The Lounge: Official Spamzone Community Thread

It had an okay premise but poor execution, and particularly poor acting. I don't know if he was directed to give one of the most stale performances I've ever seen, but because he did it seems much worse than it probably was written to be. Him desperately searching for a way for to save her from dying, and then being part of the reason she did is a good idea. Not handled well at all.
I could never reconcile him seemingly aging 10 years in the time she aged like 1 between episodes 1 and 2. I don't know if either of the actors are supposed to be playing an older of younger Anakin, but it absolutely does not work.

 

From what I' ve read in a Lucasfilm magazine way back when, Lucas often digitally blended several performances into one. Like "use that shot until 0:10, that shot until 0:13 and that one till the cut". He didn' t do this just for Anakin, they mentioned doing it for Padme too.

I didn' t think Anakin' s acting was that bad considering the dialogues it was meant to illustrate. I wouldn' t be surprised to hear Lucas asked him to stick to the happy/neutral/pouty dynamic we ended up with. I mean come on, let' s face it, Natalie Portman acted better than him but it' s still the poorest performance I' ve ever seen her deliver. Hands down.

Am I the only one who thought Anakin' s acting improved drastically in Revenge of the Sith ?

 

Yeah, I've seen her do good stuff but in Star Wars she's awful, so I'm inclined to believe that they were directed that way.
Episode 3 is literally better in every way than the previous 2.

 

admitting with extreme shame and guilt that I love attack of the clones and watch it a lot

 

Yo the part where the Clones come into that arena and EVERYTHING WITH OBI-WAN.

2 good.

But jeez skip the "sand" monologue.

 

Eh I have no problem with the action scenes and what it ended up leading to overall, but it honestly took me until I was eleven before I managed to watch the whole movie. Why? I always fell asleep around the time Anakin and Padme arrived on the gondola to that "hideout".

 

i know i've said this before, but that's the one that I like the least.
and that's not coming from a place of "well the prequels are garbage anyway" because I still like them. Being my age and growing up with them I think it's hard not to, but 2 was always the one that I didn't care for watching. It has it's fun moments, certainly, but the bulk of it feels very dull. everything before they're captured in the geonosian arena is pretty boring to me.

 

The Anakin/Padme scenes on Coruscant and Naboo are probably some of the most stiff and awkward "romance" scenes ever committed to film history, to the point where I'm horrified to remember that Natalie Portman and Hayden Christensen dated irl given that the two have absolutely no chemistry. They have like... opposite chemistry somehow, like they're two forces that repel each other. Natalie Portman is obviously the better actress of the two (though both I think were suffering from poor direction and just everything that's wrong about Lucas as a filmmaker) and I found her side of the romance much more sympathetic, while Anakin just seemed... really, really creepy. There's literally a scene where Padme asks Anakin to stop looking at her because it makes her uncomfortable, and that pretty much epitomizes my feelings about the couple. Up to a point.

The arena scene on Geonosis is awesome, and not just the action parts where the Anakin and Padme are reunited with Obi-Wan. I love the Anakin/Padme scene as they're rolled out to their deaths. To me it captures the nuances of the couple I'd have liked to see throughout the movie -- two young people who are trying to be brave and do their duty to the galaxy (Anakin as a Jedi and Padme as a politician) but who can't so easily reject their selfish, human desires.

The thing about Lucas is that he is really, really caught up in himself and his own visions, and that can be a really great quality to have. If you watch Empire of Dreams they make a very big point of emphasizing the gap that existed between Lucas and everyone else -- the actors, the crew, the studio, everyone. And while it caused a great deal of strife and occasionally impeded progress, it tempered Lucas's really... unique style. These people weren't afraid to have fun with Lucas's work and contribute to it and tell him when he was off-base. I mean, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamil were constantly joking around on set and didn't really take things seriously, especially in A New Hope, before they knew how big Star Wars would be, and while it might have been unprofessional and rubbed some people the wrong way, it contributed to their performances in a way. We weren't forced to take things super seriously all the time, just sit back and have fun and enjoy the ride. But if you read about people who have worked with Lucas from the prequels onwards, they're forced into this weird like... sycophantic, do-whatever-he-says role. He might as well just be making the movies alone. And to an extent he's earned that, but that's how the prequels went so wrong.

Probably the most enjoyable and believable performance in the prequels was Ewan McGregor and you can tell he really didn't take things super seriously either. He had a life to it that the others lacked. I'm not totally familiar with him as an actor but he was definitely more experienced than Natalie Portman or Hayden Christensen at the time so I think he was more willing to break away from Lucas's direction, whereas the others probably stuck quite closely to it, to their detriment. Lucas doesn't direct actors well at all, in Empire of Dreams Carrie Fisher complains about how they'd do a whole take and he'd just say "do it again but better." That's obviously not at all helpful to an actor -- you need to hear things like "add more feeling" or "you're over-acting" or "you're coming off kinda like a serial killer choosing his next victim." And so they'd sometimes redo it but other times the crew would just tell him to move along because they had deadlines or the take was fine. He's just not a people person and thus I don't think really knows how to direct them. The movies feel so hollow because there's really very little human touch to them.

 

It feels weird to say this after I just dissed such a scene, but I think the fact that Anakin comes off as creepy is the point. He loves her so much, he becomes obsessive with protecting her, rather than keeping to his Jedi duty. Anakin believes his life worthless without Padme, and he goes off the deep end because of it. Power to save her becomes the priority, ignoring the effects it has on himself.

This scene in particular is perhaps the best at simply illustrating what I'm trying to get across:

Also, I like pretty much every scene that has both Anakin and Obi-Wan together, in both good times and bad.

(I have to admit that Doug Walker's video about what the Prequels do well is what really helped me appreciate Anakin Skywalker as a perfectly imperfect character. You guys should give it a view too.)

Now I feel like watching some fan-cuts of the Prequels. They have a lot of good hidden under the tons of crap.

 

Not watching videos right now because 1am and I'm vaguely sure I've seen them before lol but I do think you're right to an extent, Anakin is meant to be kinda creepy and uncomfortable -- the dialogue wouldn't exist if he wasn't, but there's something about the way Hayden Christensen plays it that just crosses a line to me. Like I get and agree with what you're saying but when it's as weird and creepy as it was in the movies I don't get at all why Padme goes for him. Revenge of the Sith is a different story because at that point they're already married and together, and thus she's realizing all these bad signs about him but still trying to defend him and ignore them because she loves him, but in Attack of the Clones it's a bit of a "why do you keep this guy around" type deal. I guess you could argue that Padme has loved Anakin since they first met, as Anakin did, but I don't personally see that.

It's also that Anakin's creepy over-devotion to Padme is never really... acknowledged or called out? She objects to their relationship on the basis of their jobs and **** but there's never really a realization that he's basically been carrying a torch for this girl for like ten years while he's like... nbd to him, just a childhood friend. It's something I think Lucas hoped to communicate but never really got across -- there's suggestions all around, like in the field scene, how she says that she's messed around with other guys while Padme has been Anakin's one and only forever.

I agree though, the prequels have good bits and I think the overall plot and themes are solid, especially the relationship Anakin has to power. And I think the overall idea that Anakin becomes Darth Vader not because he's evil to the core or because he wants to control this enormous Empire with Palpatine, but because he's trying to save his wife is... actually really sweet and a pretty cool inversion of what we expect. Like we see him being pouty and complaining that the Jedi are holding him back all through the prequels that I'm glad it's not something simple like "Palpatine was like yo dude you want to be the biggest baddie in the galaxy and Anakin said yes because Anakin is super unstable and power hungry." Anakin falls and becomes a monster out of love, which is something that's incredibly human and so central to Star Wars, and that comes full-circle with the end of Return of the Jedi.

 

Happy dance!

 

The exception being Spielberg, he did listen to him. That' s why the rest of the crew used him as a relay every time they wanted to plead for something. I' m glad he helped on Revenge of the Sith because Lucas' direction is super rigid. That shot at the beginning with the huge ship crashing on Coruscant, sliding up to the camera and stopping right in front of it for us to see the cockpit ? That has Spielberg written all over. Lucas wouldn' t have thought of that in a million years.

He might also be the only who knew exactly what he was signing for since his uncle (Denis Lawson) had a role in the old trilogy (he played Wedge Antilles).

 

"Okay children our test today is going to be all short answer questions." says my teacher as he hands me a sheet with a list of only vocabulary words on it. I stare at him in absolute confusion as I remark, "Um... these don't look short answer." he chuckles and looks me directly in the eyes as he says, "You're in honors, honors is defining vocabulary first, then you get the short answers."

I have not seen any of these words in a defined form before. Finding an appropriate sentence seems to be hard, because we have watched presentation after presentation of information that I cannot find an easy way to simplify. I write up as best as I can, but I soon find myself stuck.

The two words left are "capitalism" and "market economy"

and that's when I realized I forgot the difference between the two.

 

I'm suddenly very fascinated with John Stuart Mill

66 and sunny here today

 

Capitalism is a structure or culture based around growing one's own assets into infinity. Capitalism implies centralization of wealth and the ultimate goal of monopoly by individuals. Capitalism can be applied in nearly any market, including one with government mandates (by utilizing patents, regulations that only the big corps can fulfill, etc.).

Market economy has less of a greed based connotation. It covers an economy that operates on the laws of supply and demand rather than government mandates. It operates purely on voluntary exchanges and does not restrict these exchanges with regulation.

That's as I know them.

Am I close?

 

39 degrees and cloudy here currently.

https://weather.yahoo.com/united-states/washington/ellensburg-2398618/

 

@Amaury

Spoiler

This is the scene out of my backdoor.

Supposed to get 3 - 5 inches of snow by the time it's done.

 

I'm jealous of you, but also like you.

 

I like snow. I like it with the lights and the decorations. I loathe shoveling it.