Poe Dameron

It's the general idea that restrictions and parameters are often a good thing. I think Speilberg's best movie is Duel. The one of two times he had to answer to people.

Don't think that Spielberg reached that level until after Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T.. He damned near ended his whole career on the set of Jaws and, even with the leeway he was given post-Jaws, still almost managed to get Close Encounters shut down. With 1941 an expensive disappointment he was far from able to do whatever he wanted.

Spielberg's often said that one of his goals in Raiders of the Lost Ark was to prove that he could bring a movie in on budget after gaining a reputation for completely blowing through budgets. It was bad enough that even with Jaws and Close Encounters on his resume and George Lucas standing next to him, none of the studios wanted to touch Raiders at first.

Pulp Fiction was a collaboration with Roger Avery, and Avery was behind some of the best parts of the movie, be it shooting Marvin in the face or the Butch, Macellus, Gimp stuff. Even though Avery never did much after Pulp, I think QT hasn't been the same since the two went their separate ways.

How is that a filter? That's more stuff tossed onto the crazy pile.

When it comes to QT I think he was better off when he was filtered, much like Lucas. Give him free reign and you feel like you're being preached to rather than entertained.

When has Tarantino ever been filtered? The guy's had a creative blank check since Pulp Fiction, and it's not like anyone was restraining him in that movie.

Saturday (Estimate): $34,414,000. Sunday (Estimate): $19,426,000. Weekend (Estimate): $88,300,000. Domestic total: $740,265,583.

Doesn't look like it topped $100 million for the weekend. New records set: Fastest to $700 million. Biggest 3rd weekend.

Any of those taken individually would probably earn a chuckle or an eyeroll at worst, but there was zero restraint shown in any aspect so as a result each item is awful.

I'd say there was restraint for the first hour of the movie or so. The first hour was somewhere about on the level of The Last Crusade's level of fan service and quick gags, and WELL below Temple of Doom's willingness to fly off the handle.

You take Indy and Mutt on an adventure together, no Marion, no crazy Oxley, and there's potential there. Mutt's certainly no worse a companion than Willie and Short Round. Marcus was offensively nerfed in The Last Crusade. And, as awesome as Sean Connery is, Henry Jones Sr. was pretty much there to be comedy and useless baggage for Indy outside the father/son plotline.

It really was the choices in the 2nd half of the movie that brought it down. That's where they went overboard on CGI and it went from being sprinkled into the movie to pretty much being the movie. That's where the gags went from silly to dumb. That's where Marion's involvement brought a halt on the could have been interesting developing relationship between Indy and Mutt and it becomes more about Indy and Marion with Mutt just sorta doing his thing. That's where the chase scene is a confusing, illogical, non-continuous mess. That's where they bring in John Hurt to play a crazy guy and drag him around for the whole second half of the movie.

You send Indy and Mutt together on an adventure where it's mostly the two of them learning from each other and coming to appreciate the other. Where Indy falters and Mutt has to take everything he's learned and save the day and... well you have The Last Crusade. But at least you have the part of The Last Crusade that actually works.

To answer your question about whether it worked well or not, I don't feel it did at all, it was unnecessary.

Unnecessary sure. But so was Chewbacca growling at the mouse droid in A New Hope. Not that far off from the same gag. Or the "Heil Hitler" monkey in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Didn't need to be there, pretty silly. But it worked.

It's in line with dozens of other silly Indy jokes that either worked or made you groan that have been a part of the series since the first movie and were expanded upon in the prequel/sequels.

The question, to me, is more of whether it worked or not. Not what some people said in interviews. The prairie dogs stuck to the rule of three, fulfilled their observer gag, and disappeared. The CGI wasn't obtrusive or fake looking either. It was a micro-story with a mildly amusing payoff that didn't detract from the movie.

If you want to go off on them for not keeping to their word on practical effects, by all means. That whole chase sequence was lousy with poor CGI when it should have been performed with practical effects and stunts or not at all (hello vine swinging Mutt and his army of well-coiffed monkeys).

Anyway, think that's as much time, thought, and effort as I feel like putting into this subject.

I'm just not sure I'm up for the fight of constantly trying to convince my family that it would be OK for her to want to be Darth Vader for Halloween or that a membership to the science museum is a perfectly good gift for her.

Here you go. Now everyone's happy:

I thought they were a harmless gag. A fairly well-executed gag at that. I could take them or leave them out of the movie.

Never got why the moles, of all the problems in the movie, were something people got stuck on.

I think that was a problem with Crystal Skull, too. Commies just don't do it.

I didn't mind that it was set in the 50s. Even if it's not the same as the 30s, it's got a similar flavor.

But when you start getting to the 60s, you're starting to get into the era that Lucas and Spielberg were trying to escape from in the first place when they put together all these period films that took place in the 30, 40s, and 50s for a more innocent era. The only light-hearted 60s movie I recall from either of them was Catch Me If You Can.

My biggest issue with Kingdom of the Crystal Skull wasn't the setup at all. Nuked fridge aside, I liked the opening sequence and could live with the early Mutt scenes. Playing in the new era had some charm. There's a lot of silliness there, but it's tolerable and still enjoyable as long as Harrison Ford's walking around with his hat. You send Indy and Mutt on a classic adventure together and you've got yourself a passable movie, if not a great one.

It's once the plot gets going in earnest that things fall apart. Pretty much everything after Marion shows up. The whole second half was a just terribly executed.

Anyone else bothered by the notion that if they go ahead with Ford again, it means they'd probably set the new film in the 60s?

Don't think an aging Indy meshes well with that decade.

There was no other way to see them. GWTW's adjusted will never be beaten.

For years I thought Star Wars might overtake Gone With the Wind in the extreme long run. It would only take another couple of re-releases on special anniversaries, but it was within range. But with Fox owning the distribution rights and likely in no mood to give Disney's franchise free publicity, it doesn't look like we'll ever get another wide re-release of it like they did with the Special Editions on the 20th Anniversary.

BTW, it might be somewhat forgotten, but Mark Hamill got some flack for looking different and getting Aunt Beru's haircut for Return of the Jedi. There's even been a longstanding myth that it was due to a car accident Hamill got into that took place before the original Star Wars was even released in theaters where he was allegedly disfigured and required facial reconstruction and all such nonsense. Complete with explaining that the Wampa scene was made to cover his any changes and that it somehow fell apart five years later for the filming of Return of the Jedi.

So it's not like Carrie Fisher would be the first Star Wars actor who has suffered through fans talking about their looks.

But last I checked, it wasn't in a space general's jerb to be visually stimulating.

In fairness, when you think General Madine, you think comb-over.

Not a good idea. Anybody worth their salt in humanoid husbandry knows you need to pair a larger female with a smaller male if you want any hope of an uncomplicated, natural birth.

No Wookie penis size jokes?

Or has the pants challenged Chewbacca we've known for 5 movies proven that it won't be an issue.

It's not showing up on Box Office Mojo's chart for some reason. But with its current total of $686,425,583, it should be at #23 between Fantasia and Jurassic World.

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm

Seriously, once logical fallacies are brought up outside of the Lyceum, the focus of the argument is lost. There's no point in arguing further because the whole thing is derailed.

Well, there was a reason I snuck it onto the end of a fairly thoughtful (if I may) post in a humorous way after about the 3rd or 4th time Driver mentioned it. I didn't want to derail the thread.

But someone. Not saying who. Wanted to make a big deal about it.

The Gone With the Wind and Star Wars adjusted totals are safe. However, it's moving up that list quickly too and already up to #23. The Force Awakens will break into the Adjusted Top 10.

Since E.T. in 1982, only Titanic has been able to crack the Top 10 adjusted. If Disney is clever with a re-release just before Episode VIII, The Force Awakens could conceivably pass The Sound of Music and go all the way up to #3 on that list.

I'll admit to being little bummed about that since it looks like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is going to be bumped out of the Adjusted Top 10. Which is a shame.

Oddly, Pratt was in line for a couple big roles around that time. He was turned down for the lead in Avatar and read for the role of Kirk in the Star Trek reboot. So the casting people always saw something in him.

For what it's worth, with the right script and approach, I might be able to accept Pratt as a young Kirk. Though the reboot's Kirk was doomed from the start from a poor concept that had no idea what Trek was about.

And really, as meh as Shia Laboof is, he wasn't really the problem with Mutt or that movie.

I rather liked Maz. Thought she was the only new "creature" that worked and was memorable outside of BB-8.

She vaguely reminds me of what Yoda was like in The Empire Strikes Back.

That's a new internet rule. Are we still allowed to use the logical fallacy referee?

Friday (estimate): $34,460,000. Domestic Total: $686,425,583.

The Force Awakens leapfrogs Titanic and Jurassic World and is now at #2 on the all-time domestic charts after only 14 days.

This estimate is in line with a 30.1% drop, which is almost exactly where it should for the estimated $104 million this weekend. This would put it about $4 million short of Avatar on Sunday. So we can expect expect The Force Awakens to claim the title of biggest movie ever on Monday.

Expect to start seeing those commercials next week.

You seem to think that I somehow don't understand what Lucas up to with the prequels, and you keep trying to explain it like I am missing something.

Not really my intention. For the most part, I'm letting you drive the discussion. In fact, if you want to go back, I don't believe I made anything other than technical arguments about continuity and addressed the idea that the Prequels weren't full of surprises until my most recent previous post where I responded to your assertion that the Prequels were mostly filler. Something I disagree with since I found the structure of the movies to generally be fine. That was the first time I made an actual positive case for the Prequels in this whole back and forth.

Look, I understand why some people have issues with the Prequels. But I also understand why there are a lot of people who like them, or liked them in the past until the bandwagon effect caught up with them. I can only go with what I thought of the movies which are filled with my own set of biases. I most certainly walked into The Force Awakens with a different attitude than most since I enjoyed the Prequels. And that film's less ambitious, safer approach was a bigger issue to me than it was to you. Heck, to many it was a feature. An attitude that I find disappointing and constraining in the same way that Lucas himself has expressed.

In the end it comes down to what I would look to for inspiration. The Prequels, as imperfect as they sometimes are, still give me plenty of fresh ideas that few films can match. That, I think, is the central appeal of Star Wars. Something new and exciting around the corner. Something to stretch beyond the conventional perfected Hollywood blockbuster.

We can revisit this in a few years and see how the Hollywood formula and playing it safe works out for the new trilogy. If I'm right, what was lost should be a lot more apparent by then.

It's funny, I can never use what I do as an argument point cause people assume I'm just being pompous. my expert opinion doesn't count because movies are subjectional.

While I appreciate your reluctance to use a self-declared argumentl from authority, you seem to be making up for it with a liberal use of an argumentum ad populum.

In the sense that there was more story to be mined. Pretty much everything we wanted to see came in the second half of ROTS. It was a trilogy of filler.

The story was told completely. And there was less filler than you think. When you break things down, most every scene in Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith build to the dark place where the trilogy ends. The Phantom Menace exists somewhat separate from the other two as its own story to show what came before and what was lost. The Republic and Jedi still in their prime. Brightly colored with a simple classic origin story. It's adds the least to the overall plot, but it is far from filler. Its has a definite purpose while the seeds of the downfall are laid.

I understand the Prequels aren't for everyone. And I also realize there are some big flaws that should have been fixed long before we saw them. But I also believe that I understand what Lucas was trying to achieve in creating them the way that he did, and I appreciate a lot of the ideas that he put into it. They're not like other movies. They're also more like the Original Trilogy than people realize. The Phantom Menace, for example, evokes A New Hope more than any other film in the series for me. More than The Force Awakens, which copied so many of its plot points and so desperately wanted to be A New Hope.

It's not like I didn't have my own expectations for the Prequels. I basically spent the entirety of my teenage years waiting for them to come out. But perhaps I was just in a better mindset to accept them as they were. To be cool with young Anakin as a legit direction to go and not fixate for a decade on Jar Jar stepping in poop like so many people have.

With all the talk about Rey being the Mary Sue, no one has brought up the fact that with each successive film Leia is going in the opposite direction. She was once the the standard-bearer of the film heroine. The godmother of Ripley, Sarah Connor, etc. But by the time we get to TFA, all she does is stand around being sad.

Leia's the boss. Think of her as the M of this trilogy.

The problem came from deciding to end on the birth of Luke and Leia. Had they been born in episode 2, or between 2 and 3, a lot more leeway could have been bought.

In what sense? The 20 year clock to the beginning of A New Hope starts as soon as the twins are born. I suppose that solves the problem of Leia remembering her mother (though in the end, that's technically not a continuity error, just something that's tough to believe).

But it brings the final meeting between Obi-Wan and Anakin (when Anakin was but the learner) even closer to the events of A New Hope.

I think people have a problem with it because of Ewan's age.

Ewan didn't look like he could pass for 37?