Tag: Star Wars

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Alec Guinness and The Long Glass Corridor

Alec Guinness

I stood there, shaking, as Sir Alec Guinness moved down the long glass corridor fronting the house he built, slowly moving his bulk across two old legs and equally old cane, my lungs emptying outside as he neared the door inside. Every step forward doubled my heartbeat, legs as jelly in an earthquake. Hundreds – thousands – of Star Wars viewings simultaneously slammed into the part of my brain that is in exclusive control of my ability to scream. Mouth, dry, denying that request the best it could. Don’t call him Obi-Wan was my silently repeated mantra, on loop for the past few days. Finally, the door clunked, and swung open.

“Hello”, he said. The sky fell into my chest.

“Hello. These are for your wife”, said seventeen-year-old me. The flowers I held out vibrated in the still country air.

Now, this is where that part of my memory stops – or, at least, the searing is not as deep – but I’m sure the words he used were as kind and generous as each of his words he spoke to me over the next couple of years, all voiced in his deep velvet voice regardless of whether they were spoken or written. I know that I followed him in, walking slightly behind as we moved back into the house, his wife aglow on receiving my gift. He sat me down at his table and brought me tea.

“Now,” he said. “What do you want to know?”

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Awesome New ‘Star Wars: Rebels’ Posters are Awesome

Star Wars: Rebels

There are most likely millions of Star Wars fans out there that cannot wait for the shiny new films to begin next year but, for one, am actually more looking forward to this fall then the new _Star Wars: Rebels_ series begins. The series takes place between _The Revenge of the Sith_ and _A New Hope_ as the Empire expands and builds their power base, and moves away from clone troopers to recruited soldiers.

Animated Star Wars shows these days may be kids shows but they still explore parts of the story that I like to see and honestly, they’ve had much better storytelling and characterizations than anything since the original trilogy. Hopefully that changes next year but only time will tell.

Anyway, today we get six awesome new retro styled Empire recruiting posters for the new series. Check them out.

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J.J. Abrams Thinks John Williams Will Be Back for More Star Wars

JJ Abrams

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[J.J. Abrams speaking at a press conference in Berlin](http://www.comicbookmovie.com/fansites/BatFreak/news/?a=78572):

> Michael Giacchino is an incredible composer, who I was lucky enough to begin working with on Alias. … He’s truly one of the most influential members of our crew, and I think this score, he really outdid himself. Again, for Star Wars, it’s very early days, but I believe that, going forward, John Williams will be doing that film, because he was there long before I was.

On the one hand this is pretty great news if only because John Williams is a great composer and he’s been scoring Star Wars since Star Wars started. It’s also great because the more things to differentiate J.J. Abrams _Star Wars_ from J.J. Abrams _Star Trek_ the better if you ask me.

On the other hand, Michael Giacchino is my favourite composer working today and I’d really. Like to see his take on it.

So I’m of two minds on the subject. What do you guys think?

(Source:[ComicBookMovie](http://www.comicbookmovie.com/fansites/BatFreak/news/?a=78572))

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Holy Shit: Disney Announces A New Star Wars EVERY YEAR Starting with Episode VII

Disney Star Wars

In case you were wondering if Disney was going to beat the horse until it died and then keep on beating it some more, here’s [Adam Chitwood writing for Collider](http://collider.com/star-wars-movies-every-year-2015-disney/):

> Get ready for a whole lot of Star Wars, folks. Disney took the stage today for its presentation at CinemaCon—a convention for theater owners—in Las Vegas, and the studio made the bold announcement that it is planning on releasing a new Star Wars film into theaters every summer starting with 2015’s Star Wars: Episode VII. The studio will alternate every other year with an “Episode” film and a standalone film, and based on previous rumors there certainly won’t be a lack of characters for them to mine.

It’s strange, Disney has Marvel pumping out 2 movies a year now and I am not really worried about the quality of them. Disney says they’re going tp pump out a new Star Wars film every year and I get all worried.

This is likely because I can’t seem to forget how bad the new trilogy of movies was, or remember that a lot of the rest of new Star Wars stuff (eg: The Clone Wars series) has been pretty good.

No matter how it turns out though, this is officially a thing that is happening. Any thoughts guys?

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Dear Hollywood, Please Stop Making Origin Story Prequels, Love Matthew

Escape from New York

Dear Hollywood,

It’s Matthew here. I know that you don’t know me very well, but I felt compelled to reach out. You see, I just heard that [Joel Silver and Studio Canal are trying to do an origin story for Snake Plisken](http://www.deadline.com/2013/03/joel-silver-studio-canal-to-reboot-john-carpenters-escape-from-new-york/) and I want to ask you to not let this happen.

It’s been a tough time these last few years. From the outside it certainly seems like everyone down there is having trouble coming up with exciting new ideas. There have been more films based on existing material every year for the past several. That’s sequels, remakes and reboots, and the dreaded origin story.

No, for the record, I don’t think this is inherently a bad thing. There are lots of reasons why it’s a good thing. Writers and audiences like to revisit characters or stories. Studios like properties they can bet big on. Stories may have more chapters that can be told. Stories can be updated to reflect more current sensibilities. The list goes on.

However, _origin story prequels almost always suck_. Why you ask? I’ll tell you.

Take Snake Plisken. He’s a fucking badass and that’s all I need to know. He has an eye patch. You know what I don’t really need to know? How he ended up with said eyepatch. Furthermore, when you do a prequel and show me exactly how he ended up with that eyepatch? It’s either going to be not as cool as what I might have imagined, not be shocking because we knew it was coming, or you’ll try to make it _so cool_ that it’ll end up being annoying.

You know what would be cool? Just do another Snake Plisken movie in the series and in the course of that movie have someone ask him how he lost his eye. Or have him face a new bad guy and when Snake meets him and someone asks “wait, do you know him?” Snake can say _”he owes me an eye”_. That’s a movie I’d watch, even if you recast Snake.

The point is that there is some value to the mystery of it all. I don’t need to know that Snake lost his eye by using it to stop an arrow that was aimed at an orphan baby or see him fight the wars that made him lose his faith in pretty much everything. He’s already a fully formed character with a boat load of flaws so work on developing that, don’t just show us where all those flaws came from. That’s boring compared to the idea of him growing out of some of those flaws.

So if Joel Silver wants to make a new trilogy of Snake Plisken films? I say go right ahead. Just don’t make them prequels. I’m sure they’ll make money, but there is already so much to explore in that world. Have him go back to New York. Have him fight the oppressive government. Hell, you could even just rip off _Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome_ and have him fighting some bad guy in a post apocalyptic wasteland town (he destroyed the world’s technology, remember?) and post apocalyptic movies are big business these days! I’d watch that!

Take _Star Wars_ as an example, George Lucas made a trilogy of prequels and you know what? They are middling at best because we already know everything we needed to know about those characters. Seeing how Annakin Skywalker became Darth Vader didn’t make him more evil and it didn’t really do a very good job of making him more sympathetic, it just made him seem like an unwitting pawn. A _pawn_. And you don’t want to make Snake Plisken into a pawn.

To be fair, it is true you could end up with a great film. _X-Men: First Class_ is one of the best films in the X-Men franchise and it is an origin story prequel. However you’re more likely to end up with something like _X-Men Origins: Wolverine_, _Prometheus_, or _The Phantom Menace_.

Your new movie might be pretty to look at but at the end of the day you’ll have spent so much time trying to shoehorn in references to what’s already been established that the story will suffer and the film will be OK at best. Worse yet, you might end up with something like _Battlestar Galactica: The Plan_, which was utterly pointless.

And if you insist on doing a prequel please do something for me: just don’t do an outright origin story, just tell a new story with the same character. It worked for Indiana Jones after all.

So that’s me Hollywood, asking you to take a step back and have a think about what you’ve been doing lately. I love you and I want you to succeed and make a brilliant movie and that requires having a new thought about the character not just making a story that fits all the history that we already know.

Love,

Matthew