I don’t know where to start. The most flippant place to start–the most colloquial–is with George Lucas… specifically, what happened to the George Lucas who made American Graffiti. But it’s not just Lucas. Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck didn’t go on to write anything close to Graffiti–the conversations in the film, the dialogue, is exceptional, […]
Entries Tagged as 'George Lucas'
American Graffiti (1973, George Lucas)
July 4th, 2008 2 Comments
Recommend on MahaloIndiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008, Steven Spielberg)
May 26th, 2008 No Comments
The biggest development, in terms of script, in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull might actually be George Lucas’s fingerprints. Between Last Crusade and this sequel, Lucas created the “Young Indiana Jones Chronicles” television series and introduced the idea of canon to the series. As an example, in Crystal Skull, Harrison Ford […]
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989, Steven Spielberg)
May 23rd, 2008 No Comments
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade shows off Steven Spielberg’s comedic skills. Not just in his direction of the scenes between Harrison Ford and Sean Connery, but also in the film’s overall tone. At the beginning, as River Phoenix is running from the bad guys on the train, Spielberg homages Buster Keaton (and rather well). […]
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984, Steven Spielberg)
May 21st, 2008 No Comments
I can understand Chinese people being upset with the stereotypes–Spielberg and company basically lift all the anti-Japanese stereotypes from early 1940s American films and apply them to the Chinese–but at least they’re only goofy and mischievous. The Indians in the film are downright evil. Temple of Doom’s atrocious script (I suppose Willard Huyck and Gloria […]
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981, Steven Spielberg)
May 19th, 2008 No Comments
Don Siegel had an anecdote about the length of titles. He showed them to his boss, who kept asking for them to be longer, then showed them to the boss again, telling him each time he’d made the changes. In fact, he had not–his boss was simply familiar with the titles and couldn’t gauge the […]
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981, Steven Spielberg)
February 18th, 2006 No Comments
Maybe it was the viewing atmosphere… I also was obsessing about something I’d read from either Spielberg or Lucas claiming credit for “MTV-style” editing with Raiders. Once the film was edited, the two went through and snipped a few frames at each edit point to hurry the film along. As I watched Raiders tonight, it […]
Star Wars (1977, George Lucas)
January 11th, 2006 No Comments
Watching Star Wars as an adult–as a cynical adult–is an interesting experience. There are plenty of frequent reminders of the first film’s “faults,” from Alec Guinness and Harrison Ford deriding the dialogue to many of the second trilogy’s reviews citing it as a weak film. As near as I can tell, I haven’t seen Star […]
