Posts by Andre Alessi
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Muse: The High Aesthetic Line, in reply to Ngaire BookieMonster,
Heh. Until you see Star Wars meets The Muppets.
(Sorry, I have no idea how to embed these things)Or even better, The Star Wars Holiday Special.
It's quite possibly the funniest/most terrible thing I've ever seen. My girlfriend and I still make regular in jokes about "Itchy" and "Lumpy" eating "wookie-ookies".
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Muse: The High Aesthetic Line, in reply to BenWilson,
I think the main problem is that Lucas was trying to mirror the performances of Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher, who were both (let us not forget) incredibly young at the time of shooting Episode IV. What's remarkable is that Fisher in particular gave a weighty, assured performance that made her seem far older than she was. Casting Portman as her "mirror", and having her end her arc at around the same age that Fisher ended Leia's was always going to make things tough on Portman, and she simply struggled. (Although she still did ten times better than Christiansen, who never quite understood that there is a difference between acting angry and acting evil.) It's odd that Lucas managed to write such a good, strong role for a female character in Leia, especially given the context of the rest of his work.
I guess this gets to the core of why I disliked the prequels so much-Darth Vader's fall, to be meaningful, should have been the result of a mature man's conscious decision to betray everything he previously stood for. If Anakin had been 20 at the time of Ep I, and 40ish around the time of Ep III, the actors playing him and Padme could have really mined the depths of the drama inherent in their relationship from the perspective of two adults whose relationship has crumbled under the strain of their conflicting roles in a dynamic political environment, instead of a highly unconvincing tanty by a teeenager with a metal hand.
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Muse: The High Aesthetic Line, in reply to Mikaere Curtis,
The thing I appreciated most about ep I to III was the propensity of the jedi to problem-solve using light-sabres. Oh, and the fact that clones are all Jake The Musses.
What I personally find hilarious (and it's surely relevant to the discussion about racial stereotypes above) is that Mandalorians, and by extension, Jango and Boba Fett and all Clone Troopers and Stormtroopers, are depicted in canon (from the time of the release of Episode II anyway) as having a New Zealand accent.
True, the accent hasn't always been delivered convincingly (see the Mandalorians in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic I & II) but there's still this odd moment when I've though, "Oh wow, so that's how I'd sound saying that!"
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Muse: The High Aesthetic Line, in reply to Danielle,
Also: racist Jar Jar. (Jar Jar : Me :: LOTR : Giovanni)
Oh don't get me started. The Gungans were bad, but the Trade Federation dudes were genuinely horrific Chinese parodies that are probably a step beyond that old "Yellow Peril" octopus.
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Muse: The High Aesthetic Line, in reply to Megan Wegan,
I’ll admit to being kind of a Star Wars fan, but only because Star Wars was the first movie I can remember seeing. And we ‘played’ it as kids. I was ALWAYS Leia.
I was a massive Star Wars fan as a kid. My parents encouraged me-the first LP I ever owned was John Williams' soundtrack, and every Christmas and birthday, I'd get a couple of new figurines to play with. (Most didn't survive my experiments with homemade gunpowder in my mid-teens, FYI.)
We'd play "Star Wars" in the playground too. One of the most traumatic experiences of my childhood was being told that I could no longer be Luke because my previously ash blond hair was darkening too quickly-that meant I had to be Han. If only I'd known then that Han was the guy every little boy should want to grow up to be like...
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Uh oh, now we’re in trouble!
I watched the Star Wars “prequels” in sequence just last week. I was thoroughly, thoroughly unimpressed with them this time around (I’ve seen them in the past and at the time I managed to find at least a few things to like about them.) The most difficult thing for me though was how jarring it was to go from watching Episode III to Episode IV: despite Aunt Beru having spent all of 5 minutes with Anakin just as he was in the middle of his teenage rebellion-slash-turn to the dark side, and that she knows that he very nearly killed his wife and children (after all, that’s why Luke was fostered with them in the first place), she’s able to casually remark to Uncle Owen about how Luke “has too much of his father in him”. Or Ben Kenobi’s recollections of Anakin as “a good friend” that sound like he met him as an adult, not as a scrunchy-faced 6 year old boy. Or…OK, I’ll stop now.
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I haven't been to the BDO for a couple of years now-I can't say I have enough good memories to justify shelling out the cash for a ticket (as well as taking the time off work) though I still remember my first experience of the Mars Volta live with a kind of surreal wistfulness. Plus I'm, a grumbly old fart who distrusts Auckland's weather and can't stomach the thought of standing outside for 10+ hours.
The one thing I can say about the BDO's alcohol policy is that they've always policed the ID requirements very well. As someone who doesn't drive, and who only recently got myself a passport, I was simply shut out of buying alcohol at every BDO I went to, despite having a fair bit of facial hair and swathes grey at my temples. Managing to minimise underage drinking at an event like the BDO is no mean feat.
I do remember hearing a few things about one of the security companies back when I worked at the Ponsonby Burger Fuel as a student back around 2000 or so. We were pretty close with the bartenders at the Safari Lounge next door, and they mentioned to us that they wouldn't use one of the more popular security companies due to the fact that they had an unofficial "minimum one punter beating per night" rule-if it was near closing and the bouncers hadn't had a dust up, they'd deliberately provoke one of the drunken punters into brawling with them just to keep themselves sharp. Seems like the sort of urban legend you hear all the time in hospo circles, but I've seen enough extremely one-sided violent "ejections" on Ponsonby Rd that I'm not sure I'd dismiss the idea out of hand.
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Hard News: The next creative industry?, in reply to Neil Graham,
For the larger projects, games work like the film industry, huge teams and huge budgets. The huge budgets make people extremely risk adverse. Unless there is a lot of faith in the developer, the end product will be just like Transformers, crap but sufficiently hyped to make money.
There are exceptions though. Probably the best example is CD Projekt CODE RED from Poland, who made the leap from English-to-Polish games localisation to publishing one of the best RPGs of the last five years, The Witcher. That game had zero marketing in the English parts of the world initially, but it was hyped by word of mouth (and it helped that the game was actually extremely good.)
The real problem with predicting how New Zealand should approach the games market at the moment is the massive fragmentation that is going on. Ten years ago, a "gamer" was someone who played games, the end. Nowadays, a hardcore raider in World of Warcraft, a stay at home dad in Farmville or a party animal who knows all the riffs for Guitar Hero 5 are all "gamers", but that's where the similarities end. There's no one game or strategy that will capture all those different consumers, and they all have vastly different financial habits when it comes to paying (or not paying) for their games.
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I like the cadence and syllabic repetition of the phrase "What a twatcock!"
I guess this makes me an effete pointy-headed liberal after all.
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Hard News: Popular Paranoiac Politics, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
There wasn’t a window to escape out of? Maybe an air duct?
No windows! And the air con wasn’t working so I couldn’t locate the vents. Also the elevator required a swipe card, and we were on the 12th floor.