All fair, and like I said I’m not claiming objective truth here, just explaining why at a very basic level it gave me a negative reaction. Combined with the fact that I already knew all the plot from reading the books 20 yrs ago, and that the pace is rather slow, this made it a kinda tedious watch for me.
(I’m more excited for the sequels because I’m pretty sure I remember nothing about what comes next.)
And tbh I couldn’t cite you one memorable Zimmer score, so I guess his stuff just isn’t for me in general.
A great list of epic moments in that movie, but I’d still argue those moments are epic only if you already love the things they’re referencing.
RotS got a HUGE credibility boost among film nerds thanks to a long-standing rumor that Tom Stoppard (screenwriter for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) helped polish the screenplay, but he clarified his role in an interview years later.
This is your first time working with Ewan McGregor, right? That’s a trick question: Didn’t you work uncredited on George Lucas’s Revenge of the Sith ?
Which one was that?
The third of the recent prequels.
I did talk to George about one of the episodes. It must have been ten years ago. Actually, it was Steven. Steven Spielberg asked me to read a script and do a kind of dialogue polish. I did a bit, but I wouldn’t want to usurp the writer’s claim on the movie. [ Laughs ] Polish is such a strange word for what one does. I interfered with George’s script in a mild way.
“Interfered.” That’s a very Ortonian way of putting it. Ortonian or Etonian, I can’t decide which.
[ Chuckles ] Well, you know, it’s slightly misunderstood. It’s not structured like you’ve got this job to do. It’s more like spending time with friends and giving a hand. I didn’t even know Ewan was in the film.
He played the Alec Guinness role. A younger version of Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Oh. I wonder if he got to say anything I wrote. I must ask him.
Some of the more interesting changes Lucas made while writing and then in post production:
Lucas had originally planned to include even more ties to the original trilogy, and wrote early drafts of the script in which a 10-year-old Han Solo appeared on Kashyyyk, but the role was not cast or shot.
He also wrote a scene in which Palpatine reveals to Anakin that he created him from midichlorians, and is thus his “father”, a clear parallel to Vader’s revelation to Luke in The Empire Strikes Back, but Lucas ejected this scene as well.
Another planned scene by Lucas that was written during the early development of the film was a conversation between Master Yoda and the ghostly Qui-Gon Jinn, with Liam Neeson reprising his role as Jinn (he also hinted his possible appearance in the film). However, the scene was never filmed and Neeson was never recorded, although the scene was present in the film’s novelization.
After principal photography was complete in 2003, Lucas made even more changes in Anakin’s character, rewriting his turn to the dark side…
In the previous versions, Anakin had several reasons for turning to the dark side, one of which was his sincere belief that the Jedi were plotting to take over the Republic. Although this is still intact in the finished film, by revising and refilming many scenes, Lucas emphasized Anakin’s desire to save Padmé from death. Thus, in the version that made it to theaters, Anakin falls to the dark side primarily to save Padmé.
Did you read any of the supplementary stuff? I loved the Jedi Apprentice books for young Obi-Wan.
I still kinda prefer the ominous references to stuff like the Clone Wars and the epic battle between Anakin and Obi-Wan from the OG trilogy and the novelizations.
To me, the show is informed by the creator Mike White’s previous stuff like Enlightenment, The Emoji Movie, and Magic Magic (a psycho thriller starring Juno Temple).
White is primarily telling stories about addiction, recovery, and the cost of excess. In the case of The White Lotus s1 and s2, each finale is less about the plot and more about revealing what each character will do if given (or deprived of) everything they thought they wanted.
Your friendly quadrennial reminder than Lynch’s Dune is >>> Villy’s Dune – and it gives me no pleasure to say it – hopefully part 2 will be better but part 1 was like 12 out of 10 on the visuals and below 5 out of 10 on almost every other aspect.
1 Yes
2, 3 Probably, if you enjoyed 1
4 Not really
5, 6 I liked them a lot. Few seem to share my opinion, but that mostly seems due to few having actually read them.
I read a couple of the posthumous ones written (not really) by his son and that other guy who did the actual writing. They were more forgettable than outright bad.
Thanks. I will have to at least check out the first one.
Semi-unrelated. Anyone here play Dune 2? Was a DOS game that was pretty much one of the first RTS(well to the extent possible in 1990 or whatever) games and seemed like a pre-cursor to Warcraft/Starcraft. I remember it being awesome as a kid but assume it is horrible in retrospect.
The theme of both seasons is every encounter is transactional and people are essentially selfish. This current runs through class/gender/race/nationality/etc.
Right, where I disagree is that this constitutes a moral of the story. I’m not sure there are any morals of the story in the traditional sense. Like S1 was about the ways in which wealth disparities create power disparities and how this inevitably perverts human relationships, and as a lefty my reaction to this is “wealth disparities are bad, let’s reduce them”. But this season is all about sexual desire and the various power disparities that creates and how that messes with relationships. But it’s not like the conclusion can be “let’s do away with sexual desire”. It seems to me that the message is more like “sex, what a thorny issue, huh?”.
I think if the show is pointing at anything as being a problem, it’s naivety about sex and romance and the danger of enslaving yourself to those things. Like Daphne and Cameron are not supposed to be role models, but it’s Daphne’s lack of naivety in dealing with her husband that enables her to survive and prosper. In fact just now, in the middle of writing this post, I looked up an interview with Mike White and he says some interesting things about this:
I wanted to ask you about this idea of transactional sex that’s not just in the Mia and Lucia story line, but in Cameron and Daphne’s relationship and all over the place. Is there a way in which those transactional relationships are more honest than the sex that we see as “romantic”? Does romantic love even exist in theWhite Lotusuniverse?
I grew up, not to get too personal, witnessing women having their hearts broken a lot over and over—and in the case of someone very close to me, it was debilitating. Well, I’ll just tell you: My dad was gay, he was married to my mom, and then they divorced. My mom was so distraught and devastated, and then she realized that her whole relationship wasn’t what she thought it was. I’m kind of an anti-romantic. It’s good to love someone and attachment is inevitable, but there’s a lot of mythologizing around romance that can really work against you. The White Lotus gets into self-created problems.
These people are creating problems for themselves. They don’t really have problems. To me, romance is the definition of a self-created problem. You’ve decided to give up the power of your self-narrative to this idea. Maybe that’s cynical, but then it does make you go, like, “Well, there’s other ways to engage sexually and with other people.” This isn’t a pro-transactional-sex show, but what I like about Mia and Lucia is that they know what they want. They go and they get it. Compare that to Tanya where she’s so obsessive about Greg. I know women like this where they like to finger the wound. They like to live in the pain of it. They’re tragic people and that’s why, in this case, she has a tragic ending.
[Let’s talk about] Daphne, who has staunchly decided that she’s not the victim in this story. Cameron can get up to whatever he gets up to, but she’s taking control of what she can. She has that great line in the finale about not needing to know everything to love someone. I love that this season ends with Ethan and Harper being much more Cameron and Daphne than they were when they started. Is this about contentment and dishonesty? Is it about keeping those walls up a little bit and so finding some safety inside of a relationship?
I do kind of agree with Daphne. It’s colored by the fact that her husband is such a cad. He’s pretty extreme. But obviously, she’s made some kind of internal bargain that she is OK with. In general, we create the narratives of our relationships. We decide what importance to put on fidelity. If we’ve been betrayed, we tell the story of our relationships. Daphne just has a very strong sense of how she’s going to tell the narrative of her relationship. It’s not a relationship I would want, but if you’re gonna be in the relationship, figure out how to feel good about it. He can go and be the biggest sleaze, but she’s going to figure out a way to make that not feel painful.
As far as Ethan and Harper, I also think that’s true. When I was younger, there was this obsessive desire to feel like I’m totally in lockstep with my partner. There’s no gray area. It’s just this feeling of possession of the truth of what they do and their desire. I feel like that is a futile endeavor because you don’t even know yourself, let alone fully know somebody else. I’m not a relationship expert, for sure, so I’m not saying open relationships are healthier. But I do think maybe certain things you can let go. Maybe you could live in the mystery of something.
So the sin here is naivety about sex and that includes the naivety of thinking that you can have 100% honesty in a relationship, because people are not even 100% honest with themselves, let alone with other people.
I guess to put it a slightly different way the moral is about maintaining control of your own self-narrative and not subsuming that in an idealized version of another person. Tanya has this idealized version of Greg. Alby idealizes Lucia with this damsel in distress story. Ethan and Harper have this idea that they can be 100% honest with each other. Portia allows herself to be taken in by this sort of idealized version of masculinity that Jack offers to her. The story ends up being critical of all those things. The characters who prosper - Daphne, Mia, Lucia - do so because they maintain control of their own stories. So the message isn’t “sex work is good” or “Daphne and Cameron are role models”, it’s that romance and sex shouldn’t mean becoming reliant on someone else to live up to some ideal.
