Caltrops - Nanaca Crash





	[quote name="jeep"][quote name="Mischief Maker"][quote name="Lucas"]That's not my job, to make people like my movies. They either like them or they don't. That's completely out of my hands."[/quote] WHEN WILL THE WORLD UNDERSTAND I NEVER TOOK A JOB IN THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY TO MAKE ENTERTAINING FILMS??![/quote] Lucas, like Dennis Hopper way back when, was never really welcome in Hollywood as a filmmaker. There was this documentary on the other day saying Francis Ford Coppola dragged Lucas "back from exile" to make American Graffiti, and Lucas had to beg 20th Century Fox for the money to make Star Wars. Lucas went directly from no credibility and no money to Palm D'Or and richer than the Catholic Church. So you have Scorsese, Spielberg, Coppolla, DePalma, Lucas, and a couple writers like Paul Schraeder and John Milius all sort of networking amongst themselves. They spent a lot of time fashioning themselves as art renegades, but in the end all they had in common was living far outside Los Angeles. These guys, except for Spielberg who gets lumped in there unfairly but is really more a Hollywood guy than any of them, made some good movies but were, for various reasons, not really all that welcome in the entertainment industry. Minus Star Wars, Lucas never would have been welcome out there at all. He never 'paid his dues' in the eyes of the establishment, but more than that, he was out of sync with his own country: He liked japanese films and old fantasy stories, where american cultural tastes will always veer back towards our common delusions of realism. So Lucas' ambivalence towards other people's ideas of good filmmaking isn't terribly surprising, the delusional positioning of himself as a renegade isn't anything new, and the addiction to sycophants is more of a cheap excuse for everyone else than a real crutch for him. We assume he's surrounded by yes men, because what else explains his recent inability to make a good movie? The reality is he's never made a good movie. I loved Star Wars, but for the same reasons everyone else did: as a child it spurred my imagination and as an adult it reminds me of that experience. It's the thin story of that first film that was the difference, there's enough there to get your mind running, and thirty years later we're still going. The films after it, he had all the money he needed, he could make the images he could only imagine in the first one, and it turns out his imagination isn't as spectacular a place as we'd all imagined for ourselves. His dialogue was cliched back when Cooper used it for novels about cowboys and indians. His science fiction isn't much of either. His tastes in art, culture, fashion, music are worse than terrible, they're too bad to loop around to be trash art again. As an auteur, the man just sucks. This in no way takes away from his influence on modern film. I suspect that people will look back on 1975-2005 as the "ILM Era" in Hollywood, since just about every movie has their tag on it. Computer effects, blue screens, thx sound, summer blockbusters, and home theaters all owe a lot to that guy. It also in no way takes anything away from his abilities: after Star Wars he focused on ILM for years and it's clear he's been the very best at it for a long, long time. But the culture veers back: the children he enchanted years ago wonder why the films haven't grown with them, the stupid clothes and the Princess Leia hair and inane cantina jazz seem unnecessary to telling a good story, and stripped of that you can see he simply can't. He didn't just forget all that Joseph Campbell, it's like it was only a passing thought for him, a flicker in his head for a minute before he got back to skeleton animation and Ewoks and shit. He's a refugee from the other end of the tech pool, some kind of Alf-like creature, chomping on cats and telling unfunny jokes. What do you do if you're a passing fad that never passes? Can you imagine me and Zseni making a sitcom? No one would understand it and when they asked us wtf we'd start talking about old Nichols and May routines and the baroque nature of japanese litigation. So I'm going to go way (way, way) out on a limb here: George Lucas is the John Carmack of the entertainment industry, and these Star Wars movies are Doom-style tech previews, hardware demo scenes, infomercials for a service he's offering other filmmakers: buy my graphics and your movie could be the next Star Wars. Except people don't want Doom, they want Half-Life and the man just can't provide it. /jeep/ ...puts away his snotty film critic hat for a few more years.[/quote]