The movie mistake mystery from "Revenge of the Sith"
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fxrant.blogspot.com
It's really not the equivalent though. I don't see anything wrong with fixing a license plate or removing a reflection or a modern-day wristwatch.
It's the equivalent of fixing a spelling error in a novel, or a wrong chord in sheet music. None of the filmmakers wanted those things there. They weren't done with intent. They were just mistakes.
Changing music or replacing a puppet with CG, of course I'm against. That's changing the art of it. Different music makes you feel different. A CG creature has a different personality. Just like you don't want to replace vocabulary in a novel to make it more modern-day.
I think it's usually pretty easy to distinguish the two. The first ones would have been corrected at the time if they'd noticed and gone for another take. They take us out of the movie if we notice them. The latter category is a reflection of the technology, resources, and intentional choices. They keep us in the world of moviemaking as it was at that time.
With blogs that take screenshots of 4K content though, sometimes that's using a media player with poor HDR color decoding though. Bad HDR always winds up with a green tint, that's the telltale sign. VLC is the worst with that.
But I don't think that's the case here. There are definitely a lot of rereleases with badly done color.
So, what would you recommend instead? This is waaay outside my wheelhouse to judge.
Sometimes, the post processes loses a lot when people make decisions. It might take a special released version for the director to actually get a version they feel they wanted the world to see. Sometimes, yes, they go too far, but others it's actually a decent result.
Though in this day and age I can’t help but ask “why not both?” It feels easy to add a choice to your viewing experience. If they can do it for Black Mirror then they can certainly ask up front “which version would you like to see?”
Presumably the author would be opposed to that as well. Just because his employer did it doesn't mean he approves of it.
"97% of project 4K77 is from a single, original 1977 35mm Technicolor release print, scanned at full 4K, cleaned at 4K, and rendered at 4K."
Opening scene comparison - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1b47UP6ZGI
> When a film is professionally scanned in 16-bit color as DPX image files, every single frame weighs in at 100 MB.
> With upwards of 175,000 frames in each film, a complete scan requires about 21 TB of storage
> 42 TB if you want a backup copy!
> And then you need at least another 21 TB of space to work on it
> over $1,000 just in hard drives is therefore required for every film
Your point still stands but a good quality cineform or something is plenty. And you can definitely get 21TB cheaper than 1000$
A 4K fan scan of a 35mm print the was in cold storage since 1980.
It's great to see OG Star Wars looking like in did in '77, with all the optical glitches and the lower contrast with slightly green shadow bias of prints from that time. True time travel that makes the reworked releases look silly.
Another project worth a look is Harmy's fan cuts of the original trilogy, which are tastefully re-assembled from multiple sources and graded.
I was surprised to learn that this is a thing and has been for a long time.
https://old.reddit.com/r/FrostbiteFalls/comments/1flr8ue/fra...
As for the people responsible: You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!
Cory Doctorow's young-adults novel "Pirate Cinema" develops around this idea.
Something has obviously gone badly wrong in the world of IP licensing. Somehow I imagine that movies don't license different parts of their soundtrack differently to make sure they can never be rereleased.
Someone created a whole subreddit a few days ago to analyze the effect and post comparison pictures: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fuckingwaterfall/
Your analogies don't pass a simple self-check-- they are vastly different in scope.
At worst a spelling error will create a single alternative spelling in history. Wrong chords, however, typically create entire branches of full pieces of music that include allusions to and variations upon the wrong chord. For example-- there's no way to "correct" the C major chord in Rachmaninoff's Variations on a Theme by Chopin. What are you going to do, change every single variation in Rachmaninoff's piece to reflect the correct chord (C minor) from Chopin's prelude?
It gets even more complicated in jazz where chord substitutions are not only expected but often supersede the original chords. Even more to the point-- a lot of the die-hard Charlie Parker fans not only love the recording he made while obviously drunk, they love it in spite of Parker's wishes for nobody to ever hear it it (much less repeatedly play it and talk about it).
That's all to say a) correcting an entrenched wrong chord is no simplistic task, and b) in any case it's wrong to assume that the artist's intentions are always the chief concern.
Of course there are times when it's better to leave a "wrong" chord in music, but it's incredibly common for sheet music to have unintentional errors, especially in an ensemble setting. If trumpets are playing a unison part but 1 and 2 have a Bb and trumpet 3 has a B natural nobody thinks twice about fixing the trumpet 3 part. That's the analogy, not jazz and Rachmaninoff
Honestly, I personally disagree with the sentiment on all levels. Meaning, I agree with your observation that there are degrees to "restoration", and fixing a mistake is just not the same as changing music.
But then, I also have no sympathy to your objection of changing music or replacing a puppet with CG. I mean, I may like the old take better, but whatever, I'm not the one who made the movie. The people who made this particular cut for this particular release made it (duh). And these may or may be not the same directors and producers that made the cut you consider "the original one". It's their vision. Surely, it may seem surprising to a naïve viewer that it's not the director the movie is attributed to who "made it" in its entirety, but this is just never the case and obviously any cinema enthusiast knows it all too well anyway.
(But then I should probably mention that my fundamental disagreement with the sentiment spreads way farther than that, and I myself consider it kinda extreme. I often would be fine with the kind of "restoration" that essentially destroys the original thing. This would be off-topic to explain it here, because it wouldn't be about the movies anymore, but I just think that too much respect for the great things of the past often leads to losing sight of why these things were made in the first place. They were meant to be great at the time, not to be respected as a very old pile of rubbish a couple of thousands years later.)
The only thing I am kinda objecting to is when changes made reflect the current political agenda in one way or another (i.e. censorship, be it taboo on display of tits on TV, cutting out statements that seem "politically incorrect" at the time and place of the release, removing some persona non-grata who made a very minor cameo appearance in the original movie or anything else like that). But, again, I don't really object to that because "they don't have the right to do it", but because it's just irritatingly stupid and makes me roll my eyes. It doesn't necessarily make the movie worse or even substantially different (I might not even notice), but unlike with remastering of the original movie, the intent clearly isn't to make it "better" (in their opinion), but just acting out of fear to cause trouble by displaying today something that was fine yesterday as is.
What I think is kinda lacking is very clear and non-ambiguous versioning of movies. I am not that much of a movie enthusiast myself, but some people obviously care if you can see the original number-plate falling off the car, and it would be nice if these people could easily refer to that particular edit they like better. They kinda always do it anyway, but that only happens if they need to specifically mention this number plate falling off, and normally they try to pretend that 10 edits made for 10 releases on different media in different countries are all the same movie, which (almost by definition) is not the case. I mean, for books we have versions and ISBNs, and it's normal to reference specifically that, not just one of the authors and the title. Should be standard practice for movies too.
How do you know the intent isn’t to make it better, anymore than changing the music or replacing/adding characters? Why can’t a movie maker think that the protagonist casually using racial slurs detracts from the movie and the story and that they thought it would be “better” without it? Even the term “politically incorrect” is not accurate, since it is really culturally incorrect i.e. it represents a culture that does not exist anymore. Politics influence culture and vise versa, but we are long past the era of the Hays Code. These are not government mandated decisions, they are cultural decisions (or monetary decisions to perform better for the current culture).
Why this knee jerk reaction only to those types of changes? Is changing them a moral judgement on you for liking them in the past?
> acting out of fear to cause trouble by displaying today something that was fine yesterday as is.
It seems like the opposite it pretty prevalent and vocal as well. The “woke” buzzword being thrown around at any new media with too many women or minorities or gays is seemingly never ending. Causing trouble by displaying today something new that wasn’t fine yesterday.
> It's really not the equivalent though. I don't see anything wrong with fixing a license plate or removing a reflection or a modern-day wristwatch.
I think it depends on the primary objective of the restoration. If I’m trying to preserve history, I shouldn’t fix errors. If I’m trying to make a (by implication derivative) work that maximizes enjoyability for (new) audiences, then it’s ok to fix.
e.g. a long time ago, I once transferred vinyl recordings of an extremely amateur community musical group to CD.
After thinking long and hard, I decided to fix recording technology flaws (a bad hum) and vinyl degradation flaws (crackles, dust, etc). But I didn’t fix any of the musical performance flaws.
Bottom line: I decided to respect the history of the performance, and disrespect the history of the recording and playback technology/medium.
Films are becoming less and less popular with new forms of entertainment that are more immediate, more democratized or individualistic. Our dopamine is being juiced and our attention getting sucked into games, social media, and all other kinds of long tail attractors. Influencers are bigger than Hollywood stars. They simply cater to more interests. Distribution and production are no longer hard problems, so you don't need to build up a Hollywood star.
Film is becoming what radio used to be. It may never become as niche as the radio drama is today, but it certainly won't have the same limitless trajectory we thought it would have pre-pandemic.
Whatever we do today to "fix" films or make them more accessible is accomplishing one thing: extending their lifespan for as long as most (average, non-film connoisseur) people might still be interested in watching.
I quite strongly disagree with you. I lived through the latter stages of the transition from monochrome to full colour and various other things that were hailed as game changers that would render the previous status quo as somehow defunct.
I defy you to watch something like a Harold Lloyd movie involving a clock and not have sweaty palms or at least a mildly elevated ... emotional response of some sort.
We call them films or movies or whatever but those are long form stories. A book might be one too or a pdf. The novella is a short story. A matinee was an extended session at the cinema with multiple "value adds" to the main production. Theatre ... cartoons ... you know how this goes!
Might I remind you that you have only two eyes, which means that a radio drama in your car is the only safe media for a "drama" in a car, for the driver. You do get aural distraction but it is mostly manageable. One day you will have FSD (Mr Musk says so) and you will be able to watch telly with your feet on the dash but that is not today.
Media and formats change but the purpose is largely the same: telling a story. We are, after all, the story telling ape.
Would you still have these articles by chance? This sounds interesting and is something I "felt" myself.
As a personal addendum, I feel this can be (partly) attributed to the loss of the Cold War's ideological struggle that drove the West to innovate, not just in technology but in societal structures and freedoms as well. This is why it can feel as if we've arrived at "the end of history", the current system has won, so what is left to seek or prove?
Re your addendum and "the end of history": I think it would be myopic for people to think that the current system has won, and that there's nothing left to seek or prove. The current system has brought plenty to many but is destroying our planet, and there's plenty of space for fresh thinking. China is taking the lead in innovation [1]; so perhaps there's a new ideological and existential struggle, just with the US as the underdogs. Hopefully people see this as motivating rather than depressing.
[1]: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/06/12/... (also https://archive.ph/urpbY )
We all have anecdotes about the bloody kids! I noticed my granddaughter wearing a Metallica (Justice) T shirt - she does like the music - I asked Alexa. I dug out my old records and gave them to her. I also showed her how to rip a CD and put them on her phone. That's proper life skills transfer that is.
I watched Star Wars in the 1970s when it came out and it still seems to be quite popular. Perhaps you might like to avoid the shit films and go a bit more mainstream when you show kids films from the 1980s!
People grow up. In my 20s, I watched a lot of schlocky action movies and juvenile comedies. In my 40s, I watch a lot of classic and modern cinema. Do I watch a lot of movies from the 1940s? No, but I do watch some and I’m glad they are available.
Be that as it may, there's probably a day coming where only a handful of people on the planet even know who that is. Or who have even seen those films. And it'll be like that for most of our now-popular cultural artifacts.
How many newspaper stories from the 1700s have you read? The culture of those people died with them, and so too will it be with us.
Nobody is going to grow up to the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers anymore. Nobody is going to watch The Andy Griffith Show or see Last Action Hero. Even if it happens on a rare occasion, those numbers will pale in comparison to the number of Fortnite players. Or whatever's popular in the coming decades.
Our world is ephemeral and dies with us. We should enjoy our media while it is relevant to us, because that's what it's good for. Telling stories in a framework that speaks to us. In the future, it'll be a relic. An artifact of a time long ago, whose people are all dead, and whose lessons may need to come with a history book.
Apart from students of anthropology, the vast majority of future people will probably find our cultural works to be boring, irrelevant, and unworthy of their attention.
Your comment about “1700’s newspapers” reminded me of The Past Times podcast, where comedians read random newspapers from across American history. The episodes I’ve listened to were delightful, and they covered mundane news in mundane places.
“O brother, where art thou” is one of my favorite movies. It’s a retelling of The Odyssey (a literally prehistoric tale) set in Depression-era Mississippi, made in the early 2000’s.
The specific question of editing out these production artifacts doesn’t rile me either way, though. I didn’t see the original mistake, and I won’t notice the fix either.
I’ll also agree that just as no one steps in the same river twice, how the past is viewed and interpreted changes over time. What is valued or not also changes. 90% of everything is still crap. And quite a bit of the interest in the past is reflected in remixes or retellings for modern audiences.
Still, people also read Beowulf or Chaucer in the original or in modern translation. Others will enjoy both Jane Austen and Bridgerton. People will listen to Beethoven and Jon Batiste. Sure, not all those things are for everyone, but neither are modern music genres, sports entertainment, or most TV shows.
I think people will still be playing Tetris and reading Homer in a thousand years, but I’m not confident at all that they’ll be watching any of our videos.
Time stands still for no man, but we’re a curious people, and folks will search for meaning in the past through our art. As a parody of the traditional action movie, I’m sure people will be watching Last Action Hero for decades to come.
I think as time goes on the emotional hooks of media outside of universal themes fade away. My son will never know the time where “It’s a Wonderful Life” impacted my parents, or how the endless repeating of of “A Christmas Story” was a part of my siblings holiday. But the stories that are important to us or capture a moment of time will endure.
Social history interests me. So does genealogy, although I am the apprentice. My family tree has over 150,000 records in it - thanks to my uncle's painstaking research.
I generally try to read summations by people who have read all those articles but I am happy to dive in myself if I have to.
Just off the top of my head: A great example of trying to get inside the thoughts and ideas of a long departed peoples - "Courtesans and Fishcakes". That book deals with the cultural mores of ordinary people not gods and kings and legends and stuff.
How many do you read from 10 years ago? Newspapers aren’t really meant to be “timeless”. They are specifically to inform people of what is going on at that moment. I’ve read books from the 1700s. I’ve looked at paintings and sculptures, watched plays written, and read about the lives of important people of the 1700s.
I do agree that most of our culture will be irrelevant to people of the future as entertainment, but will be invaluable as history. If you want to tell a story that is relevant to modern people, tell that story. Movies are remade/rebooted/gender swapped/set in new countries/etc. all the time. You don’t have to replace the original with a “fixed” version so that almost no one can experience anything but the update. We have dozens of retellings of Romeo and Juliet but the original(ish) play is still readily available. Just because new generations will have their own entertainment doesn’t mean we should overwrite ours and present it as if history doesn’t exist and everything revolves around and reflects the current culture and always has.
Speaking of Last Action Hero, those movies won’t ever be box office hits again but the action movies and political thrillers do tell us a lot about America’s anxiety and uncertainty about our place in world affairs in the post-Cold War world. They are interesting to revisit in the same way Casablanca is interesting to revisit and think about the context for a movie made about WWII when we didn’t know what the outcome of WWII would be.
Not if you do this:
> You could generate a new updated movie set between ANH and ESB with AI versions of the original actors when they were young and alive.
The story is told! Let's have something new instead of rehashing the same thing with fake actors.
Styles change and not every movie will “survive” long term. But stories endure.
OTOH, it's fun to watch for goofs in movies, and if they're fixed up, then there's less reason to watch some of these movies.
The fact that when I die nobody will care about my porn collection is deeply unsettling. I'm saying this seriously, because it's something I enjoy so much, yet nobody else cares.
Every so often I’ll throw on some old jazz standards I’ve never heard of. Some classical music. Some early soul and R&B.
Old movies though? Only the iconic ones through a sense of obligation (eg, school/study) or someone convincing me I absolutely have to. Metropolis, Citizen Kane, interesting movies for their time and contribution. I just don’t feel the need to go back to this stuff the same way I actually enjoy going back to old music or other art.
The book community and some publishing laws have built some required transparency here. Printings and Edition numbers are generally included as key front matter in the average book by all major publishers. Library catalogs understand that as key metadata.
Today film publishing doesn't include such metadata. It could. It probably should. Arguably Lucas himself experimented with trying to include such metadata when buliding the "Special Editions". "Special" isn't a great version number, sure, but it did make it explicit the idea that movies could have multiple editions intentionally, not just accidentally or by way of the implicit chance of change during processes like digitization and media transfers.
Relatedly, there's a lot of consternation in digital media that the side-by-side "sanctity" of editions isn't preserved. If you buy a book for Amazon's kindle at First Edition, it will silently deliver every updated Edition. Covers will change from the original art to "Motion Picture Inspired By This Book" art (or TV show, etc). There's a lot of questions about how much should Amazon disclose every time this happens and how much should Amazon be required to give you a copy of the edition you originally paid for on request?
(Maybe ideally every bit of media is collected in some form of "source control"? I wonder what it would take to make some form of source control the "required" or at least "most desired" form of digital distribution?)
I personally hate the reworked Star Wars trilogy compared to the original, only because that's what I saw first. If I had seen them in the opposite order, would I feel the same way? I don't know.
As with anything, there is no bright line. For example, translations of The Odyssey are constantly changing the vocabulary. And more recently we've seen changes to novels to conform to modern sensibilities (e.g., Roald Dahl novels).
For me, I guess, my preference is to allow creators to do whatever they want with their creations, but I wish they would make all versions available. Steven Spielberg did that with ET when he digitally replaced all guns with walkie-talkies.
I empathize with, and see the validity in, both sides.
There is also decades of years between production, so the directors are different people as well. Modern George Lucas doesnt think that Han Solo is the kind of guy who shoots first, now that hes rolling is Disney franchise money. What would 1977 Lucas think if asked?
I dunno about Cameron's films (I don't think I've seen an original and an unchanged from him), but for Star Wars, the constraints helped make the film good. Yes, there's some rough bits, but all of the additions subtract rather than add.
Maybe it's not what his vision was, but we liked it as it was. If you watch ROTJ, you can already see where unconstrained technology distracts Lucas and it turns into too much of a green screen affair in parts. The prequel trilogy is so much green screen and it just feels so sterile and unbelievable; none of the characters interact with the environment at all; they're not hot in the desert or even when having a light saber duel in lava fields or whatever. They don't get cold or wet, etc. In ROTJ, the speeder bike stuff is mostly gratituous, but there's interaction with the environment.
This can go both ways. Sometimes you like things because you saw them that way first. Sometimes you're exposed to two versions of something and the second version is clearly an improvement on the first.
Example (A): I prefer the PC speaker soundtrack to The Secret of Monkey Island. I played it on an IBM. Without the exposure, there's no real reason to believe I'd have the same preference.
Example (B): The Swedish dub of the Moana musical number Shiny enjoys the considerable disadvantages that: (1) I heard the English version first; (2) I don't understand Swedish; (3) the English version is more authoritative, because the film was developed in English; and (4) the translation isn't especially close.† But I strongly prefer it anyway; to me the Swedish lyrics (as represented in the English subtitles I found on Youtube) give a very different feeling to the song and the character, one that greatly improves the film.
I'd lean toward taking people at their word if they seem to have a reason for the preference they express. The 2011 Blu-Ray Star Wars release pans down from outer space to a view of a planet more rapidly than the original film does. This seems like an issue where views either won't exist or will be dominated by the idea that whatever it was like before, it should stay that way.
"Han shot first", on the other hand, is a strong point of characterization, and objections to the change seem unlikely to be dominated by conservatism.
† Actually, I spent a fair amount of time listening to various dubs of Moana songs, and my favorite versions all make a significant change to the message of the song as I perceive it. I didn't care too much for the English Shiny, but this was also true of the songs that I liked in the original. My best model of why that might be is: every dub makes some more-or-less random changes to the song, and by methodically searching through a large number of them, I ended up finding the changes that appealed to me.
What's important is that the original is preserved, accessible, and we know the changes. This rarely happens.
“A Litany in a Time of Plague” contains a famous line: “brightness falls from the air.” Many scholars believe it’s a printing error, that the original line was “brightness falls from the hair.” But with apologies to Jay McInerney (who made this point better than I) the former is so much more beautiful. Sometimes art isn’t intentional.
That was Lucas' mistake with the original Star Wars trilogy. He fixed mistakes, CG'd characters and sets, spliced in deleted scenes, filmed entirely new sequences, replaced music, etc.. He felt he was making the movies better, but the updated editions weren't the familiar old friends people had known since childhood. If he'd made good transfers of the original versions available in the latest home video formats in addition to his newer versions, everybody would have been happy. He didn't do that.
Some people want the original versions and some want updated versions. Given that the first step to producing new spruced up versions is to restore the original, it makes sense to make both available.
Do films still occasionally have different cuts, is that still a thing with DVD releases?
There’s at least two films I never liked the theatrical release of, but the directors cuts were entirely likeable.
Anyway, movies can have revisions. A movie is as much a commercial product as it is art. I don't see why people need to get all righteous about it, especially in cases where directors, actors, etc., don't care.
Novels get revisions. Even fine art prints may have editions with differences between them. Old wood blocks by a famous artist may even be restruck decades later by a different person. They're still recognized as the piece.
Not just "a" role - he became "the" key role in the series, the evil spirit that moves the entire plot. Which was both absolute genius (turning a mistake into the first, menacing appearance of a key character) and absolute madness (how do you hand a key character of your expensive production to a random set-dresser with almost no acting career?!?). David Lynch in a nutshell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Ford
It's Hollywood, every busboy and valet is a role deficit actor in waiting.
> In the final scene, where Sarah Palmer has an upsetting vision, one can briefly make out the reflection of Set Decorator Frank Silva in the mirror behind her. When this was called to Lynch's attention on the set, he was overjoyed and shouted "PERFECT!" This is how Frank Silva was chosen to play the character of Killer BOB.
As a music fan, I really love little mistakes in incredible albums. They’re humanizing, they show that the recording was made by people and it makes the highs feel so much higher.
As an artist, I loathe mistakes in my own work and I will spend a basically limitless amount of time fixing annoying performance quirks in software — I’m talking things that I can do but didn’t get quite right — so I can listen to it without distraction or regrets. I know that nobody will notice these except me and the type of listener who does catch them will either not mind or appreciate it the way I would. But when it’s my own work, it’s different. I’m sure it’s the same for filmmakers so I understand the impulse to fix it later.
Me too. For me as a Genesis fan since I was a teenager, the worst example of a change has been the 'remastered' version of Supper's ready. There's a 'mistake' in the bass part right at the end, which to me is absolutely beautiful. It's about 22:46 in, right at the fade, and he plays the wrong bass note, a tone (I think) above what should be there, and then resolves down to the root note of the chord. Always loved this, it sounds lyrical and works really well.
And in the remastered version, it's not there, he goes straight to the root note.
And for me, it ruins 20+ minutes of buildup. I never listen to the remastered version and I'm glad I ripped my CDs back in the day so I have a record of the original (and for me, far better) bass part. Yes, it's only one note, but it's a great note!
And that's just one example that film is full of those. Here is another jarring one https://files.catbox.moe/9m3gjq.mp4
Despite that it won the Academy Award for Best Editing...
Very few such sequences complete without my noticing some spot where shots don’t match up.
Another one is key lights reflected in eyeballs. Nearly ruins Jackson’s LOTR trilogy for me, it’s in basically every damn scene. In several shots you can practically diagram out their whole lighting rig from a the reflections on an actor’s eye, so many lights are plainly and distinctly visible. You see it some in lots of movies but OMG it’s bad in those.
Yes, things are blocked ahead of time. You'll stand up at the same moment, you'll stop walking at a particular mark. But there are limits, especially with things like hands and cigarettes. If you look for continuity errors around those, you'll find them everywhere. Actors, directors and editors have more important things to worry about.
https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/walter-murch-rule-of-six/
Anybody can edit a scene so that there are no inconsistencies. The art of editing comes from maximizing emotional impact, then the story, then rhythm. When editors sacrifice matching for those, it's not a mistake -- it's intentional.
The fact is, editors work with the footage they're given -- reshoots happen when new scenes are needed or footage is unusable, but not for continuity errors. If the most emotionally impactful combination of shots has a continuity error, the worse for continuity.
I was told about the pole that causes the truck to flip in Raiders of the Lost Ark and now I can't unsee it.
—Warning to those who enjoy 2001 A Space Odyssey with their blinders on...—
2001 made a big impression on me as a kid and I've seen it many times. There was a point when watching for the Nth time in middle age that I first noticed that all the anti-gravity shots show the actors bodies carrying their own weight. Especially in the aisle scene with the floating pen, which itself is rotating about the center of the sheet of clear plastic it's attached to rather than its center of mass. Later in the same sequence, food trays are brought to the bridge after the long scenes of a flight attendant, who picks up trays as they slide downs from a dispenser, and as she hands the trays to the crew, one of them instinctively puts his hand out under the tray to helpfully catch its weight. In the next scene an officer joins other crew by coming up from behind them, leaning over and resting his arms on their chair backs as the scene cuts to details of anti-gravity meal consumption. Finally Floyd stands in front of a toilet reading a 1000 word hard-printed list of instructions after the viewer has been shown electronic displays used everywhere else. The self-consciousness of that clip provides a lovely relief from all the previous cognitive dissonance. I'm not able to unsee any of this now and it detracts from the spectacle. But at the same time, it makes the orchestration and ideas of the movie seem all the more artistic, so nothing lost except innocence. There are many other oddities to find in the movie working on different planes of awareness, including proprioceptive assumptions about reality, intelligence, progress, and spirituality.
We had very little experience with zero g at the time, and surely Kubrick and his crew had zero. They did a remarkable job despite that.
At the time of that movie, my world didn't contain much of the materials and designs portrayed, so the whole production was mesmerizing with design elements that distracted from more practical details: like ZOMG what kind of plastic is that tray made out of? Look how spacey that furniture is!
The video phone Floyd uses seems ridiculous with its $5 charge for a call. But pay phones worked on dimes. On his call to his daughter, she is seen next to a totem with a touchtone keypad for dialing. ATT advertised that as a concept product at that time, and touchtone phones were still novel (as were Tang and ballpoint pens that could write upside down).
When LED pocket calculators arrived in early 70s the color red of those LEDs was unlike anything else you would see; it seemed amazing.
And at the time real tech design was often awkward and cheesy, especial goofy arrangements of car interiors, which smelled funny and had plastic that fell apart after a few years of exposure to the sunlight and heat.
In 60s it was typical for TV remotes to have just a button for channel change and that's all. And the channel change worked by an electric motor rotating the channel dial. A big feature was a second button to change down instead of up,
In the 70s when cable TV arrived the converter box added remote functions to old TVs, which was a big part of the appeal, and in 1981 MTV was in stereo if you hooked up the cable to your hi-fi FM receiver and tuned the simulcast station. You could write to MTV and there'd send you a sticker for your tuner.
So the sets in 2001 seemed like astounding fashion design for many people, and that was still so when Star Wars arrived in '77.
The sound feedback from the machines is still ahead of our time.
I dearly love the hotel room at the end. It's so creepy. I wondered why for a long time, and finally realized it was because it was lit from the floor rather than the ceiling. If I owned a hotel, one of the rooms would be like that! Haha!
Is this one clearly wrong? As you say, it's essentially an instinctive motion, so one can easily imagine the reflex taking over even if the scene were genuinely in zero gravity.
With Star Wars in particular, Lucas' incessant meddling has long have gone far past the point of diminishing returns, and frequently making the movies worse.
More in general, I like watching the original movie, warts and all. I often disagree with the corrections, especially when they restore scenes that were left out for a reason, make color correction choices I disagree with (e.g. Blade Runner's "green tint" is inferior to its original bluish tint), etc.
It’s especially worse since the hit rate of actually good, creative movies is so much lower in the digital era.
My big pet peeve now is these “ew, this movie looks old” attitude.
I was watching Sum of All Fears the other day and my partner had this attitude. Funny though as soon as people in tuxedos showed up on the screen she changed her mind and started watching. Tuxedos are one of those movie magic things.
It’s so much more impressive when they had to actually arrange for the thing you’re seeing to exist, at least in some sense, in real life, so light could bounce off it and hit the film. That is a real landscape that the actors and crew had to travel to! They really made horses jump off that train car! They really had two thousand extras for this shot! That kind of thing. If there was a set at least they had to build it, and even if the results look a little janky it’s usually interesting and the craft impressive.
They shot with environmental lighting? They had to rig their other lights just so and maybe just work with what was available to get a good shot. The light is the light. The constraints on their options often seem to improve, rather than harm, the final product.
Now it’s like oh they couldn’t even be bothered to film on a real damn street. Ugh. All the location shooting is just getting backgrounds to composite in later. The light on the actors didn’t even exist when and where the background was shot. It sucks and is boring.
(By contrast, the 4k of Alien looks fantastic.)
Lucas wanted to push the digital envelope, but the contemporary Harry Potter films also by ILM have aged much better because they relied on physical sets and practical effects as much as possible. You can tell the actors are actually within a world.
like even most full body shots of hagrid was a robot-face version of him
Taking into account the already-negative reception of the final season, it became symbolic of the show's decline in quality. The cup was edited out in later releases.
Family Guy also did a quick cutaway gag of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGIpZk4SKTI
The making of The Mandalorian is interesting though, by using a projected screen as the set rendered in realtime, they can get the environmental lighting on the actors correct as well without much post-processing.
https://www.fdtimes.com/2013/03/29/claudio-miranda-asc-on-ob...
Another example is the motion simulator/projector setup from First Man, which makes the cockpit and landing sequences look so good. They won best VFX.
https://youtu.be/sw57ORTgGG4?si=NjRNt551HJhL_l9k&t=193 (relevant footage starts around 3:13)
It looked like complete shit even by the standards of the time, and of course hasn’t aged well.
I watched a “film edits” fan edit of the Clone Wars CG cartoon, and one of the odder things about the experience was the end, where the editor cut together the final arc of that show, another shorter 2D cartoon, and the live action (well… mostly also just CG) Revenge of the Sith in roughly chronological order (including some nifty simultaneous action bits).
What was so odd was how very much worse and less-real-feeling the “live action” film was than the wholly CG cartoon. The writing, the line delivery, the sets, the action, the editing—it was all worse and came off as far more fake than a literal cartoon.
Ep I, II, III are bad in so many ways that they may end up aging the best. It's impossible to take any of it seriously, from the infidelity of the world of the first trilogy, to the ludicrous characters and situations, to the radically morphing production values, to the utter incoherence of the plotting. For an adaptation of a beloved franchise to be mishandled so badly by its original creator... it has to be something very special. I predict it will require a bit more time to become appreciated, and its substance will be regarded as having been totally misunderstood and overlooked at its inception.
Or it is meaningless tripe beyond all reckoning.
The cool thing is that everything is being coded and sequestered to history no matter how bad it is, so the future of history looks absurd and dire: everything will be recallable, but the work of reviewing it all must overwhelm its value. The act of remembering will become an ultimate adventure.
Of the twelve year olds I have met since Ep I/II/III, they've all generally enjoyed them.
I feel the same criteria generally applies to Ep VII/VIII/IX: for the most part 12-year olds don't see the flaws, they see the fun.
I also think history is far kinder to the prequels than contemporary opinion at the time was. (You can see it directly in some of the Ep III 20th Anniversary video essays showing up this year.)
For the most part the senatorial debates and child murder both happen off screen, the screen pays a lot more attention to the muppets and droids and lightsaber duels. (The toys and the action figures.) Ep. I and II both have a PG rating and III is PG-13. Most of the Star Wars movies have PG ratings and the PG-13s are rare. They've all been "family friendly" since the beginning. It's a part of why kids love them. It's a part of why Disney paid a lot of money for them. It's a part of why they are closely tied to the (US) family friendly Disney+ brand. Are you upset that these are considered "kid-friendly" movies?
Or really, just to Look Cool And Technical And Shit.
[1]: https://www.theterminatorfans.com/the-terminator-vision-hud-...
It was a simpler time.
As part of a restoration, yes. As part of a remaster, no.
If the remaster is overseen by the primary creative (such as everything done to the Aliens UHD 4k release, which was overseen and approved by Cameron), then it's official -- and as an audience member, you have to examine how you feel about that. For example, some enthusiasts lament the removal of film grain in Aliens, but Cameron has said in interviews that he hated the grain in Aliens because he was forced to use a particular film stock and didn't like the result. So it was never the director's vision to have excessive grain in that movie, and the audience should accept the 4k UHD release as canonical and authorized.
These debates are colored (no pun intended) by nostalgia, much like the vinyl vs. digital debates.
If I hate the color grading of a remaster, and this becomes the only version readily available, I don't care whether the original author oversaw the process -- it's a net negative.
And this garbage with color grading happens often :(
Very pleasant to watch :-)
Link: https://www.allocine.fr/video/programme-12284/
Youtube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTbUDA_Dd9s&list=PLAUaCoiUsx...
From imdb trivia:
//The sequence in which Peter Sellers's character plays his bugle to rouse his troops is a satire of Gunga Din (1939).//
How many times has Lord of the Rings been revised? Dune? <Insert other long-lived actively managed novel>. Is the active management of these novels "wrong"? Is fixing grammar, spelling, or clarifying story beats "wrong"?
I personally don't think so, and I'd rather read something which has been corrected, especially if done for story clarity.
In the vast majority of cases it’s “fixing” the original in this sense;
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/18/painting-match...
Also, it’s important to be able to see these works as originally published. Otherwise, you are passing off a forgery as the original.
Normal viewers almost never notice these things, and movie nerds like little glimpses behind the curtain. So it’s doing almost nothing for one sort of viewer, and making it worse for another.
Is the Blade Runner Director's Cut wrong?
To be honest I don't like the Special Edition much, which he does consider his vision.
My favorite version of BR would be a mix: the dialogue fixes and crisper image of SP, the color grading and milder violence of DC. The extra seconds of footage are unnecessary, too. I admit correcting the face of Zhora was a big deal though (but I could have lived with keeping the stunt extra anyway)
If you want to see works as originally published, get a copy of the original publishing. Buying a re-issue and expecting it to be identical in every way is silly.
Where it goes off the rails is when you say the original is not available when it plainly is, you just don't want to deal with the very minor hassle of buying a used copy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmy%27s_Despecialized_Editio...
I’m not normally this pedantic, but on the topic of Star Wars it somehow feels appropriate.
He appears as an Easter Egg in several incarnations of the Mortal Kombat series as a head on the side of the screen that says "toasty" in a falsetto voice, particularly when the player applies a perfect uppercut move.
Mortal Kombat also shares the same initials with MK Ultra, a controversial (real or maybe not, successful or maybe not) psyops program supposedly developed by the USA.
Similarly, "Star Wars" also alludes to a controversial USA space program that fluked.
I never noticed the head behind Anakin, but I am assuming it is really there. Thus, the whole thing has striking similarity to that VFX fluke in many angles, making it a great coincidence.