Star Wars 7 shit talk

i know it's disingenuous to say "my kids didn't have a problem with the focal lengths" but, you know, my kids didn't have a problem with the focal lengths.

as a film-style wonk i enjoyed the way that even the lens lengths were allusive! obviously abrams isn't doing this for the kids, but for (a) himself, (b) other filmmakers (i think the extent to which filmmakers are making stuff for their peers is underacknowledged) and (c) people who know the other star wars films forwards and backwards (which is a lot of people).

there's a scene where all the x-wing (?) fighters are racing to get to their planes, there's a fast tracking shot whose movement is counterpoint to the direction of most of the characters' movements and it uses a telephoto lens... i would swear (w/o having watched it in a few weeks) that this directly evokes a shot from the last act of the '77 "star wars."

also i bet there's a lot of people who couldn't tell you the difference b/t a tracking shot and a steadicam shot, or a telephoto vs a fish-eye lens, but could tell you that one scene "looks like 'star wars'" and another sorta does not.

Xpost But isn't that Abrams' directorial m.o., though? Being an almost spot-on emulator of the stylistic tics of his own favorite filmmakers - or at least of 70s-80s Spielberg.
I rewatched VII at home last weekend and saw a lot of early Spielberg in the shots this time around (see the reactions outside Maz's castle after the weapon is put to use)

( that post is response to difficult listening's )

i like the idea of abrams as a chameleon. i haven't seen enough of his work to know! (the only of his movies i really liked was his mission:impossible installment.) but in any case being a stylistic chameleon is an impressive skill, if not a major one i guess.

I think he is doing it for the kids! If he isn't then he's one lucky sonovabitch, tumblr and actual (anecdotal) kids are nuts for it.

fwiw, this guy was the DP:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0591053/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cr15

lots of action films under his belt, including work with Oliver Stone and Tony Scott

xpost

i just meant he's probably thinking about tracer hand's kids when he discusses lenses w/ his DP

Yeah - doesn't partic. bother me, either. I'm curious what Rian Johnson's going to be coming with visually.

I wondered before seeing The Force Awakens if the shot composition would be similar to his Star Trek reboot, but it's really its own thing and much more indebted to the first SW film and Spielberg! I saw 10 Cloverfield Lane over the weekend and the theater played a clip of Super 8 beforehand and I was reminded again what a love story to Spielberg's work in the 80s that was.

i just meant he's probably thinking about tracer hand's kids when he discusses lenses w/ his DP

er, i mean probably NOT thinking...

xpost

will be interesting to compare Super 8 to Jeff Nichols's Midnight Special which has a very 80s Spielberg look to it as well, at least going by the trailer

interesting Rian Johnson is working with the guy who posted the film/digital juxtaposition video that was making the rounds a couple months back, a summary of which is here:
https://storify.com/tvaziri/steve-yedlin

I think it's an interesting meditation: does digital have a "look" or is it just an artifact of the process and processing done to the raw footage? I think a lot of people played to the strengths (and weaknesses) of the physical media of film, but there's an entire visual vocabulary that's inherited from the medium and not a conscious decision on the director's part.

Shots taken in digital, especially with immediate replayability and camera flexibility may be something that can be spotted, but if processing results in a film-like look when it comes to color and lighting, is there a real difference?

digital once (1990s?) had a look, now the tools you can use to manipulate the image are so advanced that you'd be hard-pressed to identify a single digital look.

as of just a few short years ago, even the highest-grade digital cameras had a hard time registering variances of light intensity in the same shot. i think that's much less true now, but aside from the qualities of film grain (which digital tools can only approximate), that's where you might locate the difference b/t digital and film. however, for all i know with the most advanced digital cameras even that's not true anymore.

Lucas embracing digital was seen as a degradation in visual style, but in my opinion the real sin was that he used it to cast off limitations that might have resulted in a tighter story. Instead of concentrating on composing a story with characters and fleshing out scenes, he had fully envisioned scenes that were visually busy completely unrelated to plot development

I think you could have an as-filmed Episode VII that would be missing backgrounds but would otherwise be a complete plot, but Episodes I - III ended up with a richly imagined world that had people doing nothing worthwhile in it

the correspondence between cinematographer Steve Yedlin and others in the link I posted is kind of telling -- people referring to film and digital as "real" versus "simulated" makes no sense to me because neither is real! They're captured images of real life, replayed. The fact you're viewing both on the same movie screen or computer monitor kind of makes the point moot.

fwiw lucas shot the first film in the prequel trilogy in 720p, i think. so it was a literal degradation, in a sense.

speaking of CGI, i think the humanoid characters in the new film still fell into the uncanny valley... i'd rather they just use puppets, or more of a mix of puppetry and CGI.

yes the CGI characters were the worst part of the movie other than the shameless rehashing

and to amateurist and anyone else who wants to comment on the rehashing: GO RIGHT AHEAD. the rehashing was lame as hell.

something about the movements of the facial musculature in those CGI characters seems like it's in slow motion. muscles don't bend and twitch in an convincingly fleet way.

facial movements look to me like ripples in a pond, and figure movements often look like the characters are moving in a vat of molasses,. i think CGI still has a hard time replicating the /strain/ involved in muscle movement.

i think the rehashing was mostly lame w/r/t the new death star but the rest of it didn't bother me much. i thought ridley and boyega were excellent enough to get past some of those issues, i guess. it's amazing how this has already infiltrated my 4 yr old's life, too, and i've only let him watch the trailers. which i don't necessarily think was happening as much with 4 yr olds around the time of phantom menace, maybe...

Maz and Snoke were the weakest points of TFA's VFX work for me. I really wish they'd gone with puppets, even augmented with CGI. Digital characters obviously still very difficult to pull off.

It would be interesting to know which scenes in TPM were shot digitally. Had thought for years that it was shot entirely on film. I assumed the oddly muddy look of some scenes was a result of limitations in their compositing software, or a primitive digital intermediate.

prepare yourself

ONE SEQUENCE FROM THE PHANTOM MENACE — A NIGHTTIME SCENE IN WHICH QUI-GON TAKES A SAMPLE OF ANAKIN’S BLOOD — WAS SHOT IN DIGITAL, MAKING IT THE FIRST FILM OF THIS SCALE TO UTILIZE THE NEW FORMAT.

Hm. Guess I'll stick with my first theory, then.

Xpost totally serious. I have kids and lots of friends with kids, and I haven't heard any of them talk about the movie since, not like they do the old films. If you're talking memes, yeah, I've seen a few, but don't know if that is a high bar. Will ask some parents and get back!

when I got home from work yesterday, two neighbor kids were running down the sidewalk waving lightsabers

That really takes me back. It's heartening to see that the nomenclature for that perverted act hasn't changed since I was a kid.

oh, you

If you're talking memes, yeah, I've seen a few

Xpost totally serious. I have kids and lots of friends with kids, and I haven't heard any of them talk about the movie since, not like they do the old films.

^^^my experience as well

also how has no one noted the irony of complaining about rehashing criticism of a film that is an explicit rehash, we're through the looking glass here people

TBF, I hardly ever hear people talk as much about movies they've seen at all recently as they do about older movies.

also how has no one noted the irony of complaining about rehashing criticism of a film that is an explicit rehash, we're through the looking glass here people

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, April 5, 2016 2:59 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

heh. actually, my superficial criticisms above were actually brilliant self-relexive meta-criticisms. yes. that's what they were. you guys buy that, right?

:)

would've been more effective if you had just c+p'd previous criticisms into a highly readable but largely pointless post that only people with an oppressive nostalgia for the original posts would enjoy

Worth remembering the films have only just become available to view at home, which is probably a better test of longevity.

the FILM.

I have no prob with amateurist dumping his thoughts even if they're mostly a rehash

tbh Οὖτις and I have posted one zillion times on these SW threads and I believe he has still seen the movie zero times

I've cobbled together an understanding of the movie based on brief examinations of various toy and fast-food tie-in products

well, I can't argue that

you've cobbled together an understanding of the movie based on your posting in this thread

guys that ridiculous BB-8 droid I got in a bundled deal apparently has a feature (just added today) where it will react to the movie if you play it in the room with your droid/phone

http://www.engadget.com/2016/04/05/sphero-bb8-the-force-awakens/

this is totally useless but I'll probably do it once

my 4yo niece is super into Star Wars cos the boys at school are all into it. she has seen part of Episode IV and a bunch of the CGI cartoons but hasn't seen any of the movies all the way through. she does own a lightsaber toy and Star Wars coloring books. her favorite character at first was Anakin but now it's Darth Vader.

where it will react to the movie if you play it in the room with your droid/phone

where do you think i got my incisive criticisms from?

xpost

my friend's kid used to think that "star wars" was actually the name of the character who we know as "darth vader." so she'd be like, "daddy, star wars is being mean to that guy." or "star wars wears a scary helmet and breathes loudly."

Wut:

http://jalopnik.com/about-those-mystery-droids-in-star-wars-the-force-awak-1769182844

Xpost totally serious. I have kids and lots of friends with kids, and I haven't heard any of them talk about the movie since, not like they do the old films.

^^^my experience as well

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, April 5, 2016 3:58 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

thanks for being the Morbs clone this thread was missing

lol oops I meant to quote this...

also how has no one noted the irony of complaining about rehashing criticism of a film that is an explicit rehash, we're through the looking glass here people
― Οὖτις, Tuesday, April 5, 2016 2:59 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

guys I need you to all shut up for the night because I'm going to have to start loading the hiddens tomorrow so I can answer all the questions. OK?