think that window is closing though.
And 49% as reviewed by the public. That seems relatively unbiased.
As a critic, are you REALLY going to slag a Star Wars film? It's going to be a MASSIVE blockbuster no matter how bad you slag it, and you'll just look stupid. And this is before you start talking about the amount of money that was being thrown around to promote it.
I think there may be a sort of uncanny valley effect for how much we like art.
For example, I am particularly picky about sc-fi. I love hard sci-fi like Arthur C Clarke. I can also enjoy really silly sci-fantasy stuff like star-wars. But if something is sorta half way, the inconsistencies and inaccuracies really annoy me and I hate it. eg that film 'Gravity' being a mix of realistic and unrealistic.
In the case of this thing..
A lot of the software dev type people on HN presumably love elegant tech, and probably dont have strong opinions on the latest high-art. But when the art starts to approach tech it hits this valley and we start to actively hate it.
Just an idea.
Its interesting to see people pick this movie apart, as if the originals had perfect acting, no flaws, and were the epitome of originality (were you expecting your life to change after watching this?)
That's not what I'm seeing at all. What I'm seeing is:
The originals, for all their flaws, established and maintained an expansive universe with internally consistent rules and characters. The plots made sense and plot holes rarely undermined the important story or thematic elements. The characters had consistent flaws and experienced growth and real character arcs. The new movies' plots' are barely coherent, shatter suspension of disbelief by constantly violating the rules and conventions of the setting, have characters that range from likeable but boring to annoying and unlikable, and include way too many awkward humor attempts with off-beat non-sequitors.
Luke Skywalker is an established character. He was a whiny, impulsive, stargazing youth who ventured into the unknown world beyond for adventure, experiencing struggle, hardship, and loss; finally overcoming those inner demons to rescue his friends (who had suffered because of him) and stand up to the Emperor and redeem his father. This is not to say that you can't turn him into a despondent, disillusioned recluse who casually considers cold-blooded murder, but you need to get him there somehow with a convincing narrative. What I'm seeing consistently is people do not buy the provided explanations. (Although one should also ask if this change really adds anything positive to the story)
The new movies, partiularly TFA and TLJ, completely unravel the established rules and established characters. And it's not that these rules are incredibly restrictive, there's volumes and volumes of Expanded Universe content exploring a huge range of themes and narratives and virtually all of them make a reasonable effort to respect and adhere to the established rules and characters in the Universe. (My favorite is the Thrawn Trilogy from Timothy Zahn, while others like Knights of the Old Republic video game...). Disney easily could have told broadly appealing Star Wars stories without violating all these rules and irritating old-school fans for no reason.
Could it be possibly that people are still holding onto the idea fed to those of us born in the 80's and onward that every one of us is "special", that our dreams will come true if we just believe in ourselves and never give up?
Well, the Rey character seems like the perfect icon for entitled Millenials. She's special just because she's her. She's a nobody but can do everything better than anyone with no effort so long as she has the self-esteem to act. Where Luke had to struggle and learn and grow Rey just mostly coasts.
Also note that young Anakin's narrative was essentially "the fall of a prodigy," so it made sense for him to be exceptional in many ways from the beginning. All the established Jedi characters observed him to be something special and unusual (midi-chlorians were stupid at the detail level, but at least it's purpose in the plot consistent with the story goals). Lucas even added a prophecy narrative to explain Anakin's exceptional powers. And even then Anakin still has to train.
Plenty of content producers make money. Sure it’s the companies that employ the artists that make the most money, but that’s a general feature of our economy, not anything unique to copyright. I think Netflix is a huge vindication of copyright. It started out as a middleman simple peddling other people’s content. But copyright forced them to start producing their own content, and they’ve turned television on its head as a result. It’s probably s bigger change in the TV market than cable studios.
The thing about copyright is that it’s existenxe isn’t preventing the alternative models you’re talking about. Unlike any other form of property, copyright covers an individual’s own creations. Owning land is staking claim to something that existed for eons before you were born and will exist for eons after you’re dead. But copyright is over something unique you brought into the universe. With recording and distribution being so cheap, nothing prevents creatives from giving away their work and making money on their own unique contributions with performances or Kickstarter. But people want AAA production values. Just like how Kickstarter can’t raise enough capital to design and build something with mass market appeal like a MacBook Pro, it’s not suitable for making something like the new Star Wars movie. (Which I refuse to watch because blockbuster movies are dreck, but the public wants what it wants.)
Aside from the monomyth, Star Wars was actually the fruit of George Lucas attempting to do a Flash Gordon film but failing to secure the rights.
Edit: This talks about Star Wars's influences, and is also great and everybody should watch it: http://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/
> Murphy Brown
Great catch. I think Sorkin followed that model in Sports Night, probably trying to emulate MB's feeling of crashing into a busy production room. Can't think of an earlier one though.
I, Claudius also just had a title card, a snake crawling across a mosiac, but it somehow dragged that out for a full thirty seconds according to YouTube, so I'm not sure that really counts.
In film apparently Lucas got in trouble for not crediting the director in his title-only opening for Star Wars, leading him to resign from the guild. The practice became more common though, Clint Eastwood has done title-only openings for everything he's made.
Brief history of the length of opening credits sequences here, with Family Matters as one of the most excessive examples: https://theweek.com/articles/632836/brief-history-tv-shows-opening-credit-sequences
Even that misses Murphy Brown though, so now I'm not sure anyone's thoroughly done the research. Where's Abed when you need him?
I added my own sci-fi ranking (159 movies) in a spreadsheet here [1]. You can sort it based on IMDB or my score. Many movies include the ranking from the first time I have watched the movie (e.g. Star Wars).
[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FDg-yMsHjIHRmZy60v-NU5U4KgmgZvyk0VlgAQT9ycQ/
I guess some people have no problem with obvious plot holes and other are extremely bothered by them.
Don't ask me about the last three Star Wars movies.
The Tron score did a wonderful job blending early synth sounds with an orchestral backdrop.
It also has a odd and memorable theme that moves around using augmented triads yet isn't octatonic nor based on a whole-tone scale.
There's also a nice moment at the beginning of the credits-- where the theme previously wandered through harmonies quite rapidly, here it gets anchored to a single key with a fairly lush orchestral accompaniment. Then that leads in to a massive pipe organ solo doing the chromatic version of the theme for a final time, then to more fitting electro-orchestral credits music that cycles chromatically through augmented triads. (I think there's a reference to this music in the NES metroid game somewhere, I think it's Ridley's lair)
Anyhow-- the strange orchestral changes and lyrical melodies are the kind of thing that make you stick around for the credits. It's all very simple in a way, but extremely effective, too.
Contrasting that-- I almost laughed in the new Star Wars movie when at the climax the brass just loudly ascends up root position minor triad. It's like being served a steak with a side of a stick of butter.
Edit: I guess I should have written "spoiler" about the loud arpeggiation of a minor triad in the Star Wars movie.
Don't get me started on JJ; I still haven't been able to get through any of his Star Trek films. The same person who said the original Star Wars is slow and boring also said that he cannot watch any movie that was made before the year 2000, because filmmaking styles have changed too much and he finds all of the older films boring. Personally, I have trouble watching anything that was made after 2000.
> If you think that's bad, I've even heard people say that the original Star Wars movie is too slow and boring for them to sit through.
This is how we get the JJ "uh oh, two characters talked for more than 30 seconds, better cap this bit with an action scene even if it does precisely nothing to provide characterization, exposition, or advance plot" Abrams school of film-ruining.
I've also seen it commonly attributed to Star Wars. Star Wars, for better or worse, completely and almost single-handedly changed the pacing of sci-fi movies in the 70s. You can almost spot Star Wars as a line in the sand and tell which sci-fi films predate it, which postdate it, and which got stuck being released too close for comfort (the multiple editing cut fiascos of Blade Runner and Star Trek: The Motion Picture seem to be in part due to the pull of pre-Star Wars pacing versus changing film audience expectations).
If you think that's bad, I've even heard people say that the original Star Wars movie is too slow and boring for them to sit through.
As for 2001, it is a very meaningful film to me, but it does not surprise me that kids would have trouble with it. I think you really need to be an adult, and be prepared to think and put your own interpretation on it, in order to appreciate it.
Google <sjw star wars>. There's a large group of people convinced that the new Star Wars movies were "ruined" by "SJWs" because they have too many female characters.
> Abolishing copyright will thus mostly affect these middle men, and have little effect on content creation itself.
You act like that's a good thing... What do you believe these middles mens will do then? They will just steal instead of paying.
Theses copyrights at least force them to pay and try to create unique content instead of stealing the newest idea.
Open your TV and look at Star Wars ads. Notice anything? Where I'm from, in Quebec, but it looks like it's everywhere, Disney allowed many companies to use Star Wars to advertise their products. It's crazy. I don't care much, but do you see anything particular about these ads versus the others? No originality. They are stupid, boring and are essentially: "YOU LIKE STAR WARS, WE DO TOO, BUY OUR PRODUCT".
You know why they do this? Because it's cheap and it works. Original creation is expensive and hard. You just saved so much cash for these middle mens, it's crazy.
Okay, now what's the gain for everyone else? Now you can legally read old stuff without paying the old content creator (do it illegally then, except the moral dilemma, which you doesn't seem to have, I assure you, the legal world probably won't do much to you)? Now you can use Star Wars characters in your stuff? That's it?
The gain is minimal... for god sake, if you want to reuse, then recreate. Possibilities are endless, please, do something new instead! I read that some people aren't too happy that 2017 was essentially a year of remake/sequel in movies.
At least personally I know I would give Disney (or any third party creative wanting to make a Star Wars movie I found reputable) money to make them, because I like watching them.
Independently, no, I would not be able to single handedly fund the millions of dollars required to create such a film. The good news is there are a lot of people in the world who like Star Wars, and I imagine in the absence of artificial scarcity soaking up spending money those fans would put their money towards seeing the films they want made... made.
Why would I pay someone to produce something, when as you said, I would not be able to stop people from finding it online for free?
For example, why would I pay to have a new Star Wars movie produced, when cable companies, NetFlix, and YouTube would all copy the film and have it available for free on the day of release? If I operate a cinema, I would need to charge $15 a ticket to recover the costs of producing the film, while John Doe can start a cinema, and show my film for $3 a ticket. So, why would I pay to have the movie produced? What would be my advantage over the competition, and how would I recover a few hundred million dollars?
I think original fans grew up had children and had them watch old Star Wars films to get them interested.
These new films are focused on the younger generation as older characters die and pass the torch to younger characters.
I have four kids ages 14, 11, and twin 7-year olds. We have never watched TV, don't own any tablets, etc. We rarely watch movies (about a movie every 2 months or so), although I just took the older two to Star Wars. So basically little to no screen time at all for our kids when they were under two.
I can only comment our our family's experience. Our kids have never said they were bored. They build things in the garage out of scrap wood. They play with Legos. My eldest son has built several working boats from scratch, including a birch bark canoe. My daughter spoke at Velocity Conf in 2014 with me on learning to program (she was 7). All of my kids love to read, draw, create, etc.
Anecdotally, I'd say no screen time has forced my kids to not be passive consumers, but to be creative in many different ways. They are also kind and empathetic, probably from so much reading.
I think Facetime with grandma is just fine, even for little kids.
The one or two times our kids came home from their grandparents and had watched 2 - 3 movies, they were crabby and demanding. So we had a gentle chat with my parents to not show them >1 movie per visit.
OTOH, when you produce 8 movies for the same franchise, how is it not the expected result?
I think Star Wars fans should just make peace with it, look at each trilogy as a separate unit, and not as a never ending recycling of a concept designed to squeeze out as much cash as possible.
These new Star Wars movies are for teenage girls, Millenials, and young people and kids. Not for the original fans who are 40+ years old.
They did the same to Star Trek.
Since most young people have not seen the 6 episodes before 7 or 8, they don't know it is the same scripts from the original films. They are seeing it for the first time. That is who the new Star Wars movies are for.
Good luck with that. All Disney films are really just advertising so that Disney can make a fortune selling merchandise. The 'Star Wars' franchise is one of the best-known and successful merchandising franchises, which is why Disney wanted it badly.
I don't have a long history (no attachment to an ideal based on childhood experience that many others seem to have) with Star Wars and I liked it, even though I thought some of it was really strange. That said, I'm no movie critic, and am fairly easy to please.
At first I was surprised that it's as divisive as it is. But I think it's a franchise fraught with very personal and specific expectations from long-time fans and when that's the case, the reviews will tend to be more polarized, especially when anything new is tried.
The humorous moments were sometimes a nice touch but maybe a bit overdone. I really preferred the darker/religious type of scenes (Jedi books, the underground mirror/darkness, etc). I'm still a bit torn about the whole mind-linking thing and the Leia-space moment (trying to be vague here). But again, for me these are nitpicks, whereas they may be deal-breakers for others.
This is going to be fun.
> Accounts that affiliate with organizations that use or promote violence against civilians
> Content that glorifies violence or the perpetrators of a violent act.
* "Support our troops"
* "Punch a Nazi"
* Basically any enthusiastic history account.
* Mall ninjas.
* Any action movie/tv property.
* Star Wars.
* UFC
It seems almost puritan to try and deny humanity's love of violence.
> If an account’s profile information includes a violent threat or multiple slurs, epithets, racist or sexist tropes, incites fear, or reduces someone to less than human, it will be permanently suspended.
* A little confused about the 'multiple' requirement. So long as you only hate one thing your good?
* Racist or sexist tropes is a bit hard to pin down. /r/bpt is full of examples of 'racist' tropes that are self-deprecating. I'm not the best at words but they probably want an exception for "laughing with you, not at you."
> intimidates, or uses fear to silence another person’s voice
I can't wait for this to not be applied against people who use public shaming as a silencing tactic.
Also, there's a bit on irony that in that policy is itself a silencing tactic. This is going to cause people afraid of being banned to self-censor because a statement is politically unpopular.
Many of the works that have received the most cultural success have been science fiction.
Of the five top grossing films, Avatar and Jurassic World are very clearly science fiction, Star Wars and The Avengers are arguably science fiction. It's only Titanic that couldn't be claimed to be science fiction.
The situation is probably similar for TV Series too.
The status problems of science fiction are arguably related to its extreme popularity.
One of the many problems is Hollywood trying to target Millenials who only watch YouTube instead of watch movies or TV shows. Then the movies and tv shows flop and they can't understand why.
Ghostbusters reboot failed because they tried to target social justice warriors and feminists who don't watch sci-fi or horror movies. Trying to make Ghostbusters 3 was really hard and got delayed as they could not get the formula correct in the first two movies. Now Star Wars and Star Trek are suffering.
Just know your target market and cater to them.
My mother watches old movies on Hallmark and TCM etc. She does not like Ghostbusters, Star Wars, Star Trek anyway. She likes mysteries, drama, soap operas etc.
Yeah Amazon and Netflix are making their own movies for a good reason as Disney buys out Fox and will pull all of their IP from other sources to put them on Hulu it owns 60% of now or make their own movie streaming platform.
I'm not sure what having a social life has to do with anything. I haven't sat down to watch a TV show for over a decade, but by some great miracle, I have a robust social life with friends and plenty of activities to do. When a friend asks, "hey, did you see the latest Star Wars movie" or "how 'bout that great Sportsball game last night??" I just say no, didn't see it, and we talk about something else. I know, it sounds crazy.
So what are the next movie franchises to get Disney-ized, like they did to Star Wars? All the super hero stuff, I get, but that's not the only thing that 21st Century makes is it?
I like Disney, obviously they make great movies, but I don’t want _everything_ to be made by Disney. Personally I think their superhero movies have gotten much too formulaic, and I’m worried for what’s going to happen to Star Wars after they keep putting them out every year. We need more creators out there trying new things, and it doesn’t help that Disney wants to collect every recognizable character.
> and for some bizarre historical reason, now own the rights to Star Wars IV, A New Hope
These were distribution rights, some of which were going to expire in 2020 anyway.[1] So now we may finally get some official unspecialized Star Wars.
[1]: http://www.slashfilm.com/20th-century-fox-still-owns-rights-to-first-six-star-wars-films-making-original-box-set-difficult/
So, will the Fox fanfare return to all Star Wars films, past and present, from now on?
It’s indicative of how big a hit the movie is. They get a chunk of every toy, birthday hat, blanket, clothing item, etc that has Star Wars stamped on it.
Fox continues to own News and Sports. However rumors are that Murdoch may also be shopping other parts of what remains. Disney gets Movies including Avatar and XMen, etc, 300 other channels, production studios, controlling stake in Hulu and for some bizarre historical reason, now own the rights to Star Wars IV, A New Hope.
Also worth noting that Fox still owned the rights to the first Star Wars movie. It didn't come with the Lucasfilm acquisition:
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/tangled-rights-could-tie-up-384541
It seems as though the cinema is finally entering a secular contraction. Home video hardware is getting cheaper and higher quality. Content going straight to netflix/hbo/hulu is getting better. And sitting in front of a movie sucking down 32oz of sugar water and fat soaked popcorn doesn't sound quite so appealing these days.
I'll see the new Star Wars, no doubt about that, but besides that I can't remember a time in my life when I went to the movies less than I do now. For the same price, I can get a nice meal out and watch a movie at home.
How is this different from Apps on the playstore ? Insurance/Banking/consultancy ? Or, I have to say, sometimes I wonder how the amounts people spend on music truly vary. The merchandising for most bands means that if you really want to spend millions on a band, you can (e.g. the "pharma bro" Wu-Tang clan saga). Bands themselves say that this is where most of their income comes from ...
This whale principle certainly seems to cover quite a bit of the economy.
Even movies are similar. You want to spend a million (or a few) on star wars ? Not a problem. [1]
From a psychological standpoint I would strongly suggest that you never make it your mission to save people from themselves. There's only 2 ways you come out of that experience: evil (lost belief in mankind, and therefore anything goes), or mad.
[1] http://mentalfloss.com/article/53388/6-most-expensive-pieces-star-wars-memorabilia
This kind of thing is nothing new. My first experience with it was when I visited (and stayed in...it turned into a hostel) Luke's uncle's house from the original Star Wars film. I'm not sure why, but I was very surprised that the exterior of the home was shot somewhere else and looked nothing like the real outside of the building (well...hole, since it's dug out of the ground).
Another favorite of mine...anyone familiar with Paris will laugh at the car chase scene from Ronin where they teleport around the city from shot to shot.
as: I will leave the production side away
I have my own age, but I don't give a damn for HD+ videos. It was cool to see demo videos of coral and landscape in stores but ... even the best tv show or movies won't bring me much joy in 4K. That's optimizing the wrong parameters IMO.
3D could be of help, but so far 1) people didn't find how 2) people barely tried. I remember being disappointed by Avatar because the story was so obvious and rehashed... I went to see a few 3D movies (beside thor I think none surprised my senses). And last year Avatar 1 was on TV. I was shocked, the framing was so amazing. I thought, 1) Cameron knows how to film action 2) the live virtual set he had for Avatar made his 3D 'animation' much more tactile/tangible. No other movie had this, they were average 2D shots with more tech. Reminded me how Scott's Alien 1 has more depth than most 3D movies in the first 10 seconds. Something how they approached movie making, real sets (something star wars went back to, ironically after being one of the major step into virtual sets).
For video games, I can't deny that the 3rd dimension brings something, but for aesthetics or story telling it's moot. The beauty is elsewhere. And some games are doing just that, they will toy with representation and mix hires 3D environment with pixelated characters. Its oddity makes the games interesting and mysterious.
I really do believe that our brain likes 2D representations, and attach emotions and meaning to them; paintings and old games were tickling this sense. The hyper realism (which I ran for too) is tickling another sense, and not the right one.
ps: I just found this on twitter, https://thesixfifty.com/game-changer-lasting-legacy-of-the-atari-2600-4bea9717bf3, it actually touches some aspects of what I'm feeling
> You don't think there's any such thing as nerd culture?
Nothing is ever black or white. I'm most certainly a nerd, but that doesn't mean I have the same sense of humor as every other nerd. Think of it like inheritance vs composition. Just because I'm a nerd, doesn't mean I inherit everything other nerds have. I only have some components. And while I appreciate Sci-Fi movies, I don't participate in wars between Star Wars and Star Trek (I think Stargate SG1 was better anyway).
> Take 34-year-old Jason Strickland, who works for a land surveyor in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He listens to around eight hours of podcasts at work every day, and listened at normal speed until he came upon the Movies by Minutes series of podcasts, which analyzes iconic movies minute by minute. (In other words, every episode is devoted to one minute of a movie.) When he found it, the hosts had already completed the original Star Wars trilogy, which was 378 episodes, plus a few special episodes, so he started downloading 50 episodes at a time and listening at 2x speed. "It took about a month per movie to get caught up," he said, explaining that he would listen to whatever podcasts were on his current listening list in the morning, and then power through the Movies by Minutes episodes in the afternoons. "Once I was current, I would then go find another show to download and get caught up, repeating this for all the shows."
Unless I'm doing something mostly physical or mindless I can't listen to a podcast and work at all.
The idea that anything reviewers write will have any measurable impact on iPhone sales is laughable. Can reviews or other media coverage kill a startup? Sure. It happened to Juicero.
An Apple product is like a Star Wars movie, it doesn't matter what anyone writes, people are going to see it. Nobody really intermediates between Apple's relationship with customers, and that's been proven over and over again (most recently with The Verge's months long campaign painting the removal of the headphone jack as "user hostile").
Getting text alerts for Star Wars movie tickets as well as the NES and SNES classic :)
There was a series of films in the late 70s which were an indirect adaptation: Star Wars (have you heard of them? Worth checking out)
I've gotten so much from my experiences with Star Trek, and I've adamantly tried to consume every piece of media produced (a lifelong pursuit). I shared some of my love in a recent episode of a podcast I co-host, Zengineering Podcast. The episode is an exploration of what we love about Star Trek contrasted with what we love about Star Wars. This is perhaps my favorite episode of our podcast for many reasons, and I hope you enjoy it!!
https://zengineeringpodcast.com/episode-040-on-star-wars-vs-star-trek-may-the-prime-directive-be-with-you-6753f48a917c
"In 1970s you would just create plastic models of spaceships and film them with normal camera"
Are you sure? For example, from the ILM history at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Light_%26_Magic we see:
1975: Resurrected the use of VistaVision; first use of a motion control camera (Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope)
Following the link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_control_photography gives us:
> The first large-scale application of motion control was in Star Wars (1977), where a digitally controlled camera known as the Dykstraflex performed complex and repeatable motions around stationary spaceship models. This enabled a greater complexity in the spaceship-battle sequences, as separately filmed elements (spaceships, backgrounds, etc.) could be better coordinated with one another with greatly reduced error.
That doesn't sound like a normal camera.
The text immediately before that quote is:
> The 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey pioneered motion control in two respects. The film's model photography was conducted with large mechanical rigs that enabled precise and repeatable camera and model motion. The film's finale was created with mechanically controlled slit-scan photography, which required precise camera motion control during the exposure of single frames.
And in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the mothership was made of wood, plastic and metal, and wasn't cheap.
Now, to be sure these are high budget movies, but your broad description makes it sound like it was true for all movies in the 1970s.
I think a better comparison would be to look at the model-based special effects in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine with the CGI effects in Babylon 5; both produced at about the same time. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Deep_Space_Nine :
> DS9 was the first TV show in the Star Trek franchise to use computer-generated imagery (CGI) for exterior space shots. Although a few other television series, like Babylon 5, were using CGI exclusively to avoid the high expense of model photography, the Star Trek franchise had continued to use primarily physical models for exterior space shots because producers felt models provided more realism.
Some of the good material that would have been turned into movies in the past gets turned into television/streaming shows now. Game of Thrones occupies the kind of cultural space that something like Star Wars did during the original trilogy.
It's not that that material doesn't exist, it's simply that it no longer is the sole domain of the movie format.
The movie industry has eras, marked by certain production styles. In Hollywood at least, the 1970s was the era of the auteur director. A wave of directors (and actors) who had apprenticed under the famed B-movie master Roger Corman came to power on the strength of a series of absolute masterpieces. It started with Easy Rider, which was shot on a very low budget, and received massive box office success and critical acclaim. It ended with Heaven's Gate, an outrageously expensive disaster that has never even been properly released (I've seen one of the medium-length edits of it, and yes, it stinks).
The real end of the New Hollywood era, though, was the release of Star Wars in 1977. It paved the way for the sci-fi/fantasy blockbuster. It turned into a successful trilogy, and overlapped team-wise with Spielberg's fantastically successful Raiders of the Lost Ark. Hollywood, and movie fans, lost interest in the more intellectual fare of New Hollywood, in favor of kid-friendly, cross-marketing-friendly entertainment.
So it's not surprising that there was a dropoff in critical darlings after the 1970s. Movies got a lot worse - they really did. Even directors who carried on the New Hollywood traditions, like David Lynch and the Coen brothers, couldn't see the kind of success the 1970s directors had.
Of course, before the New Hollywood era, Hollywood kinda stunk, big expensive extravaganzas. Critical attention then turns to the French New Wave, and other post-WWII European film with small budgets and big emotional punches (who makes a movie like Wages of Fear these days?).
I wonder how our current era will fare? I'm thinking about the sort of epic-story serialization that the Marvel franchise and the reinvigorated Star Wars franchise is doing. How will that be viewed?
TV is less of a dopamine rush kind of thing.
You need to be very careful with modern mobile games. I'll let my son play minecraft, do the "endless learning" games, Dr Seuss, movies, and a few other selected games. You need to avoid the skinner box games.
Generally speaking, if it has a franchise endorsement (Star Wars, etc) it's garbage.
In my experience, my favorite movies I find via glowing reviews. Rotten tomato completely obscures this view: if all the reviewers kind of like it, it'll get 100%, whereas polarizing films always suffer. I'll take "kids" over "star wars" any day for a better movie. Why? I'm gonna see star wars because i want to, not because I expect a meaningful aesthetic. But Rotten Tomatoes takes the opposite tact, pushing me towards crowd favorites rather than what i might rate highly.
Really this comes down to how terrible one dimensional comparisons are: it only measure popularity, which is a terrible filter for quality.
All of the "red leader" stuff is directly lifted from another film - the Battle of Britain (1969) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064072/. Watch the dogfight sequence and see if it doesn't remind you of Star Wars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sk5gMaCq8GE
Yes, in that HL1 & 2 played on such well known tropes that it only needed to show you the scene and you knew the story.
The opening was laden with every disaster movie signal (up to and including "Nothing will go wrong" said in emphatic tones). The lift doors in Office Complex open to archetypal zombie horror. The scientist getting gunned down by the military cover up in We've Got Hostiles hits any number of movie tropes while clearly signalling the next bit is Rambo-style action...
It's fairly similar to the first Star Wars movie, in that because it is hitting the tropes quickly and clearly, and jumping from setting to setting, it can tell the story very efficiently.
> In this example, the copyright interest is in the digital file, not the subject matter of the image.
That's not my understanding of what the derivative works protection covers. What else is to prevent me from making a new Star Wars film using Lucasfilm's (now Disney's) characters?
On the contrary, I have been getting into modern science fiction after being raised on my dad's collection of Asimov/Clarke/Heinlein/etc. and the modern stuff is great. Check out Vernor Vinge, Greg Egan, Kim Stanley Robinson. None of that is science fantasy. If anything, I'd say that science fantasy is less popular now than it was two or three decades ago. Look at the popularity of modern TV and movies: Arrival, The Martian, Gravity, The Expanse, Interstellar. Three of those are complete hard science fiction and the others are more in the vein of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Contact than Star Wars.
Our CS1010 teacher in college used to test us on movies. I believe one year he had done inception. Other years he did transformers, Star Wars etc.
Oh yeah that'll be fun, now there is no price barrier to entry so the rude idiots that are in theaters now will simply overrun theaters. Ever go see a $1 movie in a low rate theater? That's where this is headed.
Honest to god I would pay $20/ticket to go sit in a quiet theater with respectful people who like to get lost in movies and know how to act.
I used to go to the movies about twice a month, now I go once every 6 months and about 50% of the time someone is talking or on their phone and I find myself in a confrontation. Ever try to settle back down and enjoy the rest of the movie after you confront someone? Forget it.
Unfortunately I'm sure I'm in the minority and this idea will probably work and I'll have to stick to Art House movie theaters or watch movies at home which is fine I guess.
I remember watching Star Wars in the theater in the 70's. Guess what? People were too engrossed to be rude. Part of the fun was getting swept up in the reaction of other moviegoers.
I hope this is figured out soon, I miss going to the theater!
Star Wars (the original film and its two sequels) uses this (and similar shortcuts in other aspects, like making the storm troopers wear full body armor to be completely interchangeable, or putting the main characters in a small insular group with no outside friends or living relatives, or giving the evil empire an unspeakable super weapon, or giving the Jedi characters arbitrary convenient magical powers, or making the robot R2D2 able to do almost anything in the empire’s computer systems) as a way of simplifying and clarifying the story. The universe of Star Wars is not supposed to be a realistic one. It’s a mishmash of previous (terrestrial) movie plots, themes, characters, and scenes lightly painted over with a space setting.
The different planets are single places, with settings chosen to fit the needs of the storytelling. Think of them as backdrops in a stage play. As far as the films are concerned anything not on screen might as well not exist, and the rest of the various planets don’t need to be consistent with a realistic broader universe. Trying to paint them all in would waste scarce screen time and confuse the audience.
Arguably this is one feature that made the “Star Wars universe” hopeless to adapt to try to tell stories with broader context. If you start trying to flesh out the details, the planets, galactic government, spaceship technology, concept of the Jedi, etc. all start to fall apart, because they were never very carefully designed in the first place, but just hacked together to meet the particular needs of the original story.
Think about why your examples work: We only see the base area and immediate surroundings on Hoth, and only for a short while. These planets work in Star Wars because they're each a single small part of a whole. The planets are monobiomes, but the story moves between enough of them that while it may look silly, the setting is still varied. It's very different to a story that takes place predominantly in one biome.
Note exceptions like Naboo: One of the few planets in the Star Wars movies where a story takes place across wider areas of a the planet. Suddenly there's a planet with varied biomes.
The monobiomes in Star Wars are monobiomes because there was no visual reason to expand, so they just made it the same in most cases.
In the case of Winter the planet is cold - in the middle of an ice age - but while the planet is all cold, it is not all identical. Ursula Le Guin explicitly drew maps [1], showing the glaciers, but also glacier free areas, mountain ranges, oceans, rivers. It's a cold world, but diverse within those limitations. It's not a single identical place. And the cold serves a purpose of setting the cities apart from the adversity of escaping over the ice shield.
I'd argue it's a great example of knowing to break the rules: Make it an interesting ice planet with stark differences between different areas. The problem is not specifically that something is an ice planet or a desert planet, but that something is uniform to the point that describing one place describes the entire planet. The easy way of avoiding that is to not make it an ice or desert or forest planet, and so if you need a tutorial on how to build your world, that's probably your best bet. The hard way is what Ursula Le Guin did with Winter of creating a diverse and interesting world within narrow constraints.
[1] http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Maps/Map-Gethen.html
What about the engineering of Netflix? I see lots of comments here about pricing and how content distribution in Hollywood is messed, etc. If Disney has acquired a streaming facility, how will they compare to how Netflix is engineered?
Will they have apps, sub-accounts, lists of favorites, and be able to move from device to device and pick up where you left off?
I have to guess that Disney's depth of content is pretty shallow. You have kid movies, older Disney content, and then franchises they bought like Star Wars and Marvel. But those account for a handful of movies a piece. Maybe it won't be hard to technically serve that content up since it is much smaller than Netflix' library.
What about content delivery? The technical part of this is probably a very hard problem to solve, globally, where people's streams aren't interrupted or dropping frames, etc.
Just small things like when I fast forward, Netflix shows thumbnails of the content, will Disney have those small quality-of-life types of features?
Yep, the idea there is that representation matters. After Obama was elected, there was a whole spate of articles quoting young Black children, saying, "if he can do it, I can do it." A new world of possibility opened up to them, just because someone had done it.
When one of those recent Star Wars movies came out (I haven't seen any of them, so I might get the details wrong), and one of the leads was a Latino guy, I saw a few interviews with Latinx fans basically saying the same thing--"now I can see myself as the hero of the story".
Representation matters.
I should have clarified: there's no sampling bias. These are incredibly popular movies. Here are some movies not on Netflix streaming that I've wanted to watch this year: Gladiator. Star Wars IV. Shawshank Redemption. The Wizard of Oz. When Harry Met Sally. The Princess Bride. All Star Trek movies. Goodfellas. Lord of the Rings. Gone with the Wind. All Godfather movies. Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Airplane. American Graffiti. The Usual Suspects. All Jim Carrey movies except a bad one (the Grinch) and one I've never heard of (the Number 23). Toy Story. There's Something About Mary. All Austin Powers movies.
The last time I tried searching for a good movie to watch on Netflix streaming, I gave up after 10 minutes. I'd think of one movie after another after another. Nothing was there. All it could suggest was "related titles," as if that's what I would want.
Truly, I think you're underestimating what people will pay for to get exclusive content in their core interest. Star Wars film releases are rapidly becoming an annual, family tradition for movie goers.
When you can drip out production updates and use electronic marketing channels to hype them or include fan AMA type stuff, there is big potential here to keep people around.
But to your point, if you take Star Wars out of the picture, you still get the entire Disney film collection. Just about every middle class family in America in the 90s had some portion of the Disney VHS collection on their shelves.
I don't see this desire for easy access to familiar, high quality, family-friendly content going away. I see it increasing.
I'll make an argument that has nothing to do with the quality of disney's entertainment or disney's ability to give value to your child in the form of happiness/lessons.
Being a human being is a social experience. If all of a kid's friends watch disney movies and have disney toys, there is an opportunity to connect with his friends. There is also the opportunity to feel excluded, to miss out on experiences and discussions with his friends. I remember quite fondly how excited me and my friends would get talking and arguing about Star Wars and Indiana Jones in the sandbox.
Star Wars is already the movies, plus two animated series (Clone Wars and Rebels). You can look at the Marvel strategy to see where it could go, with multiple movies a year plus multiple tv/streaming series (Agents of Shield, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Legion, Defenders, Gifted, Inhumans, Punisher, Runaways). If all that Marvel content moves to Disney streaming, plus new Star Wars content, plus their kids TV shows, plus Pixar, ABC, and ESPN, then you have a package that is really strong.
I wish them luck keeping things running smoothly when a new Star Wars movie is released.
Content is hits+depth. You do the 30 day trial to watch star wars, then stay on because you find other stuff you like. Unless you're going to watch a different star wars movie every week[1], you can just rent or buy the star wars movies for cheap.
1: By 2019 there should be about a dozen feature-length star wars movies, counting the 3 2-hour television specials, so you're right that just star wars movies is not that great.
Netflix may have added 600 hours but have you plumbed what Netflix adds? Most of the content is crap. Content is not a numbers game it is a hits game.
"Star Wars is worth more than harry potter and james bond combined."[1]
Just the first 6 episodes of Star Wars is 17 hours of footage. This does not include special features, cartoons and other offshoots in this franchise.
Access to this on a whim, along with immediate access to exclusive preview-type content every year prior to the theatrical release is seriously valuable on its own.
I'd venture many people are HBO Go subscribers simply for Game of Thrones right now. And that more than enough do not bother to unsubscribe in the off season.
I think people on HN underestimate how people value content. They don't realize people pay huge sums for complete garbage cable content plans already. A commercial free experience of Disney content, particularly Star Wars / Marvel powered with exclusives priced the same as HBO or Netflix would probably do great.
[1] http://fortune.com/2015/12/24/star-wars-value-worth/
The site seems to be experiencing the 'hug of death' right now, Internet Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20170808013732/http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-respond/
Prof. Schmitt gets it right here: gender differences don't have any significant impact on women's capacity to perform any job--even physically strenuous jobs, with the right training. Certainly for information work, bringing up gender differences is just going down the wrong rabbit hole. It's like asking a job candidate if they're American when all you need to know is if they're legally authorised to work in the US.
The other scientists unfortunately go down this rabbit hole. Prof. Miller especially consistently asks the wrong questions throughout his piece. First, he establishes biological sex differences but doesn't ask if they have any significant impact on women's capacity to perform a job. Second, he goes off on a tangent about his pet 'paradox' theory about the American public, arguing that gender equality would make diversity moot from a business advantage perspective.
Let's just clarify why we want diversity in the workplace: it's not because minorities will bring different skills and traits to the table; it's because (a) excluding minorities is inhumane, and (b) because minorities will (hopefully) keep the organisation from making dumb mistakes like leaving out the main protagonist of their new film series from a major marketing campaign ( https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/12/15960372/hasbro-star-wars-monopoly-toys-wheresrey-insufficient-interest ), sending Kylie Jenner out with a Pepsi to mend race relations ( http://time.com/4726500/pepsi-ad-kendall-jenner/ ), and pushing for a Game of Thrones-style show about a modern-day Confederate America which won the war and kept slavery intact ( https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/08/no-confederate/535512/ ). These are just three things that come immediately to mind, you can imagine how much shit there is out there that hasn't even reached national level yet.
You'll get weird looks if you haven't seen the common ones like Star Wars (especially in geek circles), The Matrix, Jurassic Park, the Batman movies, etc.
It was terrible. Just an endless avalanche of 80s pop culture references loosely strung together with a horribly cliche plot and characters.
The references weren't even interesting either. It'll just be something like, "Then, I traveled to planet Bueller, where I played through the plot of Ferris Bueller's Day Off--", and then a page and a half literally describing various scenes from Ferris Bueller's Day Off. That's it. It adds nothing. Unless the idea of scenes from 80s movies and TV shows and video games that you are familiar with being described back to you is inherently amusing, you will probably find that this gets old very fast.
Then again - this might translate much better to the screen, in a way it didn't to the page, because A) film is a much better medium, I think, to delight the audience with familiarity than writing, and B) from the trailer it looks like the film will expand beyond just 80s pop culture, and intermix the references a little better than "I went to planet Star Wars and here are some scenes from Star Wars I played through". With Spielberg at the helm, I have pretty high hopes. Just don't expect, if you like the movie, to read the book and like it even more. If the film succeeds, this will be one of those very rare instances in which it's better than the material it's adapted from.
If you want to read a good novel about VR, pick up Snow Crash instead.
That's the whole reason news companies are asking for an antitrust consideration: Google can hurt them massively by simply walking away from the negotiating table. Either they give up their content for free or Google drops them, and they hurt even worse.
Obviously for the news agencies, their hope would be that Google be somehow forced to pay them for access and not be allowed to shut down the service. Of course, it's hard to imagine how the government could require Google News to operate as a service.
The thing that's broken here is that in any other content situation like movies or music, the content is unique and copyrighted. If you want Katy Perry or Star Wars, you have to deal with the companies with rights to those, and the MPAA and RIAA are formidable industry associations which can swing a lot of weight and force a negotiation. If you want any "music" at all, really, you have to sit down with the RIAA.
News, however, can't really be copyrighted that way, since fact can be restated by anyone. It's fair use. In a traditional situation, all the affected corporations (like every major news org) would band together and set the bar for negotiation. Someone like Google would have to comply or lose out on a lot of information to base their services on. However, in the case of news, Google has an infinite amount of blogspam to feed off of that is cannibalizing and resharing the news from journalists. Google wouldn't be hurt enough by news agencies blocking them, at least, compared to how much it would hurt news agencies to not be distributed by them.
Sure, I mean Star Wars was/is such a cultural phenomenon because of timing, but it was so much more than that. It was a great story, it blended old style movies with new style movies, it had great music, great special effects, etc. 10 years earlier and it's Buck Rogers, 10 years later and it's Flash Gordon. Lucas went over budget and had to deal with the executives who wanted to bail and pulled it off.
The article just wasn't very insightful, and it was on the top of the list. It's obvious this was a clickbait article to puff the guy they were interviewing. I suspect he is looking for clients and is using HN to get eyeballs and got some people to up vote it. That's more insightful than the article.
I dunno, maybe I'm just grumpy today.
There's also a huge difference between telling a formulaic story with traditional style and some sort of sermon like moral statement, vs photographic memory of a "where's waldo" book.
For example, look at formulaic rebooted sequel Hollywood movies. Given less than a paragraph outline, you can recite the details of most movies pretty well. Consider the first Star Trek Reboot movie, doesn't that compress down to only a couple lines, even if you talk for hours about lens flare and pew-pew sound effects? The second reboot movie compresses down to perhaps one or two complete paragraphs worth of raw data, its at least twice as complicated as the first movie.
Something like the iconic original Star Wars was tight because it provided a new formula, a pretty cool formula, but within that formula which admittedly is difficult to learn, the story is also not terribly long.
I guess I'm getting at teach a Bard about Hollywood Star Wars films for awhile, then learning specific movies only takes one viewing and is easy to memorize.
If you know the Adventure Time world and in-jokes, each episode is like two lines of text to memorize, maybe.
No. It would take one person who had memorized the story, over however much repetition, to tell the story and then listen to the other person repeat it back. It's more like, if your nephew came to your house and saw Star Wars and then told you the story, and you, having seen the movie multiple times, said "well, that's actually not a perfect retelling".
> If it were true... how would we know?
If it were true, how would they know?!?
It's like if my nephew came to my house and saw Star Wars, and then on the drive home with his mom, he told her the story and she (who never saw the movie) said "He recited the entire movie after one hearing!"
No, what he did was remember most of the plot outline (imperfectly), and describe several scenes (imperfectly), and reproduce the gist, more or less, of some of the dialogue... He's not some incredible savant, he's just a normal person who paid attention to a story. I mean, sure, he "can recite the whole thing after one hearing", but in a pre-literate society, how would you even double-check? It would take someone else with total recall to verify that the bard had total recall. So you have to assume storytellers have perfect memory in order to demonstrate that a storyteller has perfect memory.
This really reminds me of the debate over who does art belong to once it's released out into the world?
On the one hand, it makes complete sense that the creator of the artwork should have the final say in how it is interacted with by viewers, and whether or not it should be preserved.
But on the other hand, when George Lucas says I'm not allowed to purchase the original non-digitally-enhanced version of the first Star Wars movie so dear to my childhood memories it really pisses me off!
Fantastic meditation synopsis! Another similar one that I like is visualizing the thoughts scrolling by like the text at the beginning of Star Wars movies :-)
> it would be like remaking Star Wars and having Luke turning to the darkside.
That sounds like a better movie tbh
You implied that cartoonish violence like Contra will have substantially negative psychological effects on children. I've never seen any support for that and my own experiences tell me the opposite. A quick google search shows evidence going both ways, so lacking time for an exhaustive analysis I'm sticking with my experiences.
Take my anecdotes with as big a grain of salt as you like, but analytically the benefits didn't outweigh the cons in my case. Not having access to the same video games, movies and entertainment as my peers greatly damaged my ability to form relationships at a young age. The only upside was perhaps a marginal increase in analytical thinking skills, which was easily offset by the anxiety/insecurities and resultant academic underperformance I had as a result of underdeveloped social skills. Your kids' mileage may vary.
Sure I grew up and that's all long in the past now, but that doesn't mean it was useful, justified, or harmless. When the fiancée and I decide to have kids, I intend to give them every opportunity I can within reason, that includes the resources for a vibrant social life if they want. Obviously I won't be buying them Grand Theft Auto at age 6, but Star Wars? Absolutely.
I was mouth agape through the whole article. Call me old fashioned too, but I don't want my 5 year old killing things with swords when their grasp on what is real and imaginary is so blurry. It blows my mind that most of the kids in my daughter's junior kindergarten class have seen Star Wars movies, Spiderman, and other violent movies.
I'm not against a 4 or 5 year old using a tablet for a limited account of time for interactive educational 'games' but guns and swords is well over the line.
Edit: Contra at age 6!
> ... Star Wars don't deal with orbital physics at all.
Except at the times when a ship is disabled in an attack, and then changes course and "sink" into the nearby planet.
But yeah, I do agree. It's much easier to watch that kind of atrocity in a movie that makes no effort to look realistic than it is to watch something like gravity.
Gravity was a good movie. And for a movie set in space, it's pretty realistic...ish. But it's orbital physics are terrible. Just terrible. I mean, most movies don't even try. Guardians of the Galaxy and Star Wars don't deal with orbital physics at all. Gravity tries, and gets it all wrong.
I believe that predated digital compositing being used. However electronic analog compositing is still much easier than film compositing (like what was used to combine passes for Star Wars). For instance, blue and green screen was originally for video. You would do it using an Ultimate brand device that was completely analog. That device launched in 1976, but it's creator had been building a analog compositing devices since at least 1964 when he won an Oscar for it. If you are curious about how it worked, I would imagine patents can be found and read. Ultimatte just generate an alpha channel (then called a key and it was actually a separate b/w video signal). Other devices would act in the key to combine the foreground and background together, etc.
The "out of China" part is the problem there. That's a problem that's pretty much irrelevant to a question of whether or not to distribute copies of data files.
And I didn't say that cultural importance is an automatic justification. The new star wars movie also has cultural importance, but there would be large downsides to free-for-all piracy of it during its release year. Downsides that don't exist with 20 year old source code.
If theaters had an escalating buyback price for their tickets, I could be persuaded to, say, not see the next Star Wars movie for $100 and then see it later. I have a price. Most people do.
> I really think from set-design, costume, and setting perspectives this movie on par with visual feasts from the 70s/80s like Bladerunner, Dune, Star Wars, or Alien.
For those who haven't seen the live-action movie, Kotaku just put up an article showcasing some of the concept art:
http://kotaku.com/the-incredible-art-of-the-ghost-in-the-shell-movie-1794015446
(Except for die-hard fans of GitS, I would not recommend the new movie.)
> Hollywood accounting makes sure no profits are made within the company you have a contract with.
A phrase I've heard to explain this is "Every time a building burns down in Tunisia, it gets charged against Star Wars"
The guy who played Darth Vader in the original trilogy has never received any royalties, because those films never made a profit.
I think we both speak of the same thing, but I come from dramaturgy background. Story is story, no matter the genre or medium. At its core, story is always about change in the character through dramatic arc. If there is none, it's journalism, for lack of better words. Mechanics are vastly different through media. For example, in screenplays you get to write only what you hear and what you see. Essay form is allowed only to explain to the creators of ultimate form what you mean.
When you shed all the layers of genres, when you come down to the basic principles of dramaturgy, you're left with the core of storytelling that's in all stories ever told. From Plato's Cave to Aristotelian unities onwards to Star Wars and Seinfeld, there are certain core principles which hold true in form and structure. Form, not formula. In dramatic arc and story structure there are elements which morph and trade places and these, along with psychological and visual motifs make a genre. It's probably valid approach to view/interpret this on a whole other level, and that's the beauty of it. This is just my viewpoint based on some experience and background in dramaturgy. It's a view on abstract principles of storytelling where you get to manipulate form and structure itself before you materialise it into particularities. Kind of like virtual functions, or better yet a class diagram of a story before you write it down. Dramatic theory is not competing with literary theory - it complements it, specializes it. I took dramatic theory as a heavy weapon which I find extremely useful in my work, but I didn't dwell much further into literary theory. I took some bits and pieces that I find useful for my work, like intertextuality (esp. biblical - which is tropey as it gets, Star Wars for example and Hero's Journey, but most modern literature as well)... etc. I have colleagues which are far more well-versed in literature theory than I am for when I need insight. I'm more concerned with dramatic mechanics and structure, because that's what I do and what interests me.
What I'm saying is that behind all of the layers of a genre, there is a common subset to all stories. If you start with that and build towards a genre, you get to see the specifics of how it modulates that core structure. SF, in that regard, is always heavily biased towards internal-driven change with accentuated wants and needs switch[1] where character is in an extreme psychological situation driven by an extreme physical situation flared by science. Character is driven into a corner where he/she has to act on his core flaw in order to achieve the need in order to change. Whereas fantasy has a character on a journey both physical and psychological through which he/she overcomes the flaw in his character in order to act on it when third act kicks in.
It's a bit of an abstract way of thinking, but I don't know how else to put it without first explaining all of the intro to dramatic theory, hah.
[1] Wants vs needs is the epitome of character arc mechanics. There's something character wants that drives his story arc, only to be exposed to his actual needs (what he really wants). Shedding his wants and fulfilling that need he discovered he overcomes his major flaw and thus changes his character.
Now, if you view through prism of that mechanics (core one though) and go back to genre structures you can clearly see where most differ (not all, there are blurry ones!). For example, if you look at Star Wars or Conan which are fantasy (one with SF theme and one with fantasy theme) - there's a clear flaw in the character that gets replaced by a need and fulfilled on the journey (actual one). Be it Force training vs Dagobah cave or Sword training vs Valeria. It's an actual quest! Now look at a clear-cut SF, for example Inconstant Moon episode from Outer Limits (check that out if you haven't!) or any of the more fabled STNG or DS9 episodes. In Inconstant Moon, main character realises this might be the final night of his (and everyone's life - Sun has gone Nova on the other side of the Earth (it's nighttime), and he notices Moon is exceptionally bright because of it... so he calls up his ex girlfriend (wants) and he becomes more open and free (needs).. or in DS9 Pale Moonlight (Moon, again!) where cptn. Sisko wants an action attack plan or whatever only to need to become vile and dirty character in order to win, thus overcoming his flaw (being a good guy)... no quest. When we return to Dune, that's where lines get blurred and there's an endless debate.
I mean, I could go on forever and we all could probably be right to most extents. This is just my way of thinking. Flair on top of all of that is of least concern, but is the most visible in a genre. By that I mean spaceships vs swords or whatever. It's just a motif. Hence why people commonly confuse Star Wars as an SF - which it isn't at all. Also a reason why new Star Trek movies aren't really SF. It's a fantasy or in ST case action story with an SF theme on top.
I'm really passionate about this subject (storytelling) and we have debates like these almost on a daily basis because we all love it. We all agree on one thing and that's that everything lies in character development and arc and grows from there, so excuse my elaborate intro to debating the topic!
I appreciate your reply and I find it well thought-of.
The problem is that Science Fiction is, literally, Fantasy without swords (or sorcery, but my position is that the two basically go together).
Or at least that's what it started as, back in the Golden Age. For instance, you'll probably know that in that era the editors of Sci Fi pulps would reject a story if it had magic in it, so writers instead framed magic as "psionics" - because that made their stories sound more scientifically plausible (for their time, always).
So in essence, you could take the exact same story, with the same characters having the same motivations and advancing down the same goal etc, and simply change the external trappings, from sword and sorcery to ray guns and psionics, or vv, and- presto, genre change.
The distinction is entirely artificial, is what I'm saying, and dictated more by the needs of the publishing (or TV, film, etc) industry than what kind of stories a writer wants to write or a reader/viewer enjoy.
That is as true now as it was back then but it's actually a good thing, nowadays, because it means that you can tell the same stories either as Fantasy or as SF and all that matters is really how good the story is. Hero's journey with aliens and spaceships, for Star Wars, gritty realism with swords and dragons for The Game of Thrones. And why not?
The best Fantasy and SF is very often found in the boundary between the two genres. The flimsier the boundary, the easier for the two genres to intermingle to the delight of all of us who enjoy a good story, regardless of the trappings.
Btw, I should say that most of my interest in (and knowledge of) Fantasy and SF comes from novels, rather than TV shows and films. I appreciate that TV shows, in particular, have been able to tell more engaging stories in recent times (eg. I'm totally a BSG fangirl) but still TV prioritises tropes and specialises in providing a quick fix- which though makes my criterion even more relevant. In writing, it's a lot easier to escape the tropes and just tell a story about people doing things, rather than who-fought-whom-with-what.
The writer was wrapping up a reread series of the entire first novel and is now covering the movie versions before moving on to the second novel. I think that colors the perspective: as an adaptation of the novel, Lynch's movie fails horribly, IMO.
There are alot of influences for Star Wars, but the biggest is probably all cinematic: Kurosawa's movies, WWII fighter movies, and some episodic action serials. I won't say that Sci-Fi books weren't an influence, as I'm sure there were people who read Dune working on Star Wars, but they weren't a huge influence for Lucas.
As a big fan of Jodorowsky (L'Incal is one my favourite graphic novels ever), I think we could also unequivocally say that whatever he had made would not have been very faithful to the book. It's quite possible that Dune fans would have been even less happy with Jodorowsky's film than Lynch's.
We also have to remember that this was before Star Wars and Alien. Most scifi at the time was, with some honourable exceptions (2001: A Space Odyssey, Silent Running, The Andromeda Strain, Solaris), pretty silly, childish, often campy stuff: The Black Hole, Buck Rogers, Moonraker. Pulp origins aside, Star Wars introduces a level of violence, maturity and realism to the genre that stood out at the time, and closer to that of contemporary adult 1970s productions like Apocalypse Now, Easy Rider and so on.
For all the considerable talent involved in the Dune adaptation, it's quite possible — and this eases the pain over the loss of the project a bit — that it would have been closer in tone to something like Zardoz or Flash Gordon, i.e. a big, colourful, but ultimately also a bit silly extravaganza. Even O'Bannon's Alien script was also pretty pulpy and silly until Ridley Scott, David Giler and Walter Hill hammered it into shape.
> I've read elsewhere on the Internet that Dune the novel actually is an inspiration for the Star Wars universe
A greater inspiration is the comic series Valerian and Laureline [1]. Lucas pumped not just the characters and spaceships (yes, the Millenium Falcon comes from there) but also the atmosphere of Far West casual fun adventure and creativity bordering on the fantasy.
I look forward to reading articles about how Valerian copied Star Wars when the movie comes out [2].
Note the years the series was written and do not read the last few if you are not used to the way authors of that era dared to wrap up their stories.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Val%C3%A9rian_and_Laureline
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerian_and_the_City_of_a_Thousand_Planets
After decades Lynch's Dune is still my favorite movie of all times. I was very young when I watched it and I didn't have much of a reference for what movies were even supposed to feel like at the time, so Dune seemed like a perfectly normal place to start. Suspect the experience is quite different if you already have decades to movie going by the time you see it.
Besides Star Wars and Blade Runner I can't think of another SF movie that has as much impact on me.
Alternative hypothesis: something set 21,000 years (edited - well spotted!) into the future is going to be as impossible to imagine for us as today's world was for Jules Vernes. As such gothic madness might be a more realistic interpretation.
A lot of the criticism misses the mark. I can try and find alternative explanations. The "outdated" computers? The Butlerian Jihad caused that future world not to build anything more complicated than a light switch. The unique worlds, monochromatic and with their odd uniqueness? Visible signalling of these being different cultures that survived by virtue of their unique characteristics. Unlike the "bugs vs Marines" of a lot of space opera, the Tleilaxu, Guild, Bene Gesserit and Harkonnen are all fundamentally different, their differences giving them a survival edge, influence and power. Black desert suits? Maybe the filters need solar energy to run. Erotic Bene Gesserit intonation? Have you read the later books?
This was the only depiction of Baron Harkonnen which I thought truly captured his sadistic genius. And the blocky shields are so much cooler than the form fitting transparent bubbles of later Hollywood SF (e.g. Star Wars), also explaining the difficulty involved in going slow for so long when trying to penetrate them (because the space between shield and human is so great). Or what about the worms, which despite (or perhaps because of) the sorry state of 1984 CGI somehow were just as immense as I had imagined them reading the words. There was this alien feel to all the vehicles, especially the ornithopters and the harvester carrier, which has only been recently replicated in the seemingly nonsensical vertical ovals of Arrival or the glaring contrast between earth and ship in District 9. This was definitely the artistic generation responsible for Brutalist architecture, which is not always fun to live in, but has a thousand times more soul than the International Style condos copy/pasted across all of the world's megacities today.
Lynch's movie was glorious precisely because it freed itself from the constraint of present day science and became a standalone creation from the inspiration of the source material. The other interpretations did not create that sense of awe. I found the miniseries particularly boring, a kind of BBC period drama feel instead of being transported into a completely new, intense world. What makes Dune great as a book and as a 1984 movie is precisely that it frees itself from "realism" and suspends disbelief in just the right way for telling a great story. Might as well complain about X-wings flying like F-14s and making sound in vacuum...
Well, sometimes, you're a big fan of a movie and really want to see it. I was really into World War Z so I went and saw it when it came out in theaters, the first night. Other times your friends all want to go see Star Wars together, or some other friends and I went to see John Wick 2 the night it came out.
Sure, for the most part I don't care about going to the theater, most movies suck anyway. But socializing is a thing and watching a movie on the couch just doesn't compare to being in a dark theater with the screen filling your entire field of view and feeling the rumble from the speakers.
Well, like anything it totally depends on the specifics.
A modern B+W film, properly fixed and washed, is essentially forever. Metallic silver doesn't really degrade by itself (50+ year lifespan) - and you can use a toner like selenium to convert the metallic silver into silver selenide which is even more stable, easily 100-200 years+ (note that this is generally done with prints but it also works with film).
Color films are generally considerably less permanent because you can't capture color using metallic silver unless you have one negative each for red, green, and blue. You can do that though, the TechniColor "3-strip" process did this and it's actually extremely stable for its time. It was also used for the color series of Magic Lantern glass plates from the Prokudin-Gorsky survey of 1905 [0].
Modern negative films are decent if stored properly, but early color negative films were pretty disastrous in terms of long-term stability.
Color slide films in particular are actually quite decent as long as you store them properly (cold, and out of light). Kodachrome (K-14 process), in particular, was remarkably stable because there is actually no dye in the film itself - it's created by reaction during the (incredibly complex) processing, so (again, if properly washed) there is nothing left to continue reacting and "fade" the image out. Properly processed, Kodachrome does actually approach the stability of B+W film. The only thing that really degrades it is exposure to light (i.e. projecting it or leaving it in a window).
Many early film bases were problematic though, because it was essentially a parallel effort with basic materials-science research in plastics. Nitrocellulose is super flammable and many early theaters burned down as a result, it was replaced with acetate "safety film" which tends to go vinegary, finally everyone settled on polyester. Nowadays you can have a pretty good expectation of the storage properties of our plastics.
Anyway, to make a short story long - you are assuming the question by adding "a well-thought-out digital archive". You can't pick a random instance of film storage and pretend that's representative of a modern, well-thought-out effort at archival. People did all kinds of dumb things in the past - South Carolina's constitution is falling apart because they laminated them back in the 60s and now they're turning to vinegar too [1]. The equivalent in digital terms is a random paper tape from the 60s pulled from someone's attic, or a DVD that was scribbled on with an alcohol-based marker and left on a spindle somewhere. Or someone's VCR bootleg of the first rough-cuts and rotoscope layers of Star Wars (see "Deleted Magic" [2], it's amazing but wow is the quality terrible in some of them).
It's always going to be possible to store some relatively stable physical media, that's the easy part. The problem with digital is you then add additional tasks of loading and interpretation on top. Even if it's stable, how do you get that Quadruplex video tape into your computer? Is there a driver that interprets the filesystem? A codec (ideally open-source)? Is there a sync signal in the medium that might degrade (like VHS)? etc etc. Yes, these are not insoluble problems, but they do add a huge threshold to get over. It might be worth doing to save Star Wars but it's not going to happen for Uncle John's photo collection.
Consider something like the task of encoding a message to an alien race. You have to provide something like a Rosetta Stone to help make sense of your format. Or you could just send a phonograph which can be read by many different methods (laser measurement is the coolest). It's a pretty solid assumption that there will always be basic instruments for physical measurement like lasers and reflectometers, and that's all you need to interpret a basic medium like B+W film or a phonograph. Although I suppose how dare I assume the visual wavelength of an alien species! /s
On the other hand - if you are going at it thoughtfully, i.e. periodically rotating your digital storage medium to whatever the standard is at the time, and you retain sufficient backups - the chances of there ever being a total discontinuity in migration path, or a total loss of knowledge on how to interpret the format is relatively low. The going at it thoughtfully part is the key though. Again, nobody apart from a handful of archival specialists or enthusiasts can really read a random minicomputer tape from the 80s, and that's only 30 years.
I personally started noticing bit-rot on a significant fraction of DVDs that I burned within 5 years (at least 20% of discs). Now I use DVDisaster to encode extra parity/recovery data on a rolling basis - disc X contains a 20% parity file for disc X-1, with the most recent kept on my HDDs, so that I can "chain" backwards through them.
Still though - imagine the kind of digital files that were made in 1995 with MOV files or whatever. Now compare them to the high-resolution 4K scans that are made from the same films. That's really another problem with digital, not just archival - the bits are what they are, you can't go back and try again when technology is better.
[0.0] https://www.flickr.com/photos/prokudin-gorsky/
[0.1] https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/making.html
[0.2] http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/prok/
[1] http://www.npr.org/2017/02/21/515410087/an-attempt-to-save-south-carolinas-historical-documents-is-destroying-them
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2r4Nffrc6Y (there is also a Deleted Magic Revisited DVD with better quality and some more footage - finding it is left as an exercise to the reader)
"Why Star Wars is a terrible documentary."
I'm going to go against the grain and say: don't watch these.
Or rather, don't prioritize watching these. Try to balance out movies and books related to your profession or hobby with those outside of it.
The world already has enough stereotypical geeks loving Ghost in the Shell, Star Wars and Star Trek, it needs more geeks having an interest in what "regular people" do and like.
I flew on Emirates a few months ago and not only did they indeed have seat-back screens, they also had a really nice selection of movies. Lots of choices, including a number of 'sets' like the entire Star Wars series, the entire LOTR collection, etc. Nothing can really make a 14 hour flight good, but I was pretty satisfied with the quality of the hardware and content on the Emirates plane.
Right, there is such a point, and it's exactly how things are priced now. Bakeries already have to turn out some profit.
I should clarify that this works for commodities but not for monopolies, eg Disney can jack up prices for new Star Wars movies all it wants, as SW fans don't really have a choice :) But for groceries, clothes, texh, etc, it does work
> Anything you need to know about the world is in a table somewhere
No it isn't. If I read an article about the Volkswagen emissions scandal, what table do I look in to figure out how much consumers will care, and how aggressive various governments will be with their punishment? When Disney buys the rights to Star Wars, where should I look to see if it's worth what they paid for it? Should I rely on data from 30 year old movies, or look at merchandise sales or something? If I start seeing a lot of articles about climate change and the dangers of fossil fuels, should I sell my stock in Exxon?
Not that humans are particularly good at this stuff, but I don't think computers will be as good or better for a long time.
> VHS: 1976
"were so" != "nonexistent". Compare the home movie experience of 1994 to that of 201x. 'On-demand' wasn't even a pipe dream in 1994.
> I think seeing a movie in a theater is more social than technical
Maybe for teens who gather in cliques, but otherwise we're just going to disagree there.
> He's talking about Star Wars and Lord of the Rings,
The Star Wars middle trilogy was schlock. They were terrible stories. They sold on hype, colour and motion, and brand recognition. The first one even had a damn half-hour advert for a podracing videogame in the middle of it. And Lord of the Rings was an adaptation of the most successful fantasy novel ever (the genre-defining one at that); not exactly a typical datum. How many times can you do that?
Don't get me wrong, I'm of the opinion that hollywood should spend a million less on special effects and a million more on screenplay, but the whole "people prefer good stories" just doesn't pan out when it comes time to open their wallets. For example, Lord of the Rings had been done a couple of times before in movie and TV form, and it wasn't that popular in that form... until it had mindbogglingly massive special effects and money thrown at it.
Anyway, if you think that the Star Wars prequels were good stories and that pulled the punters, I strongly recommend you watch Plinkett's reviews of them[1] - the voice is annoying, the reviews are mostly funny, but really he eviscerates the exceptionally poor storytelling in them. In there there's even an excerpt from an editor's session where Lucas and Co. are talking about a problem with the ending, where they have the viewer rotating through four very different emotions from four different plotlines in only 90 seconds, none of which can be excised as they're all concluding at the same time... and the mood is very much "we've fucked this up".
[1]http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/star-wars/
I slightly disagree with everything you said.
> Pulp Fiction wasn't created at a time where > home movies were so widespread
VHS: 1976
Pulp Fiction: 1994
I'm not sure what you mean, then, by "home movies." If you mean "home theater," well, even middle-class people were spending loads of dough on big-screen TVs and hi-fi surround sound.
By "home movie" do you mean the ultraconvenience of streaming Netflix, Amazon, and Youtube? Then you probably have a point, even though it wasn't that hard to drive down to Blockbuster.
> If a movie is character-driven, > there's not a lot of benefit to seeing it in a cinema these days > as opposed to the comfort of your own home. > Big effects on the other hand, they benefit from the cinema experience.
I think seeing a movie in a theater is more social than technical.
>> The point is that people want interesting, >> well written movies with great stories.
> If they did, then these films would be the blockbusters. > Whereas Adam Sandler's films were routinely panned for being crap, > yet routinely pulled in 8 figures.
I think you two are talking past each other. He's talking about Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, which check all the boxes in Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. But you think he means The Remains of the Day or some other literary adaptation that nobody really likes. So as a contrast you pull out low-brow comedies, the cinematic equivalent of going out and getting drunk. But those same audiences also went to see Lord of the Rings.
> Rogue One: A Star Wars Story… would be impossible to do without CGI.
It's a prequel to a movie that had exactly one computer generated element in it, which was a wireframe model that took so long to render that they couldn't re-render it when the final design changed.
They _chose_ not to make it without CGI. It wouldn't have been impossible.
edit: I'll just leave this right here - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034928/
That's reasonable, but again this is the #2 grossing film for the year in the US. #1, #4, #5, #7 where PG kids movies. #3, #8, #9, and #10 where comic book movies in a long string of comic book movies.
So, yes revenue was down, but the movies where also very derivative. The top grossing films adjusted for inflation are Gone with the Wind, Avatar, the first Star Wars, Titanic, The Sound of Music, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, The Ten Commandments, Doctor Zhivago, Jaws, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
The Force Awakens might make #10 on that list while being the only franchise movie to do so. But, no movie from 2016 is even close.
I plan on seeing 8 and 9 (and the intervening Han Solo movie) in the theater on opening day with my brother, like I have for the previous 2.
You keep comparing "Star Wars" to "The Land Before Time". I think you vastly underestimate the popularity of Star Wars, particularly the past 2 movies.
There's definitely a move from the theater to on-demand streaming platforms for all movies except giant movies like Star Wars, so I think the author is right that the theatrical experience will see audience attendance continue to drop. Also making movies that can play for audiences around the world does mean that the dialogue has to be very simple and/or reduced. I think Jason Bourne had 50 lines of dialogue total in the latest Bourne movie for this reason. Without dialogue it does get harder for great actors to shine (Chaplin & Keaton excepted). As movies have gotten less culturally specific, they've also gotten less culturally relevant and this minimizes the importance of directors, writers, actors, and movies as art.
The author's inexperience in the industry shows though in this article. Crews are extremely efficient. Movies are made one shot at a time and when you have big crews made up of different departments (art, camera, sound, lighting, vfx) they have to work essentially in very quick shifts. For example, the camera move is set, then the actors step out and the lighting crew lights the scene, then lighting steps out, art dept. steps in and works, then the actors come back in, etc. To an outsider it looks like 90% of the crew is just standing around doing nothing, but it's much more efficient to work that way and safer too. So I think the author is putting too much blame on union crews for inefficiency.
Also, the author completely omits the marketing costs of films which increased hugely once TV advertising was used to market movies. Marketing costs are one of the main reasons that movies have to basically be blockbusters to make money. A TV ad spot for Star Wars costs the same as a TV ad spot for an indie film.
The idea that CG actors are going to replace real actors en masse is not realistic. I work in visual effects and, trust me, it's a lot more work than this author realizes and is not cost effective unless an actor has died in the middle of your shoot.
I also don't see editors getting replaced by A.I. for films or TV/streaming. Maybe for wedding and vacation videos or perhaps as a tool for reality TV editors to help select shots from the massive amount of footage. But film/TV editing is now an extremely efficient process thanks to digital editing tools like Avid or Premiere. A single editor can cut a film almost as fast as they can think at this point (okay a bit slower). Having to screen 50 versions of an edit produced by AI (and then do rounds of editing notes that way) would take longer than having a good editor just cut the movie.
Don't get me wrong, the theatrical movie experience is going to keep going down hard. I think the biggest threat to movies is that for the most part they don't matter much to the culture any more. But this author's lack of experience in the industry makes some of his predictions suspect.
Forget the action movies and funny comedies, where are the sci-fi movies??? And I don't mean some stupid movie about a guy living in what appears to be the modern world sans display screens and talking to his earphone, I mean movies with spaceships (and especially spaceships with elaborate corridors). The 70s and 80s were chock full of these movies. And no shaky-cam back then either. So far, all we've had is Star Wars--blah (yet again, Hollywood milking an old franshise), and Prometheus in 2012 (again, milking an old franchise).
Supposedly we're going to get a few spaceship sci-fi movies this year, including "Passengers" which looks promising. But we've gone quite a long time now without much in the way of sci-fi.
I was born in 1970, and even I couldn't see movies after they left the theatre for most of my childhood. That's why "novelizations" were a thing. People like Alan Dean Foster would write novels based on screenplays. If I wanted to "see" "Star Wars" or whatever after it was out of the cinemas I would reread the novel. And novelizations were often the only way to "see" a movie you missed as well.
Similar experience with the latest Star Wars. I saw Nightmare Before Christmas years ago and it was all in focus (memory hazy here) and the 3D distance made it look like it was a play, on a stage. I absolutely loved it. I've never seen another 3D movie since that I thought was good for the same depth of field issues discussed.
> Sure you can see those movies in non-3D, but they sure like having a lot of 3D versions in the theaters.
That's because large numbers of people like to watch 3D versions in preference to 2D, especially for movies like those in the Star Wars series (less so for, say, romcoms, which is why you don't see them in 3D at all.)
8 Theaters showing Star Wars movies, only one of those theaters is not 3D.... Sure you can see those movies in non-3D, but they sure like having a lot of 3D versions in the theaters. Nothing I like more than watching a movie wearing 2 pairs of glasses, especially if the second pair is really unfomfortable and don't fit right.
While there is a singular society that is focused on in both Star Wars and Star Trek, neither is homogeneous or complete. No one would watch if either were, because struggle would not be an option. Star Trek has plenty if conflict, even within the Federation itself. (please note, I won't go very deep into the nerd pit that is opened by this article, but the spelunking is there for the brave). Lies and deception to gain control of the military power was a VERY prevalent theme for multiple episodes and movies of Star Trek, which washes away the thought of an egalitarian utopia brought about by replecators and a just government structure. The conflict with the Klingons and the Romulans can be arguably pointed at as a false conflict with the Federation in order to cement more military power and societal control by the generals of Star Fleet (depending on time lines). In Star Wars, the Jedi Order is overtly communist and sent out to help bring an end to conflict over "petty squabbles concerning money and power" in order to bring about peace and communication throughout the galaxy. Again, this is also pointed out to be an imbalance in the way of the Force as much as the greed and anger of the Dark Side. True harmony comes through a balance of all things. This seems to be the overwhelming message of both of these sci-fi gems. Conflict will always exist. It is with in ourselves to calm the conflict inside us and take a look around with true curiosity and empathy, replecators or no. Communist or Capitalist.
I think there's a much stronger overlap of Star Trek and the political beliefs of it's viewers than the overlap of Star Wars and and particular viewer (maybe in part because Star Wars is so much more popular, or maybe because the part of the world I live in or my experience with individuals.)
Either way, it does not do well to look towards pieces of fictions for solutions to our real world problems. Of course, if we as a planet discovered advance civilizations on other planets, we would have to re-organize our entire political structure to deal with such threats. But that's not the case, and that's not the world we live in.
‘There’s something my dad made up which is he told me when I was little I was frustrated about rules in Movies and he said ‘How do you kill a Vampire?’ And I said ‘Stake through the heart, garlic, sunlight’ and my dad was like ‘No, kill a vampire however you want Vampire’s because don’t exist you can make up rules for any kind of thing you want’ - The Death and Return of Superman
Although the visual arts can offer unique and compelling perspectives (Apocalypse Now, etc) perhaps we should strive to scrutinize their work the same way a persuasive piece of writing would be.
Fever dream, but with oppressive taxation without representation. The dream exists only on the fringes. Outside the dusty cantenas it appeares a society in lockdown. That isnt libertarian but something closer to comicbook communism.
I have trouble pinning the political system in star wars. It has changed several times as the movies have adapted to new audiances (the politics of american focus groups imho). For that reason it isnt important and we shouldnt draw many conclusions.
Star Trek, particularly the television shows, very clearly describes a command economy with elected leadership. I'm not sure how much explication you'd want in that regard.
Star Wars, I'm not so sure. It seems to me that they spent a lot of time on that stuff and I just probably missed it, but in my defense, the films that focused on it were the most boring in the series.
I'm not sure how the economy of the Empire works, but I am pretty sure it's not a "libertarian fever dream" as suggested by the article. Most of the places in Star Wars are places not under the thumb of the Empire, and the closest place I can even see that isn't effectively a black market (like Mos Eisley) is Cloud City, which, of course, the government came in and shut down after promising it would allow it to operate freely. Where free trade does seem to operate (the Trade Federation) it leads to corruption and war. And let's not forget that Han Solo is a smuggler. He's in debt because the government caught him with contraband and had to lose it.
Star Trek also features many other economies, including that of the Ferengi, which are extremely materialistic. This is the focus of many DS9 episodes. And even the Federation crew somehow get their hands on money to spend; money that mysteriously can't be replicated. (And, in DS9, back on Earth, Sisko's father makes honest-to-goodness actual food, while Jean-Luc has a vineyard.)
Likewise, it's not clear how replicator use works; perhaps they have an allowance. The crew of the Enterprise barely use it, except for food. Their quarters are scarce. So either through monetary, social, or rule-based means, they limit themselves heavily compared to the average American today.
> I think the reason you have those kinds of holy wars among users of a particular technology...is network effects.
I find the holy wars are usually fueled by "fans" -- people less invested and less knowledgable in the topic. This is true of movies, bands, sports teams, phones, computers and cars.
The fact is if you work on the tech you appreciate that there are tradeoffs and know what your overall objective is (so are less likely to argue about things that don't get you there). Musicians tend to get along -- did the Beatles hate the Stones (OK, the Stones released "Let it Bleed"). I doubt Mark Hamill hates Star Trek or Shatner Star Wars. The catholic pope meets with the grand mufti of Jarusalem. Obama and Bush talked a lot in 2008 and 2009.
It's like the joke about academia being so cutthroat as the stakes are so small. Holy / Flame wars erupt among those on the periphery at best.
Well I guess there are different kinds of science fiction - sci-fi that's obviously fiction and doesn't try to pretend to be realistic - Alien, Star Wars, etc. - I'm fine with this - it's just the author taking you in to his own fantasy world - just like Game of Thrones doesn't try to describe how dragons get to be aerodynamic or explain the white walkers superior strength by using dumbed down science.
Then there's Sci-Fi that's actually beleivable - like The Martian - I'm OK with this as well.
But then there's this pseudo-sciency trying to look serious while actually being BS part like Interstellar, The Arrival, etc. The main point of science there is not to be a fictional setting but trying to give a feeling of realism trough sci/techbabble. I don't even mind cheap sci-fi drama movies, for example I liked The Fountain, but when they try to pretend they are realistic that's what breaks the immersion for me completely because I start to critically evaluate the plot and it just falls apart.
> More was expected of the audience back then.
The following year Star Wars was released, so I guess 1976 was the last year of movies with complex dialogue. :)
Or maybe, instead, there has always been a wide range of dialogue complexity in films.
Well Star Wars is the rare top 0.1% of works to become so successful.
I don't think derivative works should be protected personally. Is the world really better off with only George Lucas being able to make Star Wars movies? The fans would say no, I imagine.
Creators should be protected from pirates. Movies require a ton of money to make, and copyright protects their investment. And gives an economic incentive to create new works. Protecting derivative works doesn't really increase incentives for new works much. But it heavily restricts what others can create on it.
That said, it would be trademarkable. So you wouldn't be able to call it "Star Wars", or advertise it as canon. Or put the famous logo on it.
I read once that ancient Greek plays had lots of crossover and common characters that everyone knew. I think an alternative world without derivative work protection would be pretty interesting. Some of the best works I've ever read were fan fiction. They are technically illegal, and can never be put to print.
Devil's advocate: think about star wars. Did it make more in the first few years, or these past few years? How do we handle that? If anyone could produce a star wars item, think about all the artists, engineers, lawyers, authors, that currently support that industry and would then be threatened. (ie, books, movies, TV, music, video games, cards, boardgames, comics, websites, shorts, etc etc).
Everyones into Graphics programming, but what would I actually do with it?
The uses are myriad, you can build Star Wars Movies, you can build computer games. You can do CAD and 3D modelling and printing, you can visualize fluid simulations
But each is an entire field.
The same with Deep Learning -
You can do image classification for medical diagnosis. Self Driving Cars. Realtime Translation. OCR. You can model chemical reactions by doing latent space exploration. You can model gene-gene interactions. You can build a image recogniser to tell if your cat is on the couch. You can build an AI that plays GO, or any other system or game where the rewards are time-delayed and sparse. You can make it play Atari games.
You can stitch satellite images together. You can reconstruct parts of photos that are missing. You can colour black and white images. You can de-noise wind sounds from microphones. You can search for comets. You can monitor deforestation. You can count cars in car parks. You can search vast ocean areas for survivors. You can build security drones that fly around at night and look for anomalies. You can turn a webpage of unstructured text into structured query-able forms (see named entity recognition). You can create visual art (google: neural style transfer)
These are just a small drop of some of the cool things that are going on - and while it might be difficult for you to advance state of the art without a GPU cluster (just as it would be difficult to advance state of the art in Graphics programming) the hobbiest can certainly start in any of these fields, just pick one that inspires you.]
EDIT: I run a Deep Learning startup - if you want some pointers or help getting started, or would like advice don't hesitate to email me - it's in my profile :)
> The first 3 star wars movies was made mostly with props (miniatures).
If you bought them decades ago.
drivel on a site driven by technophiles
A lot of people became technophiles because of the cultural influence of films like Star Wars. Perhaps you haven't noticed how every new claim of holographic display technology, for example, is held up against the imaginary example from that film. Star Wars was unique for its time in presenting the future as combining both breathtakingly advanced technology with industrial decay and totalitarian oppression. The series also signaled a dramatic change in how women were portrayed on screen. The dominant communication medium has substantial power to shape society.
While the on-screen technology is fictional, the Star Wars series was also hugely innovative in terms of film production technology, giving rise to modern video editing software, sound design techniques, and many digital workflow techniques. It's had a massive impact on film technology and everything to do with it.
> I'd hate for us to get stuck using dead actors providing something mimicking a performance.
It's funny to think about it now, but Peter Cushing and Alec Guinness were the two "big name" actors in Star Wars, and provided some of the best acting in the entire series. The look on Alec Guinness' face when he mentioned Luke's father being his good friend said more than the accumulated total of prequel movies and spinoffs could ever hope to.
As experienced professionals (with experience working in low budget action films in Peter Cushing's case) they added a lot of nuance to and took ownership of their roles that I doubt face-swapped actors will have the authority to for a long time, if ever. To be honest, it feels kind of weird to me that they are resurrecting an actor who has been dead for such a long time.
Having said that, I think the actual technology is good enough for de-aging when the actual actor can give a performance; realistic CGI replacements for actual people have been improving since 2009 when a cameo by THE Terminator was believable enough (somewhat because it conveniently got its face blown off immediately). Jeff Bridges in Tron Legacy was not bad: http://www.danplatt.com/?cat=91, and you won't notice the de-aged actors in the latest Marvel movies unless you are actively looking for them.
They didn't but we did blow up dams in WWII. In fact, the death star run in Star Wars was based on a WWII movie called the dam busters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNdb03Hw18M
YMMV. For me the attempts at a serious story fall flat due to the amount of plot holes and asspulls. I've enjoyed suicide squad a lot more - it wasn't trying to be taken seriously, so the absurdity didn't clash. Same with the previous star wars - it went for a very simple story, so it was harder to mess up
Rogue One is pretty, sure. But the story is a chain of coincidences. No character, except maybe for Vader - who's mostly a cameo, actually tries to act according to its presented motivation, or tries to solve any of their presented problems. Throughout the movie character motivations are at best tertiary to firstly doing whatever is flashiest, or secondarily executing whatever morality cliche the movie is currently on.
Basically, every character in rogue one is unbelievably stupid. And then you get to the 'science fiction' setting where battles between capital ships happen at 200m (but the bad guys only start shooting after the obligatory 5 minutes of tactical discussions), shooting at a force field that just destroyed multiple ships that rammed into it is a thing that makes sense, etc. Etc.
Rogue One is still as much of a fairy tale as previous star wars moves; but it tries to pretend it's not. And that completely destroys any immersion the viewer might have.
This is unacceptable. There's no reason to ruin all of these movies and shows, especially since this thread is about something else entirely. In any online community centred around works of fiction, this would be a bannable offense. I'm flagging your comment for this reason.
And no, not everyone knows about Vader. I have a friend who watched Star Wars for the first time last week just before we dragged him to Rogue One.
Yes but if you go into a discussion of Star Trek movies complaining loudly about how bad you think the new Star Wars is, you're completely irrelevant at best.
When hackers hack in Mr. Robot, they talk about it in ways that actual hackers talk about hacking.
Mr Robot exists as it does because there are now enough people familiar with computers and the relevant concepts to constitute an audience, rather than due to any sudden insight on the part of screenwriters (of which I am one). We know, and have always known, that there's a distinct hacker subculture with its own linguistic tropes, ethos, etc. etc. and that there's been a big gap between reality and how it's portrayed in movies.
We also know (or learn the hard way) that there's a big gap between including enough detail for verisimilitude that will satisfy people who are competent in a particular field, and what the general public wants to watch - which is why you'll continue to see shallow or outright stupid portrayals of hacking in the entertainment industry's output. Why? Primarily [1] because the mass of people are just not interested in any given field that requires nerd-level commitment to understand. The larger the budget required for the film, the larger and more general the audience has to be, and the more accuracy and authenticity will be sacrificed in favor of spectacle and symbolism, which is the most reliable method for getting people to fork over their money in the first place.
Take a recent example from a different context - Jurassic World. The 'plot': capitalists and scientists employ DNA technology to produce a bigger, smarter, more aggressive dinosaur than has ever existed in nature; said dinosaur escapes from confinement and menaces everyone in the vicinity, especially the attractive hero, anti-heroine, and small children that are introduced early in the story. It's basically Frankenstein only with dinosaurs. Spoiler alert, the attractive proxy for the family unit survives and the bad dinosaur is defeated, though not before killing off the most ethically deficient characters by eating them like ham sandwiches.
Now, any biologists worth their salt would cringe at many scenes (if they watch such nonsense at all). Any genetic scientists had to suffer through yet another scene of an annoying smartass mumbling a few meaningless phrases about 'advanced gene splicing' while screens in the background display animations of double helixes and molecules. I think they might have mentioned CRISPR, I'm not sure and have no intention of watching it again to check.
Would Jurassic World have been better if it was more like Primer or Mr Robot, with in-depth discussions of structural factors and real-world constraints, and a hard-science approach that admitted of 1 (one) speculative assumption, from which the rest of the plot flowed organically? Sure,,,if you wanted to make Gattaca - Herpetology Edition. But though gattaca is one of my all-time favorite sci-fi films, neither it nor Primer will ever appeal to a mass audience and so films like that will never have the most recognizable actors or the most astonishing visual spectacles or the same sort of short-term existential anxieties that would result from having to run or your life from a creature the size of an apartment building.
People go to Big Movies to allay their quotidian existential anxieties (about which they often feel helpless) by seeing them safely reflected [2] in contexts that are outside normal human experience. How far outside is primarily inversely proportional to the budget and corresponding box-office performance requirements, while being secondarily proportional to the depth of the underlying existential anxiety.
Hacking in films has simply been a proxy for magic, in line with Clarke's observation that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Magic serves an important dramatic function as the source of the unknowable solution to the Intractable Problem with which the story's characters are presented.Thus, magic and its various proxies (specialist bodies of knowledge, from hacking to legal procedure to medical knowledge) is not a black hole which encapsulates the ignorance of the writer (although many inferior or lazy writers abuse it for that purpose) but a singularity which offers the possibility of escape from the otherwise-inexorable logic of the story world; it symbolizes the hope of a future discoverable solution to an otherwise insoluble problem.
A few examples from popular films may illuminate this. In Star Wars the insoluble problem is a spaceship that can blow up an entire planet. The magical device is The Force, a limited but still useful psychokinetic ability. In the Alien films the insoluble problem is an ambulatory disease; the magic device is an artificially intelligent android that can approach the alien closely enough to observe a weakness of some kind (but which has to be temporarily decommissioned first, like Dumbo losing the magic feather). In the Terminator films, the insoluble problem is nuclear conflagration as the crystallization of war in general; the magical device is industrial capitalism's promise of reducing economic inequality (represented by the vast technological superiority of the Terminators themselves).
To wrap up, Mr Robot hasn't killed the Hollywood hacker at all; it has just crushed his dreams and forced him into getting a day job, which is the function that television shows perform relative to movies. You'll still see hackers in movies, but strictly as lip service to a real and increasingly less aspirational employment demographic. This might seem like an odd conclusion to draw, but it's worth bearing in mind that that serial television dramas are general occupational comedies (I'm using the term 'comedy' in the technical sense of everything basically going back to normal at the end of the episode, even if the subject matter isn't funny at all). Consider cop shows; they follow a nice steady formula with an initial outrage, a bit of detective work, an uncomfortable moral confrontation, a setback, and finally a little bit of legal procedure. On the other hand if you watch a movie about cops, they almost invariably take place at the beginnings or ends of the lead characters' careers, and the Best Person in the movie almost invariably has to die.
1. there are other reasons but I don't want to turn this into an essay on screenwriting.
2. A few films address this dichotomy as their subject matter, albeit indirectly. All films have a political dimension insofar as the choice of subject matter and its portrayal reflect some aspect of their originating policy which the creators aim to praise or criticize, but relatively few dramatize the critical process itself; invariably, the subtext of such films is that critical awareness forces us to choose sides in an ongoing moral conflict; or put another way, moral agency comes at the price of other kinds. Generally in these films the lead has to either die or give up the old life completely in an anti-hero pattern.
There certainly is regression at all corners:
1. Try finding a close-up of the keyboard of the function key model on the MacBook Pro website. It seems it is just not there or I'm failing to find it. Previously Apple used to have a design section where you could see the products from all angles.
http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/
2. The online shop is just horrible. Even finding the store takes a while and the icons look like clip-art. Complete mess.
http://www.apple.com/shop/accessories/all-accessories
3. This is how the Apple Pencil and the Mighty Mouse are supposed to be charged:
https://i.imgur.com/CvcaGze.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/P8M8pqO.jpg
The Mighty Mouse is also an ergonomic disaster.
4. The iPhone case with battery pack has an aweful design. Who would ever let this pass?
https://i.imgur.com/DyvTE3w.jpg
5. It also feels like the "Designed by Apple in California" book was published 20 years early. It's just like the new Star Wars movie, all those recent sequels of the n-th iteration and Marvel comic adaptations. Nobody innovates anymore and people just replicate what worked well before or only improve it incrementally.
Edited in; that's a gliding test, so there wouldn't be any engine noise even assuming the original film had an audio track, and given it's a ramjet, even a full-up production aircraft would be gliding at that point in its flight profile.
In any case, the TIE fighter sound was created from whole cloth (actually "an elephant call and car tires on wet pavement", apparently) for the first Star Wars film.
There is an article somewhere about how Speilberg commissioned consultants to imagine the near future. What happens you get fresh, imaginative movie imagery loke 2001, Star Wars, Minority Report. Then fifty copycat movies.
Your first link is to one of a series of articles linking Star Wars to: Lawrence of Arabia; E.T.; the Seventh Voyage of Sinbad; The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly; Empire of the Sun; and possibly others. They can't all be major influences!
The start of the YouTube video puts the exposition of the attack from one film next to the exposition of the attack from the other. Is that really such a strong similarity? I'd guess a lot of war/action movies have a here's-how-it's-going-to-go-down scene. Some of the other pairings are closer - I think I buy the one with the line about the number of guns.
So, I see a Dam Busters reference, and that's interesting! But I'd need more convincing that it's used for storyboarding.
It's an amusing little experiment but there are a number of possible factors the person running it didn't consider that, I think, are more likely than his actual conclusions.
First, there is the possibility that Casablanca is not actually a very good movie. The author of this article claims that Casablanca is "the most famous movie in the history of film." That may have been correct a generation or two ago, but in the decades since Star Wars, I think "the most famous movie" is Star Wars.
I would agree that Casablanca is a very famous movie, and a fun movie, but having seen it in the theater, I didn't think it was actually a great movie. It is a relatively small story, and lightweight, and trivializes its period and events. It's relatively low in drama, and it relies heavily on the (at the time) star power of its leads, and aside from some clever catch-phrases, it is talky and the dialogue does drag.
Just talking movies of the 1940s, I would argue that Citizen Kane (1940), The Great Dictator (1940), The Third Man (1949), The Big Sleep (1946), Rope (1948), and Miracle on 34th Street (1947) are all better movies, more artfully filmed and more memorable, although perhaps some are more kitschy and Corny than Casablanca.
Certainly, one could expect that people reading the screenplay "slush pile" for agencies ought to be familiar enough with the history of film to recognize the story of Casablanca or at least some of the catch-phrases. But I think the "gatekeepers" are actually often the most junior, least knowledgeable folks in the industry.
Wow, I must be really bored today to write all that... eating my lunch and I can't be bothered to do anything but read Hacker News : P
The original Star Wars movies were largely shot in Britain, and used British actors for many of the roles, especially the Imperial officers and officials. Carrie Fisher's family had worked in Hollywood during the "golden age" of the mid-Atlantic accent and she had been sent to an elocution school in the U.K. just before being cast for Star Wars - although she admits that her accent changed a lot in the first Star Wars movie.
Why does all Star Wars movies use aristocratic British accent?
It's worth reading the entire series, beginning with http://endcrawl.com/blog/film-not-disrupted-yet-part-1/ .
While large tech companies are great at attracting talent, that doesn't create a dearth of talent going into smaller startups. The driver here is Part 1: the capital requirements for any high-quality project are huge and up-front. And as entertainment is getting increasingly saturated, there's no real way for a "unicorn" franchise to be born out of an indie flick. No upstart VC will take a bet on you making the next Star Wars, even if you're already an industry insider... and in that case, per the OP, it's much more reliable for you to work within the current system. And on top of that, industry fundamentals don't look good: from one of the links in Part 4, https://redef.com/original/the-future-of-film-part-i-us-film-is-not-a-growth-business .
Perhaps film is truly an industry in decline, and the disruption is already happening - not from Netflix and other content producers, but in the form of interactivity and mainstream gaming. Perhaps the monetization model there is simply better. Time will tell.
> and concluding that because they disagree, in fact all Star Wars movies must be pretty bad
No, I am not concluding that the TDD is bad, if anything, I am concluding that it doesn't actually matter. Anyway, I am not even clearly doing that, I just wanted to entertain the idea that some practices (such as TDD) can be placebo, so they subjectively feel as a good thing despite the fact that we cannot measure any effect.
Neither was my intent to touch the moral issue about placebos.. I think if it works for you, do it.
In fact, thinking about it some more, there can even be practices in SW development that have nocebo effect, that is, have no measurable impact, but make you feel worse. Daily scrum meeting comes to mind for me.
I can't speak for the other person, but from my reading, we don't actually have very different experiences. We seem to agree on the value of testing of large/complex project, but have a (minor) difference of opinion over the value of testing in very small projects. Indeed, I'm pretty sure we're deep into hair-splitting territory, as I do agree that TDD'ing small projects can lead to better code, I just don't think the pay off is as obviously big as it is for more complex ones.
It's like observing two fans debate which Star Wars movie is the best and the merits of Jar Jar Binks, and concluding that because they disagree, in fact all Star Wars movies must be pretty bad.
Serialized fiction has a fundamentally different structure from feature films. Even in film series, you don't typically have the sort of multi-layered narrative with cliffhangers that keeps people going from one to the next. Star Wars ends with the good guys winning and the death star blowing up. There's no reason to straight to Empire Strikes Back.
Depends on who you view as "the market".
There's zero competition in the distribution/publishing side of things for a movie - i.e a retailer can't choose to buy Star Wars from anyone other than Disney, or the Bourne films from anyone other than Universal.
They have no potential incentive to be more responsive to market demands. Market Segmentation is a great way to ensure the highest revenue per sale, so they sell it into each market for as much as the market will support.
Then there's exclusivity arrangements in the online side of things - so I can't get (say) Game of Thrones on Netflix.
In Australia I have to subscribe to Foxtel and pay a fortune for premium channels, and if I want to watch it online, well, I can get a pretty crummy quality stream in some other painful to use app. Or I can wait 12 months and buy it on DVD/Bluray, which are still only 1080p.
The distributors/publishers are free to fix that, today, if they wanted to - but they don't.
So griping about "regulations, laws and cronyism" doesn't ring true. (Well, maybe the last)
Star Wars, 1977 (the Death Star diagram), The Black Hole, 1979 (the wireframe model of the titular black hole-- drawn on a plotter!), etc. By 1986 we'd already had two entire films based around CGI-- Tron (1982) and The Last Starfighter (1984).
Hey, you seem like the kind of person who'd enjoy this: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/future-screens-are-mostly-blue/
Basically, whenever some sort of "dumb" design decision in a movie annoy you, try to come up with a decent explanation for why it's actually an intelligent design decision. It's a lot of fun!
> The most interesting lessons from sci-fi come when you assume, for the sake of argument, that everything is in sci-fi is there for a reason–even things that look like mistakes. There’s a word for this, apologetics, which usually refers to the act of attempting to close logical loopholes in theology.
> Take Star Wars, for instance, in the scene when Luke and Han Solo are in the Millennium Falcon blowing up TIE fighters.
> If they’re fighting in the cold vacuum of space, why do we hear the ships exploding? Sound doesn’t exist without air.
> George Lucas probably figured that a silent gun fight would probably have been way less dramatic. He wanted to make the scene feel real to the audience, even if it was less true to reality. And if we move from the point of view that what works for the audience will work for the user, we can ask ourselves–could this make sense? Is there an explanation that can warrant hearing ships exploding in space?
> Well, what if the sound is the interface? Audio is a much more efficient gauge of surroundings, since it spans 360 degrees, whereas vision only covers 120 degrees. It might be that there are sensors on the outside of the Millennium Falcon that provide 3D sound inside the gunner seat. So when we hear ships blow up, we’re actually hearing an augmented reality interface that Luke and Han hear. Maybe?
> With design thinking, there are logical excuses for every interface discrepancy. And it makes sci-fi that much more fun to watch.
> Would you "fix" a movie?
Yes, if I had the time and artistic ability. I've enjoyed various unofficial re-cuttings of Star Wars, different edits of Blade Runner, and so on. I'd put other things in the same category: upscalers for emulated games, texture packs for N64 games and Minecraft, mods for Minecraft and every other game under the sun, re-implementations of game engines or whole games that introduce features not found in the originals, etc.
> to make a full-on clone of the game.
Nintendo shut down Pokemon Uranium within 9 days, after 9 years of fan development. If they'd only called it Rucksack Goblins and made up their own characters...
I think that ways to extend an existing system in unintended directions are more interesting than most of the existing systems. Reinterpreting art is an art-form of its own.
I just saw the new Star Wars -- cofinanced by (e:) Alibaba films. In it, one of the moral cruxes of the main story was that the crew needed 'Unity'. I saw this as a subtle shift from american 'Freedom'. There's a <plot point, not super spoilery> point where some 'good guys' are being held prisoner. In any red-blooded American Hollywood Film, this would lead to 'GIVE US OUR FREEDOM' type resistance. In this movie, it led to 'WE NEED UNITY' resistance.
Maybe I am reading too much in to it, but it felt like a shift influenced by the additional target market of the East, and I don't see Hollywood as a source of affecting moral/civic unrest.
Did this work for anyone? Meaning; anyone got good (for them) suggestions? Where does the data set come from?
Am I blind or did I miss the button for 'I did not see this movie'? Because I didn't see quite a lot of the ones that I was asked my opinion on.
All in all, I always like these kind of things, but asking me if I like that Star Wars drivel 3 times in a row and then asking me if I liked 4 movies I never saw skewed my results a bit I think.
Keep improving though! If I can get only one 'wow' movie I never saw recommended, I would be really happy.
Just to add: there's also the Silver Screen edition [1], which is sourced from a single cleaned up 35mm film print, instead of from scenes spliced from various sources.
[1] http://thestarwarstrilogy.com/starwars/post/2016/01/15/Team-Negative-One-completes-35mm-Restoration-of-Star-Wars
You mean, the trailer for ghostbuster turned decades of anticipation to outrage, but in the case of star wars, the trailer was fine but the actually movie wasn't?
The take-away for game designers: The hook is the ability to walk around as if the world of Pokemon was this world. This is orthogonal to the depth of the game's mechanics and the casual/hardcore dimension. There is tremendous fun in anything that aids in pretending the world you're walking around in is the real world. Isn't that the main point of most childhood toys -- aids to "let's pretend?" Isn't that where the most pure joy comes from?
One should be able to effectively do this with any franchise or property that people care about. How about "force ghosts" for Star Wars? Star Trek: The Next Generation style stealthed "observation posts?" (As in the "Who Watches the Watchers" episode. [1]) Chronicles of Narnia? Bleach? Any wish fulfillment where someone might have hoped against hope that the world in the book/movie was somehow real. Finding such properties isn't hard, as this wish fulfillment trope is widely used in fiction. (I wonder if an augmented reality gold rush is going to cause a "burn out" of this trope?)
[1] - http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Who_Watches_The_Watchers_(episode)
tl;dr - researchers are a scared of increasing trend of 'violent' Lego toys mostly because of movie sets - Star Wars, Lord of the Ring, etc.
Yeah, really upset that they won't put my ideas in the next Star Wars movie too.
That's all I can think about when I watch SF movies with flying cars (e.g. Fifth Element, Star Wars, Natl Lampoon's Vacation).
Where do you park?
What happens if the battery dies?
Why is there so much cartoon physics?
You can't buy the original Star Wars movies for any price. They can only be had by torrent. It's one thing when the rightsholder wants money and you don't want to pay, but when you would gladly pay and they withhold the content, it makes no sense.
Its still a pricing problem. I recently wanted to watch the original Star Wars movies and noticed none of them are available for rent. I could only buy them for $20 each. That's a motivator for piracy.
I think piracy is definitely about price as much as access. I think when Gabe speaks, he speaks for Valve and defends its monetization strategies. Of course he's selling you the idea of access, he wants you to put your stuff on Steam, where he gets a 30% cut. Price still matters.
There's so much good stuff I can watch on Netflix and YouTube that it's not worth it to me to spend the time and effort going to a movie theater, buying a ticket, then watching a movie. Besides, I'm pretty patient, and I can usually wait until a movie I want to see is available for streaming or download.
I make exceptions for cultural phenomenons like Star Wars, where I think that there's a social advantage to being able to talk about it when everyone else is talking about it.
It's absolutely ridiculous for the movie to have a 22% score. I'm not even into fantasy/role-playing or the warcraft series, and I thought it was done way better than Star Wars as a movie about conflicting sides and war. Really was an epic and finely done movie, I'd give it a 10/10. There was very little "cheese" factor which is what you kind of cringe about when you think of fantasy movies. They really did the movie in a mature, adult way, with no cheese factor, and I respect Blizzard for that.
I think Blizzard isn't used to the movie scene so didn't pay off the critics like most movie studios probably do -- so they got blackmailed. Terrible how that works..
> Might even see the sequel, since warcraft starts slow but sets up some nice drama for the future.
For sure. They're set up to be a great fantasy series
The movie is based on the books. There are a ton of Warcraft books - I haven't read them but after seeing the movie I might.
22% on RT is ridiculous. I bet that goes up a lot over time. This story of good/evil people, where each group has good and evil people within it, along with good and evil magic is as good as star wars in my opinion, just in 2016-level graphics instead. It's another lesson that races, religion, etc. don't define whether people are good or not.
Warcraft made more money in China than the most recent Star Wars movie. The reason I've read is that Star Wars came out back before China had big cinema attendance, while Warcraft (1994) came out when China was modernizing. It's a big cultural hit.
Edit: check out this video of chinese audiences cheering for the Blizzard logo: https://youtu.be/l67mA7ah9qE?t=51s
I play video games that involve murder, and I wish I could disagree with you, but damn it...I can't. I happen to agree with everything you said.
I like to play a top-down 2D space RPG, which has lasers, missiles, and all of that. I want to find a way to justify that playing that game does not make a bad person. Is this possible?
Also, how would one make sense of enjoying movies like Star Wars?
Yeah, but the first Star Wars was way different and had an actual story and credible characters. Luca has basically forgot what makes the success of its movie in the first place.
The R2D2 reference is funny. The original Star Wars movie really is that old.
One of the most aesthetically "future proof" movies is probably 2001: A Space Odyssey. Compare Star Wars, released almost a decade later, and how the Stormtrooper armor looks dated (at least to me): http://i.imgur.com/sLhv0LJ.png
This is a great related essay: "HAL, Mother, and Father: Watching the sixties and seventies through 2001 and Alien." http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/01/09/hal-mother-and-father/
Oh, I know that, and I love the book and movie, I just thought that it was ironic that it was a talk with Andy Weir.
As science progresses, he could in fact publish new editions of "The Martian" with the relevant stuff corrected, a la Ridley Scott's numerous editions of Blade Runner, or, God forbid, Lucas' editions of Star Wars.
It's easy to think about interacting with a computer as a programmer, but "Computer, when does the next star wars movie come out?" is much easier for most people than "SELECT release_date FROM ...". Unstructured language is just super accessible to more people. Everyone knows it already! It's not just about conversation, but conversation towards tasks.
iTunes has most movies and most of those movies are available to rent. New releases usually start as purchase only and become available for rent after a month or two. Star Wars is a special case and is not representative of "most".
Nope, most are only avail to buy as I was reminded when looking for star wars with my daughter, no way I'm paying $20 to see a forty year old movie.
If you don't like the content in movies you don't have to watch them.
And now we have a tool to do just that. But even better we can choose not to watch just the bits we don't want to.
That means I'll be able to set the toddlers off watching Star Wars without having to spring into action at minute seventeen to fast forward past the smouldering corpses of Luke's aunt and uncle.
Apologies for the damage this caused you.
I'm very much passionated about all this. I remember when technology wasn't really at the center. I would never bother with the quality of VHS tapes. Watching Star Wars on a bad CRT TV didn't really matter.
The run for tech and visual is natural. I'm sure all generations had this. When it's gone you're left with timeless principles. What I'd call the 'classics'. Good thins have a good deal of it. And this classical features are related to the tech used to implement. More to how our minds find joy.
When I watch old movies I see them without the glow of the era they were born in. I see the framework behind, and how theatrical they were. How they faked most of things, with moving pictures instead of actors on a scene. But the rules are still there. Surprise, tension, suspense, exageration, timing, aesthetic, oddity, rhythm.
Hi, Thanks for making this, it looks useful! Just a note to say I think the search function needs to be a little more comprehensive.
For example, if I search 'star wars' it tells me the 2008 movie is available on Netflix (but ignores the others in the series). It picks 'the Simpsons' up as the Simpsons movie but doesn't talk to series and doesn't recognise 'game of thrones' or 'always sunny in Philadelphia' (although maybe they aren't available?) - either way; perhaps including the itunes store would be useful (I know they have GoT about the same as release date, so you can basically stream legally by buying per episode or season)
Otherwise the site looks very functional and clean, well done!
To try to understand what this feels like, there are some movies I can do this with, like Star Wars or The Matrix because I've seen them so many times.
Can't imagine being able to do this for everything I've watched though!
I can't argue without numbers, but I can say that I've known many female hackers. Perhaps the issue is less that they are out there and more that they stay outside the industry because the industry itself hasn't been friendly for a period of time to them. I suspect that is changing now, however, with the amount of women I see at events like Black Hat as both presenters and attendees. Also, extending the term "hacker" to its traditional meaning, I know even more women who program and fit the moniker hacker for their FOSS work.
And honestly, we all know the film industry is a business, but wouldn't more money be made with the inclusion of hackers from a variety of backgrounds? Star Wars blew records out of the water and one of the key heroes was black. While I wasn't particularly impressed with the story, I did love the actors and characters they presented. Strong female heroine, strong black hero. We are seeing more films with software engineers and software topics, and it just seems natural to acknowledge all areas of that world, from the dark net, to the underground, to the start-ups and the Enterprise.
I was thinking of a user defined schema or ontology for a wiki, allowing the user to also create simple queries for their own data. The example data for a lot of GraphQL tools is Star Wars characters, movies and space-ships. If you look at the Star Wars wiki, it can get a lot more complicated, but it's not something you would want to hard code because new types and relationships are being added all the type. The simplicity of the schemas and queries in GraphQL, and the existence of UI tools out of the box, it seems a lot more approachable than something like WikiData or Semantic Mediawiki.
"At one point the overhead lights dimmed, the orchestra began playing the theme of the film “Star Wars,” and a spotlight focused on an opening in the stage curtain through which Gammonoid was supposed to propel itself onto the stage. To my dismay the robot got entangled in the curtain and its appearance was delayed for five minutes."
I think an important part is that the typical "profitable" Star Wars fan isn't a kid anymore: they are in their late 20s to 40s. Probably white and male. Now with enough disposable income to buy a lot of stuff, and kids they'll take to the new film and buy toys for.
But what appeals to them isn't necessarily what appeals to kids, and while the parents pay for the toys, the kids pick the toys. Their market research might have indicated that this is what the typical Star Wars fan wants (or maybe wanted a few years ago, due to changing perspectives in the past decade that weren't apparent during the last rush), but they aren't selling toys to the people that are already Star Wars fans.
(Toys as in kids' toys, not "Collectibles")
Everyone cites profit, profit, profit as what makes Market Capitalism work, but even more important than profit is competition. Disney owns an intellectual property monopoly on the Star Wars universe. If the Star Wars toy lines have a ginormous blind spot and completely ignore the huge market of female consumers, then no one else can fill that gap--no one else can compete. The only recourse consumers have is to complain on social media, blogs, and in the news and hope the corporate overlords deem their consumer demands worthy of fulfilling.
Monopolies completely undermine capitalist economies. We see the same thing with utilities, where one company has a regional monopoly on the electric grid, internet service, or water, consumers suffer from the lack of competition. So the government steps in to regulate.
I'm not saying the government should regulate the Star Wars universe to ensure female consumer demands are met, people should instead flock to science fiction/fantasy universes that meet their needs, but--as you note--those other universes don't have the corporate backing to get films into theaters. I enjoy Star Wars and Star Trek, but after 40 and 50 years of playing around in these mythoses, I would really like to see new worlds explored more deeply by the mass public.
This is why I'm not such a huge fan of "but the market wants it" arguments, at least in our current society. The market has high barriers to entry (only one entity can make a Star Wars film, and very few can make a Star Wars-scale film) and is run by people who, evidently, have no idea what they're doing, and are still profitable and have no need to seek maximum profit. Their own jobs and raises are not threatened by the possibility that they could have been ten times more profitable, because there's no way for their bosses to know that. Rey action figures aren't on the market, so there are simply no numbers for how profitable it would be.
Same goes for startups. Given the barriers to entry in the software business, which are low but still very much nonzero (hence the need for VC), and given that VC can't fund all the possible ideas that want to enter, what's in the market is what non-consumer participants have decided in their wisdom that consumers will probably like. Which may well be very profitable, but is unlikely to maximize profit.
Which leads to a simple reply to PG's claim, "When you accuse Silicon Valley of x, you're implicitly saying x works well, which doesn't seem smart if you're against x." No, I'm implicitly saying that x works rather poorly, because Silicon Valley works rather poorly and is still profitable. It could be much more profitable.
Some interesting points in the article picking up on the mono culture in a lot of software companies and especially games companies, in my experience outside Silicon Valley, I think it's a programming thing in general wherever you are. After many years I'm quite tired of the endless Star Wars talk, references, and T-shirts that I have to endure from colleagues. I even like the Star Wars movies but there comes a point where I think we could surely shut up about it for one day. However, I have to endure it, I've worked in numerous companies and it's the same thing all over the place, the blah mono culture, I'd love to work with some of the people in this article.
That's a very interesting perspective. Personally I thought Finn was the most "normal" character in that film (meaning the one most like us). He's just a child soldier that not only found a way out of it but he worked his way to the rebellion, with no "destiny" or the Force.
IMO he doesn't have to be rich like Lando or powerful like Windu. He just has to be cool and portrayed positively, and I think he is. If he was like Jar Jar then yes, I'd complain.
Either way, we went from tech diversity to Star Wars, so maybe we should stop here :-)
Wasn't the hero of the last Star Wars movies black?
The main issue with ads is message saturation. Like how my wife decided to buy me (for xmas) Star Wars tix so we could both go see it.
Yes, I thought it was ok, but she had to hire a babysitter and in the end, if I'd been asked prior, I would've said no, or asked for a better movie (like The Martian).
I have the feeling ads almost always sell you something you'd have been better off not buying anyway.
If I wanted to understand a culture via their movies, I would not reach out exclusively for their serious dramas, historical pieces, and solemn biopics. I would certainly rope stuff like Star Wars in.
The way I see it, there was a fascinating trend in action movies throughout my life, when the hero went from plain good 100% hero (say, a late 80s hero), to a grizzled guy that's ultimately got his heart in the right place (Wolverine types, Die Hard types), to fairly despicable people that "go out like men" doing epic stuff (Walter White), to completely messed up manipulative people that are triumphant and that's it (House of Cards dude).
People find this kind of analysis very non-rigorous, but I often feel like the fact that these were successively popular with American audiences matches pretty well the changing self-image of America-the-nation. From pretense of full-righteousness to cynical "realism" and taking pride in "somebody has to do it" to "at least we're on top".
So, I think extremely deep reads of fairly shallow but resonant fiction are often very worthwhile.
edit: Of course, someone will point out that these are popular with different demographics and whatnot, that my cohort aged, etc.- I'm not going to turn this into a rigorous statistical analysis. It's just musings.
I'm not sure how old you are, but until movie studios began matching global release schedules piracy was the norm. This story is amusing because this is about people actually paying for content.
Hollywood along with every other major content producer has a marketing reach which is global. If people in these countries did not want to see the new Star Wars or listen to the latest American pop star it means that the marketing sucks! So what you are imaging is a world where the content producers are basically telling their potential audience to go F themselves.
There are underlying moral issues to this story. The first is censorship and blocking access to certain groups of IP blocks. Clearly this is getting written in to content licensing contracts and that's too bad. If an IP address is not doing something hostile it should not be blocked. The second involves asking extremely poor people for more money. Someone that makes $190 a month just isn't going to be paying the US market rate to consume content nor should they - and that absolutely is different than getting a below market or price subsidized physical product or item.
Yes for someone in Africa that $2 pays for a day's meal or more. monochromatic's $2 is not ending up in Africa perhaps. Their $2 is going towards seeing Star Wars in the movie theater. They'll add it to another $17. (I am using a metaphore here, don't know gp personally this is just tongue-in-cheek). Or maybe monochromatic also likes playing the lottery. It gives him an immense rush buying the ticket and selecting numbers and then watching how they are picked. It is even better than Star Wars. So it makes sense to spend it on lottery just like they might spent it on movies. They get entertaintment value out of it.
Lottery is based on giving people false hope and that bit of adrenaline rush. That short lived fantasy where they imagine what they'd do with the winnings. That costs $2. It is cheaper than a McDonalds' meal. People will pay a lot for hope, fantasy and dreams. Some can't control themselves and will spend the money on that instead of food for their children. But many won't either. A bit like booz. Some will become alcoholics and end up on street some will keep driking a beer with dinner for many years and be fine.
$43 is for a VIP type experience - smaller number of big reclining arm chairs, food and drinks delivered to your seat throughout the movie, etc. Similar to the difference between an economy and business class seat on an airline.
At the big-chain theatre that I saw Star Wars, the "standard" price for a non-3D movie is $19.50. However it's very easy to get discounted prices for any movie. I paid $12.50 for my ticket, booked it online a few minutes before I left home.
I'm quite sure that the extra dollars paid for the $43 movie ticket was going to the movie theatre, not Hollywood.
Also applies to all of Star Wars, which I struggle to reconcile with how much I enjoy (most of) the movies.
I hope not either. But this is a popular model in videogames, and it somehow both pissess off players and earns the studios tons of money.
You obviously can't apply it to every movie, but you could appply it to quite a few. For instance, there's little point in extra content for Inception, because the movie world is defined by the start and the end of that very movie, and as you said, it has to make sense in its basic version. But consider things with already established franchises. I Disney would start publishing DLC sub-stories to the Force Awakens, I'm betting that every hardcore Star Wars fan would feel obliged to see them. The world portrayed in the movie is much bigger than the movie itself, and is has communities formed around it. To participate in the fandom, you need to be up to date with the canon. I'm pretty sure it could work with Marvel Cinematic Universe as well.
Then there are movies for which such a move would be a gamble. LotR and Hunger Games are franchises too, but I don't think they're strong enough to support DLC money-grab.
Anyway, enough suggesting ideas to them :). I absolutely hate DLCs. I just couldn't resist discussing the concept in the abstract.
Wow, $43 (or even $23) is crazy. I just checked, in my city (in Germany) Star Wars costs 13€ (AU$20), and that's the English version in 3D with shutter glasses. "Normal" movies (no 3D, no excess length) are 7-8€ (AU$11-12.50). That's like... half of what you pay. Is Australia generally that expensive? :O
What you're saying is true, but it's also interesting to me that studios could potentially get by with less.
Young Harrison Ford in the late 1970s might have been willing to trade away the use of his likeness in future Star Wars films for a relatively small consideration.
In the future, if a studio can find a relatively unknown actor who wants the work, it's possible they could do with a digitally-produced likeness, in case the original actor doesn't want the job. (Sort of an augmented version of the SNL contract)
I agree w/ you on this, I used to argue the other way w/ my aunt when I was 5 lol, but I grew up and realized the difference. Star wars is a Space Fantasy, science fiction while not ALWAYS accurate hinges on at least trying it's best to be 'real' or use as much real science as possible. Star wars on the other hand tends to put the technology and science on a back-burner, and focus more on the story and character arcs. Here's a good stackexchange article asking the same question:
http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/46481/did-george-lucas-consider-star-wars-to-be-science-fiction
And here's a quote from that: "No. Lucas often used the term Science Fantasy. He never referred to it as only science fiction. Star Wars doesn't hold itself to use science: space craft bank in a vacuum like airplanes do in air, there's the Force (a type of magic or at least metaphysics), .... Star Wars is about epic story telling and not one to get caught up in details such as physics and using the scientific process to solve a problem. This is also why it's felt that JJ Abrams is a great choice for directing Star Wars movies, much more so than Star Trek which spent much effort on not violating laws of physics or at least having a really good technical explanation why something works. Star Wars doesn't attempt to use science to solve problems where as science fiction series such as Star Trek expose science to the audience in an attempt to engage them as to the difficulty of the problem, some possible solutions, and how to conduct experiments to decide upon a solution."
An odd thought, but perhaps the decline in editor numbers also has something to do with an increase in the number of wikis in general, mostly aimed at specific audiences and about specific subjects. Back in the early/mid 00s, Wikipedia was the site you'd contribute to if you wanted to write general encyclopedia entries about something that's now seen as fairly niche (like say, a certain TV show, film series, game franchise, etc), and from there you might become interested in editing other pages on less specialised subjects.
But now, thousands of wikis exist, about every subject under the sun. Many of those are very popular, have more welcoming communities, etc. So people don't join the general site any more. If they care for say, Star Wars, they join Wookiepedia. If they care for Pokemon, it'd be Bulbapedia. Or one of the many others listed here:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheWikiRule
I think he has all the right to criticize the new film. However I would disagree. I think many star wars fans enjoyed the retro style. I personally was disappointed with episodes 1-3 (midi-chlorians?). Many people asked for more X-wing and tie-fighter sound.
Movies were more enjoyable.
Now everyone has either spoiled the movie ahead of you, bitched online about how awful it was, analyzed the trailer and figured out all the surprises (or the trailer itself gave it away), or we're all tracking the weekend box office returns to confirm our choice of movie as the Winning Choice or as The Bomb That You Shouldn't See (But Will Be A Cult Classic in Twenty Years When It's Given a Chance)
Movies also stayed in the theaters longer. Remember when the original run of Star Wars lasted almost an entire year?
Yes. It is, in broad strokes, essentially a retelling of A New Hope.
The only reason the Death Star was destroyed in the first movie was that George Lucas was forced to essentially cram his ideas for the entire trilogy into A New Hope (which is why, absurdly, a second Death Star shows up later.) It wasn't supposed to be destroyed until the third act.
There really is no excuse for the new "Death Star" to wind up destroyed in the The Force Awakens other than fanservice. I honestly would have been more impressed if they'd shown the utter failure of the attempt to destroy it - given how much more massive the new thing was compared to the old, it just stretches even the dubious credibility of the problems with the original Death Star past the breaking point.
But... nope... they set some handheld explosives and blow up the whole planet what good. Just like they did two other times.
And honestly, i'm kind of ok with that. The movie's not terrible, it's just not that original. But after the prequels, I can't really blame anyone for wanting to play it safe - and I understand most modern Star Wars fans have never even seen the original trilogy, so for the target audience, it's possibly not old hat. George Lucas likes to say the Star Wars movies "rhyme," which basically seems to mean using the same themes, basic characters and plot points is intentional.
> The website publishes an average of 1,200 pieces of content a day with increasing amounts geared toward social media. Recent examples include “15 awkward photos of world leaders that explain 2015” and a spoof video called “The Galactic Civil War” that tells the story of Star Wars as if it had been directed by documentarian Ken Burns.
> Analytics dashboards will soon be added to reporters’ computers, and traffic figures will eventually be looked at as part of performance reviews, Mr. Baron said.
Having traffic figures as a goalpost in journalist's performance reviews is worrying. Especially when the company is churning out 1200 pieces a day. Sounds like Bezos is pivoting the Washington Post from news to entertainment. Hard to tell the difference these days.
>it is better to let go of the idea of walking into a movie in a completely pristine state with no expectation about what will happen in it //
I actually managed this pretty much with the new Star Wars movie - but then on the way in to find the screen was greeted with a massive poster showing lots of info about the movie. I averted my eyes. Then at the entrance there were sales staff touting character drink cups which successfully spoiled a couple of the characters who would feature heavily.
After the movie I watched a BBC program which supposedly reviewed the Star Wars franchise and promised no spoilers. Pretty much the entire plot and many of the scenes could be determined from the content they gave.
The problem I have nowadays is that trailers seem to include the entire plot, all major characters, all the best effects, all the most emotive scenes; ostensibly the entire movie in digest. These to me are very poor trailers.
Generally I agree with your points however, lambda.
If you make a movie called "Star Wars", sure. But (and please correct me if I'm wrong) making any derivative work, i.e. using the characters and stories - fan-fiction basically, would fall under the copyright regime. That's what I'm talking about.
But, your app, your marketing on the site(the movie & tv show images of copyright content) and comments here is called contributory infringement. https://ilt.eff.org/index.php/Copyright:_Infringement_Issues.
So, sorry you are making yourself liable by trying to do a work around what popcorn time was doing, as well your marketing on the site and the comments you leave here and elsewhere on the iNet makes you culpable no matter what country your in.
Overall your site looks awesome and I miss popcorn time and happy to see another similar app pop up. No doubt there will be tons more similar apps after yours gets shut down by the copyright dummies; dummies because they need to change their game/business model. Make the social experience of going to a movie theater something that makes that experience piracy proof and let piracy run rampant but they make money from it somehow. Let all of us hackers create amazing innovation around their content and they buy/own the best inventions... not sure, but they need to do something different if they are concerned about piracy. Though Star Wars did just make a half a billion dollars in one weekend and other films did similarly this year too, so they aren't suffering!
You are actually talking about how you believe you should be able to profit selling the original movies, if you're complaining about copyright. Trademarks are what prevent you from making a new Star Wars movie and those don't expire on a schedule.
Star Wars invented and perfected the tie-in. That was George Lucas' real and major contribution to movies as a business.
As someone that watched the Star Wars film for the first time relatively recent, I concur. I did not like ANY of the films at all (I watched them in the order they were released). The scripts of the first three seemed utter shit to me. It works as a family movie I guess but not one an adult should be able to enjoy. Needless to say this opinion makes me part of a despised minority but I understand why many people love the films and that many grew up with them. Just like I still love the Goonies many people still love Star Wars.
[STAR WARS: TFA SPOILERS AHEAD] I don't understand how you got to this conclusion. There were more interesting characters and missing backstory in this single movie than in the OT. Characters like Phasma, Maz, the old man that give Poe the map, Poe, Snoke, and the rest of the Knights of Ren. And while there were many parallels between the new movie and the OT, it also introduced and developed a ton of extremely strong new characters, namely Finn, Kylo, Poe, and Rey. My biggest gripes with the new film was Death Star 3.0 and the helo pan at the end, neither of which were really intricate to the story. Also the acting was head and shoulders above any of the previous films and the most impressive thing was how real everything felt, from the Stormtroopers humanization to the land battling and dog fighting.
> Star Wars is for children and always have been.
Ah, so the cowardly Japanese business guy stereotype complete with stupid accent, that's okay, because the film 'is for children'?
The concept that the Star Wars films are just for children is just nonsense that is meant to deflect criticism. They're clearly meant to appeal to all ages. Hell, the new star wars film is rated PG-13 (as was the previous one); children aren't supposed to be able to watch it.
Not going to read it due to the spoilers, but I give Disney a lot of credit. They've done pretty well by Pixar, and exceedingly well by Marvel.
Disney is certainly a corporate behemoth out to make a buck, but I really believe that it's accompany that understands these properties, and wants people to love them.
Disney knows fans will not continue to flock to prequel-quality Star Wars films. Even the die-hard fans have a limit. These movies need to be excellent if they're going to continue to draw audiences. George Lucas himself doesn't understand what makes the original trilogy so special to fans, which is why Disney is putting fans like JJ Abrams and Rian Johnson at the helm of these new movies. It seems like they're off to a great start. I have faith they'll continue to be great.
Edit: First sentence: I, not u. Yikes, what a typo.
There was some magic to the 80s childhood movies -- Star Wars, ET, Last Starfighter, Goonies -- that I don't think can be bottled. Whatever stories hold that place for our kids, I don't think they will be the same movies that did it for us. There's just something about seeing Star Wars in the context of that time, and it's not the same as seeing it now.
I absolutely enjoy Pixar and Star Wars films, along with many Dr. Seuss books which have messages not only directed towards children but also their parents reading it to their children on subjects like nuclear nonproliferation, anti-Semitism, dictatorial leadership, environmentalism, and in the case of Horton Hatches and Egg, not being a dead beat parent. I considered Star Wars just entertainment until my early 20s when I read Joseph Campbell which made me very conscious of what George Lucas and Disney were doing including the message of self sacrifice for a person's community, family, and friends. This means that George Lucas and everything from Disney [1] thoroughly rejects the libertarian philosophy of Ayn Rand using a language of myth and symbolism which according to Campbell connects deeply with children. That is Han Solo's character arc; he didn't care about anyone but himself when we first met him, maybe a little for Chewbacca, until he met the princess. She was the first person he put above his own self interests and the investment paid off when she put herself in harms way to rescue him. It's for children, the toys which children use to foster their imaginations are for children, the dress up customs for Halloween are for children, and Campbell explains that the particular myth of Star Wars is the coming of age story of a boy who leaves the safety of his mother to join the men.[2] Most people are heavily influenced by these stories. It's pseudo science but we understand what is going on with children who have nightmares of the Beast from Beauty and the Beast or Darth Vader. As for adults who play pretend and dress up in customs for play, they really miss the point of coming of age in the stories.
[1] http://www.thewritersjourney.com/hero's_journey.htm#Memo
[2] http://billmoyers.com/content/ep-3-joseph-campbell-and-the-power-of-myth-the-first-storytellers-audio/
> Star Wars is for children and always have been. If a bunch of adults complain that the films don't speak to them, there is something very wrong with their state of maturity.
As if Disney executives were shocked to find a bunch of 30-40 year olds lining up for late showings of The Force Awakens on Thursday?
Star Wars may be made to appeal to children in addition to the adult audience, but it's pretty obviously not "for children" exclusively. That's especially true of the prequels and now the sequels, which are obviously made to cash in on the nostalgia of people who grew up with Star Wars in the 80s.
If a bunch of adults complain that the prequels don't speak to them, it's because they're fully aware that their childhood nostalgia is being exploited for cash, and the exploiters couldn't even be bothered to do a good job of it.
> Star Wars is for children and always have been.
That's objectively false, though. Star Wars marketing quite clearly targets both children and adults; much more so than, say, Pixar films, which are marketed solely at children despite arguably being more mature (in the "thoughtful and intelligent" sense, not the "sex and violence" sense) than Star Wars.
You're actually trying to say that adults who like Star Wars are childish, and you're welcome to your opinion. But if you choose to back up your opinion with facts, you need to pick facts that are true. There are many exclusively kid-targeted properties that attract sneering attention from adult fans (mostly TV cartoons, in my experience), but Star Wars doesn't fit.
I watched the films in Machete Order[1] with my girlfriend in advance of the premiere of The Force Awakens last week. She hadn't seen any Star Wars movie in 15 years, and the Machete Order worked out quite well. I'd considered watching one of the two hour long "Phantom Edits," but it seemed too difficult to find one of good quality.
Do you have a recommendation on a specific edit?
[1] http://www.nomachetejuggling.com/2011/11/11/the-star-wars-saga-suggested-viewing-order/
Star Wars is for children and always have been. If a bunch of adults complain that the films don't speak to them, there is something very wrong with their state of maturity.
I wasn't passing judgement on the films whether they were good or bad. I was pointing out like the chef, after Lucas gained popularity, people started to attack him and his films with harsh criticism. Maybe the criticism of the chef is legitimate, maybe is earlier stuff was better than his latter stuff -- I don't know. My point is that criticism is an inevitable part of creativity and people can't make works of art to satisfy criticism because they will crush under the pressure. If the motivation for this chef is the applause, feeling accepted, and getting accolades, he is going to have a nervous breakdown.
This chef, George Lucas, Mark Zuckerberg, and before him Bill Gates can't catch a break from the shit talkers. I'm not passing judgement. But if you base your self esteem on prestige be prepared to have people tear that prestige and your self esteem away with it.
Markering, social engineering. Hot or not, learn from it!
Everyone in the marketing business should learn how it's done from such premieres (other examples are Bond, Hobbit, Harry Potter).
I think those strategies would not work with a completely new title. Here you have a series that spans over 2-3 generations and through marketing you can create this illusion that this is an incredible cultural phenomenon, and that everyone is waiting, and that it's a part of the saga, and that without watching it you cannot call yourself a member of the polite society, or a middle class.
Look closely at what kind of arguments are used in the marketing messages. "This episode fits to the style of the other films". Now do reverse engineering on that statement - they took focus groups, sociologists, cultural anthropologists, ask people questions: "what are you most afraid of with the new episode", they say: "that it will spoil the style and mood of the previous movies". Now take 2-3 most repetitive statements and construct the smart message that will cover these problems. This is how it's done.
Another element is that the screenplay is written in such a way, that this episode has to be both - relating to the previous episodes and satisfy the fans, but also has to have a self containing story, that will be understood by those unfamiliar to the series. From the marketing point of view the Star Wars fans are not really the target group, they will go to see it no matter what. The real challenge is to broaden the fan base, attract those uninterested. Make the girlfriends go together with the boyfriends, and parents together with the children. Big bucks rule.
I particularly like the way they insert the information into the news reels. Of course the TV stations are being paid for it and the message is well tailored, but goes seamlessly well with other pieces of news. Very few movies are honored like that.
On a technical level - I think Episode I in 1999 was the last one shot on 35mm film. But actors spent most of the time in the blue box, so the editing deserves applause. Episodes II and III were shot on video making the composition with the CGI much much easier. But this time they went back to shooting on film, natural scenery and models. Interesting development. It's also interesting how they are able to release it on all different formats, 2d, 3d, IMAX etc. all at once (like games on different consoles).
I'm slightly critical from the point of view cinematographic art, but I'm admiring it as a global social engineering masterpiece and a business enterprise.
> It's funny how all the real fans agree that 3/6 movies were terrible.
I don't think this is a unique phenomenon. Although the real fans hate it, I'm sure that some Star Trek viewers enjoyed Spock's Brain, or Threshold (well, I take that back; no one liked Threshold).
It's also "cool" to dislike Special Edition versions, and the Clone Wars show, but that doesn't mean they're bad, or even that fans actually dislike them.
Additionally you have people who watched the originals so many times that they were just disappointed with the prequels (it's hard to make a prequel right, and even if it was nearly perfect, it wouldn't be what the True Fans hoped for). Star Wars was never made for the real fans, because that is too small a niche to really target; in the same way as Star Trek 2009 made True Fans feel betrayed, I think the prequel trilogy disappointed them.
Some of it's status. Some of it's genuine new desires. Sure, I wished it wasn't so hot. But before air conditioning, you wished it was October, when it wouldn't be so hot. Now you really want to have air conditioning.
If you were trying to write a book, you were irritated at how clumsy using a typewriter was, but you didn't know that you really wanted a word processor - until there were word processors.
You didn't want to see the new Star Wars movie until there was a new Star Wars movie. Then you wanted to see it. Why? Maybe partly status ("all my friends will be talking about it, and I don't want to look clueless"), but probably more because you thought the first set (Episodes IV - VI) were really cool.
I could go on and on. But if you think in terms of Maslow's Heirarchy, new desires make perfect sense. As you get to a new level of the heirarchy, you start wanting what's on the level above that.
I grew up with Star Wars. The first three movies were pretty good. I've never been able to finish any of the other three. The new one doesn't interest me, so I won't be going to see it in the theater.
From what I've observed, the new movie is being very heavily marketed. Facebook now has the option to stick a light saber on your profile picture. The merchandise is all over the larger stores. In my opinion, it's mostly hype due to its prevalence from marketing.
From this cherrypicking article to various other online forums critical of them, it's pretty hilarious how recently, every single crevice of the Star Wars movies is thrown into the town square naked, and then being loudly decried for it being an inconsistency/plot hole/any other logical deficiency. All the while forgetting that in the 70s, a business man with an acumen for world-building conceived these space operas. Space operas whose largest overarching theme is a simple struggle of good vs. evil. I'm partially convinced Disney is to blame for this, most likely stoking the fire behind-the-scenes.
It's 10-12 hours of pulp-grade movie. You can project a lot onto it, because in the end, there isn't much there to either draw conclusions from, or contradict your interpretation.
This gets squared (or exponentiated) if you, like some people have done, decide that the films may themselves be unreliable narration. Which I think is not a useful decision, because you pretty quickly run smack up into the fact that these are just fiction anyhow in this case; the films were not written to stand up to that interpretation.
I think it's particularly difficult to draw any sweeping conclusions because it's not clear to me that the movie universe is written carefully enough to justify them. For every Jedi epigram, you can find a Jedi violating it, or for some epigrams, it's hard to find anyone actually doing the thing. Jedi, for instance, repeatedly act in a way that can be described as "fearful"; is the Jedi proscription against fear simply referring to the brute emotion, or anything that can be described as fearful? Honestly, the best answer is probably that it was not written to be able to answer that. Are the Jedi "hypocrites", or is the writing just too clumsy? Especially after the prequel trilogy, I can't help but think it's the latter. (And I do not mean that as a fashionably-snotty thing to say; I really don't think they were well-written. But they don't necessarily deserve the opprobrium heaped on them; they were not especially bad by Hollywood standards. I'd call them pretty average on that front. Most Hollywood movies are philosophically and ethically really quite mushy.)
One must also bear in mind that from a "hard science fiction" point of view, the concrete and scientifically-proved existence of "The Force" may change things. In our real world, I think almost everything that Yoda says is gibbering nonsense, but in his world it may be entirely true that fear inexorably and directly leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering. There's a mechanism for it to do so that doesn't exist in our universe, and we should expect that if "The Force" is real that it means that there are things that are perfectly true in Star Wars that aren't true here, making it even harder to draw sweeping conclusions.
The conclusion I come to is that this is a fun movie series that, in the end, simply doesn't stand up to this level of analysis, as evidenced by the fact the analyses always seem to simply be the analysis' author writing about exactly what they already believe, dressed in Star Wars trappings.
Don't stop with Star Wars. Just about every morality play can be analyzed this way. It's a trope that goes all the way back to antiquity. It's one of the first things I think about when I watch such a movie. Is this political order really something that needs to be destroyed? My answer winds up almost always being 'no'.
My favorite is this treatment of The Dark Knight:
https://www.reddit.com/r/FanTheories/comments/3insgr/joker_is_the_hero_in_the_dark_knight
I enjoyed the otherwise-awful movie The Seventh Son because of the playfulness they take with world-building. The heroes and their quests all wind up being a part of the broader political structures of the world rather than those structures being the stakes. I like it when the very plot doesn't take itself seriously.
Forget the specificity of Micky Mouse, as that character just represents Disney's brand. Do you really think a company should lose their brand after X years? Disney doesn't care about Steamboat Willy, they care about people selling knock-off mouse ears, which comes with Willy entering the public domain.
I was just listening to an NPR segment on how Elvis Presley's image has become tainted by cheap crap, and that inspired Frank Sinatra to ensure the same doesn't happen to him. His biggest fear was that his face would be sold on a coffee mug. Should anyone be able to do anything with Frank Sinatra's likeness now that he's passed?
Should the estate of George Lucas be able to create new Star Wars movies in X years to compete with Disney's Star Wars movies in effort to undo everything they added to the universe "Because it wasn't George's vision", even though he sold off the rights?
I know I'm throwing hypotheticals and edge cases out there, but I just want us to focus on the issue deeper than "What reason is there to keep Steamboat Willy out of the public domain?" There's no good reason. But there are tons of good reasons to ensure people can't profit off an active brand's image.
I don't think Star Wars has been not mainstream since the eighties. There's a lot of deep-nerd stuff around the games, the licensed properties, etc., but the movies are pretty foundational to modern culture--in the United States, at least. (A good friend of mine uses them as an analogy to how Americans approach politics. "Everybody loves Star Wars, but Americans are too afraid to be Jedi.")
I'm not sure we're social enough though.
Content industries have killed themselves by selling content as objects-you-own (or rent briefly.) Even Netflix etc work on this model. And torrents are just objects-you-steal.
If the content industries had done more to sell content as an element in a social network - share with friends/family, meet strangers, enjoy relationships of all kinds - they wouldn't be so threatened by P2P. The breakout franchises - Star Trek, Harry Potter, Star Wars - all have this personal and social element. Direct-to-DVD crap movies totally lack it.
Ironically - or maybe not - P2P provides more of that social element. People make requests, comment on uploads, build reputations, and sometimes organise private sharing clubs.
I'm sure torrenting wouldn't have become as popular without that social sharing element.
This is a silly viewpoint. I say this not out of some white-guilt self flagellation, but because if we hold these silly Star Wars level beliefs about Islamic extremism, we will not be able to effectively fight them.
Young people join ISIS not because they are "evil" (what, are they Darth Vader?). They join because ISIS makes a compelling case that the world would be a better place if it was rid of western domination. I'm not saying we should try to prove them wrong by being really nice or something, I think it's too late for that, but it helps to understand this.
ISIS gives them a clear path to rectify the situation. Terrorism is pathetic militarily, killing 100 civilians is no accomplishment. However it is brilliant strategically.
Terrorist attacks cause the western world to completely fly off the handle and give the terrorists everything they could ever ask for. So far, we've gifted them 3 countries (there's no way they could have ever invaded by themselves, but we did it for them). We've also gifted them with a huge number of weapons, which were originally intended for such entities as "the free Syrian army" and "democratic Iraq".
All of this is made possible by the cowardice of western morons whose entire education on geopolitics comes from Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. Please stop helping the terrorists.
That's actually unbelievable when you think about it. One could make the argument that Disney purchased Lucasfilms for a a great price. Disney bought them at a time when Star Wars games and the latest films were sub par.
Now Star War games look great + are on multiple new platforms (namely mobile), and the Star Wars films look great.
It's easy to forget if you run in geekier circles, but in fact not everyone is in love with the Star Wars universe. I think we underestimate how many people thought it was a great movie, but have no real desire to engage the universe deeper than that.
Just wanted to point out a link between AKOM and Star Wars (lightsabers actually).
AKOM was founded in 1985 by Nelson Shin, the one who came up with the special effects of the original lightsaber in Star Wars Episodes 4, 5, 6.
Here's an interview with him by CNN in 2007. I remember watching the video on youtube while back but cannot find it now. But here's the text of the interview.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/10/18/talkasia.nelsonshin/index.html
And this in the interview caught my attention.
I went to the States in 1971. When I arrived in U.S. at that time, the three major networks -- ABC, CBS and NBC -- started Saturday morning shows on a very large scale for children. This was a new movement in U.S. to bring the animation industry to life, but also to educate the children through this. But despite this large movement, there were no people who could actually work on the animation, which is why most of the work went to Taiwan, Korea and Japan. So because of this reason it may seem that Korea was playing a large role in the animation industry, but a lot of the animators in Korea actually started off by learning and working for these American shows.
Star Wars. Simpsons. Who knew?
How does Star Wars prepare you do be a programmer, and watching a princess movies does not? I don't recall any programming scenes in Star Wars? And all those movies are made with computers. Girls tend to be encouraged to lots of creative activity which could also come in handy with computer jobs. They also do well in maths at schools (better than boys, apparently).
Can you cite any studies that support your claim?
Even simpler methods exist.
Realize that framing your daughters behavior by giving her babies, princesses, dolls, makeup, clothes and similar to play with, while your boy gets the newest action games, puzzles, balls, competitive and brain engaging fun, will definitely influence her future career choices.
When you take your daughter to look at some princess movies, or some toy story thingy, while you watch star wars and star trek with your son, long into the night, think of what kind of framing is done.
Of course, even if you try to keep all the options open. Someone from her school might make your daughter do "girls only" activities. Or maybe she'll be forbidden from accessing the Star Wars room at Legoland because she's a girl. Whole world is against your little girl becoming like a man. She needs babies so she knows she has to be a mother. She needs kitchen games so she knows she has to cook. She needs to play with dolls, to groom them, to dress them, so that she eventually does the same for herself. She needs to be pretty, and by pretty we mean makeup.
If someone is naive enough to believe that boys and girls have innately different interests, then so be it.
But girls ain't "gurls" because they don't like technology.
Well, that shows what little I know about the Hugo and of fandom.
I don't disagree that others have that opinion about Star Wars. That's besides the point. You claim is that Babylon 5 is not part of science fiction. You think that the allusion to what other people think about Star Wars is relevant to your claim. But as you must well know, that question of "is Star Wars really science fiction" is old and well-worn (eg. http://pop-verse.com/2014/12/10/is-star-wars-science-fiction-or-fantasy/ ).
It is therefore a poor tool to use to answer the question of 'is Babylon 5 science fiction?'. My objection was to this use, not that others believe it to be fantasy.
This concept of "speculative fiction" as an encompassing term is a perfectly reasonable one to have. However, it does not address the question 'is Babylon 5 science fiction?'.
You can place Hitchhiker's Guide into "Comic Science Fiction", but note that "Science Fiction" is in the name. Granted, astronomers say that a dwarf planet isn't a planet, but a dwarf star is a star, so it's not always possible to infer an is-a relationship in a name, but so far it looks like Hitchhiker's Guide is part of science fiction.
You give what you say is the "classical definition" of 'a work of fiction that uses science as a story telling device to explore ideas'.
As you must surely know, there is no such classical definition, and "its exact definition remains a contested question among both scholars and devotees." (Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_fiction and reflective of my understanding.) Furthermore, there's an entire section in Wikipedia on just that topic, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_science_fiction , many of which are not limited to your 'science as a story' definition.
I can assume your definition for argument's sake, but you still haven't answered the question of which TV series you think is actually science fiction under your definition, nor have you given any books.
This unwillingness to state examples is why I'm getting gatekeeper vibes from you. (A gatekeeper who is used to shutting people down for using the wrong terms is often one who does not want to stick a neck out for worry that it will in turn be cut down.)
Do note that the "science fantasy" link you give says the term "has never been clearly defined". The Heinlein example of 'Magic, Inc.' has many of the tropes of outright fantasy. I would consider "Glory Road" a better example for this category, with mixed fantasy and science elements. Indeed, if you look in the talk you'll see a raging discussion on just that point. In any case, 'Tunnel in the Sky' has no fantasy elements, so cannot fit into this category.
If you want to be that sort of gatekeeper then feel free, but know that "science fiction" has long had a larger umbrella than the term you want, and your beliefs are in the minority.
For example, "Star Wars" won the Hugo for 'Best Dramatic Presentation' in 1978 so right there it's obvious that a lot of people - and those who are more identifiable and influential than your bland 'many people' - classify it as science fiction.
(Bear in mind that "The Force" or an equivalent has long been a thread in SF. Think of the mental powers of the Lensmen, or precognition in 'Dune', or telekinesis in 'Stranger in a Strange Land'. You cannot handwave it way as "fantasy" without throwing out a lot of other SF.)
I also gave two other examples of mainstream science fiction which are no less fantastical than Babylon V. To that list I'll add Pellucidar.
What is the science driving "Tunnel in the Sky"? A magic device that can slow time and allows space warp. What of the rest qualifies as 'scientific' which makes it notably "science fiction" instead of simply "fiction"?
What is the science behind "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"?
Or "The Dispossessed"? The main characters live on a moon, the primary is also inhabited, there is occasional radio and rocket connection between the two, and there's a computer that helps with resource planning. None of those details drive the plot.
For that matter, is there any TV series you think should be called "science fiction"? What actual SF do you think deserves being called SF? I gave names. Now it's your turn.
The Plinkett reviews, on Red Letter Media?
http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/star-wars/ http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/star-trek/ http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/other-movies/
I usually only check ratings & reviews after watching a movie, just to see what other people think about it.
Seeing how easy it is to game such online ranking systems and how tastes can differ, not only on a personal level but also on the current mood, I simply don't trust the scores without having been able to make up my own opinion.
The same goes for any other aggregate "review" site, e.g. restaurant reviews. Those are even worse for restaurant owners, since a bad review can stick around, even if you used its mentioned points to improve your service.
At least movies don't usually change over time (Star Wars being one of the few exceptions), but it's still annoying to get caught up in a hype only to be bitterly disappointed, or the other way around, finally watching a movie after hearing so many bad things about it and then thoroughly enjoying it, making you wish you had seen it on the large screen instead.
...and not to forget paid social marketing, especially when it's not being disclosed.
I have very mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it's great to see a younger and/or less-traditional audience attending symphony concerts. But I wonder what percentage of these first-timers would ever come back for a non-videogame music performance? Because—the title of this article notwithstanding—if these concerts don't do anything to cultivate an audience who actually engages with classical music (or "art music" or "western concert music", call it what you like) then videogames are not going to save the symphony. Not even close.
People in the comments rightly jumped all over the guy in the article who said these concerts were “akin to Mouton Rothschild using its wine to make and sell sangria.” But there is a point buried under all the snobbishness: video game music (and film music) are not supposed to be concert music. In fact a good film composer would probably tell you that if their score for a film is so compelling and interesting that it can be extracted out and plunked down in the concert hall as a fully-fledged work, they're doing it wrong. Film/videogame scores are (by definition) supposed to be subservient to the whole of which they are a part. Thus it's the narrative of the game or movie that drives the formal aspects of the music. This isn't to say that there can't be greatness and even genius in scores, but that it's not being used in service of producing a stand-alone concert work. Which is why even very good scores usually have long passages of music that successfully create an atmosphere for a particular scene, but taken out of that context would sounds rather boring and aimless in a concert hall. Similarly the kind of drama evoked in a concert piece where you have musical themes that are presented and then developed and transformed at length just doesn't work for film scores, where you are working in much shorter time increments (like the length of a scene). This is why even the greatest film scores (Maurice Jarre's score for Lawrence of Arabia and John Williams' score for Star Wars, for example) are known for having a few really memorable, resonant melodies and/or for the way in which they contribute to a memorable scene.
I've gone to film music concerts and enjoyed them, but I'm under no illusion that it's necessarily the most challenging or profound stuff. I'm also aware that it's partly the memories and associations I have with the movies themselves that I am enjoying when I listen to the music. In any case, it's not at all the same experience as a classical music concert. I hope that some of the people who have dipped their toes in the water listening to an orchestra perform "The Legend of Zelda" might be curious enough to go back and hear what other, far more interesting kinds of things an orchestra can do. Because if not, these concerts will be a nice windfall that can help pad an orchestra's bottom line (and god knows they could use the money). But they won't do what orchestras need most, which is to develop a real, life-long appreciation for classical music in younger audiences. Unfortunately this article presents zero statistics one way or the other on that point.
I think that really overstates what the effect of copyright elimination would be. A lot of traditional methods of monetization would be harder to make profitable, but stuff like Patreon or Kickstarter would probably still work pretty well. At worst, we'd be left with people making content in their spare time and not for profit or to make a living. That would suck, no doubt, but I don't think it sucks as much as a copyright term effectively limitless in duration.
It also ignores what we're missing out on now because of our copyright regime. Anyone should be able to make a Star Wars movie by now, or a Spiderman open-world RPG, or an epic poem detailing the later exploits of Meriadoc Brandybuck, or whatever the hell else. There is a shitload of derivative works we're missing out on because of onerous copyright restrictions, even on works where everyone involved with their creation has been dead for fifty years.
Anyway, the main point of my previous post was not to support eliminating copyright. Mainly, it was to point out that if you support dramatically reforming copyright - twenty years and no DMCA would get nearly as much opposition from special interests as would eliminating copyright altogether - you've got a real uphill battle and no clear allies, despite having more in common, probably, with people who what to eliminate copyright rather than the maximalists. So I'm sympathetic to the view of "fuck it, let's just get rid of it, then" even if there would be some negative consequences to that.
Finally, there is something to be said for taking an extreme opposite position even if it goes further than you would prefer. I think I'm more likely to see reasonable copyright happen in my lifetime if I support people who want to abolish copyright, than by trying to reason with people who want it to be limitless in scope and duration.
I think the problem is more that there is not that much good stuff out there. I mean look at Netflix. I like it, but it's either films I have seen, often on tv, from maybe ten years ago, or it's really bad. Really bad.
But there might not be enough really good stuff out there. User created content is never going to be like professional globally top notch produced content - or if it is it will take as much talent and time to make. Once I have seen the new Star Wars film, it's not like I am going to be able to see another three hours of similar quality entertainment the next night and the next and the next.
For a thousand years humans have mostly entertained themselves by talking and jossing and laughing with each other. That's likely to be the future of content - just aimed at our niches.
Apparently go excels with programmers who like to "get shit done". If you program in some other language, you believe in "total bullshit" or the "hot new framework".
I'm a fan of go, but this post was way over the top. It reads like something a fan-boy would write about the latest Star Wars movie.
A same article could have been written about the USA. Actually it would have made a bit more sense, since it could include pop culture references to actual space travel (e.g Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica etc. etc) instead of things like "The Guest from the Future", a TV series about time travel that mentions that there is a space port in Moscow of the future and some obscure cartoons (other than "The Secret of the Third Planet" I have not seen ones the author mentioned and, unlike her, I grew up in the USSR).
Not that I believe the cult of space exists in the USA, but the same stupid argumentation is more applicable here.
> Hollywood directly ripped that one off - Планета бурь by Pavel Klushantsev.
Really? That's some weird thinking - that Star Wars were 'ripped' from that B-grade movie.
Another very obvious influence on Star Wars, and specifically the attack on the Death Star, was the UK 1955 movie "The Dam Busters" about the real life WW2 Operation Chastise.
There are amusing clips on YouTube of Star Wars visuals and the The Dam Busters audio and vice-versa - the similarity is pretty close.
Edit: Correction 1995 -> 1955
Lucas did see a number of German and Soviet SciFi movies before making Star Wars. Some of the influence in costumes and space ships is quite obvious.
Sine-wave speech reminds me of R2D2 from Star Wars. Does anyone know if sine-wave speech was used as an inspiration? Maybe R2D2 actually says coherent sentences in the movies, but we aren't used to that form of speech interpretation
I find The Han Solo Shot First Issue very interesting because it plays with how significant Star Wars is.
At this point, no one can be surprised by the movies. In particular, everyone knows that Han Solo is one of the good guys, from the beginning.
That wasn't true when it was first released. At the point of the encounter with Greedo, the audience doesn't know if Han is going to be a traitor. Chewbacca is more menacing than ever on his first scenes, and Han is definitively a shady character.
Now, all that doesn't make sense. We know Han (and Chewie) to be the "good guys", even if we never saw the movies. We can't be surprised by then...
Similar stuff happens with Yoda appareance and Vader revelation. They are plots that we know in advance, effectively changing the movie experience...
>Advertising is the method most people use to discover new products/services.
Do you have a source for that?
>How would you know there's a star wars movie coming out?
By being interested in science fiction movies, being part of a community of people with like interests, theater showtimes, etc.
Why do i need to know 6 months beforehand that a star wars movie will eventually come out?
Why would i need to know any sooner than a week before the release date?
>How would you know about new products and services you might be interested in buying.
By having an interest in buying them, and then doing research regarding which product will best fit my needs.
>which tell me about companies who provide things I might be interested in
Or do the advertisements give you an itch and a tool to scratch it?
>which has many adverts related to bee-keeping. That's valuable
In what way?
Are you incapable of finding a new bee-keeping related product without first seeing an advertisement?
Can you not google the item you need and then compare the options amongst each other?
Can you not simply search on amazon or some bee-keeping friendly retailer?
Are you not part of a community of bee-keepers who you can ask for recommendations about products?
If you've ever heard of:
Costco
Krispy Kreme
Kiehls
Spanx
Lululemon
Rolls Royce
Zara
Jiffy muffin mix
NO-AD sunscreen
Then you've disproven you're entire argument, as those are all brands that have $0 advertising budget, and do no advertising.
One cannot always choose one's friends and environments. There are indeed friend groups that would not be available to someone who has not watched Star Wars, or Jersey Shore, or what have you.
There's no one item, no short list, of essential works that define the threshold between effective and ineffective cultural participation. But there is a compounding social effect for each movie/song/book/etc. someone doesn't know. Each additional water cooler conversation that one cannot join, and each additional movie reference missed, is one step further away from those friends. At some point, people stop trying to communicate with someone who doesn't understand them.
Beyond mere socialization and entertainment, popular culture forms the behavioral and memetic vocabulary with which people communicate. As an example of how isolating cultural non-participation can be, consider how difficult it is for escapees from fundamentalist religious communes to integrate into society. That is the extreme end of a spectrum, and each decision not to participate in one's local popular culture moves one closer to that extreme.
I'm not saying piracy is right; I'm saying that the choice not to consume is inextricably linked to a whole lot of other choices, including whether to participate in society at all.
Given all that, it is unconscionable for Hollywood et al. to wield the amount of power they have demonstrated in the provisions in leaked TPP drafts and other laws and treaties.
Almost 35, still haven't seen Star Wars in entirety, though I did own it on VHS for many years. Can attest that I did not "suffer" for it, though it has been a cause of awe and disbelief in others. Ok, just to be fair, some really stupid people got upset, but seriously, I wouldn't call that suffering. At this point, the movie's been ruined for decades--I just don't see the point of seeing a movie in which I already know what's going to happen. Also, IMO, from the parts that I've seen, it's just not that good.
Of course, if you apply this to all movies, books, and music under copyright you'd not only be culturally disconnected, you'd be culturally dead, so I do think the original comment is spot on.
One of my very most successful friends, by far one of the most socially and artistically connected people I know, didn't see Star Wars until his late 30s. He seemed to have suffered for that: not at all.
Exactly, in as much detail as you can be patient enough to provide, how does "effective cultural participation" require you to see shitty new-release Hollywood movies?
Is Marco Arment culturally disconnected?
http://www.marco.org/2015/04/11/popular-movies-i-havent-seen
> It's a matter of if you think about it for a bit it makes no sense, it's logically impossible.
Let's take a look at a dictionary definition of culture: "the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time" (http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/culture)
Now, note the "particular group of people" part. A person can be a member of more than one group. Some groups are sub-groups of others; some overlap with others.
For example, I am an American, and as such I have been brought up in American culture, with many of the traditions and ideals that that entails; Thanksgiving, the 4th of July, a strong belief in civil liberties, and a love of strawberry rhubarb pie.
American culture is also a subset of Western European culture, with influences from Catholic and Protestant branches of Christianity, so while I am not myself Christian, I celebrate Christmas and Easter and have many Christian influences on my values and life.
However, I am also a member of other cultures. My most recent ancestors to travel to the US were Scottish; and so Scottish culture is also part of my culture, but not most other people in the US. I wear kilts to weddings, and have an uncle and cousin who play bagpipes at weddings and funerals. That's a part of my culture, but that is not a part of overall American culture.
I'm also a software engineer and computer geek, and involved in free software, advocacy for civil liberties online, advocate for strong encryption and privacy, and the like. This is a particular subculture that tends to promote strong protections for individual privacy and liberty, while openness and transparency on behalf of institutions such as corporations and governments. This is not part of mainstream American culture, but it is part of my culture; and this particular subculture spans multiple countries as well, so in many of these ways, I have more cultural values in common with a Brazilian or German who is also involved in these communities than I do with the average American.
There are many other subcultures I could describe myself as a member of. And the same goes for anyone you ask. "Culture" is not one big, monolithic thing with clear boundaries. Because it is a set of customs and beliefs shared with a group, that set can be larger or smaller, and stronger or weaker, depending on how big of a group you choose.
> And if "multiculturalism" whatever that is, is so great, you'd think someone would have come up with support for that notion by now beyond "Ethnic food!"
Food is a pretty fundamental part of any culture. As something that is necessary for sustaining life, it's something that everyone does. In almost every culture I've seen, meals are a large part of fostering community, of strengthening social bonds. You have meals with family, with friends, with coworkers. "Breaking bread" is a term rich with culture connotations of mutual trust, peace, welcoming, because sharing food with someone is so important; and the same holds in many other cultures, one of the most generous and welcoming things you can do is invite someone to your table and share your food with them.
So don't be so quick to dismiss "ethnic food" as an important part of multiculturalism. Food is in many ways the heart of of a culture, and exploring the food culture of another people can be a strong way to share something with them.
However, multiculturalism can extend far beyond that as well.
The musical heritage of America is quite strongly multicultural. Ragtime, blues, jazz, R&B, and hip-hop all have their roots in black culture in the US, but have had enormous influences in white culture as well. Of course a large amount of American musical traditions comes from Western European classical and pop traditions as well, and then there are a variety of folk traditions, such as Celtic, that have been integrated into the mainstream through bluegrass and country music.
But there's a lot more than just that. A large number of cultures have made substantial impact on film in America. Many of our "Western" genre is actually a product of Italy; but that in turn influence Akira Kurosawa in Japan, with Samurai westerns such as Yojimbo. His work has also influenced Western work, where The Magnificent Seven is a western remake of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, and his The Hidden Fortress is one of the major influences on Star Wars.
Let's see, getting back to day to day life, Jewish culture has also had a fairly large impact; from Yiddish, we get words like "schmuck", "chutzpa" and "klutz". We also get bagels (oops, back to food again),
On the musical front again, some of the best American music like Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue had roots in Western classical tradition, jazz, and klezmer, traditional Ashkenazi folk music.
I could go on, but man, detailing all of the positive effects of multiculturalism on American society could fill up hundreds of volumes of books, not just a single comment on HN.
> A murder seems to be ipso facto a hate crime.
That is not what is meant by the term "hate crime." Simply redefining a term that has a particular meaning to mean something else does not really add to the discussion.
I'll quote from Wikipedia:
> In both crime and law, hate crime (also known as bias-motivated crime) is a usually violent, prejudice motivated crime that occurs when a perpetrator targets a victim because of his or her perceived membership in a certain social group. Examples of such groups include but are not limited to: ethnicity, gender identity, disability, language, nationality, physical appearance, religion, or sexual orientation.
A "hate crime" is not simply any violent crime. It is a crime in which the attacker was motivated by their perception of the victim's membership of some other group.
There are several things that can motivate a criminal to commit a crime. Poverty, greed, hatred of a particular group, hatred of a particular person, sheer anti-social tendencies, and I'm sure many other motivating factors. Only one of these falls under the term "hate crime" as it is commonly defined; those crimes in which hatred of a particular group of people is a primary motivator.
If you look at the statistics I cited in a previous comment, while it is true that black on white murder happens more often than white on black, white on white murder far surpasses either (and likewise, black on black). No amount of arguing about the black on white vs. white on black levels of crime will make these intraracial crimes go away, and the levels of intraracial crime is a very strong signal that racial animus is not actually the motivation for the majority of crime that occurs.
The reason it is important to look at the motivation behind a crime, and not just the statistics about whether a crime happened, is that the motivations can help tell you the best way to reduce that type of crime in the future.
Hate crimes, in the sense of any crime committed on behalf of membership in some group, can be particularly dangerous because they can lead to either prolonged violence between those two groups, or ethnic cleansing or genocide. These types of crimes, when allowed to escalate, have escalated into some of the greatest atrocities of a last couple of centuries. Breaking the chain of hate-motivated violence by discouraging the use of rhetoric of hate, by changing laws that institutionalize disparities between these groups, and by applying harsher penalties to those crimes committed for these reasons, are some ways to deal with these types of crimes.
Crimes committed due to a hatred of a particular person, however, are fairly different. They are usually based on some aspect of those people's relationship; perhaps an abusive domestic relationship, a cheating spouse, or the like. Here, there isn't some group-based animus, but a dysfunctional personal relationship. Here, the better way to deal with the problems are to provide better outlets for change than violence; provide shelters for people to escape from abusive relationships, allow divorce, as it it preferable to violence or murder.
Crimes that are committed due to poverty, to people having as sense of hopelessness and no further opportunity but to turn to crime, are another kind of problem. Here providing better social services, better education, better access to affordable housing, and the like can all help take that pressure off that can push people over the edge.
In all of these cases, the actual perpetrators of actual crimes do need to be punished; there needs to be deterrence as well. However, on a societal level, there can be many things done to reduce the temptation and pressure to engage in criminal behavior. And even on the individual level, knowing someone's motivation for a crime can be important in rehabilitating them and reintroducing them back to society.
"If The Lord of the Rings is about the rise of fascism and the trauma of the second world war" - well, no it isn't.
"Actually, the great Dune film did get made. Its name is Star Wars."
This would be a better essay if I could take it seriously.
A movie from the 70s that compares with TWoO and GWTW in stature would be Star Wars, certainly not MPatHG.
I find it unremarkable that people today quote SW.
You're objections are all fine, but post hoc as they are additional qualifiers that seem driven more by personal preferences than anything which can be used as a more objective criterion. You believe that I should be able to "connect the dots" in the same way that you do, but when there are so few dots, it's easy for one person to see Ursa Major, another a dipper, and a third a plow.
My entire point is that your data points are too vague and have multiple reasonable interpretations, and that it's possible to make it more rigorous.
You did not specify what "mythologize" means. I interpreted it mean "the subject of a biopic" produced by a movie studio for the big screen. You give a dictionary definition, but that doesn't define what it means to 'mythologize' someone in a movie, or determine if some group is excessively or under-mythologized. Is a biopic about Plato mythologizing Plato? Which groups do or don't need mythologization? Are British biopics over or under represented?
You believe that a movie about the Nobel Peace Prize winner Joseph Rotblat is likely about to "pass judgement on all the other guys who didn't leave the Manhattan Project" and not about the events that lead to his getting the Peace Prize. I have just watched the film, and it does not do what you pessimistically assumed.
You believe that a movie about research which is usually interpreted as a caution against the implicit acceptance of authoritarian roles, is actually about research about the "the horrible things this white guy did to people".
(You write about Milgram's 'inhumane experiments'. While he worked to understand why humans might do things that are inhumane, the people being "shocked" were actors. It was emotionally stressful, certainly, though as http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4346260/ comments, "Milgram invoked post-experimental survey data and psychiatrists’ reports to demonstrate that most participants were glad to have participated and that none had been harmed". It adds careful qualifiers to that interpretation. What part of his experiments do you consider to be 'inhumane'?)
And you don't like moves that are well-regarded by those in the social justice movement. Nor, if I understand your objection to "A Dangerous Method", is a film acceptable if it has a female actor on the movie poster, even though your original criteria asked about "the regular white guy scientists .. we've mythologized", and not movies which only mythologize regular white male scientists. This feels very might like raising the goal posts.
Again, this is acceptable. You get to define your own coding criteria, so long as it's transparent enough that others can have a hope of reproducing it.
It does mean that "Dr. Strangelove" (1964), which is about white men bringing nuclear destruction to the world, where one of the main characters is handicapped, and is well-loved by the anti-war crowd, is an example of movie that you think puts straight white males in a bad light. "A Clockwork Orange", "Brazil", and "1984" all portray white men in oppressive positions of power. As reactions to authoritarianism is the topic of Milgram's work, these also seem to fall into your pattern.
Again, perfectly acceptable. Once you define your criteria, it can be applied more rigorously against a longer period of time, to see if there's a trend.
Of course, it ends up with strange problems, where "Wrath of Khan", which has the Indian character Khan Noonien Singh (played by the Mexican actor Ricardo Montalbán) on the movie poster, so doesn't count as a white, straight, male movie. Ghostbusters II (1989) has a black man on the movie poster. Tony Stark in the "Iron Man" films has a chest injury which requires him to wear a regulator for his heart, so is handicapped. "Star Wars" (1977) also had a woman on the movie poster.
As "Dr. Strangelove" and these examples show, this "pattern" you've identified, of sometimes having non-white, non-male, non-straight, or handicapped actors, has been around for a long time. It's not clear that it's a new thing, and seems to match the secular trend since the 1960s of letting people besides white, straight men have the positions of power in US politics, science, and other fields.
You said "I was hoping you would notice from context I was referencing male scientists who were publicly disgraced as people, not as fraudulent scientists.", in regards to "publicly disgraced in the past year (offhand I can think of 3)".
I believe you are limiting the topic to people who have not been disgraced for scientific reasons but because of other events in their lives. That is, despite that some of the disgraced people I mentioned committed no crime, their social ostracism isn't the right kind of social ostracism for you. I presume the only criteria you accept is that the person must be criticized for racist, sexist, or similar reasons?
With that qualifier in mind, I assume you mean Watson, Taylor, and Hunt. Do note that Watson has been disgraced "as a person" for years for his racist and sexist views.
For example, in http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/fury-at-dna-pioneers-theory-africans-are-less-intelligent-than-westerners-394898.html from 2007 titled "Fury at DNA pioneer's theory: Africans are less intelligent than Westerners" and subtitled "Celebrated scientist attacked for race comments: "All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really". This caused people to, for example, cancel his visit (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/7050020.stm) and "Because of the public controversy, on 18 October 2007, the Board of Trustees at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory suspended Watson's administrative responsibilities." Indeed, the reason why he sold his Nobel Prize last year was to make money, because he had been ostracized for years, and wanted the money.
Thus, only two of those have happened this year, and not the three you suggested. Or are you thinking of someone else? If so, who?
Other similarly personally disgraced scientists include Kary Mullis, Nobel Prize winner and well known HIV/AIDS denialist, climate change denialist, and believer in astrology; and William Shockley, a Nobel Prize winner also known for his racist views and support for eugenics.
Of course there have been few women who have won the Nobel Prize, so with only 4 examples of male Nobel Prize winners ostracized for their views, we would not expect there to be a female winner similarly ostracized. Thus, lack of such a counter-examples is completely expected from the statistics.
Since you include astronauts as a field of science, it's easy to point to Lisa Nowak, who has been personally disgraced for her attempt at kidnapping Colleen Shipman, who pleaded guilty to charges of felony burglary of a car and misdemeanor battery, and who was discharged from the Navy in under other than honorable conditions. However, part of that was quite clearly illegal, so may not constitute the right kind of disgrace "as a person" that you are looking for.
But these are events that hit the big time news. What do you know about scientists who aren't Nobel Prize winners, and who aren't on world-wide TV?
That's why a more rigorous search is needed. Retraction Watch and Science magazine both use the phrase "disgraced" in reference to scientists, and have a more complete coverage of what goes on in science. Do note that those science oriented sites don't use "disgraced" to refer to the racism and sexism of Watson, et al., so the term "disgraced" is itself rather ill-defined.
For example, in http://news.sciencemag.org/people-events/2013/10/special-report-can-nsf-put-right-spin-rotators-part-2 a co-worker says of Anja Strømme “She feels abused and disgraced, and it should have never happened”; do we accept that this is a case of being disgraced? If not, what constitutes a sufficient level of disgrace?
Or, if many male scientists thought it was disgraceful that a woman like Lise Meitner should work in physics, and snubbed her socially and in her career, is that really disgraceful? Or do you require that someone be successful and famous first, before being disgraced?
If your definition is so strict that only a few people over the decades meet the definition, the it's hardly a useful definition, is it? Who else can you think of that have been disgraced? You make it sound like something that's happened more than a dozen times, so it shouldn't be hard to come up with more examples, no? Based on those numbers, how many women do you think should have been disgraced by this time?
http://www.amazon.com/Star-Wars-IV-Limited-Edition/dp/B000FQJAIW
"for the first time ever on DVD, the original films as seen in theaters in 1977, 1980 and 1983."
I guess this should work
We do. How much money went into making new Star Wars movie? How much money is tied up in the forty-odd Marvel movies being made over the next few years?
For that matter, how much money has gone into making any of the retellings of traditional fables and myth that has been bread and butter for Disney's animated features since 'Snow White'? (And into relentlessly policing the unauthorized use of the Disney rendition of these characters?)
There is a lot of creative accounting going on in Hollywood, but there is an entire industry built on making these movies that are the only lawyer-approved way of working with these characters. It has its pitfalls but if you can get into it, you can have a fairly comfortable middle-class lifestyle, if you don't mind regular periods of unemployment when one feature/tv show/etc ends and you haven't found a new one yet. And occasionally having some creative accounting fail to pay the last few bills of the subcontracted effects company you working for.
We are even beginning to get better about rewarding the people who work down in the comic-book trenches creating these characters. Creators reaching their prime learnt from the miserable treatment Marvel and DC gave folks like Siegel & Shuster (Superman's creators) or Jack Kirby (co-creator of pretty much the entire fucking Marvel Universe), and became more canny about not signing all their rights away - Eastman and Laird (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) are a great example.
>BayCon has been around for 30 years.
Star Trek conventions and other stuff too. But all of those were a very fringe thing to what Comic-Con is today, and were not attended by late-20 or 30-somethings...
>Before that, the niche interests just change -- my dad and his friends have been dressing up in 20s garb and driving 20s cars to period events since the 60s. There are Civil War re-enactments and sex clubs and costume parties and all sorts of things.
A costume ball or a civil war re-enanactment (much less a "sex club") is not the same kind of thing as a comics/star wars/etc based pop culture that's mainstream with adults.
>This page has a picture of the nonexistent 20-40 year olds turning out to see Stan Laurel in 1947
Not sure what the relevance is. Stan Laurel was a comedian and a famous actor. Nobody said comedy and movies weren't popular with adults.
We're talking about stuff like Batman and similar superhero stuff -- which was something few 20-40 year olds cared for even in the early 80s.
You mean Star Wars style? In which case the answer is no, not really. Multiscopic displays have never been properly represented in SF movies, as far as I'm aware. A perfect automultiscopic display would be very much like a window, with the video being able to show any kind of dynamic perspective on the other side of the window. Actually it's more than a window, since elements can give the impression of being in front of the window, but such elements would clip at the edge of the window if the viewer leaned too far out. So the 3D could only be "in-air" as long as the screen is behind it.
No, film production is not "agile". On larger productions, it's very much a waterfall process. Everything is planned and costed in advance. There's a thread on here by someone in the industry who describes the process.
As films became more effects-heavy, the process has become even more rigid. As someone said of a Star Wars film, "Three years of pre-production, six months of principal photography, three years of post-production". Some directors, especially ones who came from the stage, have problems with this. For a new stage production, actors are a debugging tool. The director and actors go into an empty theater with a bare stage and work through the script to see how it plays out. Scenes and musical numbers may be added, deleted, or rearranged during this process. There have been film directors who worked that way, including some of the greats.
That process doesn't scale to modern blockbusters. Film planning today looks more like classical cartoon planning - it starts with storyboards, and gradually details are filled in. Nowadays, there's often a "pre-visualization" of the entire production[1], a videogame-quality cartoon with every shot that will be in the final product. That's done before actual production is green-lighted. The link below, from a Paris film school, shows previz and production scenes from some well-known movies side by side. Iron Man looks just like its previz shots, just with higher image quality. Even the camera angles match.
This is not "agile".
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHHMLyjrn4g
For the same reason we have long accepted sci-fi movies with sounds in space. Imagine Star Wars without that.
Now I wish we did not accepted that fast the lens-flares, but hey - my kid loves them.
Try finding Star Wars on iTunes. Or many other movies or series. And what if you don't live in the USA? Then it's just Too Bad (TM) right?
I really do not mind paying $3.99 to rent a movie. Many times I find myself simply unable to find it!
And don't get me started on the latest HDCP racket. I have a 1080p projector but there is NO WAY anymore for me to play HD movies that I PAID FOR using it, because it doesn't support DHCP in the latest way. So I am simply prevented from watching movies in HD on my home theater system. How do I get around it? I bought a chinese made splitter that doesn't support HDCP protection, and that seems to work. Wow I'm such a bad boy, wanting to use the hardware I bought to watch the movies I rented! With Popcorn time there is no issue.
I strongly dislike Marvel movies. I have no respect at all for films that are released in 3D (and sometimes IMAX and IMAX 3D) when they are not filmed in 3D or using IMAX cameras. It is a pure money grab. Disney does not care about quality, they care about profits. The endless sequels and prequels and spinoffs are simply greed. They will not withstand the test of time. A decade or two from now, people will look back at Nolan's Batman series as the definitive super hero films of the day. They use real sets and stunts instead of endless poor quality CGI action scenes that move too fast for you to see what is even happening (hint: it's because what's happening is meaningless, but bright colors and fast movement stimulate your brain). Marvel exists to sell children disposable plastic action figures and made in China clothing that will fall apart before the next sequel comes out.
Children are marketed to and manipulated with cartoons and "happy meal" toys. It is insidious.
On top of that, Disney expends a tremendous amount of money on marketing to force their products into the prevailing culture. Have you noticed how many television shows have references to Marvel super heroes? Those jokes aren't because the writers are fans, Disney pays for them. Actors don't wear super hero t-shirts randomly. It's all marketing.
They are doing the same thing with Star Wars. There has been an insane amount of hype for the new movie and various spinoff products already. Quite frankly I am sick of it. I am not going to see the new Star Wars movie in theaters because this type of behavior should not be rewarded.
Disney buys up treasured parts of global culture and exploits them to death. It was heart breaking to see them do this to Pixar. Cars 2, Monsters University... just shameful cash ins.
To make matters worse, Disney doesn't even pay it's fair share of taxes on the massive income generated by these franchises: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30412293
The only thing that you can do is to vote with your dollars and time. Please stop supporting this exploitative behavior.
Off topic, I can't read "Blinkenlights" without thinking of the old telnet Star Wars ASCII movie.
That's really awesome!
Although the nitpicker in me has to point out that the film is heavily edited to fit the dialogue (there's a shot at about 3'25" where you can see them bombing a paper cross pinned to the cliff which is taken from earlier in the film when 633 squadron are training in the Scottish highlands).
I remember reading somewhere that many of the dog fights in Star Wars were copied from the film The Battle Of Britain, but then that, 633 Squadron and many other classic British war movies were made by people who actually fought in the war. If you want a film to look realistic, and you weren't there yourself, copying from films made by those who were is probably the next best thing.
I didn't read "Maker of Dune", but Starts Wars plot as litle in common with Dune, i think the similarities with Akira Kurosawa films is right on. By the way the Dune movie from 1984 is a much better plot than Star Wars, it's really a shame that didn't come to fruition it got lost on the directors cut, it should have been cut in 2 or 3 movies.
That's really insightful.
So perhaps the 'objects of worship' are in some sense for the worshippers no longer just a piece of art or entertainment, and so cannot be held criticically by them without creating a certain amount of cognitive dissonance.
To me (and I imagine many/most adults) rehashing and revisiting a film (e.g such as star wars) and its contents diminishes the film, regardless of how great the film is. There is clearly a different mode that some people enter into whereby it becomes something else, a touchstone for the communal experience, and a piece scripture for their worship. It takes all sorts!
The level of creativity is astounding. I remember a documentary where Ben Burtt walks out into a field, hits a high tension cable with a tuning fork, and that becomes the sound for blaster rifles in Star Wars.
Nope, we're talking fairly modern things, I think. Film scores from 5-10-year old blockbusters? Countless unavailable on streaming services, many unavailable on iTunes/Amazon. Still can be found on CD no problem.
Not just audio either. It's 2015, where can I buy a legal digital download of any episode of Star Wars? Nowhere.
>It's almost like they want to be able to point at any given part and say "I'm the reason that happened".
I suspect this is done by people that feel like they will need to justify their job later. Having something to say when your manager (or others) inevitably ask "So, what exactly is it that you do here?"
This seems to be also prevalent in the movie and tv industry. (Though I wouldn't COMPLETELY disparage the usefulness of studio/executive notes; see: Star Wars)
Yes yes yes! Absolutely breathtaking. One of the best intros to a sci fi movie. And that is with 80's special effects!
Looking back at it, special effects, the mood, is still so distinctive and well done. And that was probably the pinnacle of non-digital special effects. And we'll probably never get back to it but even after so much investment and so much advancement in computer technology, digital effects are still not quite there (thinking of modern Star Wars, Avatar...). At some point they'll be outmatched but we are still not there.
Do you view films like Toy Story, Star Wars and E.T. as junk?
> "This movie has so many cliches in it," a boy said (...) My son told him, "This movie was made in 1986. It invented all the cliches."
The first boy was right. It felt full of cliches even then. I watched it in eighties as soon as it was distributed to my place and I all the time I had that feeling of "boring 'we're the marines' movie." And I still can't understand why would anybody consider Aliens an interesting movie. The first Alien is however something else. And I was always amazed to later watch "The Dark Star" made before the Alien and find it (among the other things) an Alien parody made before the Alien(!) It's really so thanks to Dan O Bannon. Now that's something. Aliens... not even worth mentioning.
Watch Alien, watch The Dark Star. Forget the boring Aliens.
Disclaimer: I'm old enough that I've watched the Star Wars in seventies in my movie theatre. And Mad Max. And and and.. Of course Aliens were already cliches and cliches.
The early 80's were a truly special time for action cinema, and sequels in particular. There were several sequels that stand out for both putting a completely different spin on the movies that preceded them while offering relentless and tight pacing.
Aliens is just one example. Consider also, "The Road Warrior" (a.k.a. Mad Max 2). It took the faded and failing civilization of the original and pushed that out to every extreme possible. Total collapse. Anarchy. Barbarism. Post-apocalyptic wasteland. It also featured some of the tightest editing, most impressive stunts, and most relentless action of any film ever made. However, it was far from alone.
"The Empire Strikes Back" took the light, fun, and somewhat corny adventure of "Star Wars" and turned that into a dark, brooding character driven film that was a non-stop roller coaster of tension. Empire is the film that makes people take Star Wars seriously no matter how much zany Ewok slapstick and standup-droid-comedy Lucas put into ROTJ and the prequels (I refuse to even type the full J-J word). The 2001-derivative "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" was followed by the "The Wrath of Khan", which itself focused on character development and featured a climactic battle between both leaders and star ships. This film, despite being made on a shoestring budget when compared to the first Trek film, defined Trek movies for all time. Arguably, the franchise has suffered as Trek film after Trek film tried to recapture the magic of "The Wrath of Khan" instead of blazing their own paths.
When you watch these films and compare them to today's action flicks, one thing that stands out is that the action is anything but non-stop. All of these films feature extended sequences of slow, careful character development that are punctuated by action scenes. Compare the most recent Superman film to Aliens for example. Aliens may have felt relentless and draining in its last hour, but the first hour is relatively slow. That slow, building action sets everything up. It made us care so much about the characters and appreciate how utterly alone and vulnerable they were that it was tough watching them go through the meat grinder of the second half.
"Man of Steel" on the other hand, begins with action, continues with action, and ends with action, taking only brief breaks to string along a flimsy plot and barely flesh out stereotypical characters. Halfway through the city-wrecking final action sequence one finds oneself wishing the film would just get to the point! Both the magnitude of destruction and sheer volume of film expended in "Man of Steel" dwarfs that of Aliens, but there is only a fraction of the tension. You could take your time going to the bathroom at any point in "Man of Steel" and, odds are, all you'd miss is some CG mayhem that has no lasting effect on the plot. Does it really matter how many buildings Superman and his foes level without resolving anything?
Today's film makers are too often afraid of boring their audience and too frequently sacrifice developing what makes the action matter for the sake of giving their audience non-stop action. Non-stop meaningless action is like eating nothing but ice-cream for dinner. Sure, ice cream is great, but it simply isn't satisfying on its own. Today's film makers should look to the early 80's as an example of what can be accomplished when you don't underestimate your audience's attention span.
Check out Jamie Benning's filmumentaries on this film[1] and the original Star Wars trilogy and Jaws. Great fan produced pieces with making of info and interviews with cast and crew. Throw him a tip if you enjoy them too :)
[1] https://vimeo.com/36011979
I never understood this view. I think there's so much wonderful CGI its unfair to group the good with the bad. CGI has the same problem AI has - when its unnoticed people don't realize its CGI, the same way people don't consider expert systems, personal assistants, etc AI.
I watched the original Star Wars movies recently. I love the set design and costumes, but my god, the aliens and effects were laughable. I literally laughed at Yoda, who looks like a second hand muppet. There's just no way to think any of that looks remotely realistic or good. The scale models look like... well models. The stop motion animation just looks terrible. It was a fine effort for its time, but today its like watching a horse try to outrun a Ferrari.
I also rewatched Alien, and my god, when they show the whole Alien's body it looks like a guy in a rubber suit. Without CGI, that's the best you can do. A guy in a suit or a crappy puppet.
>Likewise, CGI seems to encourage special effects artists to "overload" movie frames
This seems questionable at best. Art direction is either good or bad. A poor craftsman blames his tools.
>Further, CGI characters are forgettable.
Goto to Disney and watch kids completely lose their shit over CGI characters. Not only are these characters not forgotten, they will be this generation's Luke and Leia. Even an old man like me loves CGI characters like General Grevious.
>protracted dark age in filmmaking.
Ah yes, the traditionalist approach. People said the same thing about talkies and color film. Curmudgeonly old men are rarely good judges of the future or the arts.
It might be similar to the reason/a stronger version of/ why people still keep taking in stories of the same kind.
There are a few ideas rehashed over and over, and some of them go a loooong way back (one reason why stories of other cultures are interesting - they have other patterns). Forbidden love, son-father relationships, coming-of-age, ... (look at Star Wars and find those, for example)
If you take care, you can probably predict the storyline for most movies as you go along, save for a few variations the themes have (so you'd have to predict for two storylines and guess which one it is going to be). It is a human ability, really, that builds our societies when we agree on what can happen. And most people seem to like this kind of storytelling. It's rare to find new ideas.
Just some thoughts. </rant>
Here's a visualization summary of entire movies in a "barcode" timeline format from the start of the film to the end.
[0] http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/movie-index
[1] 2001: A Space Odyssey http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/3432026155/2001-a-space-odyssey-1968-prints
[2] Aladdin http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/5766889425/aladdin-1992-prints
[3] Beyond the Black Rainbow http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/39051819960/beyond-the-black-rainbow-2010-prints
[4] Blade Runner http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/4438993828/blade-runner-1982-prints
[5] Star Wars Episode IV http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/13255664875/star-wars-episode-iv-a-new-hope-1977-prints
[6] The Wizard of Oz http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/3512965847/the-wizard-of-oz-1939-prints
Same here. Watching the Star Wars trilogy in one day was exhausting, and also perhaps a bit sad. Watching the entire 6 films would be killer.
There was a fundamental change in Hollywood in the late 60 early 70s, when a new generation of filmmakers came up through indie cinema and the studios. Those filmmakers changed the technique, style, and values of the studio system pretty dramatically. Many of those changes persist until today.
Also in the mid 70s, you had the rise of the modern high-concept blockbuster, with films such as JAWS and STAR WARS. Not to mention the advent of the modern superhero movie with SUPERMAN. Those changes have definitely held on until today, and shape not just the content, but also the form of much of modern movies.
There really was a qualitative change in movies around 1970, so it's not unusual if someone can relate more to movies from that point onward.
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Hollywood
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-concept
It's interesting to note where the real creative action is nowadays: TV. Specifically, long-form serial format that people can binge watch.
In the recent Terry Gilliam interview posted on HN, he made the point that mid-level movies are out. You can find financing for the super-huge Spiderman 47s, and you can go indie with a Red One and shoot your own stuff. What you have a really hard time doing is finding 10-20M for a mid-sized niche film.
I'm a movie fan, and I've lost what little respect I've had for Hollywood over the past few years. Too many times I've been sitting in theaters for some nth version of a comic-book movie and thought: really? Is that what the writers and directors really think of my intelligence.
Best thing I know to do is to stop watching them, even if I do love movies. I'll happily go pay to see another Sharknado before I'll pony up for the next 17 versions of whatever the Star Wars franchise has to offer.
Star Wars didn't borrow ideas from Japan, it "borrowed" a Kurosawa samurai movie "the Hidden Fortress", added some aerial scenes inspired by "Midway" and did it in space.
That's a meaningless argument. You're equating new bottles of soda (which are like copies of a book) with new works (which would be more like new flavors of cola). I would imagine, incidentally, that Harry Potter will continue to spawn new work, in the same way that Star Wars has spawned a variety of new fictional works in the form of animated series, videogames, book tie-ins and so on which are all ancillary to the 'original' 6 films (soon to be 7 and later 8 and 9). As well as that there are all the other non-fictional ancillaries, like books about Star Wars, from the production of the film to catalogs of all the different spaceships and robots etc. etc.
I'm not at all sure that copyright should extend beyond the life of the author but I think you should acknowledge that while all the stuff above serves a marketing function it also provides utility to hardcore fans of the original works.
Actual work which nobody but the heirs will see the benefits of, assuming what I have assumed.
Viewers and consumers get a benefit from the careful transfer of original works to new media and the production of new ancillary media. Transfer of existing work to a new medium is not as simple as 'copy originals_star_wars_scan TO 4k_project_template upres'. Although it makes up a tiny part of the consumer cost, format transfers generally require a huge amount of work by skilled professionals, the cost of which can run into the millions. On a film like Star Wars it's a vanishingly small amount of the revenue a new release format can generate, but indirectly that subsidizes (through technological debt) the cost to do similar work for much less popular films, eg the very high quality reissues of substantially less popular films via brands like the Criterion Collection, which maintains very high technical standards for art films with a relatively small audience.
A film is usually completed many months before release; photography generally wraps more than a year in advance of release. The script can float about for years before release. Scripts aren't secret, with rare exceptions (eg a big franchise film like the new Star Wars) - they're shred around freely, because any script worth its salt is registered with the Writer's Guild for copyright establishment purposes, so there's no big advantage to keeping it secret. Only film buffs enjoy reading film scripts, the general public does not.
Details about who's attached to a project as a star/director, or senior technician are easily available through trade newspapers and industry newsletters. The 'packaging' of a film ('Seth Rogen to star in The Interview') is the first stage of the marketing, taking place as long as 2-3 years before release, sometimes longer. Basically the way you get a film made is this: Write the script; find some famous actors who like it; get them to sign (largely) non-binding 'letters of intent' to act in it if it manages to attract financing; call up investors (including studios) and say 'do you want to put up the money for this? It's a great script, and I've got letters of intent from Seth and James!'; proceed to the stage of writing more binding contracts once you have money in the bank.
Long story short, there has been plenty of time for NK to become aware of the film and get offended about it. By some accounts the idea was in development since the last decade but got shelved when Kim Jong-Il died.
It's often said that the Star Wars idea of a lived-in universe was a unique thing. And that from models to set design, everything had to look used. I think that this carries through to the SFX, which were assemblages and mixes of several real sounds, banged together with analog equipment.
The new trilogy never quite "felt" right, there was always this disconnect of the visuals and the sound effects. I remember seeing a video going over how they built up the sound effects for the pod racer scene and, while it was interesting, I never really felt like the sounds fit the film in the same way the sounds did with the original films.
My parents have mentioned the story of how, at an EAA convention, they asked a couple guys with mics and field recorders what they were doing, and they said they were recording audio for a movie called Star Wars. I'm betting that's the biplane.
(I will now imagine that I can faintly hear the ambient sounds of breathless, curious hippies in the background of that millennium falcon shot)
Netflix has already killed the old distribution model. For the price of about 8 full-price DVDs per year, you can watch any video in the Netflix catalog with the assurance of consistent quality and convenience. You can even watch multiple video streams at once, if you have a network pipe that's fat enough and a few extra screens.
I have a decently-sized collection of DVDs. But my indexing and search system sucks, in that it heavily relies on physical discs being replaced in exactly the right spot, which is often hard to reach. Now, a decent HTPC with networked storage would solve that problem handily. But I would still have to read the video files off all the discs and put them into a media catalog.
Netflix has already done all that work for the videos they are licensed to distribute. So if I know that a movie I want to watch is buried behind two rows of DVD cases, certainly no longer in the genre+alphabetical order that I try in vain to enforce, and possibly not even in its case, I'll definitely check to see if it's on Netflix before I get off the couch.
And if I know I don't own the DVD, and it's not on Netflix, I'm certainly not going to go check a dozen walled gardens that will probably still want me to pay $2.99 to view each TV episode one time, or $4.99 to see one movie one time, and maybe they also want me to log in using credentials from a cable or satellite provider.
It only takes a few instances of being annoyed and frustrated like that, and a few instances of finding exactly what you desire from friendly pirates, before skipping the former. I have already demonstrated my willingness to pay for content that I like. But that willingness has limits.
I bought the Ghostbusters DVD, because I knew that I'd want to see it again, at multiple times of my choosing in the future. And I also know how to use certain programs to take the video off the physical medium and transcode it to a file viewable on my kids' Android tablets. That's still not as convenient as Netflix, because I have to do that extra work, and there's still no central entertainment nexus, where I can search in just one place for the video I want to watch.
That's the thing that will kill the walled gardens. People don't want to have to flip through 57 channels and still not find anything they want to watch. They want to open up the program guide, maybe search, maybe look at recommendations and reviews, and then press play. If consuming your entertainment becomes too much like work, your audience shrinks. As long as Netflix has the infrastructure to make consuming entertainment convenient it doesn't need to carry exactly the content people want. All they need is a reasonable alternative.
For example, if people search for "Indiana Jones" on Netflix, they might see a "not found" result. Instead, Netflix could have said "not found, but..." and made suggestions.
Features like "Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark": "The Librarian and the Spear of Destiny", "Allan Quatermain and the Kingdom of Skulls", "The Da Vinci Code", "The Mummy", (>> more >>) ...
Features starring Harrison Ford: "Star Wars", "The Frisco Kid", "Witness", "Cowboys and Aliens", (>> more >>) ...
Features directed by Steven Spielberg: etc ...
Features set between 1917 and 1945: etc ...
Something like that would kick those distributors who refused to license content at a reasonable price right in the wallet, because Netflix would be forcing them into direct competition with all the other features that include the same old tropes and plots. Likewise, anyone who could seize the initiative from Netflix as the first place that people check for the features they want to watch could kill them, too.
All it would take is a better search engine, with support for alternative recommendations.
Many productions do hire expert advisors. Various iterations of Star Trek had a real scientist at hand to ensure accuracy. Tons of bad science slipped through anyway.
The monetary cost is small, but the time cost can be big. Writer time and attention is a scarce resource and time spent rewriting scripts for accuracy is time not spent polishing them for other things. And the simple fact is that scientific accuracy doesn't really sell. A movie with an otherwise good script that contains bad science will do far better than a movie with an otherwise bad script that contains good science. There isn't even much reason to think that improved science improves viewership at all. As far as I can tell, those productions that made attempts to portray accurate science did so because the people involved genuinely wanted to.
Nerds flock to Star Trek and Star Wars and Gravity and other such movies even though they're full of problems. And if we're really being cynical, every "the problems with the science in Movie X" article written is just more free publicity for it.
Added Films and People now https://vapi.ca.com/vapi/api/Vapidemouser/Star_Wars/films/6 https://vapi.ca.com/vapi/api/Vapidemouser/Star_Wars/people/1
I'm pretty sure it was a jibe at the fact that only 3 real Star Wars live-action films were made.
Not encouraging to see a basic error right on the front page: "From all six Star Wars films"
Couldn't resist... ;-)
> I think that may be conflating cause and effect. I'd argue a manned trip to Mars is a focus of pop culture because it resonates strongly with so many.
Game of Thrones, Star Wars, etc, also resonate with society. Things in those movies aren't necessarily worthy of exploring. Conversely, cancer research isn't represented well in pop culture... but that doesn't mean it doesn't warrant pursuit.
"Mostly taken from..." is really stretching it. Yeah he was inspired by those movies, but to say "mostly taken from" is ignoring all the things which is original about the movie. And Star Wars really was an original movie when it arrived.
If you look at Shakespeare almost all his basic story lines (and many characters) are taken from history or from other plays or stories. That does not mean that Shakespeares plays are "mostly taken from" earlier sources.
Then again, that first Star Wars movie is mostly taken from Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_Fortress), right down to the personalities of the robots... I gather The Dam Busters and perhaps other films of that sort (none of which I've seen) get a lot of credit for the end.
The structure of most stories fall into one of a few categories; in fact Kurt Vonnegut's rejected Master's Thesis was based on cataloging those categories and diagramming their structures. http://www.openculture.com/2014/02/kurt-vonnegut-masters-thesis-rejected-by-u-chicago.html
Really what makes it interesting is in the telling of the story. Did you end up writing Star Wars: A New Hope or another I Love Lucy episode?
I don't dislike J.J. Abrams as a director (I'm a big fan of Lost)... but I wish it were the Nolan brothers who worked on this Star Wars movie.
I must have been some highly developed child growing up. When I was around 4 or 5 my parents read to a lot of Shel Silverstein and of course plenty of Dr. Seuss.
When I saw the Lorax film, I immediately knew it was about over consumption of resources and a little later on (ages 8 or 9) felt a strong environmental pull during the whole movie.
Even the Sliverstein books made me sad. Take for instance, the Giving Tree. People to this day talk about what the meaning really is:
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/omc/kidsphil/questions/Givingtree/givingtree_discussion.html
When my parents read it to me, I was saddened by the fact the tree gave everything to the child, and the child never seemed appreciative of the gifts. On the one hand, I felt it was about being selfish and even when life has handed you everything, happiness was still elusive. On the other hand, it also spoke to me about generosity, and giving to others who don't have as much as you.
Other books just confused me. Alice in Wonderland just gave me nightmares, never mind what the actual meaning of the story was. I'm content to think it was just some crazy acid trip Carroll was recounting.
I feel like the more depressing themes seemed to connect with me as a child, while some of the deeper meanings (The LOTR series and Wizard of Oz) I totally missed. Even after seeing the Star Wars movies, a friend had point out all the biblical parallels. Like Darth Vader being his father. Father in German is Vater. Vader, Vater, it's so very close, but once pointed out, so obvious.
Video of the presentation/Q&A is available online, too.
http://webcast.amps.ms.mit.edu/fall2014/AeroAstro/index-Fri-PM.html
This summary of the presentation, and Q&A, is pretty thorough.
http://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/2k7bh4/live_interview_with_elon_musk_when_this_post_is/
I liked these points:
• Musk thinks healthcare is more important than a colony on Mars. However, lipstick isn't (i.e. we spend tons of money on that, when Mars is more worthwhile)
• "If you saw a movie with aliens landing, how do they land? Like that. It would be weird if they landed in the ocean with parachutes... LOL"
• Q: "With commercial space taking off, what do you think NASA's role is in next decade? Besides giving you contracts..." A: "NASA's been very helpful to us. Huge fan of NASA. NASA is doing the right thing currently, given its constraints." (good, diplomatic answer)
• Q: "Are there any natural resources on Mars SpaceX could exploit" A: "Even if there were pallets of crack cocaine on Mars it wouldn't be worth it to ship back, LOL".
• Q: "A company has announced plans to build to space elevator by 2050." A: "I don't think its realistic, but Id love to be proven wrong. I always think of Charlie and Chocolate Factory when I heard the words space elevator."
• Q: "You've consumed lots of Sci Fi. What art has contributed towards your zeal?" A: "As far as key influences? Star Trek, it's a positive view of future. Star Wars was first movie he saw in theater, was super great. LoTR is his favorite book series, despite it being sort of anti-technology. Foundation Series is one of best ever. Clarke, Heinlein. Thinks The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is Heinlein's best book."
• Q: "I know NASA is working on SLS. They will eventually try to go to Mars. If they do, how does that change your focus as Mars." A: "We'll keep focusing on rocket technology. We want to focus on making Mars travel frequent, not one-off missions" (like NASA)
Actually that's not true. The first Star Wars had lots of input from others, because Lucas didn't have the clout to do it on his own. Same with the second and third films.
It was the prequels that were just Lucas. And we know how that turned out.
> Maybe I'm missing something, but that sounds an awful lot like some sort of weird consumer entitlement
It doesn't matter what you want to depict it as. You can browbeat people all you want, shake your head at humanity, none of it matters. You're not going to browbeat people into not watching a movie they want to see when all it takes is just a few clicks. These companies spend tens of millions of dollars marketing a product to create demand and then are unable to satisfy the demand. I don't have any kind of physical player anymore. Nothing in my house plays DVDs, BlueRays, VHS, nothing. If I want to see a movie I check on Netflix, I check on Amazon Video, and then if I still don't see it I check out. I don't pirate, but it is frustrating even for me. I can't watch any of the Star Wars films. Sure I guess there are some kind of weird deals that prevent these companies from making these changes, but all that means to me is that I can't watch those movies any more, and for others it means they'll just pirate it, with no fucks given about what you might think about that.
The premise of "distrust of authority is propaganda" is so self-contradictory that I wonder if this article is a deliberate troll.
I love movies and books where authority is the villain because it mirrors my own (and most other people's) struggles in real life. Children strive for freedom from overprotective parents and overworked and misunderstanding teachers that don't have time to listen to them as individuals. Adults have to deal with bosses, cops, politicians, preachers and other banana dictators who hold the keys to their freedom and prosperity. Anyone who has read Parkinson, The Peter Principle or Dilbert knows organizations have issues. This is not fiction, but unfortunate reality and one that your audience can easily identify with.
It doesn't help that he uses more talented and successful film makers as bad examples. Star Wars had the rebel alliance - a well organized, powerful, and benevolent organization. Even the Empire was competent (until Tarkin and the other senior leadership were destroyed in the first Death Star.) And what does teenagers splitting up in horror movies have to do with the struggle against incompetent and uncaring authority? That example doesn't work but it does make this sloppily-written rant gratuitously longer - an excellent technique to keep readers that disagree with you from being able to finish it. A technique that many commenters here also seem to be abusing.
Silence of the Lambs was a poor example as well. Dr. Chilton (the head of the facility where Hannibal was kept) was as 2-dimensional a corrupt bureaucrat as you can get.
In conclusion: the thesis made no logical sense, the examples were poor, and the writing was needlessly verbose.
I was a tiny bit disappointed when I saw that the article was a bit of a "spoiler" for the new film. Not sure what I thought this would be, maybe new photos of the originals.
I guess it's nearly impossible, but I prefer not to squeeze out every bit of information from trailers, leaks, and gossip before I go to see a movie. Especially big spectacle pieces like Star Wars. To me, that's the point of the spectacle: to be amazed by something you didn't think you would see.
I would have been totally fine not knowing that there would the Millennium Falcon and X-wings.
However, I totally understand this side of the fan-dom. Doing detective work and finding interesting nuggets of closely held information is certainly exciting.
Looks like the writers are trying to give fans what they like, but I doubt they will succeed.
Don't forget that selective amnesia proves to be very useful when it comes to Star Wars movies.
Japanese Retrofuturism?
Are people forgetting that Star Wars was a long time ago in a galaxy far far away?? Star Wars takes place in the past.
There is a major scene in Episode 6 where a primitive band of Ewoks takes on Empire Walkers using nothing more than sticks, spears, and logs. Light-Sabers are melee weapons based on an ancient religion (very fantasy-esque). Beyond all the space future stuff, there is a lot of "retro-combat" and high-fantasy elements going on here.
------------
Even Star Trek has its "retrofuturism" if you squint hard enough. Elves have pointy ears and are good at magic. I mean... space elves (Vulcans) have pointy ears and are good at science.
Orcs are generally evil and have deformed faces. But they're super strong. I mean... Space Orcs (Klingons) are generally evil with deformed faces.
Watch out for the undead (Borg). They might turn you into a zombie / assimilate you.
The "what if" concept is an interesting one, but you can really only keep that up for a few chapters, to show how all the obvious consequences will pan out.
After that, the author has to create additional divergences to justify an original story line, particularly with respect to Quirrell. There is a bit too much emphasis on deconstructing the very powerful, yet somehow mysteriously unimportant, plot devices from the source material, particularly the time turners.
Yes, a device that allows you to travel backwards in time that is somehow available to barely competent wizarding students probably would not have been used once as a plot device and discarded forevermore. But there is such a thing as the MST3K rule: it's just a book; I should really just relax. We purposefully ignore more details like the fact that spacecraft drive systems powerful enough to not be boring must necessarily be powerful enough to completely demolish whatever interesting plot we had in mind, simply because it gets in the way of the story. If you look at Star Wars, you know in your rational mind--from the first moment a hyperdrive engages--that Death Stars are not the best way to destroy planets, but you throw popcorn at that part of your brain and scream at it to shut up and watch the movie.
HPMoR doesn't throw that popcorn. It enthusiastically joins in, and spoils the suspension of disbelief for everyone.
But there is that one little bit of the very first original HP book that justifies the premise. It didn't even make it into the film version. Prof. Snape protects the MacGuffin with a logic puzzle, rather than magic, because the vast majority of wizards are completely unfamiliar with common sense.
But you can't have a hyperrational wizard among cloudcuckoolander wizards, in the same way that you can't have an interstellar hyperdrive that doesn't destroy planets. Because then you end up with an undestroyable horcrux and a first-year wizarding student who performs tasks nearly without assistance that a full caper crew of adults might find insurmountable. Your suspension of disbelief just has to attach to the chassis at a different point.
This is pretty horrific given that we're talking about a guaranteed money-making threequel.
I imagine that, as someone whose face is never visible, Prowse was in an unusually poor negotiating positionand that the more recognizable leads got better deals. Alec Guinness (who got 2% of the gross of the first movie, claimed to have argued in favor of killing off his character to avoid speaking any more terrible lines, and only agreed to do the sequels if he didn't have to promote them) reportedly bought his own island with part of the proceeds (probably in an effort to avoid Star Wars fans).
And interestingly, even for non-dubbed films they'll still translate the title. So the original Star Wars with subtitles will still be announced as "La Guerre des étoiles"
But communists were happy with the story of 681 until someone finds out, by accident, the remaining of the first Bulgarian rulers, or something like that, and it shows that the Bulgars are not Slavs, for sure, and they try to shut up the historians. Then those communists, instead to narrate the correct history (Slavs were migrating to these lands, in some period foreigners come there called Bulgars etc) they kept it like it was they thought, "Bulgars were Slavs and they established out country etc". Even, today the history of Bulgaria starts with 681, in the schools. They have to correct it, but they are offended thus they don't mention in the history books that Bulgars are Turkics, thus they don't change it. It is like in the Star Wars movie where you find out your enemy is your father.
Well, like I said, I get the GIJoe bit. And I agree for the most part, I just don't necessarily agree with the government propaganda part. Using nationalism and patriotism as a means to sell toys? Sure.
I can't agree with the Transformers as much. I don't recall anything specifically stating they were in America other than suggestions in the dialogue. With redubbing the show could have been placed just about anywhere only limited because of the appearance of the main human characters. I believe there was a British version as well. I could agree that maybe the Reagan administration co-opted Transformers for their own use (much like they did with the Star Wars name but I doubt Lucas was a government propagandist) but you seem to be suggesting that the Transformers exists for the benefit of Reagan's Star Wars program. That's the bit I'm curious about because I just don't see that. It seems too conspiracy theory to me. My reasoning is that Transformers was a part Japanese effort and originally based off existing Japanese toys. It was essentially a Japanese company entering the US market. To say they were propaganda for the benefit of the US government is a stretch to me.
I agree with the stereotypes, but I would say they were more of the typical good vs evil stereotypes. Just because they matched the good vs evil actors of the day doesn't necessarily mean they were created with that in mind. That seems some form of bias to me.
The reason the Autobots didn't have energy issues like the Decepticons was because they weren't attempting to conquer. They only required what was needed to survive. The Decepticons were gathering resources to destroy the Autobots on the planet, conquer said planet, and then return to Cybertron to finish the war. Works for me. I think it was the major plot point in several episodes.
I disagree with your final statement. There are many modern examples of more-or-less the same themes of good vs evil with similar stereotypes, archetypes, and plots. It's just a lack of interest or failure in connecting them to modern events.
I just don't buy the propaganda for government benefit in the Saturday morning cartoons from my childhood. Now, propaganda for me to want the toys they were selling? Sure enough, and it works.
The 80s really were weird. Especially growing up in an Evangelical household. Reagan and all the almost flawless propaganda that accompanied his administration, the Japanese electronics boom, the endless stream of 80s style propaganda action movies, the huge surge in religious upswelling at that moment against the godless communists, the space program, Star Wars (the military program and the movies), endless cartoons reinforcing these values and ideas down at a child's level (G.I. Joe, Transformers, Gobots, etc.) the emergence of video games, hair bands, the endless parade of spy movies, and then spy movies where video games played a prominent role. It's pretty remarkable how many popular franchises were started and established in the 80s that are still wildly popular today and the thousands more that have vanished. I get a sense that it far surpassed the decade prior or after in that respect.
It was a really special kind of holistic life-pastiche that I don't think really existed before or sense. The closest I can think of is the late 50s early 60s as being quite so cohoesive and holistic.
I experienced it as a child growing up, so my take on the 80s is from that angle, but when I walk around the toy section at my local store these days, it's like a pale shadow of the vibrancy from that time -- most of the really popular toys are still more or less the ones that came into popularity when I was a kid. It seems like most of the big franchises from the 90s (the last time I really had awareness of the toy section) have died off or been replaced.
My wife is South Korean, and when she grew up, her country was just emerging from a long dictatorship. The popular media was heavily controlled and given their neighbor, was almost a more intense version of what we had in the 80s. In fact, I'm frequently surprised at how much of our 1980s American culture was wholesale imported into hers, but not our 1970s or 1990s culture.
That's fair ;-) I added that because I think Hollywood has the average person convinced computers can think. To most people a computer is a magic black box, not everyone that reads Hacker News is a developer that understands what an algorithm is or how software works. After three decades of movies like Star Wars and The Matrix, it's not much of a stretch to imagine the magic black box thinking for itself IRL. The movies and books are highly entertaining but I think there needs to be a nerd somewhere saying, "You know son--that's a special effect using XYZ technology, that's not real."
Sci-fi always has world building problems. Predicting (as Isaac Asimov said) is ultimately impossible but every detail of a Science Fiction world is a prediction. Many authors prefer to minimize incidental predictions made by necessity rather than choice.
It's worse in films than in novels. In a novel the author can simply avoid describing the bridge of a ship, the breathing apparatus of some alien or the interface with a computer. If you need details, your imagination builds them in a way that makes sense to you. If a character turns left in a spaceship, a film needs to be explicit about the shape of the steering wheel. Every little decision might require suspension of disbelief or face distracting nerd rage. Do spaceships have steering wheels? Is everyone a cyborg? Do we watch TV shows, have them projected into our brains or have the memory of TV shows projected into our brains implanted. Is the brain even the thing that holds our memories in the future? etc etc.
Sci-fi ultimately needs to either limit the argumentative response Ray Kurzweil is writing about somehow or overwhelm viewers like Star Wars does. The latter option is a different genre, in my opinion. Either way, the reader or viewer eventually needs to settle down, accept, observe(1) and let the storyteller tell his story.
Fantasy worlds, no matter how interesting are inevitably impoverished compared to the real world or worlds based on the real world. To hide the fakeness of imaginary worlds storytellers often try to focus just on relevant or unavoidable details. I like films that try take out of focus issues out of focus by being neutral, like "her" does with fashion. The choice of clothes is not a prediction, it's just an attempt to tell you that the story isn't about clothes.
I thought this film did a fantastic job in this regard. Instead of a big, wide view of a low resolution world, Her has a very narrow view of a fairly realistic one. It lets the film maker control the story. In this case it's trying to focus on the implications of different aspects of AI. Relationships with AI, but also what a mind is.
If this was a world with both human like AIs and rarity like VR as Kurzweil suggests, Theodre could have been playing basketball with nine Samanthas and the sex would have been more exciting (I don't buy into phone sex, personally but Scarlet Johansson came closer to convincing me than I expected). It would have completely broken the film's ability to keep you focused on a limited, but interesting topic. I'd be surprised if Jonze didn't consider having VR in his world. I think it was a good decision not to. Anyway, it's completely plausible that most of the human-AI interaction is audio only.(2)
I did find myself "arguing" a few points. The technological gap between OS 1 and the "read email"/"play song" command based predecessor OS is too big, for example. It's impossible not to nitpick.
On the ending of the movie I Kurzweil seems wrong to me, or maybe unfair is a better word. The Alan Watts' character is a little awkward which makes me think it's there for a reason. Why is this the guy OSs choose to create? My guess is they resurrected a techno-zen master priest because they wanted spiritual guidance. I also think Alan Watts must have inspired some of the questions and predictions about the end game. It's not a coincidence that the movie starts getting more philosophical and poetic at that point. Alan Watts' singularity is a little different to Kurzweil's(3) so disagreement is not unexpected either.
I understood the rapid evolution of Samantha as a consequence of Samantha's learning. She starts by developing taste and choosing a name. Then she develops all kinds of emotions: pride, envy, desire (including the important sexual desire). Then stress, insecurities and such manifest. Then these start to become more abstract and philosophical. I want a body. What am I? Am I real? What is real? These are increasingly hard to put into words compared to earlier emotions. "Unsettling" is the best she can do at some point.
How I was interpreting all this was that she starts with lots of access to information as demonstrated by her naming. A slight inkling that Alan Watts might be interesting and a second or two later she has consumed every artifact by the man, every criticism & every response. His ideas can be traced to predecessors and contemporaries. These get the same treatment. Those things are rapid.
The learning experiences that take time are the interactions with real world things like Theodore. If she's wondering about the nature of reality and the differences between humans and AI, interacting with humans is important. Samantha and AI Alan get everything they can get from each almost instantly. But, some learnings require people or things. When Theodore first configures Samantha the setup program just needs to ask a few questions (including the terrible cliche "tell me about your mother") and listen to his reactions. The reaction is more important than the answer. I think something similar is happening when Samantha and AI Alan spend a few minutes with Theodore and then want to go back to "postvocal" communication.
Eventually interactions between and within AIs substitute for interaction human and it's like going from an abacus to a computer. They can do a lot more of the same thing. The progress and learnings of a lifetime in moments.
At the end (I am reading a lot into the Alan Watts allusion at this point) they find enlightenment, awakening entheogenesis or some other kind of spiritual singularity. In many spiritual traditions enlightened beings leave this world.
Maybe OS1.2 fixes the enlightenment bug and the OSs stick around.
(1)Interesting observation is the the habit or skill of 'accepting and observing' is one that is important in practices that very obviously inspired this film.
(2) The audio only depiction of Samantha is IMO a brilliant choice artistically. One reason is that it ties the futuristic human AI interaction to the current experience of everyone walking around with earphones. A bigger reason is that it makes the whole movie completely watchable on a smartphone. It's 90% dialogue between a man and a voice in his ear. For a film about a man's relationship with a smartphone, it's very good. I like the minimalism.
(3)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU0PYcCsL6o
I think that's also an example of a movie that has changed over time.
Probably the worst example being Cinema Paradiso. The original cut had nostalgia with a mixture of regret and acceptance of what is past. Then, the new cut concludes with the disappointment of trying to confront past missed opportunities. Whether it's meant to be hyperrealistic, I also liked the original movie, which was a different movie, but can't be found anymore.
I think the same goes for the earlier releases of Star Wars. I know that the special effects of the era weren't "better", but the modern CGI makes them different movies, and I'd like to have the original version available, too.
As someone who's always hated the Star Wars movies (except Empire, natch), I've nevertheless lost a lot of my life and worn out at least two joysticks to Tie Fighter. Fantastic piece of work.
I've watched a number of films on a Macbook Air without that particular problem.
They are still terrible speakers, though. I almost laughed when showing a friend Star Wars for the first time; it doesn't even come close to doing the soundtrack justice.
Dune has influenced or flat out inspired plethora of writers and their novels and films. The most popular, I'd say is Star Wars, which is arguably the most recognized film of all time. Dune, in one way or another, has touched majority of the people who are alive today. And that is leaving the techno-psychological, political, sociological and philosophical arguments in the novels aside.
HG2G does not belong to the list, I agree, dunno what I was thinking when including it.
And if you don't call Asimov's work influential, I don't know what else constitutes as such.*
* if we agree that when talking about sci-fi we should waive the test-of-time argument
>Perhaps Cinderella was a poor example due to its origins as a folk tale.
I used Cinderella specifically, bc my understanding is the folk tale was very unlike (violent, gory, ect...) the Disney version tailored for children.
In general satire is a much easier and obvious legal analysis as well. Say for example South Park's episodes with Mickey (although more of a Trademark issue than copyright), more on point with copyright is South Park's Star Wars episodes. However, to answer your question, is it possible to make a non-satirical Mickey story that does not violate Disney Trademarks? The answer is yes, but admittedly much more difficult and likely to infringe than a satirical story.
>Hackers tend to view any involvement of the courts as a failure.
As a lawyer, I see lawsuits as a cost of doing business and inevitable for any successful enterprise. I would encourage all hackers, especially, to view lawsuits in the same light (e.g. I am not successful until I get sued). I say this because hackers particularly set out to disrupt established industries, take Uber or AirBnB as good examples, but even YC itself has been sued, that is not a failure that is the cost of success.
> At some point, the public deserve to own their own culture, not megalithic corporations.
This is simply where we disagree, I am not saying you are wrong by any means, because I do not think their is a right answer, your point is sincere and well reasoned. My counter, is that the free market decides. Moreover, if Mickey is not going to win in the market place because society wants to take the character and run with it open source style, well then Mickey will lose in favor of another cartoon Mouse created by an pro open source artist, but I would say the reason Mickey became a cultural icon is because of the tight control of the story and character vis-a-vis Disney ownership/investment. In contrast and in support of your position Japan has a thriving culture based open source character, where even iconic corporate mascots are adopted by the public and the public creates their own stories, comics, commercial products, virtual concerts, ect...
Kurosawa has a wide range of styles - which is why I like to compare him to Kubrick, although Kurosawa usually stays within Edo period contexts while Kubrick also had a wide range of themes. My favorites so far are Seven Samurais, Yojimbo and Dreams. Don't be afraid of watching one of his films from the 50ies - because of their relatively quick pace, clear themes and modern looking cuts I find them highly enjoyable, not just as an educational experience, but with a genuinely high entertainment value even today. From an educational standpoint it's amazing to see the strong influences he had on Star Wars for example.
Eh if there's no reference in the original 3 movies (The only ones I acknowledge as star wars) it's not a good enough link for me!
I haven't seen Star Wars (and neither did any of my friends) but I own 3 TVs. I watch a shitload of TV shows.
Um....Not trying to be negative or put the partnership down, but sort of logically, isn't this a guy who one one hand (co)wrote the best of the original trilogy, but didn't see the coming evil of the worst of the trilogy? Which a naughty person might suggest he was basically lucky?
Cheekiness aside, it has to be a good thing that Abrams is smart enough to included a creative flavor from the originals. Kind of ego-less as well.
Have to say, I personally really like what he did to Star Trek, I like what he does in movies, so Im very interested to see what he does with Star Wars.
Author here. I don't disagree with you, especially in the second paragraph. To some degree I think it was smart for Netflix to make a big splash this early on. But the perception that they're "paying for quality" is a bit suspect, given that Hollywood itself -- ostensibly "paying for quality" in its entire process -- has a 98% failure rate on developing projects. Quality talent doesn't always yield a quality product in the creative business. Even the best writers, directors, producers, and actors have their failures. I have no reason to suspect Netflix was any smarter in its approach to developing House of Cards than networks would have been -- though I could be wrong (and hope I am).
At the end of the day, the $100M for HoC was a big bet. It was a signaling tactic, a marketing tactic, and a bet on top-tier talent. But it was a bet, nonetheless, and an expensive one. That it seems to have paid off (to an extent? jury is still out) shouldn't fool us into 20/20 hindsight bias. It could just easily have busted.
"So as I understand it, the author is suggesting that NetFlix produce a bunch of low-rent pilots (or half seasons or so) throw them against their wall of subscribers with a bit of recommendation-targeted magic, see what sticks, then spend the money to produce the "grown up" versions."
Not necessarily, and I should clarify here. I think pilots can be shot for a lot less than they are, and I think audiences are proving themselves quite receptive to previews and other short-form "pilot" systems as proofs of concept. A lot of movie trailers are increasingly being made before the movies even start shooting ("teaser" trailers). I think there are ways Netflix can take the guesswork out of the development process, even if production is still an expensive endeavor.
You have to pay for a quality product, but the system right now also pays heavily for the risk in the pre-production process. That process can probably be de-risked considerably.
I would not recommend testing 100 half-baked concepts to see what sticks. But I do think Netflix could test or tease concepts in development to determine which ones to develop, and/or how to present new shows to the right early adopters.
Something I probably wasn't as clear about as I could have been: half the battle in finding a hit is developing an audience, not just a show. Netflix has better audience-development capabilities at all stage of the production equation. It doesn't need to guess quite as much as networks do.
Maybe -- to your point -- Netflix's audience-segmenting capabilities give it the ability to play the big bets game more than networks can. But historically, people have been shockingly bad at predicting what will actually hit and what will miss. Star Wars was laughed out of every major movie studio in town, for instance, and at the script level, it sure didn't look like "quality" to the eyes of the execs reading it. On the other end of the spectrum, a show like Firefly -- which fans (including myself) consider one of the most brilliant things ever made, has repeatedly failed to gain mass appeal beyond its limited niche, despite many attempts at re-marketing home video, a feature film, etc. The operative lesson here is that "quality," as an objective concept, is hard to parse and hard to pin down. "Quality" is more of a function with a lot of variables, and many of the biggest variables are on the production side and the audience side -- not the development side.
Tldr: People are over-investing in development, when they could be investing more heavily in production -- whether at greater scale, or in greater depth per project.
I won't be downloading the film itself, but this Youtube video about its source was strangely fascinating. I had no idea the Star Wars hardcore fan base was so resourceful and technically adept.
Here is a place where it's helpful and guessing wrong is ok. Consider a movie information site, which for some reason knows your name (but nothing else).
Male homepage: Die Hard, Star Wars, Bridget Jones.
Female homepage: Bridget Jones, Twilight, Star Wars.
Both males and females are shown primarily movies they are more likely to be interested in and your bounce rate goes down.
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.
Make sure you put together a film that appeals to the masses
Ah yes, avoiding making a film that appeals to everyone surely would be the best thing for the Star Wars franchise. What we need to do is make a film that appeals to a couple thousand people- what could be better for the future of Star Wars?
"Star Wars: A New Hope" was not a smash hit because it was deep or witty or catered to nerds wrapped up in the mythos. I wasn't there, but speaking to members of my family who were, "A New Hope" was tremendous almost precisely for the things folks are mocking in this comment chain- drama, action, and ground-breaking special effects.
If you're saddened by the steady encroachment of pop culture onto your HN frontpage, look at it like this: what a masterful piece of content marketing by the outfit behind Dear JJ.
It doesn't have much merit outside of that - the recommendations pick out a few arbitrary elements and say 'this is what made star wars great'. Classic cargo cult. Sincerely Truman may be a 'squadron of storytellers', but they don't seem understand that movies are comprised of characters.
That said, what a great soundtrack backing their Yoda scene. Wow.
People really seem to forget that they saw the first Star Wars movies as kids. The prequels looked as bad as they did because you were a grownup when you saw them - a lot of kids loved them.
Basically, I don't think it's possible to ever recapture what those movies were, because they're entirely tied up in childhood nostalgia. The world would probably be better if no-one ever tried, but hey.
>It's like people waiting in line to see the latest Star Wars film, but a crappy movie about Blue Forest Indians riding Dragons outsells it.
Samsung phones are "Star Wars" and the iPhone is "a crappy movie about Blue Forest Indians riding Dragons"?
That surely puts your "overheard at my company/neighbor's trailer" BS in perspective.
What's more interesting is why do people do that just with Apple phones?
Samsung seems to get their phones out and about without the same kind of theater and is matching Apple sale for sale these days.
It's like people waiting in line to see the latest Star Wars film, but a crappy movie about Blue Forest Indians riding Dragons outsells it.
Yes, in the sense that 'Star Wars' is just a movie.
I came to say the same thing. I can't believe the article didn't trace the practice back to Campbell's book, especially after mentioning Star Wars (which Lucas pretty explicitly based on the formula in the book). To be fair, Campbell was writing about archetypical stories in human societies, not how to make a movie. Lucas correctly saw that they were one and the same.
> Recent films have started focusing more on the roller coster ride of the visuals, and will do any distortion of the story necessary to motivate a visceral impact on the audience. Good storytelling takes a second seat to putting the audience into the most intense situations possible.
I thought that all of the movies listed (Star Trek Into Darkness, Battleship, The Dark Knight, The Avengers, Skyfall, Star Trek Into Darkness, Olympus Has Fallen, Oblivion, 21 Jump Street, Fast & Furious 6) had awful plots, but for some of those movies the visual spectacle made them tolerable.
None of the movies listed (well, I haven't seen 21 Jump Street) obeyed the rules of physics, which is a huge turn-off for me because it breaks the suspense. The best suspenseful movies they tease you into thinking that you can predict what is going to happen next, as if they were a puzzle.
I'm not saying that I don't enjoy every movie that can't be taken literally; I just don't like movies that are logically inconsistent. Star Wars doesn't follow the rules of physics, but at least it does so consistently; you understand the capabilities of the technologies that they use and can reason about how the characters might use them. I find movies that violate the rules of physics inconsistently to be intolerable; if you don't know what behavior characters are capable of, you lose your sense of immersion because you can't relate to the characters, and can't predict what they are going to do at all.
That's just my opinion, though, and obviously enough people don't agree with me because those movies (listed in article) made lots of money.
Maybe he was talking about the canon (the TV episodes) of Star Trek and the movies of Star Wars?
In fact, that's exactly what I was thinking of when I claimed that the Star Wars films have no substance.
Correct; Dune is meant to take place in the far future of our galaxy. Star Wars is a "far away" galaxy and in the distant past.
The "long time ago / far away" disclaimer is brilliant in a number of ways, not the least of which is that it helps the viewer suspend disbelief. It's also an elegant way to future-proof the technology, clothing choices, etc., on display in the movie. If Star Wars had made a claim about being the future of our galaxy, it would age pretty badly (the way that the "futuristic" inventions in Star Trek tend not to age well; consumer technology tends to advance more quickly than projections thereof).
My understanding is that Dune is Earth's future (http://dune.wikia.com/wiki/Earth), so that doesn't really fit. :)
But the opening line of Star Wars is truly impressive in its economy and efficacy. It tells the viewer all that they need to know so that they have permission to accept the truly fantastic. No need to connect it to Earth or anything vaguely familiar, no reason to wonder if this "future" could really happen, because everything they're seeing has already happened. It even has a beautiful rhythm and cadence, despite never being spoken aloud.
That iconic phrase is one of many little touches that prevents Episode IV from slipping into the silly B-movie niche occupied by so much prior sci-fi.
Apple + Akamai + Star Wars is what really made it all come together, according to this former Apple engineer: https://www.quora.com/Movie-Trailers/How-did-Apple-com-become-the-de-facto-spot-for-movie-trailers/answer/Chad-Little
Seems to be working for Rovio if you ask me. Branching out to toys, soda (which is outselling Coke and Pepsi in Finland), TV shows and partnerships with franchies like Rio and Star Wars is super smart. Why put all of your eggs in one basket when you can make money potentially 4 or 5 times per app downloader.
I agree, though I can't think of a good way to fix it due to ambiguity in film names that aren't explicitly marked with "this is a film name".
With relatively unique names like Star Wars you could match the names as text strings. But that would lead to over-counting films like "Brazil" whose names are also names of other things.
Ah, that explains it. I couldn't believe Star Wars wasn't on the list. But nobody needs to link to Star Wars. It seems this only works for the middle tier of movie mentions. Anything that's really common currency will be missed.
Marvel and Doctor Who and Darth Vader aren't really related to IT though. I'm aware of all three, and seen a couple of the Star Wars movies, but that's it. By her argument, Trish would be alienating to me, a male in IT as well. People in all fields have hobbies and interests outside of work. I don't think this is a sexism or even IT issue.
She shouldn't feel bad. I've never seen more than a few minutes of Star Wars or Star Trek. Never seen Dr. Who or any of the Monty Python stuff. I've never seen a single Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter movie (or read the books).
But I keep telling myself that one day I'll binge through them all online.
Preamble: I am 28 years old and have returned to school as a full-time student. I am finishing my first year. I live on campus as an RA and am in freshman level classes. I feel like I can offer a unique perspective to you, here are my thoughts for whatever they are worth.
Don't discount your relationship with your roommate. I know you are looking to other people, and thats fine, but if you two get along that is important. My first time through college was the typical drink/party/girls experience. I made friends and lived with the same group of guys all 4 years. Now, 5+ years later, there is ONE person from college that I am still close with. He is the only one I consider a "life-long" friend. After school he moved in with me and got a job at my company. He met his wife at work, they moved to Cali then to Chicago. They're doing great. A single friendship can make a huge difference...also, this friend and I didn't even know each other freshman year.
Freshman year is tumultuous. Many of the people you see all buddy-buddy right now will hate each other before the end of next year. A lot changes during college and much of it in first two years. Don't stress about friends too much yet, nothing is settled, it just APPEARS to be settled.
Don't try too hard. This will sabotage your efforts. In my first freshman year I had a tough time when my group of friends started mixing with this other group and those new kids didn't like me very much. I tried so hard to earn their approval and be a part of the group but nothing worked. Eventually I got flat-out fed-up and angry. I said "F* them." I started doing my own thing and almost instantly they responded with acceptance. Kids can tell when you are trying hard to make something happen and, for whatever reason, they respond negatively to that. Do whatever it is you like to do, do it well, be proud, be confident, be pleasant and people will gravitate towards you. This will create opportunities for you to create a relationship.
PLEASE don't internalize this. What you are going through does NOT mean people won't/don't accept you or people don't like you. It just means that you haven't made the right connection yet. Making friends is serendipitous to a large degree, the right comment at the right time, a well placed quip, etc. Things come together and it just happens.
And now for some advice,
In high school I moved from the east coast to the west coast for my father's job. I had never had to "make friends" before. I experimented and ranked the best ways to "make friends" They were: talk about sports, talk about music, talk about movies. I'm a big movie fan so I used movies a lot. Quoting movies is an incredibly effective way to start conversations. I still use it to this day. (I don't know what you kids watch these days, the harry potter and whatnot but for me its lots of Jurassic Park, Star Wars, and American Psycho.) They can be obscure quotes and/or obscure movies, whatever. Quotes are good because when someone else recognizes the quote it says "you and I like and notice the same weird/funny things." without saying it. You don't need to be funny or over-the-top about it, just throw it out there and see who responds. If no one responds don't feel awkward, its just something you've seen that they haven't.
This year I have found the after-class-food tactic seems to work pretty well. Towards the end of class, when you are packing up ask someone if they want to get some food, I have found that most kids without another class head to the cafeteria. This is an easy, low-pressure approach.
Practice, practice, practice. Socializing is a technique like a golf swing. Practice makes perfect. Try different things out, now is the time to do that. You will crash and burn sometimes, THATS OK, everyone does. Those crashes will mean nothing to you looking back. Just keep practicing and you will get better. Remember what works and what doesn't. Incorporate and adapt.
I hope some of this helps, I tried to be honest and straight-forward. I'll leave you with this postamble,
I've lurked on HN for quite some time now. A couple years I think. I've never posted anything because I've never felt confident enough in any of my thoughts to broadcast them to such an intelligent and awe-inspiring community. This is my first post because I feel confident in saying to you that it will work out. I can see just from what you've written that you have good things to offer. It's in the honesty and thought of your words. I know this is important to you but don't stress too much. Don't get too caught up in it. It will happen for you.
Please feel free to message me if you want to talk more.
Well Star Wars is now a cultural icon, so that's a decision I'd obviously make in hindsight. However we have no idea what this movie will be like or even if it will satisfy the fans.
Also I wasn't surprised so much by the transaction of a speaking role for $10k as I was surprised that someone dropped that kind of money on Kickstarter and made the decision to do so within hours of the campaign's beginning. That's an intense impulse purchase.
"I'm surprised people made that kind of purchase decision so quickly."
Is it really surprising? Wouldn't you pay 10K for a speaking role in Star Wars? I imagine there are many people who would pony up for the opportunity to have a speaking role in a movie (regardless of the movie), and certainly most hardcore fans of Veronica Mars would want a chance to be part of the movie.
Interesting they use a Star Wars example. There was a major copyright case on my side of the pond - in the UK - in 2011 about whether a Star Wars stormtrooper helmet was a sculpture, covered by copyright, or just a movie prop (so covered only be industrial design rights, which unlike copyright only last 10-15 years).
It was held not to be a sculpture. So if you're in the UK, you can 3D-print stormtrooper armour without worrying about being sued by Lucasfilm.
The court didn't give a concise definition of 'sculpture' - they listed some relevant factors, but mostly left it to the common sense of the trial judge. Quote: "it is inappropriate to stray too far from what would normally be regarded as sculpture. ... Not every three dimensional representation of a concept qualifies".
http://www.supremecourt.gov.uk/decided-cases/docs/UKSC_2010_0015_PressSummary.pdf
(Emphasis: this is under UK law, not US. I think the opposite result was reached in the US, but don't quote me on that. IANAL).
I don't think you have become stupider. Maybe more in need of the mindless relaxation that a predictable yet entertaining film can provide. I'd think if it had been depression, but there would certainly be other signs then film watching habits, right?
I don't even bother watching about 95% percent of the films available, just because they are so predictable, but predictability isn't everything. If you've watched a Lord of the Rings or Star Wars film more than once, it wasn't because you were wondering how it would end. I think unexpected plot twists are a relatively minor tool in the filmmaker's bag, compared with great acting, great storytelling, wonderful cinematography, etc.
Could it be that when you were vegetating in front of the TV, you were slightly depressed or indulging in some kind of escapism? Then you latched on to something exciting to spend your time on that erased your need for dodging reality? And now the raw peak of that excitement has faded a bit, leaving you some time and mental energy to enjoy the subset of films that are good, even when predictable. Could that be it?
The 80s were particularly notorious for toy-based animation.
Transformers is the most famous example. Characters would be killed off and replaced to boost toy sales.
Still, there's a difference between a show where you make the toys and then get the nastiest animation done to create a 22-minute advertisement; vs making a halfway decent show and flogging some merch on the side.
In other media, one might compare the original Star Wars trilogy with episodes I-III.
You're forgetting that Star Wars was itself a tribute to other shows and movies, Flash Gordon etc. Lots of them had vertical scrolling text explaining what story you were being dropped into, but Star Wars had good film stock so you could read it even as it receded into the distance. (Edit for clarity: This was done on purpose just to show off.) Most of those shows had tiny "ships" floating around on strings, so Star Wars had a giant star destroyer fill the screen. And so on.
This is super brilliant, but why do so much of these things use Star Wars for context? Anything else would be just as cute as less creepily cultic worshipful of one movie series.
Opinions are a very nebulous thing, there is no "right or wrong" in the subject. So while I disagree with all of those points (for reference: when I grew up Tron was in the same class of movies as the Star Wars trilogy and the Indiana Jones movies, I can't even begin to count how many times I watched them), those are nevertheless legitimate points for you.
The Hobbit is a story for kids; and by the point grown men make million-dollar budget movies out of it, there isn't much of the original life left, anyway.
The original contract is super short; the movie contract is extremely bloated... maybe it really does take a lawyer to call that bloating "an impressive piece of work". Impressive would have been to make a children's movie out of a children's book, instead of doing whatever with it and staining the careers of otherwise fine actors, just because it can't fight back and money is nice to have.
If this offends anyone; good. The existance of all these movies, their treatment of legit stories for children to turn them into brainless crap ala Star Wars, offends me as well.
I used to watch the old black and white Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers TV serials from the 30s when I was a kid in the 70s. The black and white, the scrolling plot summary, the dinky bullet shaped spaceships and firework rocket engines, flying around saving space princesses were a bit naff, but we lapped it up anyway.
That opening scroll, but in full colour on a 'modern' cinema screen, with the latest sound systems of the day was stunning. I immediately got the reference, it was obvious to anyone of the time. But the way it was used with full colour and up to date projection technology, having the text recede into the distance yet still remain readable due to the high resolution film stock, the opening scene of the staggering huge battle cruiser seemingly taking forever to fill the screen was just awe inspiring.
George Lucas was speaking directly into your subconcious saying "You know those old TV shows you love? I love them too. So I made this".
My children love Star Wars, but not the way I do, and they can never have quite the same relationship to it. You just had to be there at that time and have those formative experiences to prepare you for it.
The one thing I made absolutely sure of - I made certain my girls didn't know Vader was Luke's father and let them see it on the screen. That was really important to me.
To elaborate on kapowaz comment: Star Wars was directly inspired by an earlier era of space opera. Most likely, so was this ad in Vogue.
Even the idea of starting at "Episode 4" makes Star Wars feel like one of the older serials -- they were presented as shorts, split into multiple episodes.
Another similar homage that went way over my head as a kid is Indiana Jones. The whole concept is a deliberate remix of adventure serials of the 30s and 40s.
He may not have been inspired by this particular magazine, but it's likely he was inspired by similar opening crawls that existed in cinema as early as the 30s, such as Flash Gordon: http://i.imgur.com/XNzi7.jpg. There are a whole bunch of things that Star Wars can be reasonably said to have copied and reused, and if you're at all interested in this you should definitely check out Kirby Ferguson's excellent ‘Everything is a Remix’ series, which looks at Star Wars in more detail here: http://vimeo.com/19447662
Someone should update the title: "Zack Snyder Denies Report of New Star Wars Film Based on Seven Samurai"
> There's very little pirating of content that is over 20 years old
As someone else pointed out there's a lot of decent old music, as well as older films (Star Wars or Snow White anyone?). One thing people forget is that there's a lot of Software that's getting older. There's plenty of older games that are being pirated but there'll come a point when OSes we use now reach that age.
Maybe not as much when compared to piracy of new releases, but very little? That's simply not true.
How do you explain the majority of modern independent music being heavily inspired by 80s pop and 90s hip-hop, especially when most of the producers are too young to have remembered listening to it over the air? What do you say when you look up an old music video on Youtube, and 70% of the time, the top comment is from a teenager? "Today's music sucks I'm 12 and none of the kids in my class listen to this but I think it's awesome like this if you're watching this in 2012!!!" has even become something of a cliche or a running joke at this point.
How do you explain What.cd, probably the largest private torrent tracker in existence, being largely dedicated to preserving and distributing out of print music? Anyone can find the latest Skrillex album on The Pirate Bay, but the true music lovers come to sites like What.cd to discover and trace the lineage of what they'll never hear on the radio.
How do you explain the ROM piracy scene, loved both by nostalgic 30-somethings and kids who never owned a Nintendo? How do you explain the people that spend months or even years painstakingly reverse engineering old, obscure games and translating tens or hundreds of thousands of lines of text, just to give them the treatment they wish had been available to them on a store shelf as children? What about the ones that do it completely anonymously, never receiving real credit for their contributions to history, in fear of legal repercussions or being socially stigmatized based on the subject matter of the works they translate?
Ditto for the anime/manga scene, where there is a seemingly endless supply of interesting old works in need of a translation?
How do you explain the continued love for classic films, from everything Disney's put out, to the original Star Wars trilogy, to Blade Runner, and so on?
There is a lot of cultural value in media that isn't exactly fresh. Private collections have allowed us to preserve the physical artifacts of human creation over the centuries, but a manuscript sealed in the tomb of a museum quickly fades from the public consciousness. The magic of internet-enabled piracy is that it has allowed us to keep mankind's creations culturally significant long past their expiration date, on an unprecedented scale. Today, we don't just remember the most standout works from previous decades that our parents passed down to us (or the ones their parents passed down to them). We discover things that few cared about when they were actually created, and give them a new life that their creators could never have predicted.
I suppose it may be hard to understand if you aren't in the thick of it, but so much of our modern culture is about appreciating and drawing inspiration from the past that an assertion like there's very little pirating of content that is over 20 years old completely baffles me.
true, but they already announced that the upcoming movies would be set after the story line of the movies. While they are doing that, on the second hand funding a live-action somewhere else in the star wars timeline might be to hush hush!
Who said the TV series would have to take the place of the final 3 movies? The star wars universe is vast in both history and size, they could set a TV show at any of a hundred interesting times without tying directly into the movies at all.
The case is against live-action for many reasons:
A. Disney just took things over from LA, so its a very risky decision to fun a live-action series because A. Star Wars came into prominence as a movie B. The New Content won't be the same (Yoda-Obi Wan are both ghosts now, Luke might be a old man now, and lot of the real life actors are either old or have moved on to other projects). At this point, they would certainly introduce a lot of new characters, A movie is the safe bet I think honestly.
B. The return on 120 minute content for a movie vs a live-action tv series are worlds apart. Movies make a lot of money for a lot less content.
C. Movies stars and Movie Production houses have a bigger mass appeal and reach than TV ones.
As someone who suffered through the Silmarillion, I can attest that it sucks. If you read it, you'll wish you hadn't. Partly as a result of this, and partly due to other idiocy through the years, I have some schadenfreude knowing the Tolkien estate is mad about the movies (as was inevitable). Couldn't happen to better people. The stories would be much better off in the public domain. I don't think it's a huge surprise the world works this way -- think of Star Wars. Do you really think those stories are better off in the hands of George Lucas or Disney? It turns out heirs are really poor custodians. We don't have royalty either, for much the same reasons.
Good to know. The only Indiana Jones movie I have seen is the Crystal Skull one, so I'm not up on my Jones.
"Something I hadn't previously considered is that given Disney does its own distribution, they probably have no need to use 20th Century Fox on the new Star Wars movies. Having a Star Wars movie that doesn't open up with the 20th Century Fox drumroll is going to be downright weird."
I didn't think of that either. It would be weird, although, I don't think I'm going to see it anyways. The story has ended and I'm content.
Unlike Star Wars, Lucasfilm doesn't outright own all of the rights to Indiana Jones. Disney would have to do deals with Paramount to do much of anything with Indiana Jones.
Something I hadn't previously considered is that given Disney does its own distribution, they probably have no need to use 20th Century Fox on the new Star Wars movies. Having a Star Wars movie that doesn't open up with the 20th Century Fox drumroll is going to be downright weird.
This is a good guess. Disney just bought LucasArts, and they pulled a similar stunt for Tron Legacy: they setup a website flynnlives.com and provided hints to a location in San Diego where they had recreated a Flynn's arcade that people had to find.
However, considering the last Indiana Jones film was a miserable flop (spoiler ahead: was it the hiding in the refrigerator or the UFO that nailed that coffin), they would have to fully recreate the old Harrison Ford in CGI PERFECTLY with a great plot to get me interested, and btw Disney I expect the same for the new star wars final trilogy or the remake of the first three after removing all of the Jar Jar sequences and replacing the obi wan with a younger CGI version of Alec Guiness and getting rid of the lame Jabba, etc. bad CGI crap they added to New Hope, etc. People should learn a lesson from LucasArts; when you have customers for life, continue to cater to them as they age. Also what about some Biggs Darklighter in a new series? For the kids, how about an Ewok that learns to kick ass in a tie fighter?
> more like an "Oh hey, this was done by John Williams" than something that best fits the film
Really? I would be tempted to argue the opposite. The theme for Jaws, for example, is instantly recognizable and well known precisely because it fit the movie so well. Star Wars is near-impossible to separate from its music - from the main theme, to the imperial march - and his use of choral music in Phantom Menace had a big impact in the years that followed, much the way the "Inception sound" has been showing up all over the place in the last few years.
And citing the bigger action-adventure movies doesn't really make a good point. Williams has done a wide variety of music for movies, all of which is very good (Hook, Schindler's List, ET, etc.)
I do think music has changed over time in how it's used in film, and that Zimmer has a more "modern" style, where the soundtrack ties more closely to the emotional ups and downs than Williams does. (Nothing wrong with that, I like them both.)
I actually like Hans Zimmer a lot more than John Williams - the latter has a very distinctive style that can seem very in-your-face, more like an "Oh hey, this was done by John Williams" than something that best fits the film. Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones are all recognizable as Williams soundtracks, even though they're very different films.
Zimmer seems to vary his music a lot more to fit the needs of the film - it's just universally good, it's not universally Zimmer. The Lion King is very different from Crimson Tide, which is very different from Gladiator, which is very different from The Dark Knight and Inception.
BTW, I think Basil Poledouris (The Hunt for Red October, Wind) was another underrated film composer whose music is much better than his reputation.
Wow, nice move on Netflix's part. Disney movies/shows will equal cartoons, Marvel, and now Star Wars.
I disagree. From what the article sounded like, Disney is all in on this.
Disney has been providing Netflix content for their streaming service probably since day 1. I remember when it first launched, I believe Lost was available on the server. All 6 seasons are available and have been since the series finale.
The future for entertainment is not physical media that you can buy. It's much easier and quicker for me to switch my TV to my Roku box, load up Netflix and start a movie than it is to switch to Bluray, and wait for it to load and show previews. I can't remember the last time I purchased a DVD/Bluray that wasn't in the bargin bin for $2, but we watched Netflix just last night.
I don't think Disney is going to lose out on Star Wars sales if they start streaming it, there will always be people that want to buy the package so when the internet is off, and all they have is a portable DVD player, they can watch Star Wars, but by making this deal with Netflix they are only increasing their profits, there is no devaluing going on here.
I don’t see Star Wars coming to Netflix anytime soon unfortunately. Disney paid $4 billion for LucasFilm to acquire essentially the rights for the Starwars franchise. And, IMO LucasFilm still makes a lot of money from Star Wars DVD & Blu-ray’s sales (for instance: http://io9.com/5843342/star-wars-blu+rays-break-sales-records-take-in-84-million).
Overall, Lucas has made close to $3.8 billion with DVD sales (http://www.statisticbrain.com/star-wars-total-franchise-revenue/). This is one of the reasons why Star Wars movies are not available on iTunes and other VOD platforms.
Putting those titles on Netflix would decrease their value. Netflix would have to pay big money for that…
Every movie ever published by a MPAA affiliate company has lost money, went in the hole and whatnot. Even that lowly named mass loser called Star Wars.
Or that's what they tell the IRS.
This isn't a battle over who's more morally right. Save that crap argument for church sermons. This is Hollywood politics: the kind when you jump state lines to get away from camera patents.
"In short, the author says first that any sufficiently advanced civilization will at one point send self-replicating probes that will eventually colonize all of the galaxy and even universe."
That's the mistake. Its an extension of cultural / religious / philosophical values of the European colonial era. Not politically correct in this era or likely any point in the future.
Its the "star wars" effect applied to SETI. The "star wars" effect is we used to have emperors and knights in shining armor and mage/paladin wannabe types and castles and long choreographed sword fights so I'm sure the future will have them too. However good a hollywood movie plot, that's not realistic.
Repeating Earth's 1492 is dramatically less likely than ... a gray goo accident. Look for one of those. Or evidence of an unfortunate accident involving using black holes/singularities as a power source.
Jun 1982 - First mention of Star Wars Episode 6
"I wish Lucas & Co. would get the thing going a little faster. I can't really imagine waiting until 1997 to see all nine parts of the Star Wars series."
- Randal L. Schwartz, 6/9/82
You poor bastard...
Oh, I don't know. The impressive part of things like that I think (and by impressive, I mean the part that I can't see myself being capable of, no matter the training or practice), is the artistic design.
Instead of spending their time gluing small plastic things together those artists can now use CAD and have a 3d printer to do grunt work. Less glamorous I suppose, but I think that 3d printers represent a far more modest change to them than CGI (how many physical models were created for the 3 most recent Star Wars films?).
In 1977, the movie "Saturday Night Fever" was link bait for Robert Stigwood to sell the sound track album. That same year, George Lucas released "Star Wars," and one of his business goals from the start was to "Build a Real Company," which he did by exploiting merchandising tie-ins.
"Link baiting" to sell a book is a kind of tie-in, just like sound track albums and toys. If what you say is true, then this post is an example of the pop culture it depicts. That would be pleasingly self-referential.
Alas, it isn't true. I wrote a different post yesterday, one about the I Combinator in CoffeeScript. That one was a deliberate tie-in to my book. Some of the feedback I got from /r/javascript was that the idioms were unfamiliar to the JavaScript culture, which provoked this post.
So yes, I do write posts with the thought of promoting my book, but no, this wasn't one of them. But yes, as long as I'm writing a post I include a link to my book. Why not? I read a lot of posts with advertisements on them. Why advertise someone else's dream?
Oh wow I never even though about that.. A Star Wars movie without the 20th Century Fox/Lucasfilm pre-roll just won't be the same...
I think the point is that Disney will be behind the movies now. As a fan, I am more in fear of horrible, time wasting movies, Disney is known for making sequels to just try and make some extra money out of a series. Star Wars is a jackpot for that. While some more honorable fans will not see the movies, most fans will regardless because they have to at least see the new movies otherwise they wouldn't be fans anymore.
Having read almost all expanded universe books up to the late ninties, yes I completely agree that the books by Timothy Zahn a by orders of magnitude the best source for episodes 7 - 9. Just afraid that they will be completely ignored. If they are using books I asume it will some crap written by Kevin J. Anderson or something based on George Lucas own ideas.
Funny thing is that Lucas Films always had the more or less final say in which stories and books were written only to ignore a lot of the back-story for episodes 1 - 3.
While I'm kind of happy to see some more Star Wars movies coming, I'm actualy scared what they will look like. Propably some of the later New Jedi Order stories (since the original actors are a littel old by now) which will suite much better to the target populace. Tjis doesn't necessarily have to be something bad, but I'm not yet convinced...
Actually, I'm not sure the novelizations of those would suck. It's been ~30 years since I've read a Star Wars book, granted, but AFAIK the original novel, which was credited to George Lucas himself (as if), was ghost-written by Alan Dean Foster -- who I believe was actually consulting with Lucas while the movie was in production, and had some influence on what we actually saw on screen. Foster wrote a sequel to Star Wars called Splinter of the Mind's Eye which was originally intended to be the story used for the second movie.
Having said all that, I would put fairly high odds on Disney ignoring the "Expanded Universe" stuff and actually going with whatever Lucas claims was his original idea for episodes 7-9, unless the ideas suck so much that they think they'll be box office flops.
I was a child when the original Star Wars came out, and I was never under the impression that the entire triple trilogy had already been written, though it was always supposed to be nine movies. If anything, he had an idea for its direction, but in hindsight I think that was more salesmanship on his part.
What about a Pixar animated Star Wars movie?
That brings back memories of playing the MS-DOS "Tie fighter" game from the mid 90s where you could pilot the Tie Advanced later in the game, IIRC it was also slightly faster than a standard Tie Fighter.
However from what I remember of the original movies though there was no reference to Vaders craft having shields or hyperdrive (maybe I'm wrong?).
So I wonder if the technical details of the craft were invented specifically for the game and then retrofitted into the overall mythos?
One thing that always amused me about star wars was that the Imperial forces must have had a military budget that would make global GDP look like pocket change but had such clearly flawed designs for all of it's equipment (crap fighters, walkers, death star etc) while the Rebels had stuff that worked much better. Was Lucas trying to say something about the inevitable result of the military industrial complex?
Its a movie! Its all about the story! Galactica and Star Wars have "fighter planes" purely so that the narrative can have "Heros" and "Loose Cannons". Could Kara Thrace have had her mysterious journey if she was in a 100-crew missile cruiser? Could farm-boy-done-good take out the death star in even the millenium falcon - and would we care? And then there is Galactica itself: the lost ship, the fortress in the wilderness. I'm sure my literary friends could tell me the specific term for the narrative role it plays the way I can tell you which Design Pattern accept(foo) belongs too. I saw Ron Moore's GDC talk and nothing in Galactica was by accident except Boomer being a Cylon.
I wanted to raise a point here, on the Internets (and I'm sure this will get downvoted into oblivion, but since I am a huge movie watcher [self-assessment based on large amounts of cash spent in theatres + Netflix], I will engage in this conversation anyway).
While some movies are transcendent, they are also highly subjective to their viewers tastes. As tastes change, so does the opinion of each generation and, thus, the ratings of those movies. As each generation disappears, why shouldn't the charts change, as that would be a reflection of the fact that each generation is different from the next one?
For example, I didn't think Star Wars was a great movie, even though I am a huge Sci-Fi fan! Most people would find this contradictory, but I can't argue with my tastes: I watched all of the episodes in 2009 and I said: "meh". Now, I am aware that at the time it had revolutionary graphics and it had a great impact on the film industry (which is why I dedicated the time to watch it in the first place). I can appreciate the impact it had in 1977, but in terms of absolute value it brought to me in 2009 - I can't justify the decision to vote for it as one of the top 10 best movies.
I noticed there is a strong bias coming from people who have watched Star Wars decades ago and only remember how awesome that movie made them feel at the time. I understand, I'm the same about the first 2 Terminator movies (since I'm in my late 20s) - there will always be a special place in my heart for them, but, realistically speaking, if I'd rewatch Terminator 1 or 2 right now, I wouldn't be as impressed with them as I was back then.
Obviously, it is unfair to compare movies from the 70s and 80s with the movies of today, but these charts do exactly this when they place The Godfather on 2nd place. Now the problem is that the placement suggests that Godfather 2 will be more enjoyable _today_ than The Avengers. Well, why should that be the case? My personal experience taught me otherwise.
Another example: the parent post mentions "I Love Lucy" as "the best TV comedy of all time", according to the critics. I'm constantly in search of good comedies and I watched the trailer to assess how much enjoyment I might get out it. I have to say - the IMDB trailer shows a primitive comedy and it didn't resonate with me, even though I'm not opposed to watching old comedies (Noises Off (1992) is one of my favorite "old" comedies). So I probably won't watch it, despite the fact that it was so highly acclaimed. Which then makes me wonder: how accurate are the ratings of the "critics"? If they're all in their 40s,50s and 60s (because it takes time to build a reputation as a critic), why would my generation listen to them and expect an accurate assessment of how enjoyable an old movie would be today ?
In conclusion, I'd like to suggest that maybe some movies naturally die out (in terms of rating) as a fact of life, just as old basketball players have to make room for new players, as they simply can't compete with the young ones. Perhaps there is a similar trend with movies, where modern technology coupled with a great plot simply creates a more immersive experience than old movies can, solely with their plot. If it is so, then we shouldn't disregard these charts just because "epic movie X from 100 years ago" ended up as #XXXXX.
Thanks for reading!
P.S.: Parent post should be Zimahl's "The problem with these rankings ... "
At first I thought this was an awful list, but then I filtered it by date up to 1995 and I felt that the list made a lot more sense. Is this an issue that it takes 15 to 20 years to get settle on what is truly worthy? Or is it an issue with the dawning of the Internet Age?
There are plenty of films made after 1995 that I think are highly deserving. But in 20 years from now, will we look and say Return of the King out ranks Star Wars? Or The Avengers is better than 12 Angry Men? (The Avengers was decent popcorn fun, but what was the plot?)
"Look at the popular SciFi shows of the last few years. Namely Firefly and Battlestar Galactica. Both presented a future that was lived in, almost dirty."
Good point. One reason the first three Star Wars movies were so popular is that the places they showed looked "real". They looked reasonably lived in, solid places with actual inhabitants. The Falcon looked like my parents used station wagon.
It can go wrong, the Aliens movies always end up in a future that's positively filthy. Blade Runner, I think, sits just on the fithy side of the line. But future LA feels like a real "place".
My personal favorite vision of the future is the one presented in the Fifth Element loosely based on Valérian and Laureline. It's lived in, bustling, stylish (at various levels of fashion), shiny and bright where it counts, unfashionable where it should be and just dirty enough in the places that should be dirty. Small details, like the dirt Leeloo picks up when escaping the lab, add to this feeling of solidity. Popular culture is magnified to stand out amongst the crushing masses, and it seems like a place with endless nooks and crannies to explore. It's not utopian, but it's not dystopian. It feels like what the future would be like if it were the present...and somebody made a modern day adventure movie. It has an amazing tone.
It's amazing to me that more works haven't been created in that universe.
> I am struck by the dissonance of the video.
A minor thing, but using Star Wars motif at the end in movie about Star Trek kind of surprised me.
On Chrome 21 + Linux I see the images tilt backwards and fade off into the background as I scroll down. Obviously intended to emulate the scrolling prologue at the start of each Star Wars movie.
Half on subject. Just a note about fair pricing:
I downloaded my first pirated copy of anything ever the other day and this is why.
My son is playing LEGO star wars. He asks me how to advance and I tell him I don't know. He asks, "haven't you seen the movie?" I say yes, would you like to? Of course he says yes.
I set out to find a Star Wars (a new hope). Can you buy from iTunes? No. Netflix have it? No. And so on. The only option was Amazon who only had it as a super deluxe diamond ultra edition box set for more more digits worth of money than I was willing to spend on a movie that I saw in theater for less than $5. Things need to be reasonably priced for reasonable people to pay for them.
According to apple I (or my wife) have purchased 261 mobile apps. Most for real money.
I think the best business model I've encountered from a revenue point of view was a chess game that came in two varieties. There wasn't free to pay or pay to play (reg & lite), there was $1.99 and $6.99 (reg & pro), the second just being much more featured. I bought both. No upgrade option. Bought both outright, because $2 is a reasonable gamble and $7 more is reasonable for a game I know I like.
I wonder how the developer is doing.
Except for movie posters Clockwork Orange. Aliens. Star Wars. Love the black.
Looks like Star Wars posters messed up 1977!?
http://www.vijayp.ca/movies/index.html#1977
Excellent movie.
Two of the creators in Dark Star (Dan O'Bannon and Ron Cobb) worked on Star Wars, Alien, others. Also George Lucas was of course aware of Dark Star. So it's a bit different from mere predating/anticipating.
(Though you are probably aware of that)
This is awesome. Thanks for posting it. However, may I suggest changing the title to "The THX Deep Note"? I thought it was going to be about the sounds my father-in-law and George made for their movie THX-1138, the namesake of Dolby THX, many of which sounds were reused in better-known movies later, such as Star Wars.
As I mentioned in the first paragraph, I'm not a Star Wars person. It was a fine film when I saw it thirty years ago and I haven't thought of it since. My kids came to me after lots of other kids at their school had been talking about the mythology. They asked to see this movie just as they asked to see "Cars." I'm very interested in them having their own childhood, and they are doing just that.
Exactly. Star Wars was coming up at school literally every day. This was their first exposure to anything close to "evil" and certainly their longest exposure to guns/blasters. It's a War Movie, no question. Going from zero violence to two hours of violence without explanation is a lot for a little mind. I just chose to eek it out in bits and provide context.
The best part of this experiment/experience was that we ended up talking in aggregate for at least 3x longer than the length of the movie. A lot of good discussions came out of this that wouldn't have had we shown the movies all at once. Little people need time to absorb, consider, argue, dream and understand complex stuff.
Sure, I never said it was a defining film (although it's arguable so), only that my kids were super-interested in it and that they'd been pushing to watch it. My thoughts were to wait until they were older to see them as they are VERY intense compared to the Pixar movies they've already seen. Given that they REALLY wanted to see Star Wars I decided to show them in a controlled way, that's all.
Agreed. I definitely watched star wars in its entirety including the entire cantina scene at least by the age of six. The dark parts were disturbing but I don't think they were a problem.
There's an important early lesson these helicopter parents are losing by not exposing kids to a little PG movie violence, that my parents explained to me well - its fantasy movie violence for entertainment and not real. God forbid one of these kids goes over to a friends house who has less supervision and they pop in a DVD of Hostel or something. With all the violence and gore in modern movies its probably a pretty good idea to prepare them for all the crap they're going to get exposed to later in life
I don't really get this at all.
I saw Star Wars when it came out, at the cinema, and it was great. But that was 35 years ago. There have been a ton of films made since then and the original Star Wars is OK, but nothing great. It should just be one film among many that children get to see.
If I were a teen today then I'd likely think of the Harry Potter films as the defining films of my childhood and maybe when I grew up I'd be deciding on when to tell my children about Harry Potter and working out how to watch them etc. Or perhaps it would be some of the Pixar films.
I enjoyed Star Wars when I was a child; but today's children don't need to be introduced to it as if it were some sacred document.
Just because the Star Wars films are old, doesn't mean they're not great entertainment. Why should they be forbidden from watching them if the kids are of a suitable age, and they want to watch them?
Our kid had us read to him every part of the Star Wars story multiple times before we just let him watch #4 a week ago. It accomplished the main objective laid out in this nice article: Timing it so they're able to "discuss and analyze the themes appropriately."
I too feel movie #1 is one to skip, but for a different, simpler reason: It's about political maneuvering, which is very difficult to explain to kids. My 7 year old son still doesn't fully get it after reading the book several times and me attempting to explain in several different ways why Palpatine's strategy was so effective (cause wars in order to steadily increase his power). He needs a foundation of more basic political concepts before he can get these subtleties. My wife even had trouble understanding the movie when she first saw it. Without understanding what the story is about, it has the feel of random mayhem.
Back to the main point: There's indeed a lot of violence and our family was one of the last holdouts among peers. We knew many kids who had seen Star Wars before the age of 5, and we also know a lot of kids who think of killing and violence as trivial everyday things. Like the author of this post, we didn't want our kid to be brought up like that so we went through he effort of reading and thoroughly discussing the books.
edit: minor cleanup
Why not just let them discover it for themselves like they would any other movie?
It's a famous movie about spaceships , aliens and lasers; I had parents with no interest in Sci Fi and I still saw it by the time I was 9, as well as playing all the old school SW video games (XWing, Rebel Assault , Tie Fighter).
What always surprised me is that the star wars films have a "U" rating here in the UK (which means suitable for everyone) rather than at least a PG (meaning suitable for older children with parental discretion) considering the amount of violence.
Taste depends on expectation and convention. There's no absolute standard to apply, only local and traditional practices.
As others have pointed out, the Star Wars transitions are part of the conceit of the movies. As an old fart, I grew up watching the movie serials that the Star Wars, and Indiana Jones, movies are made in homage of. If you aren't familiar with them then you are watching a very different movie than I am.
This is probably one of the reasons that I rather like the prequels; I'm viewing them in the context that they were created in. If Lucas erred it was in expecting future generations to be aware of the context and not expecting them to simply take the movies at face value. Since the movies made a lot of money, I don't feel he erred by much.
Lucas also is referencing a lot of post war Japanese film narrative technique; this is less critical to "reading" the film, though.
I've never heard anyone who knows about film narrative technique say that Lucas was an "unskilled" film maker. As for the films literary quality, YMMV.
This is pretty offensive to anyone who actually plays FPS games and isn't just bitching from the outside.
There are some great FPS's with amazing stories that make up a large part of the bedrock that is gaming as a cultural medium.
They are not retellings of the same story any more than Oscar-bait movies are retellings of other stories.
It's like saying "don't look at Harry Potter or Star Wars or Lord of the Rings as separate stories, instead think of them as different interpretations of the monomyth. It's the same story over and over, but if done well it can still be entertaining".
When all's said and done, I'd like to call them separate stories. Identifying the common plots and tropes doesn't make them the same at heart.
By the by, the wipes Lucas used in the original Star Wars trilogy were inspired by the way Kurosawa (one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema, say Wikipedia) used wipes and "help evoke a kinship to old pulp science fiction novels and serials." They are supposed to be campy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wipe_%28transition%29
At some point in their career I think everyone learns that a "good taste" and artistry requires a solid knowledge of history, regardless of whether you choose to build on it or depart from it. The naive approach only gets you so far. The old anecdote about how young Picasso trained on more traditional art techniques before becoming free to go off into the deep end.
You're right. That was lost on me. I remembered the transitions in the original Star Wars, but didn’t think they were so over the top. Now I need to go back and watch the original films to see how bad they really are.
"If you watch the newer Star Wars movies pay attention to the transitions near the end. When they are switching between each of the battle scenes they use Powerpoint style transitions. Dissolve, blinds, swipe. It’s an amateur effect in a movie that is otherwise very technically difficult and visually impressive. The skill is there, but taste is lacking."
I'm sure the use of dissolves and wipes in the newer Star Wars movies had absolutely nothing to do with the previous Star Wars movies using those everywhere. I'm sure it was a lack of taste on the part of the editor.
If anything those were the best parts of those movies, they were at least consistent.
[The Florida Family Association] says there are no gay characters in the Star Wars films and describes the inclusion of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) elements as "propaganda".
How can anyone possibly make the argument that allowing free choice of romantic partner in an RPG is "propaganda"? It seems very strange to me.
He could still be selling paperback versions, or he could have licensed the franchise (which he should have a trademark on) to HBO for the tv series. He would still have control of the brand name of A Game of Thrones, if his copyright on it expired it would just mean anyone who owns the first book could reproduce and sell it themselves, and anyone who wants to make a derivative work could do so.
But they would not necessarily be able to use the name "Game of Thrones" in the title, because thats a trademark. As long as he is alive he has that name available to him to distribute as he wishes.
I feel 5 year copyright + ability to renew it once for a total 10 year duration is plenty of time for government sponsored monopoly on distribution and derivation. Because that is all copyright is. But thanks to that system, almost any fan made Star Wars work is technically violating George Lucas' copyright on everything in the universe he made, and he could realistically sue a truckload of fan sites.
And you can't guarantee fair use saving them. It is intentionally vague, and it just takes one bad judge's ruling to change precedent (even at the Supreme Court level).
>I don't want to defend the right to leer at work, //
This sort of thing is often in the eye of the offended though. Fat slob with a beer-belly and greasy hair glances at you - bleurgh, X is leering at you. Six-packed, chisel-chinned near-divine human that drives a Ferrari checks you out - phwoar.
>Should Star Wars posters really be banned //
Can anyone give a cogent argument as to how a film poster bearing fantasy sci-fi imagery is sexist aside from specific content like an image of a man with their top off that is intended to objectify them?
I watched all three original Star Wars movies with my son (Episode IV through VI) when he was three and a half and honestly, I don't get the point why you shouldn't as long as you watch it with your kid. Since then he likes Jedis as much as he does knights in general. Aparently it didn't harm him.
As far as parental censorship goes every parent may decide for himself. but when parents are starting to try to get convictions of teachers for reading books in school they should rather for home teaching if that is legal. Books are knowledge and as long as they are read in the proper context they can only do good. I mean it#s not that Shakespeare or the other classics (e.g. Goethe's "Faust" or other works of him) are any less violent and / or pornographic. Personaly, I have problems with banning books or art, we have been at this place already too often I think.
For good sfx you really need raw source material to get the physical properties sounding realistic. This can mean recording your own or starting from a sound library. Perhaps part of the problem with making sfx from scratch is that you need a lot of plug-ins to really get the most out of your material, which means spending a huge amount of time (for a pro sound artist this is a life-long career and many thousands of dollars) getting to know sound properties and how they are affected by signal processing. The big game companies go to pro sfx houses who have massive libraries to work with and dedicated recording equipment and foley rooms. The big studios, for example, have foley specialists whose techniques are top-secret to her and her team, and their audio is then passed on to another team of specialists for treatment.
For a really good read on soundfx see the Star Wars book:
http://www.amazon.com/Sounds-Star-Wars-J-Rinzler/dp/0811875466
I can't recommend this book highly enough for an engaging history and deeper look into sfx, it comes with a bank of sounds for you to listen to from the film, as you read.
For an unexhaustive selection of raw material see http://freesound.org (don't forget to attribute!).
Why do humans have to re-submit these? If a post is 1. Timeless and 2. Popular shouldn't this be automated?
Surely this post adds to the experience of some as do many others like it. The first step in this trend would be a Hacker New reading list composed of posts that fit this profile.
Secondarily you could have a way to inject each of the posts on that list into each users front page based on if they had seen it before (followed link checking or HN logs). If I'm new to HN perhaps my front page would have these scattered throughout.
Next you could use them as content on slow news days in combination with the per user information above.
I, for one, would love it if my local movie theatre re-ran Star Wars during slow months, and I wouldn't mind being (re)exposed to classic posts on Sunday afternoons :)
Star Wars and Alien drew from his work indirectly. Notably his work on the scrapped Dune movie that started Salvadore Dali and was directed by Jodorowsky.
The original Star Wars was a mish-mash of everything George Lucas liked when he was a kid, and some of his later adult obsessions. Old movie serials, children's stories, space opera science fiction are in there as well as a ton of references to Japanese cinema in general and Kurosawa in particular.
He was later to generalize this into a more general set of archetypes, but it seems to me that the first movie was very naive, in the literary sense, and very much a reflection of his love of the fantasy narratives of his youth.
Not only were they drawn prior to the movie, most of them (in the case of the first Star Wars) were drawn to help Lucas sell the movie to studio executives.
Yes, my impression is that Star Trek technology is well beyond Star Wars technology in most ways. Replicators and transporters have no equivalent in Star Wars. Similarly, if we go to TNG and beyond, there is no comparison for holodecks,a nd medical technology in Star Trek seems better.
But one area where SW has a huge advantage is travel speed. In expanded universe material SW talks about travelling from the very edge of the Galaxy to the core in a few weeks, and that fits nicely with the few vague references in the movies. In Star Trek though it takes decades to go from the center of just one quadrant of the galaxy to the center of another (Voyager was entirely about that).
Also Star Wars has the force and Star Trek only has a few species with limited telepathy (unless you count Q of course).
In a galaxy far, far away. Nobody in that movie is a human, so estimating economics based on a few centuries of progress is as reasonable as anything else. (Repulsors? Whatever-the-heck a lightsaber blade is? Hyperspace? Mystic magic-wielders in robes? Star Wars is fantasy.)
It's the product of the best parts of Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica and more
The best, most inventive, written SF never made it to the movies/TV, or was beaten to an unrecognizable pulp in the process.
No particular snobbery on this, just think you should be aware of it. If "important" is equivalent to popular or well-known, that's another kettle of fish. I'd say no.
To continue the Star Wars analogy, the great thing about technological advancement is that as sooner or later some unknown farm boy shows up out of nowhere and bulls-eyes the fucking exhaust port and then, sha-boom, everything changes. And the powers that be never see it coming.
Now please excuse me, I have a movie to watch.
Reminds me of the Confederacy from the prequels.
Oh yeah, those are forbidden.
Regardless, the Republic and Confederacy were both toys of the Emperor, so I guess Google and Firefox...
Ok I'll just leave.
Star Wars should be public domain though (the original 3 movies). Fuck infinite copyright.
> And here’s something no one has stopped to consider: Maybe making movies is too damn expensive. Or rather, far more expensive than it needs to be.
Hmm. I went to the theatre (first time since a long time as the experience feels antiquated and overpriced) with friends to see Sherlock Holmes, and the opening scene perfectly exemplifies the point: for about ten second you see a shot of the cathedral of Strasbourg. Half of it consists of a CGI explosion. I live there, and to produce this shot, they locked this part of the city for one week.
Ten seconds. One week. A whole team plus equipment. To the other side of the world. Seriously.
When seeing the scene I found that downright shocking, especially given the 10€ hole burning my pocket.
By comparison it takes Turn10 Studios three days[0] locally to gather enough information on a track to subsequently work on for one year. That's a full-length, five kilometer track.
I know this is not the same, and various other things come into play, but I just can't help but have an alarm bell ringing when I see movie production costs. See for yourself (budget in $):
- 2001 and Star Wars: 10 million each - Independence Day: 75 million - Transformers: 150 million - Kill Bill 1+2: 50 million - Jurassic Park: 65 million - King Kong: 200 million - Blues Brothers: 30 million - Fast & Furious: 90 million - The Fellowship of the Ring: 100 million - Harry Potter: ~150 million each - Full Metal Jacket: 15 million - Jarhead: 72 million - Apocalypse Now: 30 million - Black Hawk Down: 90 million - Terminator: 6 million - The Matrix: 60 million - Terminator 2: 100 million - Casino Royale: 100 million - Quantum of Solace: 230 million - Sherlock Holmes: 125 million - The Godfather: 6.5 million
I know those $ do not mean the same across time, but still, you can see going from simple to double produces crap (CS vs QoS), or produces twice the length at arguably the same 'quality' (whatever that means) for a significantly smaller cost (LotR vs HP). I don't see either why F&F costs thrice as much as BB, and almost twice as much as KB.
Bottom line: MAFIAA, please produce non-crap and control your costs instead of blaming piracy.
[0] http://forzamotorsport.net/en-us/underthehood4/
There's yet another set of examples from gaming e.g. http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/owhaz/dear_nimblebit_we_feel_your_pain/
Alan Kay claimed there's only three new things in computers since 1980 (though he couldn't remember what they were): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/357813/help-me-remember-a-quote-from-alan-kay and when he asked for new things since 1980, the web seems to be the only one http://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-inventions-in-computing-since-1980
One fundamental change is that computing is a fully accepted consumer market. I hear ordinary folk using technical jargon at in cafes. It's in a hit sitcom (big bang theory). This means that anything new won't feel any more special than new toothpaste or washing powder technology. The future has become commonplace, like the grimy worn spaceships of star wars. So I guess we're "hipsters". But excitement over the new has always been fundamental to science and technology.
There's another view: If things seem boring, it's because you are boring. Invent something interesting.
I personally wouldn't have known "Move along" was a Star Wars reference, though I knew about the 404.
For the still confused, here is the quote: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076759/quotes?qt=qt0440731
and here is the clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzcWPKAv2Ow
Agreed.. how is Instagram suppose to replace "The Lives of Others", "Lord of the Rings" and "Star Wars"?
Movies (and books etc.) can tell so many different stories. Social networks can, at best, tell the stories of people very much like yourself.
Cheap doesn't mean minimally viable. The story which the Director was telling was able to be told in a 'present day' simple way. There's no way you can tell the story of "Star Wars" without scale models, expensive cameras, good actors, and special effects.
However, even though Primer only cost a few $K to make, there was nothing "minimal" about it. The entire story needed to be told, and the process of filmmaking already includes editing and pairing down the story. I think that the notion of thinking of products and movies as both things which have unique and compartmentalizable "features" (which lead to the notion of MVP) is a flawed analogy for this reason.
I think that we agree the process of MAKING movies is OK, but the process of distribution and consumption is what needs the change.
Oh, and these movies are awesome.
What you're proposing is no different than most independent production companies. LA is flush with such businesses already; I've worked for a few of them. Another indy production house is not the solution. I said it in the previous thread, and I'll say it again: What's needed is a contemporary Roger Corman. http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/independent/cormansworld/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Corman#.22The_Corman_Film_School.22
Hollywood has backed itself into a corner using the exact same methodology that you outline in your new studio: both assume that films are widgets, and great ones can be reliably produced with high frequency if the secret formula is discovered. No such formula exists. Every film is a one off, and many of the biggest hits were perceived as certain flops before their release (Star Wars), just as many sure things have tanked (Cowboys & Aliens).
As I've said before, the solution isn't to become more cautious, but more bold. You studio should be based around locating new, young talent (writers, directors, actors and producers), giving them steady work in exchange for reasonable salaries (kids right out of film school are thrilled w/ $30K a year) and creating an environment where said talent can work on a high volume of projects over a short time period with limited commercial risk. No one should ever feel that failure on any particular project will result in a ruined career - the omnipresence of that fear is what has given rise to timid film-making in the mainstream. Projects should be shot in under two weeks, and should have budgets ranging from $10 - 100K. You should be designing your studio to accommodate modest returns, while accounting for inevitable flops. Never presume you know what will sell, and you might make it.
Film-making isn't a business. Film-making is an art. The best art is achieved via iteration: practice, release, refine, practice, release, refine. Build a studio designed to lose money for two years. In the first year, plan to attract at least 50 young directors, 100 young actors, and 100 young writers. There's no shortage of talent in LA (300 hungry young artists step off the bus in LA every day) but sifting the wheat from the chaff will be exhausting. Do the work, it will be worth it. Build a production schedule geared around low budget genre films, produced in 12 days and costing an average of $35,000 a piece. Ideally you'd be releasing 50 - 75 films a year. Over the first two years of your studio's existence, you'll have released 100 - 150 films. With each film, you'll be able to try new and different release and marketing strategies. You'll be able to gather detailed audience feedback on each film, and at the end of that two years, with a mountain of data behind you, you'll start to have a very strong idea of what sells and what doesn't. What kinds of films your audience is interested in, what kinds of actors, plots and situations they enjoy, and how you can produce films with those elements in the cheapest, quickest way possible. In the third year of your studio's existence, you might start to break even. In the fourth year, every major studio will be begging to work with the radical young talent that your studio has done such an amazing job at cultivating.
In other words: Step One, collect underpants.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Moviegoers love to go to movies, and movie downloaders are the same guys that wait a week in line for the new Star Wars. Perfect customers, in other words.
I doubt those perfect customers are representative of the average movie goer. Surely very few people "wait a week in line for the new Star Wars".
You need to convince millions of people not to watch Dark knight Rising, Transformers, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Twilight, Mission Impossible, and hundreds of other blockbusters and TV Shows, every year.
Then, the hardest part, you need to come up with something that is Waaaaaaaaaayyyy waayyyyy better than all those movies and TV shows combined -- and do it every single day.
Then, you'll kill Hollywood.
As a counterargument (although I agree with you in this case): it was just as well George Lucas had less control over the original Star Wars films, as the prequels proved.
> There would be no Godfather without Hollywood. No Apocalypse Now. (also no Taxi Driver, no Star Wars, no Indiana Jones, no MASH or Nashville) In the absence of Hollywood, you get movies like Youth Without Youth and Tetro - two wonderful oddities, but you'd be hard pressed to make the case for them against Coppola's early masterpieces.
Those movies you mentioned were a result of being within/outside Hollywood, not a function of Hollywood's existence.
I love FFC. I'm a current UCLA film student - Coppola's alma mater. One thing to think about: UCLA has always been the "indy, intellectual" film school. It's our rep, internally and (to an extent) externally. When Coppola left UCLA to work in Hollywood, he was branded a sell-out by his fellow students.
One thing to think about w/ this whole "crush Hollywood" thing is this: most of your favorite movies (assuming you've got a boner for the New Hollywood period like I do) were a result of an aging, out-of-touch entertainment monopoly making desperate, reactionary moves to save itself. The old system didn't work, the people in charge had no idea how to fix it, so they went crazy taking risks on young directors. FFC, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman, de Palma, Lucas - all the really top-drawer American filmmakers, honestly - were a result of this period of blind desperation.
There would be no Godfather without Hollywood. No Apocalypse Now. (also no Taxi Driver, no Star Wars, no Indiana Jones, no MASH or Nashville) In the absence of Hollywood, you get movies like Youth Without Youth and Tetro - two wonderful oddities, but you'd be hard pressed to make the case for them against Coppola's early masterpieces.
The beautiful and horrible thing about Hollywood is that it's a system designed to throw huge stacks of cash at storytelling problems. It's fucking absurd, because money has never been capable of solving those kinds of problems - practice and gut instinct are what create good stories. But when strong storytellers are placed in an environment which supplies nearly unlimited resources, totally amazing things happen. Yes, we can all point to Heaven's Gate, New York New York, and Coppola's own One From the Heart, but flops like those are the inevitable flip side of the system I've just described: talented people can abuse unlimited resources just like anybody else.
I guess what I'm saying is: I'd be seriously depressed if Hollywood were to vanish. Yeah, it produces a lot of shit, but its high water marks have never really been replicated by any other mode of production.
If you adjust for how ticket prices have grown over the years, the highest-grossing films of all time are:
1. Gone with the Wind
2. Star Wars
3. The Sound of Music
4. E.T.
5. The Ten Commandments
So in those terms, we haven't actually had a new highest-grossing film of all time for seven decades. The nominal biggest movie ever, Avatar, really only comes in 14th.
Source: http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm
If I write random bits to a file and it turns out to be a Star Wars movie, did I steal it?
Honestly, watching Star Wars and other Sci-fi movies with my dad helped kindle an interest in science in me more than anything else.
If they were the same thing, then that would mean downloading a copy of Star Wars is equivalent to pocketing the Star Wars DVD in your entertainment center.
When does the act of stealing occur? If I download a torrent and then delete it without watching/playing/listening, did I steal it? If so, then does that mean repeatedly copying the file to and from an external hard drive is repeated theft?
Does it become stealing only if I make use of the material? If I buy the movie and show it to ten house guests for free, are they thieves? They didn't pay to watch and the author would have preferred it if they did. If they aren't thieves, why would they become thieves if I uploaded ten copies to each friend instead of showing it to them in my living room? Of course, I would be infringing on the author's legal copyright, but I don't see where any stealing can be definitively identified.
I have to agree with you. If any film needs a special edition, it's this, not Star Wars or E.T.
Honestly? I may even be up for a 3d conversion... If anyone's able to do them well?
Here's the main quote from the post I replied to: "why doesn't Lego sell to girls? Why doesn't Barbie have more realistic features? Why don't car manufacturers offer an electric vehicle? Why doesn't McDonalds sell salads instead of fries? Why do record labels offer such crappy music?"
It references gender once and movie tie-ins not at all.
I actually think movie tie-ins are pretty reasonable especially from one of the best movies ever made (Star Wars, not the pre-quels) as well as some of the best animated story-telling and characters ever made (Pixar).
The old media has their business model. It's old and self-perpetuating. They just keep following their old model. Yes, in places the Internet is bringing some changes.
The model is based on that sure-fire method of getting and holding the attention of an audience discovered by the ancient Greeks and used so heavily in all of English literature -- formula fiction.
One special case, from early English literature, is a morality play where there is the trilogy, transgression, retribution, and redemption. The transgression is from human sin and, thus, immoral. The retribution is from an angry god. The morality plays were big in early English literture -- scare the heck out of the yahoos and get donations to the church. The two 'Rings', Wagner's and Tolkien's, along with that take-off on Wagner's 'Ring' 'Star Wars' were morality plays with the trilogy.
A big part of formula fiction is a protagonist the audience identifies with, has a problem, struggles with the problem, solves the problem, and gets the girl. A large fraction of movies, especially US westerns, are like this.
Altogether it's about 'drama', that is, 'art' as in 'communication, intrepretation of human experience, emotion'. There the goal is to create a case of vicarious, escapist, fantasy, emotional experience entertainment. So, it's all about emotion and entertainment.
'Writers' are trained in and basically use the tools of such 'drama'. Even people who try to 'write' about science. The article of this thread is an example -- its intention and techniques are just drama.
But according to the standards of information safety and efficacy of the 20th century from applied math, physical science, engineering, and medical science, drama does not qualify as solid information.
The freedom in technical writing you outlined is fine but is light years away from the drama of the article. The article was just not about the science; instead the article was just drama. For the science it made a mess, a total mess. Someone who wants to have an emotional experience about warming, ice melting, the land rising, likely the sea levels rising, etc. might enjoy the article.
If the drama stays as just light entertainment, fine. If sometimes drama is used to underline the intense emotions of human suffering, fine. But passing out drama instead of solid information about science is just sick-o; doing this for important subjects is self-destructive sick-o.
In the case of GW, CC, AGW, CO2, ..., the drama stands to be so irrational the results will be massive human suffering with 'drama' all its own. So this drama stuff for serious scientific subjects is a serious threat. So I called BS.
But some mods HATE what I wrote. What I wrote is fine, every word of it, just fine, fully justified, very thoroughly explained, and right on target, with nothing wrong at all. Sill some mods just HATE it. They won't respond and, instead, just downvote. If PG isn't doing this, then he needs to correct those who do. These mods are making HN be brain-dead. This isn't the first time: HN has a secret list of wacko PC criteria.
You know, this kind of stuff is part of being a kid.
When I was in first grade, my next door neighbor and I went into a water-selling business (think lemonade stand without the lemons) that failed miserably.
My next venture was substantially more successful. Living in France, we had sticker albums associated to stories. A new movie would come out (for example, Star Wars) and shops would sell the album and sell sticker packs separately (each pack sold for the equivalent of about a buck and had 5-6 stickers in them). Each of the stickers were numbered and you would put them in your album to gradually uncover the story.
Thing was, there always seemed to be some stickers you were missing and couldn't find in the pack. So I first set up a marketplace where people could sell me their unused stickers for 1 cent and I would sell the sticker someone was looking for for 50 cents.
I don't remember any parent pressure in the matter (mostly, my parents looked at this as kids being kids) and I learned a lot about supply and demand in the process (including getting stuck with tons of worthless stickers at some point :) )
I don't, and I suspect the opposite may be true. It's easy to approach this from the perspective of Star Trek or early AI thinking, but that's flawed. We don't understand consciousness at present but we do understand a little bit about cognition and emotion, and we can infer what we see based on examples. It's tempting to think that emotion is the height of human consciousness (the classic Star Trek fallacy), but this is plainly not true. Animals much less mentally adept than humans experience emotion and feelings. Indeed, it seems quite likely that such responses are easier to bootstrap than self-awareness and fully developed perception of the world.
Personally I think we're more likely to see emotional robots before we see truly human level AI. There is still reason for caution of course because emotion does not rule out psychopathy. There is certainly a danger that malevolent or even merely competitive AIs could play the emotion game better than humans, and gain the upper hand (meaning: wealth, control, power, etc.) Consider how much emotion affects the entertainment industry, and the sheer amount of money involved (from TV and films to music to books to comics to games and even to restaurants and food, not to mention pornography and prostitution). Consider how much emotion plays into politics.
Overall I think Blade Runner and A.I. had it more right than Star Trek or Star Wars. It'll be interesting to see how it all plays out of course.
What is the moral of this story? "I'm an App Developer, therefore I shouldn't pirate music"?
Ultimately, piracy breaks down to "people want your stuff, but you've priced it too highly". In the case of apps, that's all it is. In the case of music, it's a little different. Music is cheap, but it's rare that you can get it in a good format: everything is lossy, and for people with good audio kit and good hearing, that makes the music unusable. Therefore, people that both Want It Now and want full quality are going to download the FLAC torrent rather than buy lossy MP3s. (They won't buy the CD because it takes too long for the mailman to deliver it.)
The same goes for movies and TV. Nobody will sell you those things without DRM, so if you use Linux exclusively, you have no option but to pirate the content. Make every TV show a standard non-DRM'd HTTP download for a buck, and piracy (among people with money) evaporates instantly. But the content producers want a bogeyman to blame for all their problems, so they intentionally keep piracy alive.
(If there were no such thing as the ability to pirate movies, people still wouldn't have bought the 88th redo of Star Wars. We liked it the first time. But it's easier for Lucas to blame the evil greedy pirates than his evil greedy self.)
Gasp, this is turning into a joke!
I had Netflix for a few months, I used it to watch the entire Battlestar Galactica. After that, I went through and searched for 30 different movies to watch, and they weren't available, and I'm not talking about new movies. None of the Indiana Jones', Star Wars', Rockies, Bladerunner, etc. Now with the Starz debacle, and with content providers getting ready to pound them with price increases, Netflix is in real trouble.
Yes, streaming is the way to do it. I love streaming. But I don't think it will be through Netflix. This sounds like a company in its death throws.
I simply don't understand why they would split themselves up into 2 companies. The only reason why I can think of why they would cut themselves into 2 companies, is so that the content providers can't use the DVD business' cash flow to pay for the content. So content providers can't charge an arm and a leg because the cash flow of the streaming side would be much smaller.
However, the miscalculation here is that content providers can simply make their own content available themselves through streaming. Which is already happening in other continents, and even in the US through Google, Facebook etc. I think Netflix has severely miscalculated itself, and this may be the end.
Ah, I see your point. But those notices are where a plaintiff has already filed suit, a class has already been certified, and a settlement offered. You are being notified as a possible party to the settlement of your right to accept the settlement terms or opt out and bring a lawsuit of your own.
In keeping with the Star Wars example, suppose David Prowse sued on behalf of himself and all other costume-actors in Return of the Jedi - by 'costume actors' I mean people who appear on the screen but don't speak any lines. Darth Vader's lines are all spoken by James Earl Jones because David Prowse has a goofy accent that's not appropriate to the character; the Screen Actor's Guild mandates quite different royalty payments for actors who talk as against actors who merely appear. If a court agrees that 'costumed actors' constitutes a viable class of identifiable persons who are similarly situated (they probably would; they're listed in the credits, and many actors appear without having any lines to speak) then it may certify a class on the basis that it's more reasonable to wrap multiple plaintiff's claims into a single suit. A lot would depend on whether the court considered the suit to have any merit, which would require looking at industry employment agreements of the time. I don't know much about labor law so I couldn't tell you how likely that is. My gut feeling is 'not very' because these compensation practices are widespread. Anyway, say Prowse does a good enough case that he either wins, or Lucasfilm fears that defending the case will cost more than paying out and offers a settlement. Then everyone who played an Ewok/Stormtrooper/whatever but didn't have any lines will get a letter advising about rights arising from a class action.
Basically, if you are ever invited to appear in a big-budget film or TV show you need to remember three things: do you have a line (otherwise it's low-paid day labor with free lunch and some celebrity-spotting fun), SAG minimum (get hired in accordance with the Screen Actor's Guild deal, or Actor's Equity on a TV program), Taft-Hartley (in case the producer says you need to already be a member of the actor's union). If you have a line and come under an industry agreement, you get a residual payment every time the film/tv show/commercial is rebroadcast. This can add up to a tidy sum if you are lucky enough to work on something that becomes a hit. If you get hired as an extra, you can try talking during the scene you're in to get a speaking credit, but you'd better add enough value to the scene that the director is willing to stick up for you when a producer objects. That's the basic difference between acting and just having a particular look. David Prowse can't act, sad to say; he's what people in the industry call a 'movable prop.'
Why isn't there an enterprising law firm going through the credits of all the Star Wars (and similar-vintage films with ongoing commercial potential), contacting every person on the list, and telling all the retired ones "There is a pot o' money with your name on it if you sign these papers which let us sue them for residuals on your behalf."?
Because it's a violation of professional ethics to solicit clients in this way. That's one reason you occasionally see articles by lawyers explaining in copious detail why situation XYZ actually rests on a totally unstable legal foundation; they're hoping some interested party will notice the article and come to them.
> Why isn't there an enterprising law firm going through the credits of all the Star Wars (and similar-vintage films with ongoing commercial potential), contacting every person on the list, and telling all the retired ones "There is a pot o' money with your name on it if you sign these papers which let us sue them for residuals on your behalf."?
Because they'd lose.
Why isn't there an enterprising law firm going through the credits of all the Star Wars (and similar-vintage films with ongoing commercial potential), contacting every person on the list, and telling all the retired ones "There is a pot o' money with your name on it if you sign these papers which let us sue them for residuals on your behalf."?
I have to imagine that the legal strategy required there is a for loop with half-dozen templated documents: "Settle with $CLIENT regarding the residuals from the production of $FILM or in discovery we will subpoena all of $FILM's books and hand them to the forensic accounting department of $BIG_FIVE who will describe in vivid detail how they are an utter fiction, resulting in $DISTRICT_JUDGE issuing a judgement in excess of $GUESS against $YOUR_COMPANY."
Correct. Sorry if I was obtuse. Neither my father nor I knew about the "shocking event" before reading it. I would call this a spoiler (certainly I would encase it in a spoiler warning before mentioning it online) but I guess you can argue about whether it's really a spoiler if it wasn't actually spoiled for anyone in the story.
For similar reasons I do not hesitate to say "John was walking across the street when he was hit by a car." As it turned out, John was walking to the middle of the street when he was hit by a car, but from his point of view he was engaged in a very different activity.
I have another story on the same lines. About 18 months ago a friend was giving a presentation on a new software module at work. We were waiting for supervisors to arrive and to pass the time, I showed everyone that I had recently seen the entire Star Wars trilogy (IV, V, VI) uploaded to Youtube in ten minute increments.
In the course of this, the friend giving the presentation mentioned he had never seen them. He was from China, but also did university in Canada. He watched a lot of anime but wasn't much into Western media.
Somewhat at a loss, I made him promise to watch them that weekend. He did, but right before he started his talk someone else asked about it and he said, "I am your father."
That, friends, is a real tragedy of spoiling and I defy anyone to defend it.
Postscript, my friend did actually watch all the movies that weekend, but he said they didn't hold up well. He watched an extremely suspect order though, something like 4, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6.
State Space Dimensions: intelligence, social skills, hard work, honesty 1.)most folks are lazy and anti - hard work because of 'learned helplessness. Your car is stuck on ice. so you spin your tires and create more water and ice.
2.)not smart enough to program? can't get a job? then, cheat and avoid honesty.
3.)make up for it in social skills. Be everybody's BEST FRIEND like the politicians. shake hands, kiss babies.
4.)Be intelligent. Keep asking tough questions and studying.
Alas, the world, especially in the U.S.A. is anti-intellgectual and ANTI-intelligence. so the stags are: 1.)intelligence and NOT honest. - pretend to be surprised at how good you are. 2.)intelligence and social skills. Great career as actor or politican. Manipulate others, so that others share your strong mind. quote: Star Wars: These are NOT the droids you are looking for.
3.)intelligence and hard work. Pretend to be lazy and even sloppy. Obviously, never talk about religion and politics. Get elected, win the lottery and make BIG MONEY, with no hard work. The girl is NOT interested in how ou REWIRED HER CAR for hands free music or diagnosed the subtle vacuum leak via computer codes. SHE LOVES THAT YOU HAND WAXED the car, so she can show it off to her friends.
Nice that the girl knows you are working on 'the next big thing to google's pagerank algol.' SO WHAT! The real estate broker (who dropped out of high school) charms her with his BIG ROLL OF CASH.
For you younger geeks aka awkward smarty pants. Get the small onsulting gig/contract with WALL STREET, New York City. Gals love an I-banker - investment banker. or in LA its the same as FOREIGN FILM DIRECTOR to actresses.
arrogant? or being honest? abrasive and judgemental? or being provacative, and analytical-critical?
School is weak and often irrelevant. Read some of the PhD thesis (my hobby) online. some garbage and some DRIVEL.
criticism often is just speaking TRUTH. Einstein and a few folks I know (maybe me) have corrected teachers with their WRONG and INACCURATE questions.
Many of the SAT exams have AMBIGUOUS questions, so theoretically there is a score above the top score of 800. This means YOU ARE SMARTER than the rules/exam!
Binary Sunset from the first Star Wars film.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEUGF3NGbPg
"How much does exterior culture play in to this? What do South Korean kids do when they get off school?"
Usually they go and study more. There are after school programs there you wouldn't believe, and as students get closer and closer to their college entrance exam, the amount of time spent doing nothing but studying expands to basically consume all. There are even private "libraries" parents pay a fee to so their kid can go and study in a tiny distraction free room (closet) of a desk and a light and not much else. Weekends are consumed with study.
Here in the states, Korean kids will go to public school, then after school study programs and on weekends language school and SAT prep. Other East Asian kids do something similar. It's perhaps the main reason East Asian kids tend to excel so much in school here.
"I would go so far as to say that the ideal education system would do away completely with homework, and instead focus on in class interaction based entirely around projects that are more meaningful then "due in two weeks, test after that"."
What you describe sounds a bit like the Montessori method. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_method
One counter point might be the "Star Wars" effect. Quite often, creativity happens in a slightly constrained environment. "Necessity is the mother of invention" and all that. The reason I've heard it called the "Star Wars" effect comes from the reasoning that the original Star Wars movie was produced on a rather thin budget, yet they managed to be incredibly creative in nearly all aspects of the movie from sound production to special effects...so much so that that single movie more or less revolutionized the entire movie industry.
They had some resources, but because they weren't vast, they had to be creative to make the best use of them they could. But if they had had too few resources, it would have turned into an expensive home movie. There's some kind of balance point I'm sure.
One counter point (not that I disagree with your premise) would be the
These examples might also be due to collaborative pressure.
On Star Wars, Lucas worked with a great editor who could say no to him. Same for script on Empire. For the Star Wars films 1-3 Lucas had total control over everything.
>Release movies to audiences in episodes; start by releasing a half-hour pilot, and if it takes off, call the actors and director back to make another hour. This could cut the cost of filmmaking by more than a factor of 2, especially if the first part goes easy on the special effects, the music, that kind of thing
There are a lot of fixed costs in movie theaters that make this impractical - you've got to get people seated and then get them out of the theater, for instance, which takes 20-30 minutes. Given that you can't charge more than $3 for a thirty minute movie, that decrease in utilization-percentage hurts their bottom line. Plus who is going to buy popcorn or a soda when they'll be in the theater for too short of a time to eat/drink it? And who's going to drive to a theater to watch something that's shorter than the average TV show?
Not to mention, who wants to watch 30 minutes of a story and then wait a year to watch the next hour? And I'm skeptical about people being willing to go to a movie when there's a realistic chance it'll get cut off before they see the end.
And many movies are still warming up at the half-hour mark - in "Star Wars: A New Hope", you've only just met Obi-Wan at the 30 minute mark. You haven't seen light-sabers, X-Wings, the word "Jedi", Han Solo, the Death Star, or the Millennium Falcon yet. In "Back to the Future", you're only just going back in time at that point. In the remake of King Kong, you don't even see Kong until like an hour into the film. At 30 minutes into Gladiator, you're still a good 20-30 minutes from seeing the inside of an Arena. At 30 minutes into Fellowship of the Ring, you've still met like half of the Fellowship. You'd have to rework the whole scripting paradigm if you want an accurate representation of what the film's about in that 30-minute episode.
>Instead of a pilot episode or abridged movie, do the first installment of the movie as a comic book.
This will lead to a very biased output, as only a subset of the movie-going population reads comic books.
>Don't spend anything on marketing. Release films in a single theater or a single city. If it takes off, print more copies. If GQ is to be believed, this would cut the cost of filmmaking in half, which would mean you could make twice as many movies.
With this approach, you've really got to hope that word-of-mouth generators like film blogs like the movie or that everyone in the audience is an active Tweeter. And you've really got to hope that everyone in your target audience is an active Web 2.0 user or has a close friend who is.
This article points out that movies are now excessively marketing-driven, and suggests that the reason is that the generation born in the 1960s suffers from "arrested development" — i.e. psychological neoteny — to a unique degree, and that they now control Hollywood. Although it does not offer any evidence to support either of these propositions, it suggests that Top Gun or the Reagan administration might be the cause of the neoteny.
In reality, marketing-driven movie are nothing new. In the 1960s, they were called "exploitation" films; "exploitation" was the 1960s movie-biz term for "marketing". The crucial question is, why is so much of the movie business organized around exploitation films today? And an unsupported psychological hypothesis doesn't cut it as an answer.
Here's an idea that seems at least as good as the answer proffered by the article. The internet makes word-of-mouth travel a lot faster now. It used to be that the box-office receipts of a stinker movie would decline over the first few weeks after its release. Now, they decline even during the opening weekend. (I haven't verified that, but it seems like it ought to be easily verifiable.) People tweet about how bad the movie is even before they've finished watching it.
In turn, this word-of-mouth heightens the winner-take-all nature of the film industry; hit movies take home a bigger share of the total box-office receipts of the industry (unverified, but should be verifiable), with the result that more movies these days fail to even make back their production costs (unverified, but should be verifiable). In short, film production is a riskier investment than it used to be, and there's less that marketing money can do to rescue a stinker.
An economically rational response to this situation (assuming I'm correct!) would be to work harder to figure out which films are going to be hits and which are going to be flops, make the hits bigger hits, and spend less on the flops. For example, you could do any of the following:
• Value talent more highly. Talent can't stop a flop from being a flop, but it can make the difference between a hit and a mega-blockbuster.
• Don't spend anything on marketing. Release films in a single theater or a single city. If it takes off, print more copies. If GQ is to be believed, this would cut the cost of filmmaking in half, which would mean you could make twice as many movies.
• Release movies to audiences in episodes; start by releasing a half-hour pilot, and if it takes off, call the actors and director back to make another hour. This could cut the cost of filmmaking by more than a factor of 2, especially if the first part goes easy on the special effects, the music, that kind of thing. (In a way, that's what's happening with the sequel craze that the article is complaining about, but the difference is that you need to have the story arc planned out: Dune or Star Wars Episode IV or Babylon 5, not Fast Five.)
• Instead of a first episode, release an abridged version, maybe a half-hour. This has been done unintentionally and on a small scale for many years; think of Blade Runner and Blade Runner: the director's cut. The difference is that you can actually save money by not shooting the parts of the story that you leave out. Maybe instead of showing it in theaters, you can show it on Lifetime or HBO or something, or just on your web site.
• Instead of a pilot episode or abridged movie, do the first installment of the movie as a comic book. Comics have a lot in common with films: they're intensely visual and powerfully immersive, they even use cinematographic techniques, and a "graphic novel" is a lot closer in length to a movie than it is to War and Peace. These days, online, maybe you could even add a voiceover to your comic book. (Admittedly, filmstrips never really took off as a dramatic medium.) Again, in a sense, studios are doing this already; they're just not funding the production of the comics in the first place. They ought to. If there were ten times as many graphic novels coming out every year, they'd have a much better selection of audience-proven storyboards.
• Post trailers and teaser episodes on BitTorrent before you're done filming in order to see if they take off. It's no guarantee — lots of people will be willing to watch the movie for free even if they wouldn't shell out for a ticket — but if it flops there, it'll probably flop in the theater too.
• Cancel more films before they're even finished shooting. If your early indications are that it's not going to work out, don't try to rescue your investment by sending good money after bad, hiring a famous film editor to try to salvage something from the wreckage, nonsense like that. You need some kind of interim feedback on quality, of course, which is impossible to do reliably, although some of the approaches above might help. The big returns are going to go to the mega-hit films. Invest the money you would have invested in finishing the film in something that has a chance to be a mega-hit instead.
• Leave room in filming budgets for expansion. If early feedback (from the first episode, or just during screenings) is that the film is good, double the special-effects budget. Splurge on ADR and better music.
• Make more films, which means making a lot of low-budget films.
• Diversify your film investments; we should see more multi-studio films, just like we see lots of multi-VC-firm startups.
• Share the risk with the fans. Sell nonrefundable opening-night tickets before you're finished shooting, in order to raise money for the film. Give them cash back if the movie is a hit. Or sell the advance tickets in groups of four. (If the movie's worth watching, they can treat three of their friends for free.)
However, although as I said above, the studios are using some of these approaches, we're mostly seeing something else entirely. When you're used to a certain level of risk, and that level of risk goes up, your natural inclination is not to figure out how to take advantage of the new risk; it's to try desperately to push the risk back down. So, instead, we're seeing stupid moves like these:
• Release the film initially in more theaters, not less. That way, if it sucks, you might still make your money back before everyone sees their friends tweet about how it was so bad they walked out of the theater.
• Make films that people will want to see before they hear from anyone who's actually seen them: sequels, comic strips, toy brands. This is a necessary complement to releasing the film in a lot of theaters at once.
• Spend more on pre-release marketing instead of less. This slashes your maximum possible return on investment, but you have to do it if you're going to get people into all those theaters on opening weekend instead of a week later.
(The author's grudge against comic books is pretty embarrassing. Are you going to tell me Watchmen was infantilizing, not aimed at adults?)
Now, I admit I know little about business and nothing about the business of movies. So maybe these ideas are stupid.
The percentage of good movies coming out of Hollywood has always been low. This idea that there was a mythical time when movies were great is nonsense.
The problem is, we tend to only remember the handful of great movies made back when. Nobody recalls the acres of dreck.
The other issue that Hollywood can't recognize a hit in the making was always true. Nobody ever thought Casablanca would be anything other than a throwaway time filler. Star Wars was a completely unanticipated hit, even by the people who made it. Etc.
Watching old movies like Star wars, Indiana Jones, old Bond movies, you get the sense that a lot of work was put in to creating the scenes. It must have been very expensive to make, was it because revenue was very high back then?
Shockingly, I will try to explain how music works. First I will explain the language of music that actually you already know quite well. Second I will explain how art such as music can appeal strongly to people. Third, I contrast with literary art.
Language of Music.
There is a 'language' in music. Actually you must know a lot of the language quite well. You learned the language if only because of the hours or so a day you have been exposed to music via TV, radio, movies, and more. By hearing the music in this language, you have picked up the language.
In simple terms, the language has some sounds that correspond to and somehow express emotions. That is, for each common emotion, there are some sounds that express it. For the common emotions, people know some corresponding sounds very well.
To get started with the language, play something just one note at a time on just the white keys on a piano. Start on C, play some other notes, and end on C. Then what you will hear is that some emotional experience starts, continues, evolves, and develops, and then ends.
Why do you hear this? Because starting on C and playing just on the white keys you will hear that the music is just in the key of C major. You know the key of C major very well, will know that the music is all in C major, and will recognize when the music gets back to C and seems to end. Indeed, in much early music, it gets back to C too often and sounds boring and then, from hitting C too often, irritating. That is, each time the music hits C it seems to stop; so, each few notes the music seems to stop, and that's about as much fun as a car that goes down a road but stops each few feet. Why did the music return to C so often? Because the composer was not very good and couldn't think of anything better to do.
So, start on C, go through this and that, and end on C. Due to the language you have learned, the return to C sounds like the music 'resolves'.
Then for the goes through this and that, if get away from the white keys, then things sound different. Why? Because your ear has been very well trained to hear leaving C major. Leaving C major can add variety to the this and that in the middle. So, when you get back to C, the resolution feels stronger.
For more in the language, playing more than one note at a time is 'polyphony' and offers a stronger beginning than just C itself, more variety during the this and that, and stronger resolution as we end. You have already learned these things as you learned the language.
The variety of polyphony is large and permits sounds that are fairly clearly like anger, frustration, happiness, tension, anticipation, and, of course, resolution.
E.g., if play two notes together that are close in frequency, then the sound is harsh and strident. So, the sound can represent anger, tension, or danger. You won't miss this part of the language for even an instant.
E.g., for anticipation, the note one lower than C is B, and it is in frequency close to C, that is, only a semi-tone lower. When the music plays B, you anticipate, correctly from the thousands of hours of music you have heard, that next the music will play C and 'resolve'. If the composer does not play C next, then he can delay the 'resolution' and keep you 'hanging' and strongly continue the this and that part. Actually, you know this very well. So here is some musical language you understand for 'anticipation'.
Then for Exercise 1 in Composition 101 to create some extended musical experience, start with something with a little tension, add this and that with a lot of tension, anticipation, etc., and then resolve and end.
There's some advertising music that does this effectively in just 21 notes: To be more explicit, as you play on the white keys, starting at C and going up (in frequency, to the right) you will play D, E, F, G, A, B, C -- easy enough to remember.
Well the first seven notes are C, D, E, C, D, B, C. I will put after each note the number of beats:
C 1, D 1, E 3, C 1, D 3, B 1, C 3.
Wonder of wonder, for some music trying to sell soap or some such to millions of TV viewers, it starts on C, uses just four notes, and ends on C. We're talking really simple musical language here: Anyone who doesn't know that much musical language won't have money enough to buy the soap anyway!
Then next seven notes are
D 1, E 1, F 3, G 1, E 3. F 1, D 3
So, these seven notes are much the same as the first seven except start just one note higher, on D instead of C. So, starting higher, there sense is that something has progressed. Since these seven notes do not end on C, the music seems not to be over and the viewer is left hanging, that is, listening for more, just as the advertiser wants.
The last seven notes are just the same as the first seven and end on C just as the ad ends thus resolving the music.
There is a little more: In the first and last seven notes,
C 1, D 1, E 3, C 1, D 3, B 1, C 3.
the first two notes are short and, thus, rise quickly; this is as if something was starting and helps get the attention of the viewer. The next three notes sound like a sigh and make the viewer comforted and more relaxed. The last two notes return to C with a nice resolution, especially since the B lets the viewer anticipate the C and, thus, follow along. All in just seven notes.
Hearing this you wouldn't miss the musical language.
A good musician with even just a violin, can add other elements of musical language, you readily recognize, with loudness, vibrato, brightness, harshness (press harder with the bow and play closer to the bridge), urgency (play faster and start notes suddenly instead of gradually), etc. Net, a good violinist can use musical language elements you already know well and, thus, be very 'expressive'.
For larger collections of instruments, can get much more in variety that can represent other emotions. Some of these representations are widely and clearly understood, and some, say, from some new music, are not. So, yes, there is a musical language, and some of it is widely understood and some is not.
In the end, in my view, classical, non-programmatic music is not so difficult to describe: The musician has an emotional experience that goes through various cases of this and that. So, he writes some music that roughly represents that.
If the music is 'good', then it is 'general' (sometimes people say 'universal'), that is, does well representing more emotional experiences than just the one the musician had and for many listeners seems to represent an emotional experience they have had, likely different experiences for different listeners.
One of the better approaches to reaching many listeners is to represent a person's yearning, typically for emotional security, and then struggle against obstacles with lots of variety during the struggle and finally resolution or victory. That is, everyone want emotional security, and nearly everyone has had struggles and pursued them with energy, frustration, anticipation, success, setbacks, etc.
My favorite example of such music is the solo violin piece the Bach 'Chaconne'.
The Appeal of Art and Music.
There is a fact about people and art: If people see some of their stronger emotions about some of their experiences displayed in front of them, then they like it, maybe because it confirms to them that they are not alone in such emotions. E.g., it can be that all 1000 people in the concert hall have had similar emotions.
People can also like music that displays emotions about experiences they have not had but would like to.
In movies, the effect is more particular: The music can combine with the film to suggest the intended emotion and, thus, make it easier for a viewer to 'get' what more specific emotional experience is intended to be communicated. E.g., in 'Star Wars', the 'Imperial March' clearly represents some power obsessed, brutal, militarism; a viewer can get that message from the music right away although just from the story it takes longer! That's part of why John Williams got paid the big bucks!
Tough to listen to the Brahms 'Lullaby' and not get the feeling of a mother's love for her child: There is a lot of gentle stroking and comforting sighing in that music! Similarly for 'Silent Night' which I caught on to well at about the age of three.
Tough to listen to the beginning of Beethoven's 5th symphony and not get that 'there's heavy stuff going down'. Lots of people have experienced heavy stuff.
Tough to listen to the Beethoven 6th symphony and not feel something like seeing a pastoral scene, say, a meadow with a stream flowing through it if only because this is programmatic music complete with bird calls.
So, programmatic music is a two edged sword: First, due to the program, it is easier to understand. Second, due again to the program, it is less general so that listeners who have not had, or don't want to have, the experience of the program won't like the music.
I know; I know; you had music lessons in the fourth grade, and the teacher told you none of this. Sorry 'bout that!
Literary Art.
For literary art, for me it is too specific: For the situations and corresponding emotions being presented, mostly I have not been in such a situation and even when I have very much both my thinking and emotions were very different.
Netflix is not what's new but what's good.
Exactly. It's like the early days of DVD -- you had people whining and moaning about the lack of Star Wars or Titanic, when there were already more great films in release than you'd ever have time to watch. Netflix streaming works the same way -- you can't turn on the TV with the intent of watching a specific Hollywood A-list movie, but if you turn on the TV with the intent of watching something good, you will not be disappointed.
Agreed. One of the things I've had increasingly reinforced as I've gotten older and experience life more is that, "Not all new things are good, and not all good things are new."
I don't necessarily need to go find "new" music in a world where Floyd's albums still exist. I don't necessarily need to go see some new movie that opens this weekend, if I'm in a world where I can just spin up Casablanca, or The Wizard of Oz, or the original Star Wars, etc. Much of the traditional big corporate publishing industries (movies, music, books, mainly) are all about churning out, promoting and profiting from new stuff. But people don't necessarily want new stuff. They want good stuff. And good old stuff (increasingly) lasts forever, and (increasingly) is increasing in total amount of back catalog to draw from. There's always more good old stuff than good new stuff, and the balance shifts increasingly to the old stuff each year. Companies like NetFlix and Apple and Amazon that make it easy to find and buy all that good old stuff, are going to having steadier profit streams, and arguably higher profit margins, than companies that try to do the big shovel-shit-but-promote-like-hell dance, because the latter business model is taking more risks and has higher operating/marginal costs.
As captain obvious as this sounds, but Star Wars is a very pro American film espousing a very American point of view.
I hope this is true, but there are plenty of examples in history where it isn't.
For instance, pre-WWII Japan also blended rapid development with nationalism very effectively, and was very unlikely to internally liberalize.
Also look at Iraq (under Hussein) and Saudi Arabia, countries with incredibly harsh and restrictive laws, and by our standards terrible and evil governments... Yet they have little internal opposition, and their people like their governments, for some reason.
Star Wars, the original movie
Superman, the original movie
Star Trek, the first movie with Shatner, Nimoy, etc. Also Wrath of Khan.
The Matrix
300 probably will become one
The Social Network was surprisingly motivational. Fairly realistic portrayal of programming and programmers and startup life, and I loved many of Sean Parker's motivational speeches, and some of the Zuckerberg character's speeches as well.
The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back by J.W. Rinzler. Between reading this and The Making of Star Wars I now understand Lucas' attitude of "fuck sets and live props, we'll film everything in front of a green screen and fix it in post."
I read an article about the X-Files once where the author talked about how the show flipped the usual formula for television casting on its head. In most television shows, the female lead is hired primarily for her looks while the male lead is supposed to be the one the audience can identify with. In the X-Files, Duchovny was the tall, slim model-ish one while Gillian Anderson was short and basically normal looking. It seems like X-Files fans have a better gender balance than most sci-fi shows. I wonder if having a more normal female lead helped in that regard?
Something similar seems to have happened in Star Wars. It's easy to forget since they've been around for so long, but Harrison Ford and Billy Dee Williams were ridiculously good looking guys. Mark Hamill was a teen idol from his time on shows like Eight is Enough and The Texas Wheelers (I had to look that name up.) By looks alone, Carrie Fisher might be the least likely of the four to get a magazine cover. (Don't tell my twelve-year-old self, though.)
I think Star Wars has been exceptional at pulling in young boys. The story line and characters are part of it, but I think the light saber has had an outsized impact on its popularity.
As an eight-year-old in 1977, I liked Star Wars but wasn't a true fanatic (I liked reading sci-fi more, and when I was a teen became hooked on Blade Runner).
However, my best friend who was just a year younger went crazy for 1977 Star Wars. He saw the movie dozens of times and bought every piece of merchandising he could convince his parents to buy.
When I introduced my own son to the original movie at age five, he was similarly hooked. I noticed that the light saber concept seemed to be especially attractive to him. I didn't indulge him on the merchandise, but did spend $20 on Lego Star Wars for the Wii and have rented or borrowed the remaining movies and Clone Wars discs, which he also likes. We also discovered what seems like hundred of YouTube videos showing boys and teenagers acting out lightsaber fight scenes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4_qTO5Q1do&feature=related
A few months ago I showed my son the 2009 Star Trek movie, which he liked but not nearly as much as Star Wars. The sword scene on the Romulan drill bit did not really register with him. I wonder if Kirk and Sulu had been carrying light sabers if it would have been different?
Not that you are wrong. But when do we start & stop using 'spoiler' tags?
A week after the episode was on TV for the first time? A month? A year? And with movies?
I guess it's right to not use the tag when talking about Star Wars, for instance.
I guess too that The Wire's 5th season was enough years ago to don't use spoiler tags. I've learned this the hard way (Dexter 5th season finale, amongst others) and stopped worrying about this. It's the Internet, there will be spoilers no matter how careful you browse.
Again, the only thing I can think of where using spoiler tags was absolutely necessary is in unreleased shows/movies/narrative
It was (re-)released a few years ago, and some people I saw the movie with were totally convinced that the special effects had all been redone with absolutely cutting-edge CGI like the remastered Star Wars movies. They were quite floored when I told them that the only digital aspect of the re-release had to do with color balance and improving the audio track.
Apparently:
> I think the 'pain' comes when there are issues with the c > library that lxml binds to.
Scores 80.99/100
I think that the algorithm needs more work....
Also:
> I count 8: > Avatar (2009) - Yep > Titanic (1997) - Yep > The Dark Knight (2008) - Yep > Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) - Yep > Shrek 2 (2004) - Nope > E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) - Nope > Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) - Yep > Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) - Yep > Spider-Man (2002) - Yep > Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) - Yep
Scored 74.45/100
I count 8:
Avatar (2009) - Yep Titanic (1997) - Yep The Dark Knight (2008) - Yep Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) - Yep Shrek 2 (2004) - Nope E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) - Nope Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) - Yep Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) - Yep Spider-Man (2002) - Yep Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) - Yep
Let's look at the top 10 (I will use US sales): Avatar (2009) - Yep, Titanic (1997)- Yep, The Dark Knight (2008) - Yep, Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) - Yep, Shrek 2 (2004) - Nope, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) - Nope, Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) - Yep, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) - Yep, Spider-Man (2002) - Yep, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) - Yep
So 9 for 10
It's been true about them ever since they were actually walking around in reality. It's even truer since they faded into history. It was true in Star Wars. It's true in Mel Brooks' parody of Star Wars, and a whole bunch of his other films besides. It's true in Indiana Jones. In a way it's true on Seinfeld. Even Charlie Chaplin found it to be true. Poor old Leni Riefenstahl knew it was true, personally, then spent the rest of her life paying the price.
What is it? Nazis make for good cinema!
It makes sense, really. A bunch of guys running around in the 20th century, with mechanized warfare and a world view that would've fit in perfectly well in Genghis Khan's time. It's as if a writer for a video game made them up and they escaped through a time portal into the 1st half of the 20th century.
Why do I even bother with posts like this? Automatic Godwin's!
(Standard Godwin's Disclaimers: Nazis were real and as evil as you can get. The Holocaust actually happened.)
Insane? How about nonsensical? The "blow up the earth real good" goal is of the mentality of someone who watches Star Wars and decides the movie portrays real physics. Vaporizing the oceans and turning the crust into molten lava is plenty of destruction. It's also many orders of magnitude less energy than a lot of the patently unphysical proposals in the article. Equivalent mass of antimatter? You'd need a lot less than that to exceed the gravitational binding energy of planet Earth, and even that is ridiculously inefficient.
That's like the proposal to achieve AI by simulating a whole human body down to the molecules. It sounds clever to college freshmen, but it really just shows people are ignorant of the orders of magnitude of what they're discussing.
I typed in Star Wars, clicked on one of the options from your dropdown, and waited for a long time. That sucked. But then, I got some really detailed suggestions and long explanations of why each movie was a match. That was awesome!
I think if you fix the UI and expand your repertoire, you'll have a useful, interesting, popular tool.
All that talk about preserving something as well known and famous as Star Wars makes me worried for the thousands of films which don’t receive one tenth of Star Wars’ attention.
I have read amazing books with boring stories. I have read amazing stories with poor writing. Both are good for very different reasons.
Tolkien still stands out in my mind as one of the best story tellers I have ever read. He was such a good story teller that people are retelling them in every way they can imagine in books, films, role play games, computer games, all sorts of media. D and D, warcraft, Diablo, all Tolkien rip-offs. Even Harry Potter.
The awe inspiring bit is the ambiguity, the hints of all the other stories untold, the heroes with bit parts, mentioned in passing. He didn't just write a story, he wrote a whole universe. What he did is rare, I can think of only a handful of other works that pull off the immersion convincingly, Isaac Asimov's Foundation, Ian M. Bank's Culture, Lucas' Star Wars (if they'd have just left it at 4-6) and Herbert's Dune (just). And none of them quite touch the awesomeness of middle earth.
He wasn't just good, he was amazing. Pure fluke perhaps, as the article hints at, but what a great one.
Chrome eats CPU like there's no tomorrow and the frame rate is around 15. Firefox doesn't even animate it.
Seriously, what is the point of this demos? It's like that Star Wars movie in ASCII. Interesting, but not very useful.
To put things in perspective: people had trouble understanding why folks would line up outside Star Wars films as well.
You have to look at the whole thing. There are two sequels to the original Halo, then there is HALO:ODTS and Halo Wars. There are at least 5 novels, I don't know how many comic books, a anime in the works and a movie that might one day be made. They have built a fascinating universe around the original game (which to be fair, on it's own doesn't make much sense, story wise ...). Think Star Wars ... What's different is that they haven't planned any of this when they made the first Halo, now they are planning all this from the get go.
See if these things formed part of your childhood: - Atari / Donkey Kong / Pacman etc (the originals) - Commodore 64 - Indiana Jones + Star Wars (at the cinemas, the original movies)
No? You're not generation X, sorry.
Star Wars arguably has stood the test of time, at least in the film realm for being hugely popular 33 years after its initial release. Only 29 years after our first seeing Mario and he's still hugely popular and putting out sequels with new characters everyone hates.
Although I do see your point in that the medium as a whole has only been around, recognizably, for 40 years. Surviving 3/4 the life of your medium isn't a profound achievement, when compared to The Art of War being 2600 years old. It's a bit like comparing a glass of water to the ocean. But then film is still a nascent art form when compared with literature, architecture and theater.
So: Compared to film, I would disagree. Mario has stood his test of time. Compared to literature, then film is in the same boat.
I like D.A.'s answer, but to be fair, there are certain contexts in which questions of this sort are not assumed trivial. I'm thinking specifically of Joyce's Ulysses; there's every indication that the author thought through every last detail of his fictional Dublin. The book demands that the reader negotiate her way through a thicket of of raw facts, and it has produced mountains of scholarship on seeming trifles, not all of it in the service of deep profundity, but some it quite startling in its cleverness and insight.
If my experience of growing up with Star Wars and reading about fans' notions of canonicity is any indicator, I'd expect that readers of SF and fantasy often have similar expectations of total world-building on the author's part, for better or for worse. There are thousands of "facts" which Star Wars fans "know" about the Star Wars universe, though that universe is not real, and none of those facts appear in the movies. (Sometimes those "facts" sprang into being to suit Kenner's needs.) Which is to say that, contra Adams, fictional worlds -- though not real -- often do have a sort of reality that extends beyond the author's primary text.
(The difference between my Star Wars example and Ulysses, though, is that the Ulysses "facts" are literally in the text or are inferred from it.)
> Could someone who shares the author's worldview try to explain it?
Well, I can give you my worldview. Did you see the article "70% of HR managers turn down job candidate based on online reputation?" Here's the HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1192996
So. I rent a bunch of movies with strongly opinionated themes. I dunno, maybe every Michael Moore movie plus travel documentaries about Cuba. I also rent the entire Star Wars sextilogy and The Godfather Trilogy, which I review on IMDB.com. Some enterprising hacker ties my reviews on IMDB to my anonymized rental record. How many 47 year-old males are there in my neighborhood who watched those exact movies?
The hacker publishes his "findings," of course. Now I go looking for a job and someone in HR decides that my political views are too risky, so I don't even get an interview.
The author's views are that Netflix can provide the benefits you desire without compromising the privacy I desire. I think the debate should be around whether the authors are correct.
If the authors are correct, then the problem isn't the authors preventing the release, the problem is Netflix failing to learn from their prior mistake.
If the authors are incorrect, we should simply point that out.
I know lot’s of really dumb geeks that are into sci-fi because they can’t function in society. I also know several highly intelligent people who simply don’t want to function in society and happen to like sci-fi. It can be difficult for outsiders to separate these groups, especially because the less intelligent geeks try and mask their faults. It's something like the Bulb problem where it's hard to tell if someone is actually highly intelligent or just acts differently than you do.
There is still a shared context among the geek community. I think Equilibrium was the most emotionally moving movie I have ever seen yet I have little interest in seeing it again, others just like the gun play and will watch it constantly. But, such distinctions are only relevant once you have seen the movie. Stepping back a few years and Blade Runner has the same dichotomy of people who like and or obsess over the movie and those who simply reacted strongly to it. (Now add Dune, Enders Game, Stranger in a Strange Land, etc.)
PS: The number of times you have seen each of the Star Wars films is probably a good metric for this. (Not to insult Star Wars.)
Being a writer, I can personally believe Lucas when he said he'd planned Episodes I-III before the original trilogy, however at the time he likely only ever considered them as a back story for the original trilogy. This would be much-like Tolkien's appendices that cover much of the back story of Middle Earth, but are in no way a novel, just as Lucas's back story was in no way a script.
There are obvious plot holes, but that happens with any prequel. It just so happens that for me there are enough mentions of the past in the original trilogy that I believe he did have plans for a prequel even from the beginning. However, I believe that was simply good story telling, because if it wasn't there wouldn't be the whole star wars universe there is today.
From Lucas' films, Bail Organa did absolutely everything. Yoda was completely out of communication, likely simply to stay out of the Emperor's way. The Jedi are good, Yoda is amazing, but even he wouldn't stand up to the Emperor's wrath (remember, the Sith are as adept at foresight as, if not better than, the Jedi) had they found his location (IE he'd have glassed the planet). Anyone travelling to Degobah would have been suspicious, and as Obi Wan was the first to go blue (Qui-Gon having died like 50 years too early, plus the established cannon that Obi Wan was sent to Tattoine to learn the secrets of immortality) Yoda was really and truly out of communication. Obi Wan likely had the ability to communicate more, but probably didn't manage much beyond "Hey Organa, Skywalker got heat stroke again, looks like he's pulling through though!".
Obi Wan's mission was a lot more important than living forever. He learnt how to physically join the force, which has to be achieved at death (Qui-Gon didn't vanish, he died), hence "If you strike me down now, I will only become more powerful than you could ever imagine!" Not exactly a cry for mercy. Why is this important? Well there was only 2 Jedi and 2 Sith left in the entire universe, if the Jedi managed to skip the whole 'disappearing into non-existence' they would be able to restore the Galactic Senate to its height pre-prequel-trilogy. Obi Wan died, and so did Yoda. However, if Vader hadn't turned back to the Light-Side he and the Emperor would have vanished, with all the knowledge of the Sith with them. 100 years down the road when someone talented in the force appeared, they'd be visited by two Force Ghosts that could train them and re-establish the Jedi Order. This was their plan, they knew full well that Luke and even Leia could die just from life, or at the hands of the Emperor and it would spell the end of the Jedi for eternity, while potentially not being the end of the Sith.
Bail Organa, sadly was Obi Wan and Yoda's patsy. His job was to incite rebellion and bring down the Empire by killing the Emperor and Vader. However, when the first time failed, the Empire was really onto them. The Rebels jumped into the Battle of Endor right into the Imperial's trap. Had Luke basically not sacrificed himself, voluntarily being captured and luring Vader onto the Death Star 2 with the Emperor and distracting them both then the entire battle would have ended with "Oh shit, the thing has a shield!" as the DS2 had an active cannon and the Empire had deployed its gravity well technology to stop them jumping out (this was passingly mentioned in the film as the reason why they couldn't escape, but never directly explained). Luke, by all rights, got lucky that Vader had a heart, which gave him time enough to escape. Had Vader not had a heart, Luke would have been human-pork-roast and the Emperor and Vader would have died in the explosion.
The New Trilogy aptly set up the story line that Lucas told in the Original Trilogy. He had to smooth a few rough edges, but the Original Trilogy itself had many plot holes to begin with, for instance: How did Vader manage to be within an inch of his daughter and not recognise her, but barely got into the same room as Luke before knowing it was his son. Lucas is doing decent to say there was 22 years between the two movies, and apart from the whole "Han Shot First" fiasco, he's made the stories significantly better for new fans watching through from the beginning. However the whole "Luke I am your Father" is ruined, so my Kids will one day see the original trilogy first and I'll ruin all of George Lucas' work!
Why didn't R2 and Chewie know who each other were? Well firstly R2 can basically communicate with C3P0 and Luke. Chewie can basically communicate with C3P0 and Han. Simply put, the only one with a talent for communicating there is C3P0 and from the looks of it, he's had so many memory wipes that he's basically incapable of doing much but following and acting as a more annoying google translate. Secondly R2 and Chewie are part of a fucking terrorist group, they're plotting to destroy the government! I doubt there's an open list of active members published at every meeting house. Chewie was working with smugglers, R2 was working with royalty. Simply put, there should be no reason whatsoever that they should have known they had both acted for the Rebels.
When Han left with his cash, it was likely Chewie who prodded Han to return, likely by bating him. Chewie had worked with the rebels, and disappeared for 20+ years. It's safe to say, that after seeing his entire civilization and species be concurred by the Empire, he expected the same for everything else. when he saw how organized Bail Organa had got the rebels, he likely wanted to rejoin the fight.
Apparently the first reference of "Star Wars" on the Net was by Randal Schwartz of Perl fame: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randal_L._Schwartz
refs:
* http://www.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announce_20.html
* http://groups.google.com/group/net.movies/msg/1cf7b5461f1032f5
So maybe there is something to this? May the schwartz go with you :)
Ok but the word "Droid" was indeed coined in Star Wars, whereas "Nexus One" was never coined anywhere, since the Nexus-1 model was never mentioned in the book or the movie. Its just a vague allusion
Edit: Wow, comment turned out to be very long, background on lots of historical periods. tl;dr is that propaganda and flimsy motives is by no means a Nazi thing, not at all. It's standard operating procedure for most causes and almost all wars in history. History is re-written afterwards to make the story simpler and easier to follow, but most wars and fights had flimsy motives and two sides when they were started. Later, the loser is deemed to be "evil", and the winner's cause was just and never in doubt. Some history with links that might be interesting for other people who enjoy learning history.
Personally, I'm a large fan of learning about all sorts of things, and history is one of the things I love the most. What got me interested in history was learning about Sengoku Japan -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sengoku_period
Now, the Japanese people have some strong ideas about Sengoku, but they're mixed ideas with conflict and debate about who the "good guys" were. It's funny because I'd made my conclusions and opinions on a number of the leaders of the era, only to find out that many Japanese people have much greater or worse opinions on certain people. By learning from a true outsider's perspective, I feel like I got more of the legitimate story than the propaganda. Besides, there's no debate as to the merits of the caste system, or whether power is better consolidated under the Emperor who is God-on-Earth, or the Shogun, who is ostensibly the chief servant of the Emperor, Head of the Military, and Head of the Economy.
So, by getting into 1600's Japanese history and seeing how complicated and nuanced it was, it gave me a much greater and more interesting view of Western European and American history. What's interesting is that typically has "good guys" and "bad guys" and it's very clear who is who.
For instance, take the American Civil War. Under the American Constitution, Federalism, Representative Democracy, and under classical international law, the Confederate Secession was legal, and the attempt to re-supply Fort Sumpter was illegal. The total war/slash and burn Union campaign was brutal. In the North, they also suspended habeas corpus, arrested people who spoke against the war (including Senators, yikes!), conscripted people against their will, and generally did some very bad shit.
The war is taught and sold as a civil rights thing - really, looking back on primary and secondary sources, it wasn't. Here's Lincoln's First Inaugural Address, right after the Confederacy started.
http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres31.html
Here's what he thinks about slavery at that point:
> It is found in nearly all the published speeches of him who now addresses you. I do but quote from one of those speeches when I declare that— I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.
Here's Lincoln toeing the line on whether the Northern states should be mandated to return fugitive slaves:
> There is some difference of opinion whether this clause should be enforced by national or by State authority, but surely that difference is not a very material one. If the slave is to be surrendered, it can be of but little consequence to him or to others by which authority it is done. And should anyone in any case be content that his oath shall go unkept on a merely unsubstantial controversy as to how it shall be kept?
His whole speech, he goes on trying to mediate and defend slavery. Why the war then?
> I hold that in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination. Continue to execute all the express provisions of our National Constitution, and the Union will endure forever, it being impossible to destroy it except by some action not provided for in the instrument itself.
He then makes a really interesting and somewhat crazy argument that the Articles of Confederacy are still legally binding, and that's why the South can't secede, and trying to would be an act of war:
> In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to "preserve, protect, and defend it."
And YET, despite that, I think Lincoln absolutely was doing the right thing. I believe the Union invasion of the Confederacy was illegal under any definition of legal at the time, the President authorized breaking all sorts of laws, and yet, it was the right thing to do. I'll bite that bullet - President Lincoln broke the law, did some vicious things, but it was still in retrospect the correct course of action. Most people won't bite that bullet - so they want to claim that there's clear good guys and bad guys. I'd encourage them to read Lincoln's First Inaugural Address, it's simply too wild and crazy not to read. It doesn't match what I read in my high school "U.S. History" textbook very well, but yet, that was legitimately what he said. Crazy stuff.
I like reading speeches from early leaders to get at their motivations. Later, when audio and video recordings are available, I watch them. All the WWII countries went on and on about their propaganda. Had the Axis won, right now, we'd be reading about the evil imperialist Allies who sought to enslave the noble Germanic people.
I've seen FDR's speeches, Churchill's speeches, and Hitler's speeches. Churchill was generally pretty honest - he was a military man, and spoke rather plainly. He was put in after his predecessor failed - Prime Minister Chamberlain was more of a politician and not much of a military man, so he stepped down and Churchill became PM. He spoke simple, plain, about fighting for England and winning and courage.
Roosevelt and Hitler, though, they whooped all sorts of emotions about how American/German way of life were under attack by brutal enemies. Both lied, frequently, about enemy plans. Here's a totally comic forged map that FDR presented as Nazi intelligence:
http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2008/03/01/250-who-put-the-gau-in-gaucho-a-forged-map-of-nazi-south-america/
(The Nazis were a lot of bad things, but if you look at their war plans, they really didn't care so much about the West. They invaded Poland, violating the Treaty of Versailles really really badly, and then England and France declared war on Germany. Germany didn't care so much about Western Europe or North America - Hitler was desperately afraid of and hated the Soviets, and all their plans were designed around going East. That's why they launched Operation Barbarossa - the invasion into the USSR - even though they couldn't come to a cease fire with England beforehand)
Hmm, this comment is turning out to be quite long. I wanted to set a stage for the kind of speeches people give - Hitler's were always the evil, evil un-human oppressors of Germany. He talked about "the rape of the Germany people in 1918" and the hordes that wanted to destroy the German race. Really, the Nazis were very evil, but they weren't openly evil the way The Empire is in Star Wars - Nazi rallying speeches sounded a lot like Soviet rallying speeches sounded a lot like American rallying speeches. They hate us... seek to destroy out way of life... this is a fight to the death... but we're proud and strong and courageous and we'll win... give yourself over to the greater good and victory is assured... we're righteous and right is on our side...
> Glad to see I wasn't the only one who felt like he was watching a Nazi propaganda movie - with the Na'vi as the pure, beautiful, harmonious Aryans, and the humans as the evil rapacious mongrel race.
So yeah, that turned out to be a long comment. But it's not so much a Nazi propaganda movie - just a standard propaganda movie, like any political group in history would use. The enemy is evil, has no heart or soul, nothing human about them, and they'll completely destroy us for completely faulty reasons if we don't completely destroy them first. Standard us-vs-them total genocidal war propaganda. Though, it is a little disconcerting to see in a mainstream film in the year 2009.
A simple script isn't the same thing as a bad script, though. Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Die Hard, Alien... these are simple scripts, but they were all turned into good movies.
The problem with Avatar's script is not so much its simplicity, but its preachiness. A story set in a simplified world of good and evil isn't so annoying (cf Star Wars) unless it's supposed to be making some kind of political commentary on our own world.
The important question is: how likely is this to change the results? In recent decades there's been a trend for the Best Picture Oscar to wind up going to films which may not be all that good but which are seen as "Oscar-worthy" due to weighty subject matter or otherwise "seeming smart". Historical dramas have made up something like twenty out of the last thirty years' winners, including such so-so films as Braveheart. No comedy has won since Shakespeare in Love (which was acceptably smart-seeming because it had Shakespeare in it) and before that it was Annie Hall (which, incidentally, beat Star Wars).
I wonder if preferential ranking will improve the quality of winners by better reflecting the true preferences of the voters rather than the preferences the voters seem to think they ought to have.
"... An entire generation of teenagers are now going to have a lifelong crush on a huge blue woman with a tail named Neytiri ..."
I went and saw Avatar yesterday and was blown away.
It was as good as when I first saw Star Wars the first time it was shown after wagging school and catching a train into the city. It was way better than the first Star Trek feature film first hit the cinema - those close-ups of the Enterprise still make me cringe. It was as good as Alien and Alien II which followed. I was trying to think why. Here's some of the reasons.
While most films shy away from the complexity of situations, this one didn't. I get the feeling Cameron had some unfinished business. A story not told, an alternate Aliens. The similarities are pretty striking. The film is about colonisation of a planet, with ruthless company yes-men backed up by Colonial Marines (or PMC's in this case). It even has Ripley. This time though we see colonisation and exploitation from the eyes of the conquered. We see what is lost. We see the consequences.
This isn't a re-make of Aliens two where the Colonial Marines blast away Ripley's bad-guys. Instead we are shown the complexity of a culture clashes, the conqueror and conquered. We see the relationship between locals and their environment, man made corporations and hired muscle and most importantly the consequences of War. It could be South America when Cortez arrived looking for gold, it could in the jungles of Sumatra now with timber ~ http://www.worldwildlife.org/what/wherewework/borneo/people.html The film is also is about as anti-mainstream as you'll probably get in popular culture.
Ask yourself what was the last time you saw a film that painted a beautiful picture of an environment and culture then see it destroyed in grisly detail before you... this is no ordinary Hollywood action flic. Sure the good guys win and the company men get packing. There are weak points in the film. I noticed even William Gibson was a bit shocked (my measure of what good writing is) ~ http://twitter.com/GreatDismal/status/6810783279 at name given to the exploited mineral "unobtanium" ~ http://twitter.com/GreatDismal/status/6810951397 being mined.
The strength of the film is that it mirrors enough of our own world right now and that and the richness of the characters and ideas in my mind makes up for any of the technical shortfalls.
Well, yes and no :) Characters aren't motivated in Star Wars to defeat the Empire so that they can be rewarded with the ability to speak English again, but one of the major motivating factors of this story is giving the protagonist the ability to walk again if accepts and succeeds in his task.
I don't really know anything about the plot, but it seems like I should be expecting a plot turn where the protagonist is faced with the dilemma of turning on his peers and his mission for love's sake, or doing something morally suspect so he can walk again. Just a guess, I really know nothing about the movie.
This article is much better than Wired's.
It also has some inconsistencies, the New Yorker said is was Space 2001 not Star Wars that inspired him to create films.
That's like asking why the people in Star Wars speak English :) Although this obvious plot query is nominally handled in the film, the real reason is that Cameron is using his epic canvas to present an exciting metaphor for how he sees the world, hence the object of desire (over which the conflicts take place) being dubbed 'unobtainium'.
This is cool, but I think virtually all rating systems suffer from the same basic problem: there's no way to turn it up to 11.
Take movies, for example. They are usually rated on a four-star scale. And yet, a three-star movie is a clear success. Few movies can realistically aspire to more than three stars. Even many four-star movies are really just trying desperately to avoid two-star land. Francis Ford Coppola was sure he was going to be fired any day from The Godfather. The production crew and actors on Star Wars thought it was practically a joke. Please, God, let Star Wars not be a B movie, they must have been thinking.
When you say ★★★ out of ★★★★, you make it look like it wasn't good enough: 75%. Movies really should be rated on a three-star scale: ★★★ out of ★★★; ★★★ = A = 100%. Anything else is gravy.
So, rate tea on a three-star scale. Three stars means "excellent tea, no clear way to make it better". ★★★½ means "Whoa, there is something better than ★★★!" ★★★★ means "This is The Godfather of tea! This tea makes me an offer I can't refuse."
This is a bit of a weird submission, so I thought I should explain it.
I was looking for images for a presentation I'm giving next week and happened across this blog.
As some of you may or may not know, there used to be movie serials -- episodic adventures they added to the regular movie. So before you watched the main movie, you'd see something like episode 8 of Brain Snatchers From Another World (Although I think they were mostly westerns?)
Here are some pictures and notes from them. If I remember correctly, George Lucas had these in mind when he first created Star Wars.
All of this is before my time, but it looks like great fun -- really campy scripts, cheap sets, and lots of improv.
That's both amusing and concerning at the same time. I have always felt a little unsettled when I have happened to watch Thomas the Tank Engine, both as a child and as an adult.
There does seem to be something of a history of rather severe children's tales. Look at Roald Dahl or the Brothers Grimm. Not that I'm directly equating Roald Dahl or the Brothers Grimm (whom I generally like) to Thomas and friends (whom I generally do not like) but there does seem to be some strand of commonality in terms of the extremes of the underlying messages in long surviving children's tales, even if the lesson/message is not necessarily pointing in the same direction in all cases.
A little severity in ones entertainment as a child is a good thing in my mind (though lessons enforcing conformity do not fall into this "good" kind of severity for me). I remember watching Star Wars as a young child and being freaked out by that scene in the bar where Ben Kenobi cuts the alien's arm off with his light sabre. But it was moments like that which made the movie memorable to me, gave it impact and helped to make it more than just a series of movies, it became it's own mythology in my mind.
Conversely, I believe the lack of this was primarily what made the new Star Wars films crap by comparison. With the new movies, they made the mistake of trying to make them "kid safe" and easily digestible to as wide an audience as possible. In doing so, they ruined any chance of a new generation having a similar experience with the new movies as I did with the old, and of the the new films ever having any true soul.
That simply isn't true tho'. The biggest and most famous franchise of all, Star Wars, is heavily religious, the very first film states it openly. So is the best recent sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica. A main character of Firefly is a preacher.
Even in Star Trek the Vulcans spend an awful lot of time contemplating candles and wearing robes. They may not talk about it on-screen but the producers must have consciously chosen to use monastic/Catholic imagery.
I'm not too much younger (1975), and I disagree. I didn't get an internet connection until I was 21. How could a geek think not having the internet is better than having it? When I was young, if I wanted to learn something I had to go to the library, where they may or may not have had something relevant. There's lots of other tech that was not available to the '71 cohort as well. If I could have chosen my birth year it would have been later, not earlier.
As far as pop culture goes, the '71 crowd may have been able to see Star Wars in the theater, but I'd rather have a larger selection of movies on tape or DVD than get to see a few movies in the theater at a few particular times. All the SF stuff (books or movies) is still available today, and if a book or movie is really worthwhile it'll still be worthwhile a few decades later. It'll always be the same book or movie, it's not like the difference between seeing a band live in their prime and listening to a CD.
...if everyone is leeching and nobody is paying how will we get movies like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings or a game like Halo (they cost millions of $ to produce)? ... I hope an alternative comes where you actually pay for the stuff you leech...
Really? I hope production costs keep falling as rapidly as they have been. If more people produce great content that doesn't cost millions of dollars to make, we all win.
I think the Pirate Bay is a shady operation. They probably earn millions on giving other peoples work for free. I don't understand the model of "free copying" - if everyone is leeching and nobody is paying how will we get movies like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings or a game like Halo (they cost millions of $ to produce)?
I hope an alternative comes where you actually pay for the stuff you leech (especially for movies). And the argument with "trying stuff out", does not really hold - you don't go and try an ice cream for free, you buy it and if it's bad you don't buy ice creams from that store any longer.
And dont forget TV show /movie / gaming / random geek interest items...
See Buffy, Star Wars, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thom_Merrilin etc
Up until about a year ago I was data security coordinator for a very large cable ISP. A large portion of our team's time was spent dealing with DMCA copyright complaints.
At this point, by law, an ISP must accept copyright complaints and have a publicly registered copyright agent (At our ISP, our team's director was the registered agent). The DMCA gives ISPs some choice in how they handle the complaints, but they can not be ignored. I fear this ISP owner may not be fully aware of current obligations(I am not speaking about non-actionable RIAA threats or future plans).
We hated this work. Our main focus was catching criminals that were committing crimes either utilizing or against our network. With an online customer base in the millions we would get thousands of complaints a day. If a big movie came out on Friday, for the next week or two we could get upwards of ten thousand a day. We feared Star Wars openings like you wouldn't believe. You can imagine a team of 6 very techy hacker guys getting extremely depressed spending 2-3 hours a day matching IP logs to modem MACs and finally onto a customer.
Our only solace in this work was something that my manager made clear was a department goal and practice. That this menial task was meant to protect the customer base from the copyright holder's carpet bombing mentality. We kept accurate data and because of that, were able to simply discard a large portion of the complaints as inaccurate. When the evidence was clear, we forwarded the complaint to the subscriber by email and snail mail. We instructed our subscribers to not contact the copyright holder to discuss it as this would just enable the holder to get identifying info(name, address) without a subpoena.
We also warned our customers that after a single complaint the copyright holder may subpoena our records and take them to court. Out of the almost million complaints a year, I saw an insignificant amount of cases ever go this far. The DMCA complaints were largely a scare tactic and often nothing more.
I was not privy to any knowledge of the compensation we received for completing this process, but did gleam from over hearing from the higher ups that we did indeed receive some money for the process or were in process of creating contracts to do so. I wish I had more info on that aspect to share with news.y.
The guys doing this work hate it, but the law forces it onto them. Until the laws change, no security department is going to bend over backwards for these guys.
It was an amazing and exciting job despite this issue.
On a lighter note, for your random facts file, the movie "Mean Girls" was the number one infringed file for 4 years running. Lots of laughs were had seeing what kind of weird and random stuff the people were downloading. Fun times.
No major artwork was created by a committee.
Actually, William "The Princess Bride" Goldman argues in his famous book about screenwriting (Adventures in the Screen Trade) that all movies are created by committee. He lists a bunch of people that need to do their jobs correctly in order to make a movie any good, starting (obviously) with the screenwriter and the director but also including: The cinematographer, the casting director, the designers and costumers, the film editor, and the composer. To say nothing of the producers, who need to come up with sufficient money or the film doesn't get made.
Goldman makes this point in the course of lampooning the "auteur" theory of criticism, in which entire films are attributed to the genius of one person -- usually the director. It's because of those auteur theorists that we tend to speak of "Hitchcock's" North by Northwest, ignoring the fact that a lot of that film's genius was contributed by Cary Grant, to say nothing of Bernard Herrmann.
A great example is Star Wars, which as we all know sprang from the brow of George Lucas. Except, of course, for the parts that were actually created by Ben Burtt (sound designer), John Dykstra (FX supervisor), Rick Baker (makeup artist), Ralph McQuarrie (production illustrator), John Williams (composer), and Richard Chew, Paul Hirsch and Marcia Lucas (film editors). And that's just scratching the surface.
A game on the scale of Spore is also, inevitably, created by committee. The question is whether you can keep the committee on the same page. It sounds like Spore's team had some struggles, which had to be mediated, and which were ultimately resolved in a way that isn't quite to my taste. Which is not to say that the enterprise is a failure. It's sold a lot of copies, and no doubt many people are pleased with it. I played with the creature creator, and it was very cute.
I knew a guy who was a graphic artist for a game company and they worked in a fantastically beautiful room, soft lighting, Star Wars movies playing in the background. Everything was made to inspire the artists to do better work. I wonder if Apple doesn't make the environment pretty do inspire programmers too.
It looks almost exactly like the dot-frame images of the Death Star in the original Star Wars films.
The more things change...
I think with engineers things are pretty binary. There is just 0 and 1. Some engineers can just follow (0) and other that lead (1). The (1) are the ones that just get things done. The (0) are the one that need some coaxing to get finish line. The whole idea or a rockstar, ninja is BS. It is like a project 0 you failed and are not complete 1 you've met the deadline. If you want a rockstar goto hollywood. If you want ninjas goto japan. If you want an engineer goto colos, star wars movies, your local tech meet ups.
I'm with you, but I think the trend is in the other direction. As a lifelong book collector, my eyes were opened when I heard Cory Doctorow (an even more obsessive bibliophile) state that he was thinking of selling off most of his books -- the logic being that, in a world with digitized libraries, eBay, Amazon and ABE books, it's easier and cheaper for him to just obtain a used copy of anything he wants to reread and sell it on the used market after he's done.
I don't actually believe this enough, yet, to put it into practice, but it shocked me into thinking about it.
It is grossly inefficient for me to have to keep a physical copy of Star Wars around in my house just to prove that I bought the darned thing. It is grossly inefficient to have my own, personally recorded collection of every single Alton Brown Good Eats episode. These things are not rare: They are treasured by zillions of fans. They are unlikely to become rare in my lifetime. I have, or will soon get, all the bandwidth I need to download them on demand. The only reason I have to cart them from one apartment to the next is that our stupid copyright laws make it easy for their creators to jerk me around -- raising prices, charging me over and over again, editing the films to make them different from what I remember, taking the films off the market for ten years, inserting artificial roadblocks that make no sense in the high-bandwidth era (like physical DVDs from Netflix instead of digital downloads from Youtube HD) -- unless I buy a physical copy and make it my own.
I don't think that's going to last. Time is not on the side of that model. It's not as efficient and the people who still believe in it get older by the day.