I say we petition GL to have either Bill or Joss Whedon write the next Star Wars scripts.
I think you missed my point. No one but a Star Wars geek would obsess over any of the characters. However, the average, “Yeah, Star Wars was pretty cool when I saw it once in 1977, Luke kicked ass,” fan probably thinks, “Yeah, he was pretty cool.” In other words, another cool character from a sci-fi movie. It’s the Star Wars geeks who seem to need to obsess and bash him far beyond what is called for.
I guess I don’t know what screen presence is. It is difficult for me to disentangle from the character. All I know is, after having watched the movie, I found his character far more memorable, interesting, and moving than Ford’s.
Yeah, we really part ways here. I’m not putting Mark Hamil heads and shoulders above Hayden Christensen, but to suggest that Hayden Christensen really pulled off a convincing performance is way out in left field in my opinion. As for Carrie Fisher versus Natalie Portman, are you comparing first movie Fisher, or blasted out of her mind on coke Fisher? I’m not sure it matters, since both of them basically degraded in their performances from film to film, though I would rate Fisher as superior in first movie versus first movie, and in particular in Empire versus any of the movies Portman was in.
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I say we petition GL to have either Bill or Joss Whedon write the next Star Wars scripts.[/quote]
After what he did with Alien: Resurrection I would rather he didn’t.
I would have gone with the Grevious running fight from Clone Wars, but Maul was good fun.
Yes, I don’t care about him, or Qui-gon, but the fight itself was closer in my minds eye of jedi fighting than what we saw in IV-VI. Really the first saber fight we ever saw is kinda lame now. Yeah Yeah, they are two uber masters that don’t have to jump around and stuff…whatever.
In E III my favorite saber scene is the teenager ripping apart the clones trying to get to Sen. Organa.
I’ll chime in again and say that I still believe that it was a good script that was directed by someone who didn’t speak English well enough to understand it.
How so?
I do know that Jeunet had no English at the time… what I mean is, how would it have been better if he had?
I’m not trying to be a dick or anything, that’s just the first time I’ve seen someone blame the director for that movie’s failure.
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I’ll chime in again and say that I still believe that it was a good script that was directed by someone who didn’t speak English well enough to understand it.[/quote]
I recently went to an all-night Alien marathon and the last one really stands out as of significantly lower quality than the other three. I don’t think the direction adds much to it but it is not the worst part. The whole film just doesn’t come off as an Alien film and I think Whedon has to take a large part of the blame for that as the writer.
As a disclaimer, I have to point out that I am hardly a massive Buffy fan (I watch it when it is on) and I thought that Angel was terrible.
Here’s what I said in the Serenity thread:
I’ll argue that the script to 4 was really good, but Jeunet didn’t “get” it all. Joss’ style demands that you leave the goopy details offscreen. Instead they were displayed in all their nasty glory. So, when the characters make Whedon’s trademark snappy remarks they come off as callous and mean instead of clever and likable.
Imagine Buffy making a quip, but instead of being dusted we just saw the vampires screaming and desperately clutching at their viscera as it fell from their slashed stomachs. Not so much with the haha.
That’s a mistake they didn’t make in Aliens btw. A good deal of the nastiness is implied, or cut away from.
Ah, very interesting!
If I didn’t hate it so much I’d watch the film again with that in mind. I guess having a director who doesn’t speak the language that the movie is in is probably a bad bet.
Worked for Sergio Leone, though!
(Once Upon a Time in the West was filmed in America with mostly American actors, unlike his earlier Westerns, and IIRC he still could barely speak English at the time. He only started learning it for Duck You Sucker.)