Imitation is the sincerest of flattery

Title quoted after Rev. Caleb Charles Colton, in Lacon: or, Many things in few words, 1820.

May the 4th be with you!

Caturday

It's caturday month here on the corner, so expect more of this:


Maybe I should have kept this one for next years Star Wars day...

Luke 15:20

"And he arose and came to his father"

May the 4th be with you.


On a side note:
Ever since reading this comment on another blog-

"Well, I didn’t find anything specific on the bit about kissing scenes as sex in Star Wars, but did see that it was Lucas, not Kershner, that said it."

I can't help but wish for some brain bleach whenever I think of Leia kissing Luke.

"May the 4th be with you"

"And with you, my son."

Have a happy Star Wars day!

Have a few Star Wars flyers, too:

"In movies give somebody $150 million and fifty years to make a film and the odds are good they'll make a professional movie.
The real challenge is to do it for a minimum amount of money in a reasonable amount of time."

"When I look at films I can tell one that cost $30 million, but if you can make a film that looks as good but only cost $15 million, then you've accomplished something."

"I remember George Cukor saying to me once, 'You refer to yourselves as filmmakers. I don't like the word filmmaker. I'm a director. A filmmaker is like being a toymaker.'
I replied that a director sounds like someone who runs a business. I'd rather be a toymaker."

-George Lucas

All quotes are taken from interviews held by Alan Arnold during the making of The Empire strikes back.

Slave Leia

Return of the Jedi is another one of my ‘off the wall’ posters.
I was thirteen (not going on thirty) when it came out, and naturally I felt inexplicably drawn to Slave Leia. So the poster did make it on the ceiling directly above my bed. *smirk*

Now, as a teen you take the things as they come and don’t think too much about it, having grown older I do start to wonder: Isn’t it strange that the same moral apostle that felt the need to go back and change the encounter between Han Solo and Greedo to make Solo, well, less roguish, has no qualms to show his only female lead in the trilogy as a Sex-Slave?

Sure, one could bring up that she freed herself, yadda, yadda, female empowerment, yadda… but the fact would still remain that when we think of Slave Leia, female empowerment is the least thing on our mind. So showing rogues as rogues is morally unacceptable, but to show women as sex objects is?

Don’t get me wrong, I do not say that he should go back once again and mess up the movies even more, but I think he should check his moral compass.
In the end I'd say Carrie Fisher is a beautiful woman, and the scenery is innocent enough.

Still, the question remains:
What could have made him change one scene but not the other?

If the idea was that Han Solo shooting Greedo first in precipitated self-defence could lead impressionable kids to shoot others unprovoked, then it would be just as fair to say that the image of Leia as Sex-Slave can encourage the same impressionable kids to far more despicable crimes…

Star Trek

The trouble with prequels

I must admit that I have mixed feelings about this comic-con teaser poster for the upcoming new Star Trek generation.
On one side I like the play on sixties pop-art, on the other I’m sceptical about this new team which mars my enjoyment of the design.

Well now, to the title.
Sci-Fi in general and Sci-Fi movies in specific have always suffered from a major problem which no amount of FX can overcome, no matter how dedicated. No matter how well plotted your story and how carefully executed your movie is, in the end it will always be a visible product of its time.
This is not always as readily apparent in novels where the author has the advantage of playing things vague, so that a 60’s Spaceship will appear no different to the minds eye of the reader than a spaceships from the two-thousands for example, but even here the use of phrases or a better understanding of advanced physics will eventually give you away.


Kids in Space *giggle*



With movies and other visual arts we will always be able to roughly date them by a first glance simply because all Sci-Fi décor & clothing is invariably at the best of times a extrapolation of current culture and at worst a simple derivation. In Star Trek with its more realistic setting this is naturally more obvious than in, say, Star Wars which leans more towards fantasy, and still it applies there, too, nonetheless.

Now Star Trek has to fight a second problem, the fact that it started out as a small TV-Show of which some of the ‘technical advances’ used within must have looked already dated for its own time (due to typical budget reasons), and so one must simply wonder:

What happened in that Universe for humankind to drop so suddenly from the high-tech used in academy years to the comparative dark-age technic used later in the field?

Can I just say "butt-ugly"?

Star Wars has a galactic war, tyranny and following on its heel public upheaval it can blame. What was it for James T. Kirk and his crew?

Commemorating Star Wars day

May the 4th be with you!

Let’s rewind some thirty+ years.

A long time ago, in a far away cinema…
A younger George Lucas lured us into a trap, hooking us on a drug called Star Wars.
Relive before your minds eye the exciting adventures of times gone by, when men were still men, Princesses still had to be rescued from the hands of evil by fortune hunters with a mercenary head and a mercenary heart.

But let’s also commemorate the annual Star Wars day with a few question:

• Why did Leia “Slave to Jabba” Organa never award a Medal to Han “I can imagine a lot” Solo’s Co-Pilot “Walking Carpet” Chewbacca?
• How comes that Darth “I am your father” Vader didn’t know he had a daughter?
• And why didn’t he recognize same said daughter when he tortured her?
• Why didn’t Emperor “Call me Sidious, child” Palpatine recognize Leia for what she is, a Jedi off-spring? As adopted daughter to the Senator of Alderan she must have met him at least once?
• What do Space-Mollusks dwell on?

And with that I concede the stage to:
Sy Snootles and the Max Rebo Band