Chen G.

Those sorts of people should be forced-fed Ralph Bakshi's Fritz the Cat:

To some extent, yes. I mean, he wrote Episode I with one of his early drafts of Star Wars on his desk, so there are parallels to the original and to Jedi, but they're more in the abstract - getting stranded on a desert planet, leading an offensive of primitives and blowing up a space station - and they're probably less important than the differences.

I'm considerably cooler towards the movie, but I do really, really appreciate that Lucas - in cahoots with the Hyucks and Spielberg, surely - clearly endeavoured to make a film as unlike Raiders of the Lost Ark as he could think of.

I also have a topical allergy towards reading biographical antecdotes of the artist's life into the work of art, and especially in the case of Lucas who clearly wants to project a certain image of himself, based on a kind of old-fashioned auteur theory where the artist inherently writes from his own life. But my understanding is Lucas discovered Marcia had had an affair circa January or February of 1982, although they had tried to get over it for some time after that, with Marcia suggesting counseling and Lucas refusing. Its therefore not stretch that it will have had some effect on the gestating story. My understanding is that the concepts Lucas hatched between July 1981 and January 1982 were for other possible films, not for what Temple of Doom ended up being: ideas like a chase on the chinese wall and discovering a "Lost World" (I've seen no convincing evidence that the "Monkey King" and haunted castle premises date from this time). So the idea of the human-sacrificing cult in India would have been hatched subsequently or at least closely to when Lucas learned of the affair. But I do think the idea of "well, it worked so well for Empire" was just if not more forefront in his mind. The biographical spin is probably more apt when we look at the second Ewok film.

Eh. All the Indy films are kind of aware of their own ridiculousness: not the degenerate Marvel sense, Lor forbid, but still. I like the more comedic touch of The Last Crusade the best. It does. I still have trouble disentangling how much of that is Lucas' personal life and how much of that is his, by then, belief that the second film should feel more intense than the first. The timeframe of Lucas' marriage coming undone and the earliest sketched ideas for Temple of Death (as it was initially called) is a little elusive, although for the moment I'm happy to defer to Brian Jay Jones' spectacular biography, which presented them as a one-two punch. Having said that, the fact that some conceptual elements like the "all that glitters is not gold" aspect of both Pankot Palace and Cloud City are mirrored between the two films, alongside comments made by both Lucas and Spielberg, suggest that the autobigraphical motive is certainly not the only factor at play there.

I'm sure I've said it before, but I never found Temple of Doom "darker' in the usual sense of the word. Its scarier, more violent but all within the realm, of as you say, "its happy-go-lucky comic book pace and structure" which is characteristic of the entire series. Hence its not dark in the sense that The Northman is dark or even in the sense that The Two Towers is dark. What it is, is its more macabre. And I'm fine with macabre, except that in the case of this particular film, I don't feel like its conducive to the film's goal, which is to have fun.

Interesting, but seems a little too strong as a piece of foreshadowing.

Yeah, but I know quite a few of the Kiwi crew have been replaced for season two following the move: Season two's credited prosthetic supervisor is not Weta (whether they're still doing some hand props is not ascertained, but my instinct would be no), Daniel Reeve (the guy who did all the caligraphy and maps in the films and in season one) had downscaled his involvement drastically, the costume designer Kate Hawley is off the payroll. It stands to reason for Plan 9 to be in the same situation, and since Bear said he's recording pieces that will be used during the filming - that is to say source music - it seems to clench the case. Heck, for all I can tell the reason Plan 9 were engaged in season one was because they needed music on the set, and Bear wasn't yet on the payroll at the time. I guess its good for Bear to consolidate the whole sweep of the music under his baton, and it might just help the show feel less Frankensteined with Jacksonisms, but Plan 9's contributions to Season One were a welcome addition to their Tolkien oeuvre. Alas...

Bear said he's doing the diegetic pieces this time around, hadn't he? Plus, it stands to reason, with the move out of New Zealand, that Plan 9 wouldn't be involved.

The budding Plan 9 fan in me laments that they're clearly not doing whatever source cues season two has to offer...

If that's the case - and it does sound vaguely like some of Jabba's music to my ears - it would be a classic Ahnung: you hear the theme in embryo before you notice that its there...

My memory is its alluded to twice in the film, but I could be corrected. But if we start thinking of "why did Williams drop this motif or that one" we'll go into such a tailspin... I mean, why did he drop the original motif associated with the Empire in the first film? I get he had the later march, but why not both? Why did he drop the gesture associated with the separatists in Episode III? Why are all the motives in The Last Jedi abandoned in The Rise of Skywalker? Why is there almost no carry-over from the prequel trilogy to the sequel trilogy? To some extent, the fact that there are little gestures that appear in one score each is what gives them individuality and "colour", for wont of a better word, and are very much germane to Williams' desire to construct each score (with the slight exception of Episode III) on new material. While I personally do feel its done to an extent that does hurt the musico-poetic throughline, it certainly doesn't nullify it by any stretch of the imagination.

Totally a marquee name!

Well, one of the characteristics of these leitmotivic scores is that, by the time you're a couple of entries in, the motives have accured a lot more associative meaning, and so the gestures become much more evocative and pregnant with meaning, and thus register more...

The opening chorus of Der Freischutz was stuck in my head since, last saturday night which was perhaps not the best timing, but worked out for the better.

I mean, in the opening portions of the film she's not terribly dislikable. She seems reasonably congenial. And then her hamartien (tragic flaws) start to surface, and ultimately become her undoing. Seems like textbook tragedy to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tár I didn't think it was "anti-woman". This is sad proof to me that we get so few tragedies in film today - stories where a character is brought down by their tragic flaw - that when people see a tragedy they don't know how to digest it.

Yeah. I seem to remember Doug Adams found it somewhat objectionable. This doesn't focus on the musicological lingo in the film but does focus on the dexterity of Blanchett's piano playing in the film:

Oh, I don't mean that it wasn't legit, so much as that had this "rapid-fire gobbledygook" feeling to it all. The Wagnerian in me would have liked more Wagner excerpts (I think there was a solo from Tannhauser at one point). Would have been nicely in keeping with a film somewhat about controversy and cancel culture...

Its a pretty nice film. Blanchett is excellent, and its always great to see Julian Glover in a movie! I also really, really like Nina Hoss in it! The musicological mumbo-jumbo that the film sometimes traffics in can be a little much, though.

This problem is hardly unique to the prequel trilogy, having also plagued Return of the Jedi a great deal: the cutting from the gloomy Emperor scenes to the Ewok crap could not be more peculiar if Marquand, Lucas and Kasdan tried. The lesson here is NOT that Return of the Jedi is somekind of prelude to the prequel trilogy but just that, as I always say, it doesn't do to lump these films together in trilogies: its best to look at them as individual entries, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. I'd definitely agree there is a neither-fish-nor-fowl quality to Episode One, tonally-speaking. Its weird to see a film whose overall style is that of a children's film, but which ends with the death of the protagonist. I don't think Episode two has that in quite the same way: that movie is just goofy from start to finish, even if not entirely by design. Episode III has some of this inconsistency, too, but definitely lands harder on the more gloomy side of things. Interesting you associate this more Machiavelian turn in the prequels with Star Trek. I tend to think it more in terms of Dune and, to a large extent, Lucas trying to one-up Coppola and his Godfather films: the structure of the prequel trilogy is suspiciously similar to the "prequel" parts of The Godfather: Part II, and all the Machiavelian atmosphere is very much in Coppola's wheelhouse.

I keep on going back-and-forth on that kind of stuff, both with regards to the occupation the Naboo are experiencing and the film's rather picture-postcard view of slavery. On the one hand, its cloying. On the other hand, it is a film for younger audiences, which is both in-line with the rest of the series (with the slight exception of Revenge of the Sith) AND really works for the film as "Episode One" (and would have worked better still were it a prelude), so that audiences can "grow up" with the films, at least in theory.

Well, Frank Herbert kind of took something of the tropes of Edgar Rice Burroughs (man comes to alien desert planet, befriend the local noble savages and leads them against a technologically-superior but tyrannical foe) and inverted them, and Cameron's films owe a lot of Burroughs.

My understanding is Lucas considered all sorts of motivations all throughout: early drafts of Episode I seem to set-up a romantice triangle with Obi Wan, which would no doubt drive Anakin to jealousy and treachery, an idea hinted to in Episode III ("Obi wan was here? What did he want?") but mercifully kept at bay. There's the Dark Side as an external force compelling the individual like a drug, an obsession with artificially preserving life ("I will even learn to stop people from dying"), thirst for power, possessivenss over Padme and so on. Lucas was still experimenting with a great many of those as far as some of the very last pickups of Episode III, but I do agree he gets away with it because the kind of clutter of the different motivations is very psychology compelling (even though I still think the actual turn is still that bit too abrupt). I actually think that, of what we are presented with in Episode III, by far the most compelling motivation for Anakin is not the "official" reason of safeguarding Padme but rather the very credible fatherly relationship he develops with Palpatine, a notion that was particularly late in coming to Lucas but which works very well.

Correct. The prequel trilogy is often given as the most planned of the trilogies, but your critique exposes the flaw in that outlook: in some (not all) ways it is, in fact, the most episodic. Another aspect is that the three films look almost nothing alike: Episode I having been shot on 35mm anamorphic, Episode II on 960p anamorphic, and Episode III on 1080p spherical. Baffling. Add to that dropped plot threads like Boba (in any other trilogy, you'd surely have an older Boba in Episode III, something Lucas pondered), the whole Sifo-Dyas mystery, and the rather housewife-y role that Padme is reduced to in Episode III. Its also clear that rather than have a clear hamartia for Anakin's fall in mind since Episode I, Lucas had multiple possible avenues open and didn't decide on one until he was editing Episode III, although he gets away with that much better.