Star Wars
I won’t be coy. The genesis for this piece was the hypothesis that The Last Jedi was not “divisive,” despite that word being Battle of the Box-Office Blowhards
The Last Jedi is clearly an abysmal failure. Take it from Rob Cain, who on December 22 published an article on Forbes.com with the headline “Last Jedi Grosses Are Collapsing with the Worst Daily Holds of All Nine Star Wars Movies”. But Cain’s chosen lens has several flaws.
Save What You Love, and Let the Past Die
Writer/director Rian Johnson gives Star Wars fans just about everything they could want in The Last Jedi, assuming they didn’t require it to follow the story beats, narrative cleanliness, and relatively consistent tone of The Empire Strikes Back. That, of course, means that Johnson has given a large number of fans what they didn’t want.
Box Office Power Rankings: August 22-24, 2008
How badly has George Lucas damaged the Star Wars franchise? At Box Office Mojo, The Clone Wars’ revenues are being compared to Final Fantasy and TMNT – and after two weekends, it’s losing to both.
A Sense of Place
Is it possible that the failure of the second Star Wars trilogy has nothing to do with plot, character, and storytelling and everything to do with physical space?
Tagged: Blog-a-thons, George Lucas, Star Wars
That’s No Moon. It’s a Blog-a-thon.
Fresh off Culture Snob’s own Misunderstood Blog-a-thon is Edward Copeland’s Star Wars Blog-a-thon on Friday, May 25 – the 30th anniversary of Episode IV’s release in the United States.
Tagged: Blog-a-thons, Star Wars
Ignorance and Taste: Catching Up on Links
- How ignorant are you? Cinemarati recently asked its readers: “What’s your big, embarrassing, Never-Seen-It movie?”
Tagged: Links, Neko Case, Netflix, Self-Involvement, Star Wars
The Movies That Were Not There
David Wong offers “The Top Ten Sci-Fi Films That Never Existed.” (And, yes, it’s geeky.) The title is cool because it’s accurate while having its own little sci-fi vibe. The content is cool because Wong brings to the task a keen understanding of what works (and how it works) in narrative and in movies.
Tagged: George Lucas, Science Fiction, Star Wars
The Phantom Nuance
The troubles with Revenge of the Sith are large: conception, narrative arc, tone, and pacing, all related to a failure by George Lucas to acknowledge what, exactly, the prequels represent, and to shape the material accordingly. And the raw materials of the movies suggest a startlingly detailed, mature, and nuanced vision, not just a popcorn space opera.
Deleting History
The (mostly rhetorical) question raised by George Lucas’ changes to the original Star Wars trilogy is at what point a movie is “finished.” Put another way: Is there a version of a movie that should be considered the definitive version? If so, who gets to decide?
