Star Wars 7 shit talk

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?

mod please lock until an expert can come back and cover the important opinions I mean fiction facts

kids like all the movies! kids were/are totally into queen amygdala and other stuff from the prequels!

i'm not sure what anyone on any side of this argument thinks they are proving. kids like all kinds of things.

like using magnifying glasses to crush ants and picking boogers.

I kind of wonder if I'll have similar responses when I finally watch it at home this week. Obviously seeing it the first time on opening night in a packed house almost in the center of the front row of the upper deck was fucking awesome but the next morning watching it at 9am in a small art house size joint around the corner of my office so I could make a bunch of my coworkers spoiler-proof I was a bit less drawn in. But that was going from audience reaction dialed up to 11 to like lol it's 9am what are we all doing here.

I doubt I'll ever notice the practical details to the extent you are able to but I'm kinda intrigued by Casino's "no in-jokes" cut idea, I wonder what that would feel like.

Kids do like everything, but there seems to be something different about this one. When I was a kid everyone played Star Wars. When the prequels came out, all the kids played nu-Star Wars; Darth Maul was the most popular costume and boys ran around playing Anakin, not Luke. But when I see/hear kids playing Star Wars lately, they're still playing Luke/Darth/Han, and by "they" I mean mostly boys. I've never seen a little girl, to the best of my recollection, dress up as Leah, let alone Rey; I wonder if making the latter the protagonist will have an impact come Halloween? I wonder if this is because Lucas, is his odd genius, aimed the prequels at children first and foremost, and that Abrams attempted to make a more "grown up" Star Wars, which obviously hit a lot of adults in the nostalgic sweet spot but may not have had more than incidental traction among the young set? (Unlike what Frozen did, or even Guardians of the Galaxy or the other Marvel movies seem to have done. Certainly Force Awakens did really well, but not exponentially better than, say, Jurassic World, I don't think.)

Or maybe it's that kids like "Star Wars" generally, in any form, and don't really make a distinction between films/generations/narrative? Maybe to them it's a brand in the truest sense, like Disney or Kellogg's. What flavor of Star Wars is your favorite, etc?

Abrams attempted to make a more "grown up" Star Wars

is that true though?

your last graf is closer to the truth imo - it's all Star Wars, it's all part of the same thing. kids don't make distinctions until they become snotty teenagers and start thinking they know everything. Darth Vader is an iconic villain, nobody will top that for a long time - of course they'll still talk about him. And shops continue to sell Luke and Yoda and Vader toys, brand-new, right next to the new characters. There's just masses more cumulative accretion of material from those movies than from the new ones. There is also just masses more mainstream entertainment alternatives filling every minute of every kid's day, from Candy Crush to Netflix, there's no way a single movie will have the kind of impact now that Star Wars did in 1977.

I've never seen a little girl, to the best of my recollection, dress up as Leah, let alone Rey

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/88/1e/4c/881e4cc64fb24de8bcf469c6fde84c73.jpg

http://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/i-crocheted-this-bb-8-for-my-little-rey-12__700.jpg

http://fangirlblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Rey-costume-Gigi-FGOTD-1024x682.jpg

https://blog.adafruit.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/WonderCon-Cosplay-4-03272016-337x480.jpg

http://40.media.tumblr.com/fc9507c874d4a8bb554894804c53061a/tumblr_nre2lpb42w1qcewzfo1_500.jpg

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/5zfBGA5QV84/hqdefault.jpg

fwiw the "cool" Star Wars action figure series (the taller, more articulated ones) are releasing a Rey action figure.... this month. and it looks a little janky compared to their other ones.

It's more "adult" in that it's actually interested in its villain as something other an obsidian slice of badass - which is not something the original films do until RotJ.

The last few posts seem to be coming from an alternate universe where there hasn't been a popular Star Wars TV show for most of the last 8 years.

thank you Phil <3

ftr i saw plenty of girls dress up as leia when I was growing up.