Category: Film and TV

I really want to like the new Star Wars films. And I do, but not near as much as I’d like to like them. The second of the new films was, in fact, much better than the first, but the flaws in the films are all too obvious to me. (The flaws in the original trilogy are also obvious.)

One major flaw in the current trilogy is that there is no equivalent to Han Solo. Han was an irreverent, skeptical, selfish smart-aleck whose presence helped keep the first trilogy from bogging down with everybody on screen taking the Jedi so seriously and going around acting so grave and noble. Subtract a Han figure from the first trilogy and everybody ends up taking themselves waaay too seriously.

Lucas has said that the new trilogy is much more like what he envisioned the first trilogy, but he didn’t have the tech (or the money) to make it the way he saw it.

Not everything Lucas says in this regard is true. He makes it sound as if the story of all six movies was clear in his mind when he made the first, and that patently isn’t true–at least if you read the original scripts (also available in an easier-to-use book form). Lucas had all kinds of stuff in the originals that indicate his vision of the story changed in midstream–repeatedly. Yet the original series ended up clicking in a way no previous movie trilogy had.

Despite the alterations to the plot, I think that Lucas is telling the truth when he says he originally imagined a much more lush, detail-rich universe for the original trilogy, yet for budgetary (and non-budgetary) reasons, he ended up cutting it way back.

As the years have passed, he has now begun adding back the missing detail, in the "Special Edition" of the original films that was released in theaters, in the Extra-Special Super Chocolate Fudgy Edition that has now been released on DVD, and most notably in the films of the current trilogy.

As he’s added more detail, fans of the original series have been complaining, and loudly.

There are some circumstances in which adding detail hurts a work of art, situations in which less is more.

That’s the message fans of the original Star Wars movies have been sending to Lucas, but he doesn’t seem to have gotten the message.

HERE’S ONE OF THE MOST INSIGHTFUL ANALYSES OF THE PROBLEM THAT I’VE READ.

GET THE STORY.

Getting a thumbs up from Usama bin Laden probably didn’t help the film’s chances at the Oscars, either.

SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS SEASON 2 IS OUT!!!

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BUY IT WITH SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS SEASON 1!!!

Ahh . . . can nautical nonsense be more sublime?

Interesting analysis of the chances of The Passion of the Christ and Fahrenheit 9/11 at the Oscars this year.

Flashbacks:

* Matt Abbott interviews Mel Gibson’s brother

* Me on the two films

* Me on The Passion (my first blog post!)

. . . or they will be . . . sooner than you imagine.

Here’s the deal:

You know how George Lucas announced at first that he wouldn’t release the original Star Wars trilogy on DVD until after Episode 3 comes out in 2005–then he released it suddenly last month?

You know how they are currently releasing Star Trek: Voyager season-by-season on DVD and then decided to release the original Star Trek series on DVD at the same time–instead of maximizing their profits by getting one series completely out and then releasing the next so that it doesn’t overtax the Trekkies’ pocketbooks?

You know how they are currently talking about releasing Star Trek: Enterprise on DVD next year even though the series isn’t even complete yet (contrary to the normal way Star Trek series are released)?

You didn’t know that? Well, now you do.

There’s a reason for all this sudden releasing of DVDs.

The reason is called Blu-Ray.

Blu-Ray is widely viewed as the REPLACEMENT for DVDs. It is expected to make DVDs obsolete.

The Blu-Ray format uses disks the size of CDs/DVDs but packs 25-50 gigs of data onto them (that’s 13-26 hours of programming, compared to 2-4 hours of programming in the DVD format). One Blu-Ray disk could hold a whole season of a TV program.

And if you want video quality rather than quantity, Blu-Ray beats DVD by similar margins. It can pack far more HDTV onto a disk than something in DVD format could.

As a result, Blu-Ray is expected to be the hot new format that will make DVD obsolete. It has the major industry players behind it, who are currently developing commercial versions of their Blu-Ray players/recorders.

These are expected to hit the market in 2005-2006.

That’s why we’re getting all these sooner-than-expected DVD releases right now.

The companies are afraid that Blu-Ray will roll right over DVD and quickly make it obsolete, depriving the companies of their chance to make money off the DVD format. So they’re rushing DVD releases of their programs out in anticipation of Blu-Ray bursting onto the market.

Is this a sound marketing strategy?

Well . . . I’m glad to be able to get DVDs of favored stuff sooner-than-expected. But I doubt the release of Blu-Ray will change things too much. I’ve already got Bablyon 5 on DVD, so I’m not inclined to buy it on Blu-Ray just so I can reduce the number of disks I have to put into the player in order to watch the whole thing in one run.

You’ll have to decide for yourself whether you want to buy DVDs now or wait for Blu-Ray versions of your favorite programs to start to be released (probably several years from now).

FIND OUT MORE ABOUT BLU-RAY.

WATCH THE FILM!

(Note: Stinger after the credits.)

The other day I was watching an interview program on TV, and the discussion went something like this:

INTERVIEWER: Do you feel ashamed of what your political party did the other day?

GUEST: I think that what they were really trying to do was signal their concern about this urgent problem.

INTERVIEWER: You didn’t answer my question: Do you feel ashamed of what your party did?

GUEST: I’ll tell you who should feel ashamed of what they’ve done. It’s the other party!

INTERVIEWER: Again, you didn’t answer my question: Do you feel ashamed of what your party did?

GUEST: I’m telling you that the other party need to be thoroughly ashamed of its actions!

At this point, the interviewer gave up and moved on to a new question. I must admit that what he had done thus far was pretty gutsy. He was asking a very pointed, “hardball” question of the guest, and stuck it to him three times. But ultimately, he folded and let the guest have his way in dodging the question.

So I want to give the interviewer credit for that. But by the third non-answer I was so frustrated with the guest that what I wanted the interviewer to say was: “Okay, you’re out of here. Persistent refusal to answer the question.”

That’s at the core of a TV show I would like to see on the air. I know, Bill O’Reilly has his “No Spin Zone,” in which he will reject answers that aren’t directed to the questions he’s asked, but he doesn’t eject guests who persistently refuse to cough up some kind of answer.

That’s what I’d like to see.

I’m so sick of watching political hacks (from *both* parties, though one seems to be worse than the other these days) dodge questions and refuse to give serious answers. This is something I feel particularly strongly about as someone who is called upon to give serious answers to people’s questions every week. Even when the answer is uncomfortable to give, I want to give it as a matter of principle.

But the political hacks who appear on TV these days don’t. In fact, for them doding questions is a studied art form. The better at it they are, the more they are admired in hack circles. But as Scripture says, what is praiseworthy in the eyes of men is abominable in the eyes of God. What they ware doing is a form of dehumanizing manipulation that treats the viewer as an animal to be tricked rather than a person to be persuaded. It does not elevate the discussion and deserves thoroughgoing condemnation.

Thus the idea for my show: People come on. The interviewer asks them a question, and they get three chances to give a straight answer. If they do give a straight answer (and, “I don’t know” is a straight answer) then they get a new question, up to the length of the interview segment. But if they don’t give one then the interviewer declares “You’re out of here. Persistent refusal to answer the question,” and the host brings in a new guest.

Of course, you’d need items lined up to fill the rest of the show in case of guest ejection, but I suspect there would need to be fewer filler-interviews (including pre-taped segements kept in reserve and rotated through so they stay fresh) than you might expect. If the rules are consistently enforced then guests will not make the mistake of refusing to answer. Those guests who are not prepaired to give straight answers will not come on the show, meaning that the show will have almost all quality guests who will raise rather than lower the standard of discussion and will treat the audience like people to be reasoned with instead of animals to be herded.

What do y’all think?

I’m not holding my breath on this one.

GET THE STORY.

Okay, you know the episode (whatever it’s called) where Capt. Kirk fights the Gorn?

Thought so.

Well, in this episode they are fighting each other around some very prominent rocks that kind of jut up and to the right.

These rocks appear in *LOTS* of Star Trek episodes. Can’t tell you how many alien worlds these exact same rocks are on.

They also appear in *LOTS* of things besides Star Trek.

Last night I was talking to a friend about how I’m having a problem being distracted by continually recognizing the East and West Mitten Buttes from Monument Valley, Utah when I’m watching old John Ford westerns, and I thought about the ubiquitous “Star Trek rocks.”

So I Googled “star trek” and “rocks.”

FOUND THEM!

Turns out that they’re called the Vasquez Rocks (named after an outlaw who hid there), and (according to maps.yahoo.com), they’re only two and a half hours from my house.

I SMELL ROAD TRIP!

I hate to say bad things about a movie without seeing it, but the data I have on the movie Vera Drake suggests that it is a pro-abort propaganda piece.

It’s also just won a prize at an Italian film festival.

Excerpts from the story:

“Vera Drake,” Mike Leigh’s tough tale of a working-class mother who is caught performing illegal abortions in 1950s England, scooped up the prizes at the Venice Film Festival Saturday, including the coveted Golden Lion.

The film raises difficult questions about abortion in a world where the wealthy have access to discreet and legal abortions and the poor throw themselves on the mercy of practitioners like Drake.

“The audience must walk away with a debate and struggle with it. These things are not black and white,” Leigh said.

Staunton anchors the movie as a working mother who risks her close-knit family’s love after a girl on whom she performs an abortion falls seriously ill and she is jailed.

Somehow, I suspect that the film is more black-and-white than advertised. Given the plot as described, it would be easy for filmmakers to send the clear message that, as regrettable as injuries like this were, they were caused by the era’s “repressive abortion laws,” to which good riddance.

I could be wrong about that, but the odds of a British company spinning the plot in a pro-life direction (i.e., portraying the lead character as a babykiller who injures mothers, too) or even in neutral manner seem to me to be remarkably low.