That’s the thing about Star Wars – it’s very all-encompassing, it’s old: it takes everything from the past and it packages it forward into the future. What is Star Wars at its core? It’s classic[…]
Category: Movies
“…the parade music at the end [of The Phantom Menace] is ‘The Emperor’s Theme’ in disguise”
“The Emperor’s Theme” shows up, you know, a couple times, so “The Emperor’s Theme” happens at the very beginning, then when he checks in during the invasion, you get “The Emperor’s Theme” again, then when[…]
Star Wars “is a very, very rich soundtrack”
It is a very, very rich soundtrack; there’s so much going on and it’s a very diverse soundtrack. And, of course, it sticks to kind of the Romantic orchestral tradition of the 19th century, what[…]
Disney “usually does not return to classic characters in a willy-nilly manner”
Hollywood loves to revisit hits in ways that can be maddening — oh, that old script was wonderful; we’ll change everything — and Disney has a particular tradition of mining and remining the same stories.[…]
“…George Lucas crafted a saga that is endlessly fascinating and worthy of repeated viewings”
Star Wars has always been about the unknown and the unknowable, the instinct to seek answers where none might exist and the faith in that galaxy to have an underlying logic and integrity. By jumping[…]
“Star Wars intentionally challenged an audience who had no idea what they were getting themselves into”
Sometimes it’s easy to forget that Star Wars used to just be one movie. Before the novels, the comic strips, the video games, the television shows, and all the sequels and prequels, there was just[…]
“Dr. McCoy and Mr. Spock…don’t need to be good friends to be effective colleagues”
The differences that matter — that create comic friction and dramatic tension — are temperamental. Dr. McCoy and Mr. Spock provide the most obvious example. Their relationship in the new “Star Trek Beyond” illustrates one[…]
“Superhero team-building is a venerable comic-book practice, one that flourished in the ’60s and ’70s…more or less contemporaneously with the first voyages of the Starship Enterprise”
Nothing in popular culture, or in consumer capitalism, is ever really new. Superhero team-building is a venerable comic-book practice, one that flourished in the ’60s and ’70s — with the Avengers, the X-Men, the Fantastic[…]
“For A New Hope, the crew scavenged interesting- looking spare parts from model kits and junkyards to make the ships and vehicles”
For A New Hope, the crew scavenged interesting-looking spare parts from model kits and junkyards to make the ships and vehicles. Tomkins works the same way now. “It’s found items, you know, be it parts[…]
“At the moment that our foundational religious stories began to echo too distantly in the past, a new storytelling rose to supplement what time threatened to take from us”
Hollywood is not only a fun factory of vapid entertainment. At times, Hollywood plays an important role. The role of the ancient storyteller. Hear its stories and draw from its wisdom. If we believe that[…]