The cultural industry that the 1977 film spawned has ground its original charm and wonder out of existence.
Saw the last Star Wars movie last night at the privately-owned little theater in Edmonds, WA. I liked the film, but I liked the original trilogy and the final three just fine... they are a good time at the movies with some fun moments. But before every film at this theater, the owner gets up on stage and talks to the audience a bit about community theater, and what "throwback" films people want him to get for thee Throwback Thursdays shows. Last night was different. Disney, with the acquisition of all of 20th Century Fox catalog, and the release of Disney+, will no longer work with private/independent theaters any more. If an independent wants to EVER show a Disney-owned film again, they need to consume and market the ENTIRE superhero catalog, sell Disney's merch and partner's food, and not show any more independent films. It is EXACTLY the dick-move that everyone was expecting Disney to pull, and they did. Tron. Dead Poet's Society. Pretty Woman. Noises Off. The Nightmare Before Christmas. Ed Wood. Grosse Pointe Blank. The Sixth Sense. High Fidelity. Pirates of the Caribbean (all of them). Up. All Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Alien, Avatar, Deadpool, Die Hard, X-Men films. Grapes of Wrath. Miracle on 34th Street. The Sound of Music. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. MASH. Home Alone. The Martian. (20Th Century Fox's catalog goes back to 1914's "Gertie the Dinosaur", and includes some of the earliest films ever screened.) All the Three Stooges films. Thee King and I. South Pacific. Hello Dolly! Patton. All That Jazz. All of "The Omen" horror films. The Cannonball Run. The Gods Must Be Crazy. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai. Brazil. The Name of the Rose. The Princess Bride. All TMNT products. The Exorcist. All the Predator films. Naked Lunch. Speed. Office Space. Fight Club. Etc.
That was illegal from 1948 until three weeks ago.“We have determined that the decrees, as they are, no longer serve the public interest, because the horizontal conspiracy — the original violation animating the decrees — has been stopped,” said Delrahim.
I had to look this up, cause you had me in a bit of a panic in this one, because TMNT is split between quite a few companies right now (like Paramount and Hasbro), depending on the media, and I was worried that Disney went on a secret buying spree. Looks like the ownership rights are still all over the place. But man, I tell you, Disney is like The Blob at this point. Eating more things and getting bigger and bigger and I think we're at the point there's really no stopping them. I was actually pretty upset that they bought Fox because at this rate, they have way more corporate control over American Pop Culture than anyone should and they're not exactly graceful with their properties. So now I don't buy their products, which is fine with me, because I wanna focus more on street level art anyway. The only thing that frustrates me is that their acquisition of Fox put a real dent in my Blu-Ray Library building, because as you wonderfully pointed out, Fox has a pretty expansive back catalog. At this point in my life, the only way Disney is getting any of my money is through National Geographic, but seeing as there are many other wonderful organizations out there that fill similar niches, I can even cut that out without much loss. The only thing I can't avoid is that iNaturalist partners with National Geographic and that site is just too wonderful for me at the moment and I think they do genuine good.All TMNT products
I suspect Tim Kreider has never glanced over any of the original Star Wars scripts. There's a real yearning here for Star Wars to be culturally relevant and deep and symbolic when even Lucas will freely admit that it's Flash Gordon run through Campbell and stuffed in a Kurosawa framework. If you want to know how deep Lucas was into symbolism, you need only watch THX-1138 - which rises all the way to "fascism is bad but a snappy dresser." That the prequels were horrible and disturbing is not because Lucas lost his way or some shit, it's because he never found it: USC film students studied Triumph of the Will. They didn't study it for its context, they studied it for its cinematic tricks because Leni Riefenstahl was really goddamn good at it. She was about as close to rehabilitated as she ever got back then. When Lucas duplicates the wreath-laying at Nuremberg, it's not to say "don't turn into Nazis" it's to say "look how fucking cool this looks." And that, fundamentally, is the core of Star Wars: But that's all it is. And that, more than anything, is what literally everyone beefs about Star Wars - that " Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.Lots of critics pointed out that the coda of “Star Wars,” when three heroes march up a corridor between columns of massed soldiers, is a visual quote of the wreath-laying at Nuremberg in “Triumph of the Will,” but everyone seems to assume this is a random allusion, devoid of historical context. It’s not as if Lucas was oblivious of the source. His film is full of fascist iconography — all, up until this moment, associated with the Empire. Assuming this final image is deployed intentionally, it might be most hopefully interpreted as a warning: Don’t become the thing you’ve fought against.
Seen anew, much of its imagery is surreally beautiful: the vast plated underside of an armored starship sliding on and on forever overhead; the dreamlike tableau, seen through a scrim of smoke and framed by concentric portals, of a girl shrouded in white furtively genuflecting to a robot; a golden android waving for help in a desert by the skeleton of a dinosaur; a convoy of space fighters opening their split wings in sequence, like poison flowers blossoming.
It is a tale