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'Star Wars fans hate Star Wars' He does have something of a point.

#1 User is offline   Helena Icon

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Posted 08 December 2007 - 06:03 PM

Oh, so true. biggrin.gif
QUOTE
The sandpeople had women and children. We know this because Anakin killed them how could he tell? The children might be smaller but I never saw a sandperson with breasts. Did they hike their skirts and show him some leg or something?

QUOTE
Also, I can see the point of wanting to kidnap a human and use her as a slave, but they didn't. They tied her to a flimsy easel for a month. It's assumed they had to feed and give her water. What for? Was she purely ornamental? I can understand them wanting the droids, you can sell those for a lot of money, but a chick who's only skills are finding non-existand mushrooms and getting randomly pregnant, you're not going to get much.

- J m HofMarN on the Sand People
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#2 User is offline   RandomThoughts Icon

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Posted 08 December 2007 - 11:42 PM

QUOTE (Helena @ Dec 8 2007, 07:03 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>


Damn!!! blink.gif If i'd written on my hate/fandom of Star Wars two to five years ago...I'd prolly have said something along these lines. Interestingly enough...I was discussing the suckingess of the PT with my father (who's kinda a Trekkie blush.gif ) when I was back home over summer break and he brought up one of the points this guy mentions, namely how sleek, polished, and advanced the technology of the PT looks when compared to the OT, which makes absolutley no sense, considering the fact that only twenty years passes in-between the trilogies...along with the lack of any serious Dark Age like the one that followed the fall of the Roman Empire...ya'd think the technology of the SW universe would have in fact advanced with existence of a strong central government (the Empire) which would waste resources due to a lack of decadence, instead putting money into profitable ventures (i.e. research)...but I digress...At the end of the article the writer kinda reminded me of Rufus from Dogma wink.gif...


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#3 User is offline   84summers Icon

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Posted 09 December 2007 - 05:40 AM


A brilliantly articulated piece.

As for myself, I love the original Star Wars trilogy, as represented by my unaltered 1989 CBS-FOX videotapes, because they are great films with minor flaws.

I love my Star Wars Droids tape because it is fascinatingly cheesy.

I love the new trilogy because they are truly terrible, but not really dead-awful, and I find such films to be endearing and thus enjoyable.

I've only read one book, Shadows of the Empire. The only games I've played are Shadows of the Empire for N64 (excellent), and the Star Wars NES game my parents rented for me when I was six back in 1990, which I recall as being dreadful, or more simply, as I probably said at the time, it sucked. Oh, and Star Wars Episode I Racer, which was distractingly boring (all played on friends' systems, as I'm not a gamer).

Other than that, I've never read any of the other books or any of the comics, never collected the toys, and haven't watched either the Ewoks cartoon, TV movies, or Clone Wars (I caught one episode on Cartoon Network. It looked odd and hyper).

I guess I love/hate Star Wars as a film fan who worships at the temple of Mike Nelson and such, but not really as a true and through "Star Wars Fan."

Am I alone?
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#4 User is offline   barend Icon

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Posted 09 December 2007 - 11:40 PM

I dissagree with a few things there.

I don't hate the prequels because they've got better technology working for them. That's why I was exited about them before they came out. I was hoping they'd actually be better, and I welcomed them with an open heart.

sadly they fell a few thousand light years short of the mark.
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Posted 10 December 2007 - 01:35 AM


I laughed and fully understood the meaning
but this line is what made the
Star Wars fans Hate Star Wars real and oh so relatably true

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Every true Star Wars fan is a Luke Skywalker, looking at his twisted, evil father, and somehow seeing good.





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Posted 23 December 2007 - 09:32 PM

It's an entertaining article, but doesn't fully sit with me personally. There are a great many things about Star Wars that I don't hate. I love the OT. I always have and always will. I dislike the PT primarily due to inconsistencies it presents and the apparent lack of attempt to really meld these two works together. These films are far more an exercise in marketing and toy and game sales than any real attempt to expand on the Universe and give the fans the back story they asked for.

I'm a big critic of the PT's actors giving very poor performances, but I'll agree the OT had it's moments. The difference is that the PT is packed full of quality actors while the OT has many "new comers". It is evident to me that more time was spent working on developing characters and personality in the OT than the PT and this rests completely with the director.

I like some of the novels, but will freely admit that I have stopped reading them. As the writer states we end up seeing every two bit part time character suddenly becoming something extraordinary. I just didn't go for this.
Luminous beings are we... not this crude matter.
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#7 User is offline   RisanF Icon

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Posted 21 February 2008 - 09:31 AM

The article itself was a fun, tongue-in-cheek essay on the state of Star Wars fandom in this fay and age...until the author released that second additional article and let us all know what he really thought of Star Wars fans. I want to call attention to this one part somewhere in the middle of the article:

-

(a letter to Andrey Summers)

"Thank you for finally formulating what I was feeling all along. I saw the first film when I was 12 or so and every film that followed was a disappointment. I hated them, but as you correctly stated: I loved the idea.

Lucas did a great job in creating the technology, but telling the story was better left to someone else (Disney? look at what they did with pirates! ). Lucas even admitted he hated the whole story so I guess he went for the money, and ruined a lot of peoples dreams. You've hit the nail on the head."


-Peter

(Andrey Summers' Response)

"Why thank you, Peter. I thought I’d slot your email in here just to drive home that I’m not the only one who noticed good ideas and poor writing in the Star Wars…Sectography? 'Thanks for reading!'"


-

So Mr. Summers receives a comment from someone who is trying to support him, and then turns around and mocks him in his next article. That's really just lame. What started as a fun jibe at the eccentricities of Star Wars fans has turned into an arrogant bash against "nerds" who won't give up their toys. How is he acting any better than those Star Wars fans who booed those poor kids off stage?

The notion that "Star Wars is just for kids" is one that just cannot be supported. Not after all the Star Wars games rated Teen, the umpteenth number of Star Wars books written at a college reading level, and the fact that millions of adults went to see Star Wars back in '77. Not that it really matters; the fact that a product is meant for children isn't an excuse for poor quality anyway.

This post has been edited by RisanF: 21 February 2008 - 09:31 AM

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#8 User is offline   Chefelf Icon

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Posted 21 February 2008 - 10:31 AM

QUOTE (barend @ Dec 9 2007, 11:40 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
I don't hate the prequels because they've got better technology working for them. That's why I was exited about them before they came out. I was hoping they'd actually be better, and I welcomed them with an open heart.


That is a great point. I distinctly remember thinking about how awesome it would be to see the special effects from The Fifth Element (which I hated) used in the Star Wars universe, specifically on Coruscant. It hadn't yet occurred to me that it would be a terrible plot with good special effects.

For the record, the link to the sequel of that article is here: http://www.jivemagaz...n.php?pid=25600

And I agree with Star Wars not being just for kids. As with all this retro BS going around lately (e.g. Transformers) are surely made for the new generation but they are just as much cashing in on the thirty-somethings who want to see this retro nonsense from their childhood.
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#9 User is offline   Despondent Icon

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Posted 21 February 2008 - 12:07 PM

Thanks for the link Chef! I liked seeing the doggy vader also!
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#10 User is offline   jerfus17 Icon

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Posted 23 February 2008 - 08:46 AM

[quote name='Chefelf' date='Feb 21 2008, 11:31 AM' post='183519']
That is a great point. I distinctly remember thinking about how awesome it would be to see the special effects from The Fifth Element (which I hated) used in the Star Wars universe, specifically on Coruscant. It hadn't yet occurred to me that it would be a terrible plot with good special effects.

Yes, but as we know, special effects alone do not make a good movie. And frankly, I thought the fx in Ep1-3 were horrendous and completely unrealistic looking. I thought I was watching a bad rendition of "Who Framed Roger Rabbit". You can't tell me that ridiculous cartoon-version of Jabba the Hutt in Ep1 looked better than the one in ROTJ. Call me old-fashioned, but I think the special fx in the old triliogy are so much more believeable, even with the older technology, simply because they didn't over-saturate the entire film with nothing but special fx and focused more on the storyline and the characters. The prequels were just a giant special effects circus. I don't think there were two shots in that entire, worthless trilogy that didn't have some sort of CG background or goofy-looking CG cartoon character prancing around, distracting the audience's attention from the plot (mainly because there wasn't a plot). If Lucas had given just 1/3 of the cash he put up for those awful CGI fx and spent that money on costumes and a part-time co-writer, we might actually consider Ep1-3 at least worthy of wasting a couple of feet of film on.
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#11 User is offline   Chefelf Icon

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Posted 23 February 2008 - 09:36 AM

I have long argued that CGI is great for ships, cities, planets, explosions, etc. Even the battle droids look great. However, CGI does not work well for creatures. Sometimes it's okay for background creatures but not for main characters or things that main characters are directly, physically interacting with.

LOTR did a great job of balancing CGI with actual sets and landscapes.
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Posted 24 February 2008 - 12:54 PM

LOTR is a fantastic counterargument though Chef. Gollum was a fantastic achievement. So too the cave troll in the first film. Jar Jar didn't work because Lucas cheaped out. His use of CGI was just to show you could make a movie without real sets; it had no art to it. In LOTR, the Argonath Colossi are placed among real New Zealand landscape, which as you say is brilliant. But also an actor is removed and replaced with an animated character, which is NOT what they did with Jar Jar. For Jar Jar, Lucas threw in a CGI character to replcace a little X placed on a board somewher in the human actors' eyelines. Hence LOTR is awesome and credible, while TPM is ugly and cartoonish.

If you want to cheap out Lucas, you might as well go back to the models and the matte paintings. They looked great.
"I had a lot of different ideas. At one point, Luke, Leia and Ben were all going to be little people, and we did screen tests to see if we could do that." -George Lucas, in STAR WARS: the Annotated Screenplays (p197).
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#13 User is offline   jerfus17 Icon

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Posted 25 February 2008 - 04:53 PM

QUOTE (Chefelf @ Feb 23 2008, 10:36 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
I have long argued that CGI is great for ships, cities, planets, explosions, etc. Even the battle droids look great. However, CGI does not work well for creatures. Sometimes it's okay for background creatures but not for main characters or things that main characters are directly, physically interacting with.

LOTR did a great job of balancing CGI with actual sets and landscapes.


Totally agree. Creatures or people in the background is fine (so long as they are not disctracting from the main focus of the shot), but foreground stuff should be limited to ships, planets, explosions, etc.

Good point by civilian_number_two about Gollum from LOTR - he was probably the best CGI character I have seen done, though you could still tell he was CGI alot of the time. However, LOTR bothered me too because Peter Jackson always does those huge, sweeping camera movements around the CG worlds he's created (you know the ones I'm talking about?). He usually uses them as establishing shots. Even if his background CG looks totally realistic, he loses my suspension of disbelief when he makes the camera move like that simply because a real camera can't move like that. You can tell the enitre scene and the camera are all done inside the CG program as soon as that motion starts. At least Lucas hasn't caught onto that yet - he still like's combining his modern, ultra-bad CG and green-screen tech with 1970's era iris wipes. blink.gif
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#14 User is offline   RisanF Icon

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Posted 01 March 2008 - 09:36 AM

QUOTE (Chefelf @ Feb 21 2008, 10:31 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
That is a great point. I distinctly remember thinking about how awesome it would be to see the special effects from The Fifth Element (which I hated) used in the Star Wars universe, specifically on Coruscant. It hadn't yet occurred to me that it would be a terrible plot with good special effects.

For the record, the link to the sequel of that article is here: http://www.jivemagaz...n.php?pid=25600

And I agree with Star Wars not being just for kids. As with all this retro BS going around lately (e.g. Transformers) are surely made for the new generation but they are just as much cashing in on the thirty-somethings who want to see this retro nonsense from their childhood.


Perhaps it's not that we hate Prequel Star Wars because we hate special effects, but that Prequel Star Wars taught us to hate special effects.

There's this incorrect notion floating about that just because a product is meant for children, it is allowed to be ill-conceived and shoddy. Sometimes, I wonder if George Lucas is using that misconception as a shield to hide behind in order to excuse the genuine problems in Star Wars. That's neither here nor there though, since Star Wars wasn't originally meant to be only a kids' product. It's more of a family series.

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Posted 02 March 2008 - 05:52 PM

I don't buy that STAR WARS was meant exclusively for kids. JEDI was, sure, but not the original. The first was for folks who might get sly references to cowbow pics, serials, old sci fi and samurai movies. But mostly the serials. Anyone who's seen the old Flash Gordon serials couldn't fail to see the connection. And yeah, kids liked those, but Lucas was selling STAR WARS to those same kids, who would all have been much older when his homage came out.

If STAR WARS was exclusively for kids he wouldn't have included the bounty hunter, Han killing Greedo, the severed arm, or the implication that Leia was tortured for information.
"I had a lot of different ideas. At one point, Luke, Leia and Ben were all going to be little people, and we did screen tests to see if we could do that." -George Lucas, in STAR WARS: the Annotated Screenplays (p197).
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