- Fanfreakingtastic.
- The Empire would have prevailed if Vader wasn’t having to constantly tighten that loose nut on his joystick.
- The rebel leaders back on Yavin 4 appeared to have a sponsorship from Purina (I remember noticing this as a kid).
- The DS exploding into a bunch of bright lights meshed perfectly with the music. Or vice versa. Just perfect. It ain’t ALL about the visuals, George. You did great the first time.
- How shortsighted for Lucas to think that technology in the 90s was at its zenith. His added effects look so dated/hamfisted.
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FYI, I relented and paid $6 for one month of access to the download site. The limitation of downloads became untenable. At least they give you the option not to be automatically renewed, and I used a fake iCloud email address.
Empire and Jedi downloaded. So now it’s just a case of tagging and watching.
Empire and Jedi done, and the above comments all hold true. Just wonderful.
I always found the CGI-splattered special editions unwatchable, and now I understand why: the changes just took me out of the moment. Watching them, the changes were like someone shouting in my head “Hey! Look at this!” So my concentration was constantly broken by Lucas’ masturbations.
Now the movies just flow as they were intended to.
I’m going to Jedi at the symphony in March and just now remembering that it will be the “special” edition. But that throne room scene will be awesome.
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I watched The Last Duel now that it’s on HBO Max. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck have no business being in it, but if you can get past that, it’s really pretty good.
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Yep. Also, no “Yub Yub” song.
ETA: The despecialized versions have an isolated score track included, so you can watch the movie with just the music if you wish.
I have never and will never forgive Affleck for his butchering of an English accent while hamming it up to eleven in “Shakespeare in Love”. I’m sure it’s bad for most people but, in real life, Edward “Ned” Alleyn was the founder of my school.
The Last Duel is set in France, so you’d think we’d be safe. But no, Affleck and Damon and Driver still do “English” accents. Affleck hasn’t improved since Shakespeare in Love and the other two are just as bad. The only saving grace is that most of the time they’re so lazy it just sounds American.
Still, somehow, good movie.
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This is typical now. Anyone foreign can have an English accent and they don’t even try to excuse it.
There was a British WW2 sitcom called “Private Schultz”, and they used a clever device whereby the Germans would have a German accent and speak in broken English when speaking English, but when they spoke to each other in German they spoke in English using the actors’ native English accents. The idea being that they were speaking German to each other and so sounded “normal”.
Then there was “The Hunt for Red October” that used a zoom-in / zoom-out to indicate the switch from Russians speaking to each other in Russian to Russians speaking to each other in English but it was really Russian. All except for Connery, of course, who was speaking Scottish the whole time.
Does Damon take a moment in the movie to peddle some crypto?
He was a bear baiter! How can they leave the school named after him!
Saddlers? The Saddlers give scholarships? We had a saddler in my home town growing up, but I’m not betting he’d be giving any scholarships.
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In “Chernobyl” they just had the actors use their own accents.
Likely better than seeing supposed Russians speaking English with Russian accents.
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Watching The Last Duel, it’s impossible not to recognize how perfectly Monty Python nailed the look, and thus ruined it for evermore.
There are a couple of moments that actually made sense, like overlaying Ian McDiarmid as the Emperor in “Empire”. But the CGI is so bad that it now looks worse than the original effects. It’s also so random and hamfisted that it couldn’t be less subtle if it had been spliced in by Tyler Durden.
And don’t get me started on how how crap like Greedo shooting first completely destroys Solo’s arc from pirate to hero. I’m sure there’s a rant on this already in here somewhere.
OMG Affleck is horrible in this
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Apparently he co-wrote the screenplay so I guess he forced himself upon the movie. I was going to list a few actors who would’ve been better than him in that role but, basically, it’s all of them.
To give him credit for the writing, from what I’ve read since seeing the movie, it does appear to be pretty faithful to the contemporary reports. The duel was a lot shorter, but the call to confess and the profession of innocence supposedly happened. Marguerite’s perspective is a fabrication, because no one wrote down what women said back then.
So he wrote a good movie, and then tarnished it with his acting.
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Put Christian Bale in the Matt Damon role and put literally anyone else in the Ben Affleck role and you’ve got yourself a hell of a movie.
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These are all at 720p? Watching that YouTube Battle of Yavin clip at 4K is a treat. Masterful.
Yes. I think they’re sourced mostly from the LaserDisk releases, so that’s as good as it gets. My TV is 70” 2K, and they looked fantastic (save for the aforementioned occasional color balance issues). I don’t know how scalable they will be for a home theater screen, though.
I don’t know how they made the 4K versions either; the masters having been destroyed by Lucas (although I do still wonder whether this is true or he just said it to be a dick). But I hope they are working on doing 4K versions for the whole despecialized trilogy, because I’d love to have that!
Thanks.
And, yeah, not sure what their source data was for that 4K clip. Running it at 2160p, it sure looks like 4k. Look at Vader’s eyes at 9:55. Yes, you can actually see his eyes thru the visor lenses.