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9:00PM - 11:00PM Biography May 20
George Lucas: Creating an Empire
A 2-hour portrait of the genius who created some of the cinema's greatest treasures, including "American Graffiti" and the "Star Wars" series. Lucas's dream of becoming a race car driver ended with an accident, but he went on to build a film empire that includes Industrial Light and Magic, the top special-effects company in the world. Features interviews with Stephen Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Harrison Ford, Ron Howard, and Liam Neeson.
TV G

Harrison Ford's bio airs today:
http://www.aande.com/tv/shows/biography.html

Biography
Thursday , May 23 8:00 PM-9:00 PM
Harrison Ford: The Reluctant Hero
The life and career of the carpenter who became one of the top box-office stars in Hollywood history. Includes rare behind-the-scenes footage and exciting film clips from Ford's greatest movies including "American Graffiti", "Star Wars", and "Raiders of the Lost Ark". TV G

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<serious rant mode on> I had anticipated some bad dialog, but the script was so wooden at times I kept wondering if I was seeing the dialog and acting from "Thunderbirds Are Go."

By the end of the movie, I was half of the opinion that GL had hired people to provide him with all the cliches and overworked lines that they could think of, for inclusion in the movie. Would somebody stop and count 'em sometime? This has to be a record in any one movie.

My biggest beef though is the implausibility of the physics. The original "Star Wars" was a milestone because it was the first film to bring golden age style science fiction to the big screen and have it seem as though it could be real. Sure there were some stretches of "reality" in that film, but overall it was possible to not only suspend disbelief but not be totally jarred out of the reverie of the environment by an inapproprate stunt or effect.

Somewhere along the way, Lucas minimized the idea of consistant physics so that his characters could play and fight with fantastic toys. In this film he totally loses it. The fantastic stunts (and I don't mean fantastic in a good way) and the CGI turned this one into a comic book. I'll provide and example that is probably better suited to Miss Piggy and Kermit D. Frog than a serious movie character: Miss Always A Great Hair Day falls from a helicopter substitute onto a sand dune, rolls for a while, comes to a stop and appears almost dead from her fall, whereupon a soldier races up to her with "Are you all right?" She then immediately and totally revives, doesn't even bother to dust herself off and continues on into the battle. Right. Meanwhile her boyfriend is in the copter whining "Take me back to her" to his teacher, who has suddenly decided (after repeated instructions to the boy to "protect the senator at all costs") that maybe the senator isn't so important, let's leave the bitch in the sandbox and move on. How quaint. No wonder the Jedi students have screwed up priorities.

But wait, there's more! The leaps shown in this film while the characters hold onto a thin cord would make any flesh and blood character slice their hands in half on the cord, unless the cord had enough give, which the cords in this film obviously don't. (No budget for bungee cord?) No matter, the chains in this universe are nearly massless as well, and break only where the break will do the most good. Ahh, alien physics.

Speaking of physics, ever since Superman rescued Lois Lane by catching her mid-fall, film-makers have been envious. Lucas does his homage to this scene as well. He puts a couple similar stunts together back to back in this movie, just in case someone misses it the first time. However, it doesn't take Evans math genius to figure out the math of the word *splatt* when catching an air car by falling onto the hood or trunk from a great height.

Technically, the cityscapes were another problem for me. They just looked flat and unrealistic. Dust and moisture in the air causes things close up to appear clear and in full color, while things receding into the distance get progressively more washed out and bluish. The cityscapes in this movie were just too uniform in a L.A. washed-out hazy but clear look. Like the plot, they had no depth.

I could rant on for hours, but I'll stop with the observation that all those big choreographed asteroids never seem to bump into each other, and even though all are moving in different directions relative to each other, none have been pulverized into tiny stones or dust specks. This effect worked in the original SW because we weren't expecting it and the scene was fairly short. In this episode the scene continued long enough that I half expected to see an end credit to Busby Berkely.

quote:

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Speaking of physics, ever since Superman rescued Lois Lane by catching her mid-fall, film-makers have been envious. Lucas does his homage to this scene as well. He puts a couple similar stunts together back to back in this movie, just in case someone misses it the first time. However, it doesn't take Evans math genius to figure out the math of the word *splatt* when catching an air car by falling onto the hood or trunk from a great height.

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*ROTFLMAO*

Jerry, I think movie physics is getting almost as bad as cartoon physics. Your observations about the asteroids are right on. I'll bet they used a mathematical model where particles move around in all sorts of directions but avoid collisions with each other, and placed an asteroid at each "particle". Next time I see the movie, I'll have to check to see if any of the asteroids move in curved paths. Or maybe they generated a bunch of vectors in 3D that didn't collide with each other and used those for the asteroids motion. It's fun to think about.

Speaking of movie and cartoon physics, y'all might enjoy this. It's a compilation of cartoon physics laws. I got many of them from other sources, and then wrote a bunchof them on my own at the end.

Watching the original, I think I have a new favorite line. On the desert of Luke's homeworld, the stormtroopers are trying to find what happened to the missing battle station plans after R2 and C3PO have landed. One of them holds up a circular bit of metal, and exclaims in glee the same way the crocodile hunter would if he had found scat from an animal "Look sir, DROIDS!" This was the first time I'd made the connection that he was referring to it as C3PO poop.

I almost fell asleep in the first half (thanks, Jerry). When the action began to pick up in the 2nd half that woke me up. Granted, Episode 2 is better than Episode 1 but I couldn't help thinking how Episode 2 rips off story hints from other movies. I even found a taste of Bulworth early on!

THREE!!!

That would get really freekin boring after a while.

Yes movies do have to BORROW story hints, plot points, and even, oh my, even yes even even even have to borrow... could it be.... WORDS... that have been used in other movies. It's going to happen. Get used to it.

There are few original ideas any more that can be done. A few come up, and then they get borrowed from, as is expected. Otherwise we have no movies to watch. Can you imagine if we complained about books the same way? We would have just a dictionary, but no thesaurus, because those words are already used and just a rip off from the dictionary.

Lets see: "Train Enters Station," "Voyage to the Moon", and... um "Memento"?

Its odd that you were so specific, Dave. I'd like to hear which three you were thinking of!

However, those aside, I would have to say... Usual Suspects, Memento, and Run Lola Run.

I am sorry for starting a new thread when there was already an existing one. I am also sorry for the comments in the heading when I should have only indicated the movie's title. It will never happen again.

As most of you know, the DVD for this movie will be released in November and if you are unterested, go here for the very first review ----

http://www.lightsoutentertainment.com

-Claude

Someone call Valenti. I demand he puts these evil copyright infringers that will surely make the studios lose billions behind bars.

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