I imagine that with the Republican National Convention starting tonight and the associated counterprotests already in progress, a load of fresh bile and new arguments will soon nudge aside the Swift Boat controversy that has dominated national discourse over the past few weeks. In fact, I’m probably at least a week past the sell-by date for this particular topic. Nevertheless I would like to voice a few thoughts before the Next Big Thing hits the airwaves.
I’m working on a fairly long post about recent developments in the presidential campaign, which should be up tonight or tomorrow, but I have a couple of other things I’d like to share in the meantime.
In retrospect, yesterday’s entry on the possibility of more Star Wars films got a little long and never came to as sharp a point as I hoped it would (much like the Star Wars prequels, actually), so my apologies if anyone was bored by my ramblings.
Perhaps it’s because I feel like I didn’t make much of a point that I’m still thinking about the subject this afternoon. Specifically, I’m wondering why it always seems so inevitable, so necessary, that any successful or much-loved story will give rise to sequels, prequels, and spin-offs. Why are we — by which I mean our society, producers and consumers alike — not content to just let things be? Why do we have to keep worrying at our favorite tales like an eight-year-old with a loose tooth? In short, why do we always want more of a story instead of simply being satisfied with a well-told ending?
My friend Cheno has relayed to me an interesting bit of gossip: it seems that employees of George Lucas’ special-effects house, Industrial Light and Magic, were recently asked to sign non-disclosure agreements that forbid them from speaking publicly about Star Wars episodes seven, eight and nine. What does that mean? Well, it could mean that The Great Flanneled One is planning to make more Star Wars movies following next spring’s Revenge of the Sith.
No doubt this possibility has a lot of Internet fanboy-types wetting their pants with glee, but I myself am having a far more subdued reaction. My first thought is that I’ll believe in the legendary “final trilogy” about the time I start seeing trailers for a fourth Indiana Jones film, another long-rumored fanboy wet dream. My second thought is that I hope these films never get made.
It was a real heartbreaker this week on The Amazing Race when Charla and Mirna, who have been among my favorites in this year’s competition (well, maybe not Mirna, but I liked Charla), became the sixth team to be eliminated after falling behind during a Roadblock challenge. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then obviously you haven’t been watching the show, and if you haven’t been watching the show then my question to you is, “Why the hell not?”
Another great Hollywood artist, composer Elmer Bernstein, has passed away at the age of 82. Bernstein probably isn’t too well known to folks my age. His themes aren’t as flashy as those of John Williams, and he was never attached to any big genre flicks like Jerry Goldsmith. Nevertheless, he contributed to a number of important classic films, including The Ten Commandments, The Magnificent Seven, and The Great Escape. He also wrote the jaunty incidental music for Ghostbusters, without which Bill Murray’s antics wouldn’t be nearly as funny…
It’s another one of those grab-bag days here at Simple Tricks when I’ve got a whole mess of items that I want to write about, including celebrity deaths, human achievement, human striving, and stuff that’s just plain cool. Some of these have been kicking around my brain pan for a couple of weeks now, so my apologies if this is old news to some folks.
As I mentioned in my review of Spider-Man 2, I like comic books. I’ve been reading them fairly consistently throughout my life, with the exception of a few years in my mid- to late teens when I thought I was too grown-up for such things. (Ironic, since the teen years seem to be the time of life when most comic fans are most heavily involved in the scene, but then I’ve always tended to be out of synch with whatever my peers are doing.)
My interest in the medium was rekindled while I was a student at the University of Utah. It happened almost by chance: I was passing through the Student Union one afternoon when I spotted another student setting up a table in the large open area between the video arcade and the food court. People were always selling items there of one sort or another, and sometimes those wares were actually kind of interesting, so I stopped to see what the guy had to offer. It turned out that he was a comics fan who’d decided to liquidate part of his collection. I wasn’t too interested — I figured comics were something I’d put behind me long ago — but one title caught my eye before I could walk away: Aliens vs. Predator.
I’m a few days late in writing about this, but nevertheless I must note the passing of a Hollywood icon, the actress Fay Wray, who died this past Sunday at the age of 96.
One of the more lamentable cinematic fads of the last few years has been the use of the “Shaky-Cam,” that unstabilized, handheld camera perspective that looks like what you could expect if you turned over your Super8 to a caffeine-buzzed four-year-old. When used sparingly, this technique can provide a sense of immediacy, a “you-are-there” feeling. The problem is that many modern (and presumably younger) filmmakers are too enamored of the device. Basically, they use it too much, even in situations when it simply isn’t necessary, no doubt because they think that having the picture jerk and weave like a punch-drunk boxer will give their project that all-important “edge” that appeals to the skateboard-and-Xbox crowd. Combine the shaky-cam with the curious reluctance of modern directors to shoot anything from a distance — I have a theory that everything is shot these days with the eventual DVD release in mind, so directors don’t want their actors to look too small on a television screen — as well as the hyperkinetic, post-MTV editing style that requires a jump-cut every two seconds, and you end up with quite a mess. You end up, in fact, with The Bourne Supremacy.