Chen G.

If one considers that sort of thing regressive. I think its fair to say most people don't.

I mean, strictly speaking, if you can tell from the way a movie is shot and put together who its director was, said director is an auteur: he had stamped the film with his unique style. That a style is unique doesn't mean its good, though...

I was almost on the Second Age show when we reported this: if I was I'd have made my distaste for this known.

It’s more of a whiny piece: it’s Griffiths’ cry for tolerance towards his own racism. Now, I’m all for being tolerant towards the intolerant, but it’s one of those cases where it’s “boo-hoo, cry me a River, W Griffiths.” But the cinema of it is undeniable. A masterwork.

It is: it’s also a a pioneering piece of cinema, and a masterpiece, outdone only by Griffiths’ next film, the astounding Intolerance. Racist, too, are The Merchant of Venice, Oliver Twist and The Brothers Karamazov. One learns to live with it.

Did you watch the opera? Siegfried is nothing like Luke Skywalker. Siegfried is "ein dummes Kind" - a "stupid boy", rash, indignant and slightly murderous. Wagner doesn't write the kind of archetypal "hero's journey" schtick: He uses mythology as source material, but over that he writes complex, ambigious, fraught Goethian psychodramas that are totally allergic to the word "archetype", which makes any comparison between his music-dramas and Hollywood fairytale stories very ill-concieved. The only exception to this is Lohengrin (coincidentally, a far more popular - and more influential - work than The Ring) and even there, certainly the way Lohengrin ends (the most gloomy of Wagner's endings) is totally unlike anything in Star Wars. And really, why are we looking of all things at the Ring for influences, when Meistersinger, Lohengrin, Parsifal and certainly Tristan were much, much more influential works that we are far more likely to find traces of in Williams' ouvre? Williams hero themes have much more in common with the brassiness and overt "white hat" quality of the motives associated with Lohengrin and his dad Parsifal.

As I understand it, very little. All the more reason why Part Two needs to be a big moneymaker.

Its not so much the salary but the precentage. I mean, come on, you don't put Chalamet, Ferguson, Brolin, Skarsgard, Bautista, Rampling, Zendaya, Bardem and now Walken, Pugh and Seydoux without giving each of them a cut and that's all fine and well but it means the profit needs to be a big one.

When she walked into the room and he was fleeing? I mean, yeah you can make it all work. Just like you can explain why Owen in the original has no memory of C3PO who, in Episode II, lived with him. But you shouldn't have to explain things.

Watching the original film, you get the impression Luke had never seen a lightsaber in his life, nor had any concept of "The Force." Well, here he's being chased by a manaical woman with a saber who lates chokes him with the Force... But Star Wars was always like this! I know, I know two wrongs don't make a right. But still!

As was the case with The Rise of Skywalker, though, I really, strongly dislike the token-redemption they gave Reeva.

With so many star salaries, Part Two is going to have to make a helluva lot of money!

Nope, sorry. Not hearing it. I mean, I do. But I don't think that connection is meaningful.

An uneven episode - especially the obligatory "villain redeems theirselves" schtick - but other parts had surprising amounts of pathos to them. I liked it.

Yeah, George is not best with numbers or literature if he thought 250-300 pages is anything near the size of War and Peace...

Why of course! You see, how wrote a script and it turned to be a really giant script, about 350 pages, "it was like War and Peace!" and then he divided it into two halves. Then he... divided the second half into six parts and the first half into eight parts, the fifth of which he divded into three and so he took the third plus the two eighths and a sixth and did a square root and... I dunno, I'm not good with math.

This looks quite good, though: https://www.ign.com/articles/the-lord-of-the-rings-the-rings-of-power-orcs-exclusive?utm_source=twitter

I think Nick is talking more generally. I mean, Meteor Man, Hobbits that seem to have emerged right out a local Peter Pan play, a village that's magically turned into Mordor, etc...

Err....

Good continuity means contradictions don't rise in the first place... Obi-Wan is offers no more continuity headscratchers than any other film or TV entry into this franchise.

A quote from since after the movie was out: Lucas was reimagining much of the film’s backstory in the months following its release. In this particular context, there are two elements: that Vader dueled with Obi Wan before, and that Vader’s suit was a life-support after the battle left him crippled. The point in which the former idea emerged is in dispute, but the latter is very much a retcon. And, really, the main point is to show just how haphazard Star always was (and had remained) in terms of “continuity” and so to try and will Obi-Wan into not contradicting anything is a doomed enterprise.

And you two don’t care that the idea that Vader’s suit is a life-support is a retcon? The duel, that and only that is the real issue?! And, like I said, Kaminski does put some question into Hamil’s reliability there: just less than me.

Although he does put some question into Hamil’s recollections, Kaminski actually thinks the duel did come to Lucas mind, but only during shooting - not in the writing process. I question that: smells like Lucas retrofitting to me. He does, however, seriously question that the duel resulted in Vader scoring wounds that make him require the suit for life-support, which he claims only came into Lucas mind after the fact. It’s all in his book, but there’s also an essay here: http://fd.noneinc.com/secrethistoryofstarwarscom/secrethistoryofstarwars.com/visualdevelopmentofdarthvader.html

The only party I accuse of lying outright is George Lucas, and this is a point other authors have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt: the man is extremely duplicitous. The others I mostly attribute to faulty memory. You can call it what you will, but that’s how a historian works: he assessed the reliability of the sources as he understands it, and my assessment of those quotes of Hamil’s is that he let’s later pieces of information colour his memories of past events. When you hear Lucas talking about a duel in the past, it’s easy to project that unto your memories and say “oh sure, I remember him talking to me about a duel and stuff!” And this is not some point I’m making out of thin air: I’m mostly taking from Kaminski, who’s made these arguments (I think, very compellingly) before me.

You don’t need to be an idiot to misremember things, especially nearly 30 years after the fact. Memory is suspect.