Sherry Chandler » Oh I am so ashamed!
Oh I am so ashamed!
After years and years of making fun of Mark Hamil as Luke Skywalker, here is my comeuppance! I am a bleeding heart liberal to my very core.
But at least Lance Mannion has an explanation for why he couldn’t act!
Where Lucas’ tin or cloth ear does the most harm is in his dialogue. He’s notoriously bad at giving his actors lines they can work with. In fact, his dialogue is so bad that it turns good actors into bad ones. They have to struggle so hard to make a speech sound like it makes sense that they have to forget about infusing it with anything like emotion or character.
The rest of the post is a disquisition on Lucas and Tolkien as linguists and mythographers, written in response to Anthony Lane’s review in The New Yorker. It’s all too intellectual for the things themselves but what fun in life if you can’t over-intellectualize pop culture? What point blogging for that matter?
If you take this particular quiz, you will get sick of the continuous looping of the theme – or maybe that’s just my own particular punishment for having raised two sons and thus having sat through countless replays.
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3 Comments
1. MW replies at 19th May 2005, 10:56 pm :
They have to struggle so hard to make a speech sound like it makes sense that they have to forget about infusing it with anything like emotion or character.
This is, I think, particularly true of the newer batch of movies. With the original trilogy Lucas had to at least use a modicum of imagination to formulate his world. Now he’s just playing off already established gimmicks and doesn’t have to actually even think about anything.
2. Tommy replies at 23rd May 2005, 9:25 am :
I will say that he’s very thorough in “creating” alien languages — I don’t know how many of his characters need subtitles (but certainly not Wookiees or Ewoks).
But I agree. Lucas has tortured prose. Harrison Ford is even rumored to have commented on it during the filming of Star Wars.
I haven’t done an exhausting concordance (or any concordance at all), but I think that Peter Jackson isn’t 100% true to Tolkien’s dialogue. I don’t know whose fault it is, but plenty of the lines in the movies seem more complicated than they should be.
The Orcs and Sam are about the only ones who use plain language. What does that tell you about JRR’s conceptions?
3. Lance Mannion replies at 27th May 2005, 9:38 pm :
Luke is the hero, Sherry. You should be proud.
And Ford really did say to Lucas, “George you can type this shit, but you can’t say it!”
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