h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"It's part of my pose of studied eccentricity. It's supposed to be endearing." [Edward the Bonobo]

And it is, it is!

But Hoovooloo has a point. If you live in the U.K., the bar for eccentricity is set very very high. It seems as though nearly every family has had at least one aunt who dressed like a man and rode her horse up the stairs to her bedroom. [Okay, that's probably an overstatement, based on too much exposure to the lunacy of Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Sullivan. ]

As I say...it was ironic self-deprecation. There's nothing worse than studied eccentricity. 'Oh look at me with my extravagant mustache and collection of gonks.'

*My* chief reason for not seeing 'Star Wars' is to exasperate people.

It doesn't work, there

Will you go and watch it now?

I've managed to miss all opportunities* to see it so far despite the tide of publicity that suggests that it's culturally essential.

Meh. It's only a space film.








* Did you see what I did there?

Tide of publicity? Rhoooo.

But seeing how we all try to convince you to watch this masterpiece (only a space film! Heretic!), it must be a most entertaining pastime for you

Oh, it is. But the fun is in the exasperation.

Sorry, but when I saw the first "Star Wars" movie, I thought it was anything but a masterpiece. It carved out a place in movie history, though, with its special effects, which were state of the art at the time. Since those special effects have been surpassed, it is left to rely on dialogue (minimal), character (are you kidding?), acting and plot. That's the dilemma. Remember "Gone With the Wind?" The acting in that film can still give you a lump in your throat. The best movies do that, and people overlook the limitations of whatever technology existed when they were made.

But in truth I didn't come here to bash George Lucas's franchise. There are millions who love his movies. As coming-of-age stories go, they are worthwhile. I came of age too long ago to moved by them, though. I'm sorry about that. My bias is right out there in the open, and there's nothing I can do about it.....

>>it is left to rely on dialogue (minimal)

Famous quote by Harrison Ford*:

'You may be able to write these lines, George, but you sure as shit can't say them.'

Actually - I did like 'American Graffiti' and 'THX 1138'.





* I understand he's in the film.

The final, greatest verdict on the Star Wars films (and Star Trek films too): http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/

The key reason to watch the Star Wars films is not that they're great (although they kinda are). It's that they are enjoyable. Many of the 'classic' movies I've watched have been worth it because, at heart, they were entertaining and I had a good time watching them. When you eventually watch them, you won't regret it, and it won't be because they are seminal or epoch-making.
Also, the first one is not as good as the others. Personally, I rate it below some of the new trilogy.

"The key reason to watch the Star Wars films is not that they're great (although they kinda are). It's that they are enjoyable. Many of the 'classic' movies I've watched have been worth it because, at heart, they were entertaining and I had a good time watching them." [Just Bob]

That's a great point. I get impatient with critics and some of the Oscar and other awards group choices because they sometimes forget that movies shoulsd try to entertain. They can do other things, too, but why spend two hours in the dark watching something that creeps you out or is flat-out boring? This year, the awards people nominated "Take Shelter" and "Tree of Life." The first is so depressing you feel like screaming when you get back to your house. The second is both depressing and incomprehensible. I didn'tstick around to see how it ended. because it didn't seem likely to reach any particular point.

It depends what you man by 'entertain', though. Can we rule out (random examples) Tarkovsky or Bergman because there are no explosions?

Now I'm not saying for one minute that entertaining films are inferior. But taking two of my favourite films, say, 'Goodfellas' and 'Gregory's Girl' (I can quote whole chunks ), they are entertaining in different ways.

Oh, absolutely. In fact, I found 'The Tree of Life' entertaining because it's visually stunning and, while it takes some effort to get through the obscurity, what you get to is an interesting and well-played story.
The best example, for me, was Citizen Kane. People (and especially critics) go on at length about how innovative and visually adventurous it is, but what captured me was the story, and how it is almost more relevant today than it was then.

Well I'm a bit of a cinematography nut so I love it when you suddenly get a stunning shot.

I've just picked up a charity shop copy of 'Fargo'. From when I say it in the cinema, I remember sitting up and almost cheering with glee at an aerial shot of William H Macy walking across a snow-covered parking lot. It was like an abstract painting! Not to mention the Coen Bros trick of using a motif throughout each movie. In Fargo it was the bing bing of a car's seatbelt alarm. (Hudsucker Proxy - circles. 'You know - for kids'; Miller's Crossing - Hats; The Man Who Wasn't There - someone smoking in every single frame...)

I think we've reached a stage where one good reason for someone who has an interest in culture to watch the Star Wars movies is to see where the references come from.

There are certain things out there that get referenced so often you almost don't need to bother seeing them/hearing them/reading them. I'm thinking Homer, the Bible, Hamlet, the Beatles, Motown, Tolkein. So much of what came after them referenced them, depended on them, parodied or pastiched or just plain ripped them off, that it's possible to kind of know them without knowing them, to use phrases from them in conversation without having the original context.

At some point, someone with interest in culture thinks "go to the source". It can be a refreshing experience coming to these works with the odd familiarity you have from having heard them referenced so many, many times, yet never having got the unadulterated stuff straight from the tap, as it were.

And in some ways, it's an effort to put them into context. It's impossible, today, for an adult to appreciate Star Wars the way a child of the 70s could. We're immersed in uber-clean CGI and cameras that can do anything, so it's hard to recall just how revolutionary the FX shots were, how startlingly different than anything that had gone before.

I don't think I can really appreciate how stunning the Beatles' or Pink Floyd's albums sounded to someone who bought them on release... but you can go back and listen to them and try.

But if you listen to them without making the effort to consider them in context, they inevitably seem reduced. And I think that's the problem with Star Wars - it's a kids movie. And Lucas keeps tinkering with it, which if anything trivialises it further. And I guess it doesn't really help that, unlike the Beatles fans who screamed and fainted and chased them down the street but mostly now have grandchildren, Star Wars fans have grown older, but haven't grown up.

There again...The Floyd have never done it for me. I like my music gritty and lo-fi.

And I don't think I've ever come out of a cinema praising the FX,

"if you listen to them [The Beatles and Pink Floyd] without making the effort to consider them in context, they inevitably seem reduced. And I think that's the problem with Star Wars - it's a kids movie." [Hoovooloo]

People who are nuts about Bach don't seem to consider his music reduced by lack of context. Likewise fans of Haydn's late masses, which often expressed alarm over the encroaching armies of Napoleon. We can't even *imagine* what it was like to have Napoleon coming. What survives is that which rises above its roots.

I remember what a splash the Beatles made in the mid-1960s, when they performed on Ed Sullivan. By the time they reached the mid-1990s, the surviving Beatles were tinkering with the hits from their golden period. Remastering the old recordings, rechanneling using the new sound technologies that had come along since 1969. In this context, I don't find fault with george Lucas for trying to make his aging oeuvre relevant to today's audiences by tweaking them for 3D. I will probably go to a theater and see what he has come up with. Why not?

"I don't think I've ever come out of a cinema praising the FX"

Interesting. I guess I was an FX geek from a young age, thanks, I think, mainly to the Sunday afternoon broadcasts of the work of Ray Harryhausen. Sinbad got to me *early*.

If you took away the F/X from some movies, there would be precious little left of them. "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" was pretty much a continuous string of F/X, except for the actors, who acted in front of blue screens and were then pasted into the computer-generated settings. Or how about "The Day After Tomorrow"
with its tornados ravaging Los Angeles?

Sometimes a very fine movie with exceptionally good F/X will stick in my mind, though. "Inception" had some awesome sequences of city blocks that seemed to fold in upon themselves at right angles. That blew me away.

But Christopher Nolan could have made a head feck film without the CGI, yes?

Don't get me wrong - that scene was visually impressive. But largely gratuitous to my enjoyment of the film. To take a counter example...'2012' allegedly had good CGI, but I didn't notice because the film was so shite.

We can all agree that FX has (have?) got better and better since the days when the Lumiere Bros had trains charging out of screens. But have *films* got better in direct proportion?

Those Harryhausens are still pretty good, in their way, surely?

I am still baffled when people still say, nowadays, in 2012, that a film had a lousy story but amazing special affects *as if it was something positive*.