the crimes of george lucas ('90s on)

Especially to Australians. "The Bogan! The Bogan!"

The Obi-Wan riding the giant lizard moment is what tipped me off.

Also, I love how he builds up all this evidence that Lucas basically wrote this shit in a weekend and didn't bother to even re-watch the original trilogy. It's really so haphazard the way he tries to connect everything. Anakin needlessly going back to save that one clone to prove he's a good guy. Obi-Wan constantly referring to these other fun and exciting offscreen adventures they have together where they save each others lives. Then how they put young Anakin in at the end of ROTJ and now Luke somehow knows how Anakin looked when he was 25 rather than the man he actually saw.

all those repeated clips of lucas at the ranch with all the sycophants clapping and smiling whenever he said anything were super creepy and really illuminating.

Also, yeah, lots of sitting on couches in those prequels.

i wonder who would win the super creepy sycophant ranch contest between george lucas and david lynch.

i dont think lynch lives on a ranch

the loser would be the salad

it's a compound of some type, according to the david foster wallace article. and there's livestock, too, but they are rotting on lynch's estate.

i have GONE OFF about this before, but what really drives me nuts is that the basic scenario laid out in the prequels is really interesting! but they are still horrible. it's like someone made three really horrible movies out a great novel about a despot's rise to power. except there's no such novel. it's the weirdest thing.

― goole, Wednesday, July 15, 2009 12:56 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark

^^ this fits with my sad dream of eps 1-3 as a political story about the rise of a terrible gov't. anakin as the tyro with a chip on his shoulder, equally hungry to make the old world perfect, and wipe the old world away

― goole, Tuesday, November 17, 2009 10:40 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark

goddammit those redletter vids just have me thinking about this bullshit all over again. fuckin lucas.

I still think the only horrible things in the prequels are Jar-Jar in Ep 1. Anakin/Padme doe-eyes in Ep 2 and Anakin's wholly unbelievable conversion to the Dark Side in Ep 3.

Somehow, even though these are all three massively important lynchpins to the movies in question, I still enjoy all of them and will watch them if stumble across them on cable.

Wasn't there a rumor at some point that N'Sync would be in one of these movies? I think that was when my Spidey sense started tingling.

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/%27N_Sync

i admire these reviews (dumb humor notwithstanding) because i think it is really, really hard to explain why something is bad while staying within its own terms.

^^^^
Agreed. And I don't think he's necessarily saying the originals are great films per se, just great within their own terms, which I think they are on the whole.

If you read the first Star Wars draft, it's dreadful, totally lacking in charm, structure, characters, emotion, plausibility. The second draft is not much better, or the third... and then somehow he nails it. So I don't think his skills have painfully eroded, I think he just got lucky once (and had enough momentum or enough of the rest of the story already crafted to carry the sequels).

Yeah--when i finally saw THX118 a few years ago, I was amazed at how someone could have done that (it wasn't flawless, but it was really interesting and mostly ace) and the first Star Wars could have deteriorated so dramatically.

agree with all of this. the first star wars flick is a magnificent movie, one of the best and most interesting/rewarding fantasy epics ever made, but it's really damn hard to articulate exactly why it's so great, especially in relation to the radically diminished returns offered by the return of the jedi and the prequels. (i mean, i could try, but this doesn't seem the place.)

the tragedy of lucas' fall isn't how far he wound up from what initially made him great, but the fact that he didn't move at all. the differences between what initially worked and eventually didn't are so subtle as to be all but inarticulable. but unmistakable for that. as ryan says, lucas always stayed true to his own terms, to the basic logic and aesthetics of the universe he'd created. but at the same time, he betrayed them totally, betrayed them perhaps even by his fealty.

the first one was made in the 70s. it feels like a 70s movie. the haircuts, the attitudes. the others weren't. QED

okay, thanks for simplifying it. yes. tracer otm. luke with windblown 70s hair above the adobe ruin of his (faux) parents' dream.

those Red Letter reviews are amazing. the whole walking,talking/ bad framing section in part 3 is way better at articulating what's wrong with the prequels than anything else i've ever seen or read. who is this guy? does he really speak like that?

of course not

a quick look at their website makes it seem like a group. plus if someone was to do all that themselves they would have to be fucking psychotic (not out the question obv)

the first one was made in the 70s. it feels like a 70s movie. the haircuts, the attitudes. the others weren't. QED

Technically, the second one was made in the 70s too, its filming was finished in September 1979.

2nd is still pretty goddam AOK, fwiw

those Red Letter reviews are amazing. the whole walking,talking/ bad framing section in part 3 is way better at articulating what's wrong with the prequels than anything else i've ever seen or read.

otm. i'd love to see more long-form movie reviews like this---it's very rare in a written review to get the kind of close-reading of craft that the red letter guys got into. can't really imagine many other films that would warrant this obsessive treatment, though.

i told a friend who wanted to learn how to write to watch it.

The Star Trek (2009) review is really good, too, since he/they actually liked the movie. And he explicitly compares it to both OT and PT Star Wars to demonstrate what it got right that the prequels got wrong. (ALthough when it come's to the prequels, I'm pretty firmly in Dan's camp, here.)

http://img821.imageshack.us/img821/2989/screenshot20110105at121.png
http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lcc3ui3iSD1qewv1lo1_500.jpg

i must watch the Star Trek review one. Star Tek 09 is an all-time classic example of taking something old and making it better, i was freaking blown away by it. Dr Who, Star Wars, Superman Returns, that recent good BBC Sherlock thing, all the endless horror remakes etc.. all of them are bloody rubbish in comparison.

Well I wouldn't get that carried away about it, but it was a great reboot. Superman Returns wasn't much cop, so I'll give you that one.

This Red Letter guy is brilliant, because as easy as it is to say these movies are bad, he may be the only person I've encountered to peg just why these movies suck, and not just that they
suck. And yeah, the Star Trek 09 review is pretty vital, too, because it's a movie he likes but isn't beyond dissecting as a perfectly assembled product, which again goes back to his problem with the prequels - namely that they're poorly assembled products. Star Trek turns out to be a great point of comparison (just like Citizen Kane in the Sith review, which he concedes is unfair but still smartly knows how to employ as a useful reference).

tbh I really can't imagine watching these reviews based on the descriptions here

u should deffo skip these vids if you hate funny things

I must admit, they do provide satisfying closure to the whole ordeal.

they are hilarious and insightful and surprisingly dont seem too long but they are still reviews of a movie.

how can they not seem too long when they are JUST AS LONG AS THE MOVIE BEING REVIEWED

because they're way more interesting than the actual movie (which is a piece of shit btw)?

^^^^^^^

like dude i've seen other movies as long as ep3 that didn't seem too long because you know they were ~actually good~

ultimately, and keep in mind I spend large chunks of my work day posting here, I think my time is too precious to spend on multiple hours of someone dissecting movies I find enjoyable and inconsequential

I don't really have that many NERDS! moments but it seems like they're all triggered by ILX these days

haha dude my NERDS! moments are exclusively thanks to ilx

i find these reviews legitimately entertaining and dont seem too long because they're smart! (minus the serial killer sub-plot...)

i think the cross-cutting between Yoda's monologue on the force and the systematic contradictions of it in the prequels is sort of a high water mark for the whole series of reviews.

What makes these so great is not just that they're entertaining but that they're perceptive. You may think you know why you don't like these movies, but man, this guy offers a very educational breakdown that details stuff you may not have even noticed. Like, not mistakes or continuity issues, but good ol' film school 101 stuff that, tbh, will likely now affect not just how I watch certain films but how I critique them. Blocking, framing, writing, editing, the whole deal. And then chase it down with the Star Trek '09 review to get an idea how two very similar Hollywood productions can diverge so wildly when it comes to results.

the reviews dpn't ever even mention utility data, it's tragic

I dunno -- there's another series of nerd reviews by some anonymous kid that seems about as insightful, but the fact that the kid doesn't go to the effort of peppering it with serial killer jokes is what makes it fall flat.

also the kid sounds like the schaudenfreude kid from king of the hill + comic book guy.

I think the editing is the secret star of these videos. They do a good job of keeping your visual interest for TWO HOURS. Hard to do.

iirc the ep 1 one is broken into ten minute chunks and the first one ends with the interviews with people describing characters from the original trilogy, then the new ones. It's a great moment and probably a good place to start if you're wary of devoting precious unrecoverable hours of your life to such a seemingly pointless and nerdy enterprise.

I kind of wish the guy would do this for global warming deniers, because he does way more entertaining and effective lawyering than say, al gore

Michael Moore already does the mumbling "Then the President followed through on it... oh wait. Yeah... Nevermind" thing.