I watched the official trailer and was completely bored. This doesn't bode well for the movie if the teaser isn't even compelling. I even googled it a few times to watch again because I thought I was watching another dashed-together sneak peak one. The trailer could be about any movie and weirdly doesn't seem to capitalize on the original stars and when they are shown, it is anti-climatic. Han Solo hard pitching the original movies still wearing his original vest and hair cut is just sad. They've made him look like a member of a tribute band of his own original band. Why not have him sporting a beard and a more dignified cape after all these years? It's like he's been put on ice again for all the little jabba the fanboys amusement.
It would be great if one of the new films could capture some of that old time magic. But it just all seems now too big to
not fail. I was wondering, though, if this was all in the cards from day one? That the regressive nature of the original three films that made them (most of them) so enchanting and intriguing has continued on its trajectory to complete infantilism? I mean, I always thought that the new films were aberrations that fucked up the original recipe, but I wonder if this is where it was all headed from the beginning. Consider...
What people sometimes forget about the first Star Wars was that when it hit theaters, in 1977, it was startling not just for its revolutionary special effects but also for its unabashed sense of fun. After 10 years of haunted, pessimistic, even nihilistic hits such as Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, The French Connection, The Godfather, Chinatown, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Network, and Taxi Driver—films in which more often than not the heroes, such as they were, ended up compromised, defeated, or dead—there was something radical about a movie where the good guys win an unambiguous, bell-ringing victory, and receive medals in the final scene to boot. As Time put it in a big 1977 feature about Lucas and Star Wars, “It was a weird idea to make a movie whose only purpose was to give pleasure.” According to the magazine, Lucas’s skeptical peers had urged him to make “a deep picture, one that had meaning, significance and recondite symbolism.” Ha-ha, those film snobs. But, ironically, as Lucas over the years grew to take his saga and perhaps himself more seriously—people have written book after book exploring his really pretty simple ideas about good and evil, mythology, archetypes, and blah blah blah—“recondite” is where he ended up; what was organic and maybe even intuitive in the first film was increasingly foregrounded, skeleton turned into exoskeleton.
http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/201 ... fair-cover“It was a weird idea to make a movie whose only purpose was to give pleasure.” It does seem weird in a sense, almost like a form of pornography or propaganda. And the depth of emotional engagement and pathos in the original ones are like Hamlet compared to the new ones. It seems delivering that simple pleasure has gotten increasingly more moronic and base through more complex effects and convoluted story lines that seems only to leave the human element out in the cold.
If I knew all mysteries and all knowledge, and have not charity, I am nothing. St. Paul
I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind. Eric Hoffer
What can I say--I'm low-brow with pretensions at medium-brow.
