Posts Tagged ‘George Lucas’
Tuesday, May 28th, 2024
May 25, 1994
BEVERLY HILLS COP is one of those movies that was huge for me as a kid, but that I don’t really care much about anymore. Its significance to me was that it was my first theatrical R-rated movie and an important early chapter in my appreciation for the art of cursing. Also my brother bought sheet music for Harold Faltermeyer’s “Axel F Theme” and learned to play it on piano. That song is still a jam, but the movie is just one of those things I see parts of on cable and find some bits mildly amusing. I thought I remembered liking the very stupid, but more stylish sequel directed by Tony Scott when I watched it a long time ago, but reading my review again I don’t sound all that enthused.
For those reasons I was actually pretty optimistic about checking out BEVERLY HILLS COP III (which I definitely didn’t see in theaters, think I saw on video at some point, but maybe not because it didn’t seem very familiar). I figured since I don’t have much of an attachment to those other ones I would be more open to it than all the people who hated it at the time. And though I understand the modern rejection of director John Landis (COMING TO AMERICA) due to the fatal helicopter crash on the set of TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE, I happen to really love some of his movies, and think he’s a good director. Plus this is written by Steven E. de Souza (48 HRS., COMMANDO, THE RUNNING MAN, DIE HARD, RICOCHET). And the one thing I remembered was that there were scenes shot at Great America, a theme park my family used to go to when visiting grandparents in California. I thought that might be cool to see.
Um, yeah, this is pretty bad though. Starts out semi-interesting, gets very tedious. Oh well. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Al Green, Alan Young, Arthur Hiller, Bronson Pinchot, Eddie Murphy, George Lucas, Hector Elizondo, Helen Martin, John Landis, John Singleton, Judge Reinhold, Nile Rodgers, Ray Harryhausen, Sherman Brothers, Stephen McHattie, Steven E. de Souza, theme park, Theresa Randle, Timothy Carhart
Posted in Reviews | 29 Comments »
Thursday, July 6th, 2023
INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY is the final Indiana Jones picture, the only one not directed by Steven Spielberg (ALWAYS), and the only one not conceived by George Lucas (AMERICAN GRAFFITI). Personally I did not ask for such a thing. Even if the boys were still in charge (they chose to just be producers, with only Spielberg being hands-on) I’m one of the weirdos who enjoys visiting the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, so I had no need for another one to set things right. But Harrison Ford (EXPENDABLES 3) wanted one more for closure, and I’m glad he did. I think it’s a good movie, and a good ending.
The director is James Mangold (COP LAND, WALK THE LINE, 3:10 TO YUMA), who is also credited as writer alongside Jez Butterworth & John-Henry Butterworth (EDGE OF TOMORROW, GET ON UP) and David Koepp (I COME IN PEACE). Koepp wrote multiple drafts when Spielberg was gonna direct and the other guys drastically rewrote it for Mangold’s version. Mangold is, I can exclusively reveal, not Steven Spielberg; he’s a totally separate person. So by definition the many fine and spectacular action set pieces throughout this movie are not Steven Spielberg fine and spectacular. But I’d say Mangold is a stronger Spielberg substitute (or Sammy Fabelman, if you will) than any of the JURASSIC PARK or JAWS sequelizers, let alone the makers of any Indy-inspired adventure movies such as THE MUMMY. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alaa Safi, Alton Fitzgerald White, Antonio Banderas, Boyd Holbrook, David Koepp, Ethann Isidore, George Lucas, good part 5s, Harrison Ford, James Mangold, Jez Butterworth, John Rhys-Davies, John Williams, John-Henry Butterworth, Mads Mikkelsen, Nasser Memarzia, Nazis, old timey adventure, Olivier Richters, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Shaunette Renee Wilson, Steven Spielberg, Toby Jones
Posted in Reviews, Action | 67 Comments »
Thursday, May 25th, 2023
May 25, 1983
Nobody was surprised that the movie of the summer, and of the year, was RETURN OF THE JEDI. It was the thrilling final(ish) chapter to the biggest pop culture juggernaut in the world, it was the ultimate summer popcorn movie, the movie others had to get out of the way of, or ride the coattails of, and of course became by far the highest grossing movie of the year (trailed by TOOTSIE in second place).
It’s one of the two movies I remember seeing in a theater that summer. That was monumental because I’d seen the other two at the drive-in while very young, but this one I was able to see with slightly more awareness of what was going on, and I’d bet the crazy discussions we had of it later on the playground were a little closer to what actually happened in the movie. Not that I was all that savvy. I remember my family went to Burger King after the movie and got RETURN OF THE JEDI drinking glasses, which seemed like a coincidence. Hey, this is the movie we just saw! What are the chances?
That’s the sort of thing I intentionally avoided talking about when I reviewed RETURN OF THE JEDI nine years ago as part of my “Star Wars No Baggage Reviews” series. The rule was that I had to look at episodes 1-6 as they existed at that time, in the current George Lucas-approved cuts, as if there had never been any other way to look at that story. I couldn’t complain about any Special Edition alterations, or lean on childhood nostalgia, or disappointment about the prequels not being what we’d dreamed of. It was a fun exercise designed to jettison all the stuff people usually discussed about those movies, things I was sick of hearing or talking about, and I think it was a worthwhile experiment that turned out well.
For this revisit of RETURN OF THE JEDI in the context of the summer of ’83, though, I won’t give myself those constraints. I’ll try not to get hung up on any bullshit. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Carrie Fisher, George Lucas, Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Phil Tippett, Richard Marquand
Posted in Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 37 Comments »
Monday, June 22nd, 2020
June 21, 1985
Forty-six years after MGM’s beloved Technicolor musical THE WIZARD OF OZ, Walt Disney Pictures produced their own journey through the world of L. Frank Baum. Though titled and framed like a sequel, writer/director Walter Murch and co-writer Dennis Gill (WALK THE LINE) treated it more as a literary adaptation, basing it mostly on book #3, Ozma of Oz, combined with some characters from #2, The Marvelous Land of Oz. In an article by Alan Jones in the July, 1985 issue of Cinefantastique (my most quoted source in this review series, you may have noticed), executive producer Gary Kurtz (THE DARK CRYSTAL) says they “pondered at great length” whether to even use the iconic ruby slippers, since in the books they were silver.
Like its predecessor, the not-really-sequel is full of whimsical characters and underpinned with fairy tale menace, but in most other ways it’s wildly different. The colors are subdued rather than vivid, the settings are grounded rather than stagey, it stars 10-year-old newcomer Fairuza Balk as Dorothy rather than a teen like Judy Garland, and she doesn’t sing, because it’s not a musical. While WIZARD’s costumes, jokes and dance numbers come out of the vaudeville tradition, RETURN creates its world and characters with the rapidly evolving cinematic puppetry, animation and visual FX technology of the Lucas/Spielberg era. Murch told Cinefantastique, “At first I was worried about using state-of-the-art animatronics, but so many of the OZ personnel are graduates of The Muppets, STAR WARS, and THE DARK CRYSTAL that I realized it would be pointless to worry.”
The result is a classic entry in the unique-to-the-‘80s subgenre of dark, imaginative, FX-heavy fantasy for children, preceded by THE DARK CRYSTAL and THE NEVERENDING STORY and followed by LABYRINTH. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Brian Henson, Dennis Gill, Fairuza Balk, Gary Kurtz, George Lucas, Henry Selick, Jean Marsh, L. Frank Baum, Neal Scanlan, Nicol Williamson, Piper Laurie, Stephen Norrington, Summer of 1985, Walter Murch, Will Vinton
Posted in Family, Fantasy/Swords, Reviews | 24 Comments »
Tuesday, June 18th, 2019
When INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM came out two years after RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK it was off-putting to many, and its PG-rated monkey brain and human heart munching outraged enough parents to inspire the more hardcore PG-13 rating. So five more years passed before director Steven Spielberg and producer/story-provider George Lucas came up with the next one, INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE, for summer of ’89.
To pull it off they had to back away from everything new they’d tried in TEMPLE OF DOOM and walk right up to everything old we all loved in RAIDERS. So it’s less mean, less weird, less gross, and more directly built onto the template of RAIDERS. Not that it was a total rehash. Nazis are involved, but not necessarily in charge. Marion isn’t there, and the new love interest follows a very different arc. There’s less desert and more water. There’s a wacky old man sidekick played by Sean Connery (ENTRAPMENT). And a whole sequence from Indy’s childhood. But he steals an artifact and brings it to school and then finds out about a quest for another artifact and offers his expertise and travels to different countries and looks at ancient texts that lead him to a series of riddles that he solves while pursued by Nazis, murderers and betrayers and teamed with Brody and Sallah and ultimately when they find the thing it kills the bad guys in cool face-melting special effects sequences and etc. So it’s kind of the same thing. But they did a good job of hiding it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alison Doody, George Lucas, Harrison Ford, Jeffrey Boam, Menno Meyjes, old timey adventure, River Phoenix, Sean Connery, Steven Spielberg, Summer of '89, Vic Armstrong
Posted in Action, Reviews | 19 Comments »
Thursday, May 4th, 2017
Hey everybody. As you know, certain people enjoy lispy puns, and have turned “May the 4th” into the international day to celebrate Star Wars. Which seemed like a pretty good idea a few years ago when there wasn’t a new Star Wars movie coming out at all times.
You know I enjoy the Star Wars but in case some of you get sick of hearing about it today I thought it would be a good time to re-up one of my favorite series I’ve ever done, LUCAS MINUS STAR WARS. By going through 44 years of everything Lucas had his name on that was not Star Wars-related I think I really showed (or at least convinced myself) what a force (get it) he was in Hollywood even outside of his most beloved creation (Yaddle).
So here for your convenience are links to all Lucas reviews (including a few, like HOWARD THE DUCK, that I wrote before that series) in release order:
THX 1138
AMERICAN GRAFFITI
MORE AMERICAN GRAFFITI
KAGEMUSHA
BODY HEAT
RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK
TWICE UPON A TIME
INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM
MISHIMA: A LIFE IN FOUR CHAPTERS
LATINO
LABYRINTH
HOWARD THE DUCK
CAPTAIN EO
WILLOW
POWAQQATSI
TUCKER: THE MAN AND HIS DREAM
THE LAND BEFORE TIME
INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE
The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles
RADIOLAND MURDERS
INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL
RED TAILS
STRANGE MAGIC
And, ah hell, I guess I should include my Star Wars writings too. “STAR WARS NO BAGGAGE REVIEWS” was also a proud time in outlawvern.com history, so here they are plus my Ewok ones and the post-Lucas ones:
STAR WARS
THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
RETURN OF THE JEDI
THE EWOK ADVENTURE aka CARAVAN OF COURAGE
EWOKS: BATTLE FOR ENDOR
STAR WARS EPISODE I: THE PHANTOM MENACE
STAR WARS EPISODE II: ATTACK OF THE CLONES
STAR WARS EPISODE III: REVENGE OF THE SITH
DISNEY’S STAR WARS MINUS LUCAS: THE FORCE AWAKENS by Disney
ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS SUPPLEMENT
STAR WARS EPISODE VIII: THE LAST JEDI
SOLO: A STAR WARS JAM
STAR WARS EPISODE IX: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER
Tags: George Lucas, Star Wars
Posted in Blog Post (short for weblog) | 43 Comments »
Friday, February 19th, 2016
Thank you for indulging me these last few months as I went through all 44 years of George Lucas productions, from the one he made when he was 27 (THX 1138) to the one he made when he was 70 (STRANGE MAGIC). As you know, I’m interested in how Lucas created possibly the most beloved thing in pop culture history (the original Star Wars trilogy) and then became nerd culture’s biggest pariah when he came back to the series later in his career. The Star Wars phenomenon (both its dark side and light side) is so blindingly powerful that it eclipses everything else he’s ever been associated with. I thought it would be valuable to look at his filmography but with Star Wars removed from the equation.
Kind of. You may’ve noticed that I’m too fascinated by his idiosyncratic later work and much of the world’s fanatic hatred of it to leave it out entirely. I couldn’t help but find foreshadows and echoes of the prequels in most of his other movies. I tempted fate by bringing it up again and again, showing (as I was discovering it) that the prequels fit into a larger body of work and obsessions than just that one particular saga about the space conflicts. I want to thank all the commenters for not falling too much into another debate about prequels and special editions even though I kept leaving an opening for it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: George Lucas, Lucas Minus Star Wars
Posted in Blog Post (short for weblog) | 33 Comments »
Thursday, February 18th, 2016
The most-likely-last George Lucas production – released after selling Lucasfilm, but made mostly before – is also one of the most mysterious. When the trailer was released a few months before the movie, most of us had no idea that a George Lucas animated film had been in the works. There had been rumors reported about a fairy related project, but I don’t think I’d heard them. For once Lucas was able to avoid the pitfalls of anticipation and expectations.
Unfortunately, he did it for a pretty lousy film. I’d have to say this is my least favorite Lucasfilm.
Somewhat inspired by A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM, this is a story about fairies, elves, and I want to say goblins. Princess Marianne (Evan Rachel Wood, THE WRESTLER) calls off her big wedding when she sees her hunky fiancee Roland (Sam Palladio) messing around with some other ho, then she gives herself a makeover and acts tough and swings a sword around, because of empowerment. “Good Girl Gone Rad,” says a poster they made of her. Meanwhile the displeasingly designed Sunny the Elf (Elijah Kelley, who played Joker in RED TAILS) wanders into the spooky part of the forest to steal a monster called King Bog (Alan Cumming, EYES WIDE SHUT)’s magic love potion and use it on the other princess, Dawn (Meredith Anne Bull), which causes Bog to retaliate by kidnapping Dawn, and then everybody else goes to try to rescue her. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alan Cumming, Elijah Kelley, Evan Rachel Wood, Gary Rydstrom, George Lucas, jukebox musical, Lucas Minus Star Wars, Maya Rudolph, Super Dave Osborne
Posted in Cartoons and Shit, Family, Musical, Reviews | 17 Comments »
Wednesday, February 17th, 2016
A great historical epic could be made about the Tuskegee airmen, the all black squadron of American fighter pilots in WWII. That’s what George Lucas thought back in ’88 when he started developing RED TAILS. He put together a script that he compared to LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (or NED OF ARABIA to Young Indiana Jones), a three-parter about their training, then their heroic battles, and then coming home to a racist country and Jim Crow laws that don’t give a shit that they’re heroes.
Eventually he decided that was too much for one movie and, like with STAR WARS, chose the middle chapter to focus on. But he also decided that he didn’t want it to be serious grown up drama. He thought it could be a fun movie for black teenagers. It’s an approach he had trouble selling to director Anthony Hemingway (The Wire), but even more to critics, who rejected the movie wholesale, often with some shaming about the movie they thought it should’ve been. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Aaron McGruder, Andre Royo, Anthony Hemingway, Bryan Cranston, Cuba Gooding Jr., David Oyelowo, Elijah Kelley, George Lucas, John Ridley, Lucas Minus Star Wars, Method Man, Michael B. Jordan, Nate Parker, Ne-Yo, Terrence Howard, Tristan Wilds, WWII
Posted in Action, Reviews, War | 6 Comments »
Wednesday, February 10th, 2016
or OUTLAW VERN AND THE ENJOYMENT OF THE FORBIDDEN SEQUEL
“What exactly am I being accused of besides surviving a nuclear blast?”
INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL is the one movie in this Lucas Minus Star Wars survey that I actually reviewed on its original theatrical release, so you can see what I wrote about it at the time. I had already picked up on everybody hating it, but didn’t realize it would become one of those movies that is only ever brought up as an example of what is wrong with George Lucas, Hollywood, America, capitalism, technology, civilization, human life, etc. When people mention it they have to spit, like Indy when he mentions Victoriano Huerta in the movie. It is a universally agreed upon milestone in the degradation of our culture and past.
Well, almost universally. I really liked it at the time, as you can see. But it’s been a few years, and I honestly can’t remember the last time I encountered someone who thought it was any good. Watching it now, maybe I could finally be one of them. One of the beautiful people. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Cate Blanchett, David Koepp, George Lucas, Harrison Ford, Jeff Nathanson, John Hurt, Karen Allen, Lucas Minus Star Wars, Ray Winstone, Shia LaBeouf, Steven Spielberg
Posted in Action, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 170 Comments »
