And yet when Tarantino does it, it's high art.

The thing about B movies is, much of their charm is that they are entertaining, but many could become really good movies if only they could afford better writers, better actors, and better special effects. George Lucas can afford all that; his special effects are the best in the industry, and he certainly pulls in some great actors and actresses when he wants to. The problem remains the writing, and that's all on Lucas.

The first three "Star Wars" movies succeeded as they did because Lucas did enlist the help of other writers and directors. Even his actors were allowed to make some decisions of their own ("I know"). The last three movies were all George Lucas writing and directing, like a grown man playing with action figures.

As much as I hate Tarantino I'll admit that he still knows how to make his movies fun. His past films have been stupid as all hell, but they were fun to watch. Lucas on the other hand is a fun black hole. His films end up being stupid and devoid of fun.

Who thinks Tarantino's B movie wannabes are high art? No one that's sane. What they do have is clever writing and a healthy sense of the absurd. Which is the exact opposite of Lucas's oeuvre. Lucas can't write his way out of a paper bag, and his movies have the appearance of taking themselves seriously. The success he has managed is largely due to much more talented screenwriters and directors.

American Graffiti, The Empire Strikes Back, The Return of the Jedi, and the Indiana Jones movies have all had the benefit of co-writers and other directors. George Lucas's contribution seems to be a vague outline of a story, which other more talented writers mold into something good.

I admit, I can't explain Star Wars Episode IV. Dumb luck? Other non-credited writers? That sounds like a stupid conspiracy theory, but then again, this is the same guy who liked to say that he had the entire Star Wars story planned out in 1976, despite every indication to the contrary.

You must not have been old enough to be aware of Tarantino's movies in the 90s, because I can assure you many MANY people, public and critics, thought they weren't just art, but groundbreaking art that instantly revolutionized American cinema.

Not a joke.

I don't care what anyone says, I saw Indiana Jones 4 and it was ABSOLUTELY GREAT, EXCITING, THRILLING AND REWARDING



to exit the theater once it was over.

Oh and same goes double for both Kill Bills.

I'm pretty sure he went to the crossroads at midnight and the devil fixed his broken pen.

That pen wrote Star Wars: Episode IV. After that it pretty much just wrote the sentence "Let someone else write it" over and over and over again. I'm guessing he got sick of being ordered around by a pen.

"I admit, I can't explain Star Wars Episode IV. Dumb luck? Other non-credited writers?"

Yes on the latter. It's not a deeply hidden secret, though offhand I don't have a good link that talks about the writing of "Star Wars". But it was an iterative process, where Lucas would show a script to writer friends, they'd tell him what was wrong with it, he'd change those parts, and so on until he had a script that wasn't ass.

Luke's original last name was going to be "Starkiller", and I think it was Paramount that recommended they change it. "Skywalker" is a much better name for a young fella with big dreams.

I'm talking about Tarantino Kill Bill and after. Everything he's made in the 2000s has been pure gratuitous wank.

Pulp Fiction was groundbreaking and is the film that shaped the mid 90's, we were giving him sloppy blow jobs over it for a very good reason. It's just unfortunate Tarantino didn't become the grand master auteur we all thought he would be after Pulp Fiction. I've said it a billion times, Pulp Fiction is an example of the planets aligning and an artist blowing his load at the right moment, with the right people, when everyone is looking.

...speaking of, as mentioned, the original Star Wars was a lot of Lucas getting his ideas edited down by other people. The next two were practically Lucas having other people do his homework for him, while he wrote his name on the cover. He's a creative guy that does not know how to edit himself and his ideas down. You give him a ranch full of yes men and you wind up with the Star Wars prequels...sequels?...the ones with the fucking senate debates and trade embargoes.

On Tarantino: He deserves his blowjobs for what he's done, but like most directors and creatives in general, he has his own style. Tarantino's biggest problem is the fact that he uses genre film as a basis for his own, because while that's innovative in a field, it's stemming directly from an old field. Coupled along with people who become influenced by what he does bring to those genres, you've get one man who has only done 6 films in 20 years (I don't count vol.2 as another film, sorry), who's style has been emulated throughout, making him pretty much just another famous director. The same thing happened to Wes Anderson for me, but I guess that's apples to oranges.

On Lucas: While I echo the sentiment that they are glorified b-movies, I don't think there's much separation between the prequels and original trilogy in Star Wars. I mean I like Plinkett too, but the same problem that plagues Lucas' work, is the same for Tarantino. Star Wars was great for it's time, but it was one of the precursors to the rise of science fiction as a viable genre. Everything from Gattaca to Battle Beyond the Stars came after it, and how does something that inspired all of that (also that old), hold a candle to 30 years of progress? It's just not possible, unless you turn Star Wars into, not the Star Wars you saw when you were a kid (which is pretty much the entirety of the expanded universe stuff, which Lucas tried to adapt into the prequels i.e. the word "Sith" was never used in the OT). It sucks to see the commercialism of it all, but I don't care what anyone says, Han Solo is not that cool.

To Lucas' creative credit though, I thought Red Tails was pretty good.

In conclusion: Indiana Jones 4 was a terrible, terrible thing, and despite how Spielberg is trying to blame Lucas and Ford, if he was really concerned with his artistic integrity, I doubt he would be helming Jurassic Park 4.

Tarantino can be great if he keeps himself out of the picture and stays the fuck away from Eli Roth. Those two things are his Kryptonite most of the time.

Lucas is fat, right? And old, right? So, he'll die soon and we can forget about him.

Right?

candyheadrobot: I gotta disagree about old "Star Wars" vs. new. While I am not a huge SW nerd (my tastes run towards DS9), there are a couple things I have to say in defense of the original "Star Wars" (I still refuse to call it "A New Hope" because that's just dumb):

- The directing is very very tight; there's not a single wasted shot in the movie. ... Okay, one or two shots while X-Wing fighters are in a holding pattern over the Death Star, waiting for their turn to make a run. But that's about it; and those shots do serve a purpose, they just could have been tightened up a little, I think.

- The characters are believable. You can buy Luke as a kid chafing at his dull existence, then getting tossed in (almost) over his head. Harrison Ford sells it as a guy who's mostly in it for the money, but has a conscience that has this bad habit of rearing up unexpectedly. Hell, even the nervous shiny robot seems to be genuinely worried about his little robot buddy after he comes home damaged.

- The story is pretty straightforward, it isn't cluttered with needless adornments.

- The dialogue is sharp, or it's sharp enough anyway. They weren't going for Joss Whedon or Aaron Sorkin, but neither does it sound like a kid playing with action figures.

- Where there is humor, it tends to arise naturally from the situation, without coming across as pratfall-mongering.

I can't say any of that about the new movies. The new movies really are an exercise in special effects; they succeed on that level but are lacking in almost every other.

Here is a small point that I think is illustrative of something or other. In the original movie, when Luke is captured by sand people and Obi-Wan saves his ass, how does he do it? First by mimicking a wild animal to scare the sand people away, and then by running away before the sand people come back. Now, we find out soon enough that Obi-Wan is pretty handy in a fight, he could have certainly run in charging and beaten the sand people in a fight. But that's not how he chose to do it; instead he opted for wits and a low body count. Is there any chance that Lucas would have handled a comparable scene the same way in the new movies? I think we both know the answer: the one and only tactic Ewan MacGregor would have employed is physical force. The only question is whether he would have made rocks fly at the sand people before jumping around with a light saber.

The first 3 Indy movies have some of the greatest stunt sequenxes outside of Mad Max 2, the new film is blue screen shit strung along by an pathetically unfunny story trying really hard to be funny. Also, Indy has a son, a shitty idea in and of itself, but that son is Shia LaBeouf.

Tarantino is a good director with an original style, sometimes he makes movies I don't like (Kill Bill & Death Proof), that doesn't make him a hack.

Indy 4 is truly one of the worst films I have ever seen, and I am not a hardcore fan of the originals.

Or he could have lived like a kind off of the money from the franchise and made whatever small art movies he wanted with complete freedom because he's one of the very few people in the industry who who is actually in a position to do that.

He did! What, you didn't like the Star Wars Christmas Special?

I guess we're just lucky that Lucas didn't move into an amusement park shortly after his hair caught on fire.

It's definitely a Freudian Slip. Spielberg likely deep down wants people to think he invented the riding off into the sunset shot.

I'm pretty sure he meant invented in the sense of "came up with" or "thought up" or "suggested" that for the ending. Anyone who thinks he means he invented the riding off into the sunset shot is being an opportunistically pedantic weirdo.

i love the snarkiness, but yeah, pretty sure i still hate george lucas on this one. Keep trying! (on literally every post you make)

Drink a smarter brand of beer.

that made me laugh pretty hard

Thanks. That made me smile.

I read that too; I think the best that could be said is that things MIGHT have turned out well if the Nazis had found the Ark of the Covenant and opened it in downtown Berlin. But that's a little bit like saying we should have given the Nazis an atomic bomb because the dumb fuckers would have probably blown themselves up ... suppose they don't?

That said, "Raiders" is remarkable as about the only film where the hero fails at almost everything he does, and still you don't feel like he was a dud. Probably because he was up against an unstoppable combination of forces (evil Nazis, untrustworthy third-worlders, ancient artifacts, death pits, diarrhea) and the fact that he didn't get killed is victory enough.

Yes it really is fucking awful. I didn't go in expecting too much, and I came out baffled at how many bad decisions were made in this film. Spielberg says he didn't want to reinvent the wheel, that he just wanted to make "another indie movie", then why would he go ahead and shit on so many of the serie's staples?

WARNING: SPOILERS

Indy is a loveable scoundrel, with a new romantic interest in every film. NOT ANYMORE, now he is a dad (of Shia LaBeouf, of all people) and it turns out he's truly been in love with THAT ONE GIRL from the first film all of these years. Oh yeah, at the end of the film he gets married, in a church, with a bride wearing a white wedding dress.

Indiana Jones is one of those film series where you get to see the best action stunts in the industry. NOT ANYMORE, now it's green screen madness, with scenes where that are way over the top (nuclear explosions, a chase scene in the jungle swinging from vines a la Tarzan while being accompanied by an army of monkeys) and yet are still incredibly boring and bland.

Really, I could go on, but just watch this: http://poetv.com/video.php?vid=58811

and this: http://poetv.com/video.php?vid=102924

Spielberg is a predictable and conventional director, but he's actually good at what he does within that framework, so my only logical explanation is that he really didn't want Lucas to bust his balls about making another Indy film and so aimed at killing the franchise on purpose. Then again, they are apparently working on a fifth film...

Mind you, I am not even a hardcore Indy fan, I just had to get off my chest how much this film sucked and you just asked the right question at the right time.