Star Wars Episode 8 is only a month away! To prep for it, why not follow my elaborate and exhaustive Star Wars saga viewing plan?
1. Star Wars: Episode I – the Phantom Menace
Come for the podrace, stay for the final lightsaber fight. This was one of my favorite films growing up, and though the acting and screenplay are pretty rough, it’s probably the most beautifully detailed Star Wars film to date and the most Flash Gordon-esque of the series.
After Watching “Rogue One” multiple times last weekend I was surprised by the similarities between it and George Lucas’s “The Star Wars,” his original draft for what would eventually become “Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.” I just re-read “The Star Wars,” which you can find here, and I’ve broken down the similarities between it and “Rogue One” chronologically. Obviously there are plenty of spoilers ahead, so reader be warned!
What I loved about Star Wars as a kid was the vastness of it’s universe. I read the Thrawn trilogy and all of the encyclopedias, concept art and source books I could get my hands on when I was 13, and then proceeded to dive into the dizzying array of Star Wars comics, cartoons, toys and video games thereafter. It felt like such a big place to explore, and what I liked most was the weird stuff: the off kilter design elements on the edges of the frames in the movies, the weird characters and creatures from the cheapo 80’s cartoons and Ewok movies, and all the ditched concept art and strange pixelated video game characters and locations. To this day I still love to try to find new details in old Star Wars Playstation and N64 games, read old drafts of scripts and even books on the designs of such bizarre Star Wars detours as Shadows of the Empire and the much maligned Star wars Holiday Special.
And I thought I had mixed feelings about the first Hobbit film! I’ve seen Peter Jackson’s second installment of his Hobbit Trilogy, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, three times now and I still don’t know what to think about it. As in the first film, Jackson and his Weta wizards run amok with Tolkien’s beloved novel, cramming cartoony action scenes, bonkers sub plots and alternative character motivations in every nooks and cranny. The result is a film that’s both immensely enjoyable as cinematic entertainment and extremely insulting as an adaptation. I actually walked out of the theater the first time I saw it. It was late in the film, the characters had all strayed as far away from the plot as they possibly could and Thorin was shouting at Bilbo to “pull the lever!” Visions of a drug-addled Bela Lugosi babbling nonsense in an armchair filled my head and I fled, not after hurling a few childish insults at the screen.
It’s official. J. J. Abrams is helming Star Wars Episode VII, and I am officially relieved.
I immensely enjoyed and was immensely annoyed by Eoin Colfer’s new book, “And Another Thing,” his reverent yet irreverent love offering to Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy series. I’ve always respected Colfer as a writer. His ideas are fresh and his stories are lean and fast paced, never wasting time with heavy exposition or overly detailed descriptions. That’s why I was so surprised by the slow, almost dragging pace of this, his first book for adults. There were moments when I wanted to skip ahead a few pages–especially when he dragged out the long and often pointless Guide entries.
In Adam’s last Hitchhiker book, our heroes were left on an exploding Earth, clearly all very dead. “And Another Thing” finds them all mysteriously at the end of long and full lives, looking back with some confusion on the past. This mystery is soon, and brilliantly solved and the action catapults into . . . three very long and dull subplots that don’t seem to go anywhere. Adams often had random and very anti-climatic things happen in his stories, but at least the action didn’t let up. I think Colfer has confused Adam’s “anything can and will happen” approach to storytelling with an “anything can and will be explained in long and pointless exposition while the characters sit around and do nothing” one. Arthur Dent, for instance, spends the majority of the book sitting on a bed talking to a computer.
The characters are also a bit skewed. Though their voices are largely intact, they don’t always act the right way. Zaphod is dumb, but this time he’s too dumb, Arthur and Ford sit around and are not funny, Eddie the shipboard computer has been replaced by a very obnoxious and confusing “Left Brain,” Marvin is no where to be found and Colfer has dredged up a minor character and done so much modification to him, that he’s unrecognizable, and not half as fun. The best characters in this book are of Colfer’s own creations. Thor the Thunder-god is strangely coherent and meek, with a hammer that plays rock music while he fights, and the small group of refugee human retirees and their personal trainers is on par with the sanitary specialist from “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.”
I’ll admit, it felt good to be back in Adams’s universe, and I had forgotten how much I missed theses characters. There’s also some true comic genius at work here. There were four or five moments where I found myself laughing out loud. There are also sections so dull, so overwritten and expositional, that it feels as if this was still the writer’s first draft. If Colfer writes book 7, which I hope he will, he should definitely focus more on plotting and less on aping Douglas’s Guide narration, as good as he can be at it about half the time.
SLIGHT SPOILER: Those who were depressed by the nihilistic ending of “Mostly Harmless” are in for another bad surprise. Colfer really hasn’t fixed anything.
The sixth Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy book came out today. And I was there. And I had my towel.
Acclaimed children’s novelist Eoin Colfer is picking up where Adam’s left off in his series, with all the main characters dead. Adams, who admitted that he was depressed when he wrote the last book, reportedly intended to write a sixth book, bringing all of his beloved characters back. This is that book. Regrettably, Adams, who died in 2001 of a heart attack, is not the author.
I really like Colfer and I really want to like this book. But I already know it just won’t be the same. Adams had such amazingly witty and intelligent style. Colfer, who is a solid writer, just can’t compare. He’s even said that he thinks of this book as just a big work of fan fiction. Fingers crossed. I’ll post a review when I’m done reading.
I walked down a lonely dock in the misty sea air.
I climbed high in pine trees that grew from the ocean floor.
I rode in a boat towards a massive tree made of stone.
I watched in awe as a world I had come to love fell apart because of what I had done.
Cyan made magic. Rand and Robyn Miller created worlds so real they made me cry. I wanted to visit the lost city of D’ni and breath the air of ancient tragedy, to climb to the summit of Riven’s main island and watch the lake people work on the sun-baked rocks. I wanted to sit with Atrus in his cavern study, listening to him talk of the science of word bending and world building, to peer into his three cursed prison books and speak words of sad forgiveness to those too dangerous to release.
Myst is no more. The worlds have faded into antiquated computer programs and slowly dying sequels. The “3D” realm of Myst V held only a scent of that forgotten dream. Perhaps such beauty cannot be repeated. Perhaps the Myst games, like the ancient civilization of D’ni, will be covered by the dust of ages. But I still dream of the blue waters of Riven.
(But apparently some people think they share more in common with Dumbledore.)
Two of my favorite film directors, Guillermo Del Torro and Peter Jackson are working together to create a true-to-the-book film adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. I just found some fragments of an interview the two did for Empire Magazine. Take a look:
Jackson: We do cover some of the events earlier, like Thrain, Thorin’s father, and we’re sort of fleshing out the Hobbit and expanding it sideways, up and down. We just decided it would be a mistake to try to cram everything into one movie. The essential brief was to do The Hobbit and it allows us to make the Hobbit in a little more of the style, if you like, of the trilogy, too.
Del Toro: To make a movie of the Hobbit that didn’t go over three hours.
Jackson: You would be rushing along…
Del Toro: You would be losing iconic moments. The animated version avoids Beorn, who is a great character, and some people always feel that you should lose the Spiders (of Mirkwood), or this or that. We wanted to keep every iconic moment that was in the book and give it some weight.
Empire: How are you going to handle the dwarves, many of whom aren’t fleshed out in the book?
Del Toro: There is a very specific function that Gimli had in the trilogy. And technically and expressively, the dwarves in The Hobbit serve another. They have to become valiant, brave, sometimes funny – and yes, all of those were in Gimli, but there are moments in which the dwarves have to be tragic, or they have to be incredibly moving. Those dwarves, physically and dramatically, will work like three-dimensional characters that will as soon make you laugh as they will make you fear for their lives, or they will move you. Hopefully to tears, in some instances…
Jackson: We’re going to choose five or six, pretty similar to the ones that Tolkien spends a bit more time on in the book, and develop some quite interesting relationships between them and Bilbo. We don’t want them to be just Thorin plus 12 comedic sidekicks.
Jackson: What I think everybody has to get right in their minds is that we’re creating a Middle-earth that’s pretty much the same as the trilogy’s Middle-earth. Hobbiton is going to look like the same place. Hobbits are going to look the same. But it’s another guy going in with his own filmmaking style. That’s why I think this could be a better idea for him to direct these films than me. Let’s all see what somebody else does with Middle-earth. Let’s go in there with another director and another set of lenses and another cameraman, and see what they do with it. I think that’s exciting. He’s not pretending to be me. People have got to get that into their heads.
I’m glad they’re going for continuity but not compromiseing the book. Also, it’s good to hear that they’re going to focus on developing the dwarves, something that they had trouble with in the LOTR series with Gimli. Maybe they’ll use less prosthetics? After reading this I’m a lot more excited about this film than I was before!
The only diference is, if you’re stuck under a thousand-pound boulder or chasing a flying sofa across a vast prehistoric plain, and there’s no wi-fi, you can’t access any content.
I’ve been reading about “The Hobbit” film adaptation. Apparently, Tolkien’s son doesn’t want to see it made, and is pressing fraud charges against New Line Cinema. Guillermo Del Toro, the much touted director of the film, is making all sorts of ruckus in the media about which actors he will cast to play the parts and what crazy plans he has for creature effects. Meanwhile, fans everywhere bite their nails and worry that the film might not turn out right, or, worse, might never be made.
I’m a huge fan of Tolkien’s books and I loved Peter Jackson’s trilogy — with reservations of course. Regardless of how much liberty he took with Tolkien’s story, Jackson’s films were brilliant works of popular art that never reached too high or stooped to low. Together, these films were by far the most excellent entertainment in decades, but, to be honest, as much as I loved Jackson’s trilogy, I’m not that excited about “The Hobbit.” Del Toro has proven that he can make both brilliant works of cinematic art and jaw dropping failures. Pan’s Labyrinth is a great film. Hellboy 2? Not so much. I’ve got a feeling that “Hobbit” will be somewhere in the middle. What makes me sick is this mentality we filmgoers have developed. We seem to revolve our lives around the release of films like “The Hobbit” and in the process we limit the art of Cinema to a live-action landscape for our favorite books, comics, and video games to be played out in.
Because of this rabid fandom mentality, adaptations of popular books and comic characters are making the most money. Subsequently, these movies get the most hype, and overall, the most screen time per year. The escalation of these kinds of films is ruining the way in which we watch movies. No longer do we say: “Star Wars? What’s that about?” Instead it’s “I loved that as a kid! I wonder which villain they’ll use” In a sense, the franchise has ruined the joy of original cinema.
I like what the Inventor in Johnson’s “Rasselas” says: “Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome.” Sure, telling a brand new story, one with no tie-in to a kids books or a comic series might not make the most money, but it’s a start. Everyone thought George Lucas was crazy, but he created a timeless film that people still love today. Where are the new stories? Why do we keep having to rehash ideas that were used to make a quick buck on newsstands back in the 20s and 30s? The comic book and the novel are both great storytelling forms, but so is cinema. Let’s joyfully make and watch new cinematic stories and quit worrying about whether Sir Ian Mckellen will reprise his role, and who will play Bilbo Baggins.
I’m going to enjoy God’s gift of cinema and make my own movies, and quit worrying how Del Toro makes his.
It’s September 22, which means …
