Indiana Jones junkies and future admirers will have a field day come September. The series of films are all coming out on Blue-ray full restored. It’s hard to believe that it was back in 1981 when Steven Spielberg and executive producer George Lucas first brought Indiana Jones to the screen with Raiders of the Lost Ark . Now that film has been fully restored along with the archeologist’s (played of course by Harrison Ford) other adventures. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull . Spielberg and sound designer Ben Burtt supervised the restoration of Raiders of the Lost Ark with special attention given to its “original look, sound and feel.” The franchise won a combined seven Academy Awards and will be available in the new format September 18th. The sites and sounds of the series – and even the snakes will be in pristine shape. “The original negative was first scanned at 4K and then examined frame-by-frame so that any damage could be repaired,” said Paramount Home Media. “The sound design was similarly preserved using Burtt’s original master mix, which had been archived and unused since 1981. New stereo surrounds were created using the original music tracks and original effects recorded in stereo but used previously only in mono. The result is an impeccable digital restoration that celebrates the film and its place in cinematic history.”
Indiana Jones junkies and future admirers will have a field day come September. The series of films are all coming out on Blue-ray full restored. It’s hard to believe that it was back in 1981 when Steven Spielberg and executive producer George Lucas first brought Indiana Jones to the screen with Raiders of the Lost Ark . Now that film has been fully restored along with the archeologist’s (played of course by Harrison Ford) other adventures. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull . Spielberg and sound designer Ben Burtt supervised the restoration of Raiders of the Lost Ark with special attention given to its “original look, sound and feel.” The franchise won a combined seven Academy Awards and will be available in the new format September 18th. The sites and sounds of the series – and even the snakes will be in pristine shape. “The original negative was first scanned at 4K and then examined frame-by-frame so that any damage could be repaired,” said Paramount Home Media. “The sound design was similarly preserved using Burtt’s original master mix, which had been archived and unused since 1981. New stereo surrounds were created using the original music tracks and original effects recorded in stereo but used previously only in mono. The result is an impeccable digital restoration that celebrates the film and its place in cinematic history.”
Get ready for Titanic SUPER 3D!! With Titanic 3D about to set sail into theaters, the Internet came up with a great parody trailer of James Cameron’s epic film … as seen through the directorial visions of George Lucas, Michael Bay and J.J. Abrams instead! We would totally go see this. Picture exploding passengers, sea monsters and Storm Troopers. Enjoy. Titanic SUPER 3D Trailer (Parody)
“Ralph McQuarrie was the first person I hired to help me envision Star Wars . His genial contribution, in the form of unequaled production paintings, propelled and inspired all of the cast and crew of the original Star Wars trilogy. When words could not convey my ideas, I could always point to one of Ralph’s fabulous illustrations and say, ‘Do it like this.'” [via WSJ ]
Films about geniuses are so numerous that they almost constitute their own genre. One seems to pop up every few years, always with a few distinct markers. We usually see a brilliant character whose ideas are a little crazy, a couple of “normal” characters against whom the genius’s difference can be easily identified, and a Very Important Project that puts those crazy ideas to the test and ultimately validates the lead character’s oddball behavior. Most informed movie-goers can set their watches by these plot developments, but to me, even the worst ones have a certain appeal. Watching great ideas brought to life is thrilling, and the really good ones, like The Social Network or Good Will Hunting , seem to tap into something universal. One could argue that, rather than a genre unto itself, films about genius can be categorized as a sub-genre of the biopic; there is a lot of cross-over between them (see Pollock or Amadeus or Surviving Picasso ), even though it probably has roots in more conventional mad-scientist genre films, like Frankenstein . However, their most important aspect, more than their supposed biographical integrity, is how prominently ideas figure in the story. Rather than merely a large amount of screen-time for geniuses, like in the many Sherlock Holmes films or like Doc Brown in the Back to the Future series, films about genius humanize difficult concepts. Because another defining characteristic is that, as opposed to superheroes with mental powers that are very obviously beyond human capabilities, like Professor X, whose telekinesis is basically supernatural, the sort of film genius I’m talking about is grounded in plausibility. Their abilities are mythical but not supernaturally so. Film geniuses do what everyone else does, using recognizable materials, only they do it much, much better. Still, after a point somewhere off in the horizon, that which distinguishes the genius from the rest of us isn’t a measure of degree, but of type. These films take great pains to “other” their subjects, or make them seem different even above and beyond their achievement. It isn’t enough that they can think better or create more beautiful things. They have to be kind of weird, too. It’s no wonder that, while we have films about total non-geniuses like Abbie Hoffman, or genius peripherals like Edie Sedgwick, Hollywood has yet to produce an Oscar-winning film about someone like, say, Jonas Salk. Because while Salk was no doubt a genius, he also seems to have been a fairly nice, conventional person in his everyday life and, thus, not great fodder for the Hollywood machine. Nobody wants to watch a movie about someone who goes to work and pays his taxes and gives exact change at the grocery store. This will happen. The rules for portraying difficult ideas on film, which seem to profit from a certain graphical fleshing out for the general moviegoing public, don’t really apply to the construction of a compelling character arc, which thrives in danger and conflict. For example, in one film about genius, A Beautiful Mind , we see the concept of governing dynamics explained very succinctly and transparently by way of a scene about a bunch of guys hitting on a girl in a bar. (Visually, it’s a good scene, though the dialogue sounds like everyone’s reading straight from Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations .) However, when director Ron Howard employs a similarly graphical rendering of the schizophrenic delusions of the genius main character, mathematician John Nash, by revealing that people he had been interacting with throughout the film were actually only in his head, the technique seems totally inappropriate. A helpful graphic as filmic teaching moment for a difficult concept, sure. But a descent into madness, or in this case the retrospective unveiling of a madness into which one has already long descended, require a somewhat more emotionally charged visual than the director indicating, “Shucks, those guys aren’t actually there…” In contrast to such transparently clear filmic infographs, a character whose personality is meant to fill the screen and hold interest should be sort of messed up, harder to figure out, and certainly not party to the kind of M. Night Shyamalan-ian reveal employed in A Beautiful Mind . That said, I still liked the film — in part because of how it portrays the descent into madness as an actual hindrance to the production of important ideas. A lot of other movies merely portray such pesky foibles of personality as inevitable side effects of genius itself, easily overcome with a few cathartic moments and liberally applied theme music. Obviously, some of this just has to do with biographical information where applicable, because the particular genius in question actually experienced schizophrenia’s debilitating effect and, lo and behold, wasn’t helped along in his career by having it. But judging by the middle section of the Venn diagram for most films about geniuses and biopics, where the stories are roughly “based on a true story,” one could easily conclude that social ineptitude or mental instability are prerequisites to having great ideas. Never mind that there are quite a lot of brilliant people who don’t display any kind of odd behavior at all. And so the biggest flaw in the films about genius genre seems to be a sort of lopsidedness in execution concerning the relationship between a genius and his or her ideas, despite the fact that formal guidelines would seem to dictate that these two aspects be treated with equal attention. One film that gets this relationship right is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , in which the visuals very closely relate to the ideas of the subject, writer Hunter S. Thompson. * Director Terry Gilliam inhabits the perspective of Thompson in relating the story of his drug-fueled ride through the Nevada desert, and we see the world through the lens of Thompson’s inimitable manner and, thus, understand what his ideas amount to, in spite of the fact that no helpful infographs are provided. There is only one scene in which the Thompson character actually explains anything — where he gives context to his nihilistic fervor as cast against the idealism of the ’60s peace movement — and this is probably the least successful scene in the whole film. Hearing Benicio Del Toro’s Dr. Gonzo scream the lyrics to “One Toke Over the Line” while driving through the desert, his face a grotesque mask in Gilliam’s skewed frame, is pretty much all the audience needs to understand the point. One lesser example of the genre is Pollock , a film about the artist Jackson Pollock, which doesn’t really treat the actual art with enough care. The performance by Ed Harris in the central role is excellent, and the story is actually pretty interesting: We see the most fruitful period of Pollock’s life, his relationship with artist Lee Krasner, his problems with mental illness and alcoholism, and, most interestingly, him at work in his studio. But the problem is that getting an up-close view of how Pollock’s art is made sort of deflates the effect it’s supposed to produce. Much of the fascination people have with Pollock’s art is wrapped up in what those paint splatters don’t represent. One would want a portrayal of Pollock that grows in mystery as it grows in scope, but the “un-abstracting” of how the paintings were made in this film, even by way of a story about a fairly abstract human being, seems to detract from the artist’s original vision, if only because it employs a representational aesthetic. This is an example where learning the backstory of the ideas actually detracts directly from the ideas themselves. The problem isn’t that films about genius tend to highlight people with world-changing ideas who have no power to change their own complicated, messed up lives. Basically all strong characters start at this point, whether a genius or not; that’s the basis of a character arc, a problem that initially seems unsolvable. The real issue is that a lot of filmmakers don’t seem to get that, while a conventional plot might necessarily rely upon a messed up, complicated central character, that character’s viability relies on whether or not his or her ideas are actually interesting independent of that complication. And oftentimes, if there is a conflict of interest between the portrayal of a brilliant character and that character’s world-shattering idea, the idea gets short shrift for the purposes of “character development,” and the whole structure falls. And so, the real mark of quality for these movies has to do with inhabiting difficult ideas through aesthetic forms, like in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , as opposed to the popularization of difficult ideas in favor of a less interesting biographical story, like in A Beautiful Mind and Pollock . Good films about genius embed the relevant concepts within the film medium itself, allowing them to animate the filmmaker’s own aesthetic impulses. Less good ones tend to water down the ideas and focus on important biographical stuff like how geniuses have a hard time talking to people at parties. In any case, it must be a very difficult thing to make a film about a person whose achievements are more important that can really be expressed creatively, and many times, which are actually more important than the film — or any film — itself. * I’m not interested in arguing whether Thompson was actually a genius. He was portrayed as such in the movie, and that’s all that matters. [ Back ] Nathan Pensky is an associate editor at PopMatters and a contributor at Forbes , among various other outlets. He can be found on Tumblr and Twitter as well.
The re-release of The Phantom Menace opens with that exhilarating blast of John Williams’s famous theme, the Star Wars title zooming off into the distance in 3-D before the familiar text crawl creeps across the starry backdrop, revealing the words we’ve all been longing to see back on the big screen: “Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute.” Ah, yes. Rewatching this film (for me, the first time since it opened in theaters over a dozen years ago) really makes you admire the gutsiness of returning to one of the most beloved franchises of all time only to open with stalled galactic taxation negotiations. It takes you back, like some three dimensional Proustian sci-fi madeleine, to that feeling of slow deflation shared by so many back in 1999 as they fought to keep up their levels of enthusiasm as Episode I herked and jerked along. As an admirer of select Star Wars films but no serious devotee of the series, I don’t have quite the complicated relationship with George Lucas experienced by some fans, the emotional complexity of which is generally only otherwise seen in memoirists writing lyric essays about their loving but abusive fathers. And from a business perspective, the Star Wars films are a great candidate for the callous but surely profitable enterprise of transferring classics to 3-D and dumping them back into theaters with pricier tickets. But The Phantom Menace , in any number of dimensions, is an exercise in disappointment, a film filled with enough callbacks to the first trilogy to remind you about what you loved about them without adding much of note in all the new material. The 3-D looks fine, if subdued enough that you forget about it for long stretches. A few sequences do get a boost — the fraught journey through a planet’s sea monster-heavy core, for instance, and even more so the podracing sequence, which look particularly great in the Anakin’s-eye-view shots as camera darts through the rock formations. But 3-D tends to highlight spectacle, and much of The Phantom Menace is anything but: Senate or Jedi council debates, wooden exchanges between Jake Lloyd and Natalie Portman that are meant to indicate some deep (and future romantic) connection, and the parade of bizarrely racialized aliens, including freakin’ Jar Jar Binks. The film features some greatly imaginative worlds and scenarios, from watery Naboo’s hidden bubble-encased Gungan cities to the insectile droidekas to Tatooine’s ludicrously dangerous sport of choice (“Looks like a few Tusken Raiders have camped out on the canyon dune turn!” as the crowd cheers). Darth Maul (played by Ray Park and voiced by Peter Serafinowicz) still makes a major impression, pacing like a caged tiger during a force field-mandated pause in his duel with Liam Neeson’s Qui-Gon Jinn and Ewan McGregor’s Obi-Wan Kenobi. Queen Amidala’s outfits are still ridiculous and awesome, and Portman’s trade-offs with Keira Knightley as the royal bodyguard/stand-in are easier to spot now that the latter’s face has become just as familiar. The rest of The Phantom Menace tends toward the dull — not always the terrible (though early in the film a lot of the dialogue sounds like a badly dubbed Google translation of something originally written in a language other than English), but the legitimately wan and colorless. The film serves as a feature-length extrusion of exposition for what’s to come in later installments, with a few livelier sequences inserted as payoff for sticking around this space opera. It’s both a shame and unavoidable that Episode I was re-released first in this planned 3-D roll-out of the entire series, but if you’re going to splurge on the extra for a 3-D ticket you might as well wait for A New Hope in 2015. Even if the conversion doesn’t add all that much overall to the experience, as is the case here, that one’s going to be much more fun to see on the big screen and with a crowd. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Tyler Perry recently came out to say African American cast are on the verge of becoming extinct , even with the recent release of Red Tails, the question of the state of black actors in Hollyweird has been a major hot topic. But HOLD UP! How could we ignore the many black movies that have come out to inspire, entertain and be critically admired? Check out our list of all African American cast films and tell us what you think! Did we leave your favorite movie out?
The higher-ups at Volkswagen must be big Star Wars fans. For the second straight year, the car maker is using George Lucas’ epic saga as inspiration for a Super Bowl commercial. A year ago, Little Darth Vader was a huge hit. So much so that the company released a teaser for the ad early here in 2012. The sequel, featuring a canine chorus barking a familiar tune, may be even better: The Bark Side – VW Super Bowl Ad Preview Barking along to the ominous “Imperial March” dressed as Princess Leia, Darth Vader, Chewbacca, and an Ewok, these mutts will surely get people talking. Or howling, one might say … see what we did right there? The appropriate title for the spot: “The Bark Side.” Amazing.
There are instances when reviewing intentions would be so much easier than reviewing actual movies, and Red Tails, which was directed by first-timer Anthony Hemingway but conceived, shaped and willed into being by George Lucas, is one of them. Red Tails is – or is intended to be – a rousing comic-book adventure based loosely on real-life events: The picture follows a group of Tuskegee Airmen as they shoot down German fighter planes and blow munitions transport trains to smithereens. In between missions, they fight more personal battles, against insidious racism and bigotry. It’s a great idea to make a movie, in 2012, about the Tuskegee Airmen, who broke ground as the U.S. military’s first African American aviators: They represent a chapter in history that’s been underexplored, certainly in the world of movies. But it’s a shame the idea had to come from George Lucas, whose enthusiasm for his subject translates mostly into a peculiar strain of inept awkwardness. Even if Red Tails becomes a hit – and it just might – it still represents a missed opportunity for greatness. Red Tails focuses chiefly on two fictional pilots, Marty “Easy” Julian (Nate Parker) and Joe “Lightning” Little (David Oyelowo), both members of the Air Corp.’s 332 nd Fighter Group stationed in Italy, guys with very different styles but bound by years of friendship. Easy follows all the rules, rarely straying from the straight-and-narrow (though he does, as it turns out, have his own demons to fight); Lightning is the hotdogger who’ll go out of his way to shoot down that random Nazi, even when it means going against orders. He also has the kind of confident swagger that earns him the love of a pretty Italian girl, Sofia (Daniela Ruah); he’s so charming and well-mannered that even Sofia’s old-world mama approves of him. The cast of characters milling, and flying, around Lightning and Easy include Ray “Junior” Gannon (Tristan Wilds), who wants nothing more than to be a fighter pilot even after an injury compromises him, and David “Deke” Watkins (Marcus T. Paulk), the only truly religious pilot in the gang, who keeps a holy card emblazoned with the figure of the deity he refers to as “Black Jesus” close by at all times. In the air, these pilots show a desire to fight hard for their country, and they’ve got the skills to do so. But military brass doesn’t get it – in their eyes, the Tuskegee pilots are inferior and are thus relegated to routine assignments, flying in rickety old junkers. But Colonel A.J. Bullard (Terrence Howard) pulls off a minor miracle, getting a plum assignment for his boys. That pleases pipe-smoking Major Emanuelle Stance (Cuba Gooding Jr.) to no end – his men have been champing at the bit for a chance like this, and at last they’ll have the chance to prove what they’re made of. The problem isn’t that Red Tails paints its story, and its characters, in brilliant, admittedly corny comic-book colors. (The script, filled with dialogue along the lines of “Germans! Let’s get ’em!”, is by John Ridley and Aaron McGruder.) The approach could have worked, particularly when you’ve got a cast of actors as charismatic as these. Gooding and Howard, both known quantities, are perfectly serviceable here – Howard, in particular, makes even the most stilted dialogue sing, thanks to his silky purr. But even the lesser-known performers here, like the British actor Oyelowo, have some astonishing moments of grace – it’s frustrating to watch them working so hard in a picture that can’t, in the end, do them justice. Because there’s just no way around it: Red Tails is, for the most part, simply a clumsy piece of work, one that revels in ’40s comic-book style without managing to capture any of the emotional resonance of comic-book style. There’s no dramatic rhythm or flow to Red Tails . A terrible thing might happen to a character, only to be rapidly erased by this or that handy distraction. It’s as if Lucas were simply afraid of human feeling, any kind of human feeling, even the kind you often find in comic books. The movie has touches of comedy that, for reasons that are almost impossible to fathom, don’t come off as comic. At one point a white character tells one of the pilots that under cover of night, he’ll be safe from the Nazis: “At least they won’t see you in the dark.” The line should be a joke – it is, in fact, a marvelous if obvious joke – but it falls flat, almost as if Lucas and/or Hemingway (it’s hard to tell who’s at the steering wheel here, though we can safely put most of our money on the former) suffered from a failure of nerve and decided to neutralize it. The picture is full of clunker moments like that, instances where the initial impulse may have been good but the execution is nothing but blundering and inelegant. This is Hemingway’s first film, though he has previously directed episodes of Treme, The Wire, and CSI: NY . If he has a distinctive style, it’s impossible to identify it in Red Tails. The handprints all over the movie clearly belong to Lucas. That’s especially true in the technically impressive dogfighting sequences, which are the best reason to see Red Tails . Watching those planes swoop and skim through the air, sometimes flying in ballet-like formation, at others approximating a chaotic streetfight, is the greatest pleasure the movie offers. That’s not surprising when you consider that Lucas, the eternal, wide-eyed naïf among his generation of filmmakers, presented an early cut of Star Wars with old-movie dogfight footage substituting for the space-combat effects he’d fill in later. Yet not even these glorious, effusive sequences are nearly enough to carry the picture, and in some ways, they do it a disservice. Red Tails is a project that has been dear to Lucas’ heart for years. According to a profile of Lucas in the New York Times Magazine , the filmmaker first commissioned the script in the early 1990s, and although 20th Century Fox is distributing the picture, Lucas is footing all the bills himself. Lucas has admitted that with Red Tails he’s using the comic-book approach to lure a younger audience; he wants them to engage with the story of the Tuskegee Airmen, and his intentions are noble. If only his passion had translated into a more graceful movie, one that didn’t squander the considerable gifts of its cast. In the end Red Tails is mostly about the coolness of flying. Its heart is in the clouds, instead of with the men at the controls. Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Director has wanted to bring story of Tuskegee Airmen to big screen for nearly 25 years. By Kevin P. Sullivan Terrence Howard Photo: MTV News George Lucas made a name for himself in the late ’70s and ’80s with “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones,” but for nearly 25 years, the director tried to bring one story to the big screen, a movie he wasn’t able to make until now. After decades in development, “Red Tails,” Lucas’ tale of the Tuskegee Airmen, will finally hit theaters. The story of Lucas’ battle to get “Red Tails” in front of the camera only added to the significance of the story for many of the cast and crew. Terrence Howard plays Col. A.J. Bullard, one of the commanders of the Tuskegee Airmen, America’s first African-American air regimen. The actor told MTV News that Lucas’ passion set the tone for the entire project. “Well, he has complete control of the Force. As far as I understand it, he invented the Force,” Howard said. “It’s quite a moving inertia associated with it. You believe in him, and when he says something, he follows it all the way through.” According to Howard, having such a strong backing force changed the way the actors approached the film and their roles. “It gives us a great deal of encouragement walking into the roles,” he said. “We know that we’re going to be 100 percent supported.” Like any Lucas project, “Red Tails” comes with the technical wizardry that made the man a legend. “When you look at the final project and you look at these fight scenarios, you can’t believe that it’s not real,” Howard said. “It looks tangible, and it’s wonderful to be able to say ‘George Lucas manned this, created this vessel that Anthony Hemingway was able to direct.’ We become moving parts of this incredible armada.” Do you plan to see ‘Red Tails’ in theaters? Let us know in the comments! Check out everything we’ve got on “Red Tails.” For breaking news, celebrity columns, humor and more — updated around the clock — visit MTVMoviesBlog.com . Related Videos MTV Rough Cut: Red Tails
