Maybe George should have had it animated instead. (Hell, it practically was anyway, considering all the CGI work they did.)
When you're making a movie, you hire actors whose performances will enhance your vision. You don't hire people to play roles and expect them to be robots. If that's all Lucas wanted--self-propelled manniquins--maybe he could have talked to Disney's Imagineers and had them gin up some audio-animatrons for him.
Think about what Casablanca would have been like if its director had told Humphrey Bogart, "As an actor, you have to think of yourself as a ditch digger." Particularly if Bogard had decided that meant, "You need to think of yourself as a ditch digger, because this isn't the proper arena for actual creative expression. This is my thing. It is all very thought-out in my head, and you need to show up to make my wants a reality."
Casablanca would have sucked, instead of being considered one of the greatest movies of all time, because the performances in the movie were what made it work.
A director's function is to make the movie; but a good director knows when to get out of the way of his actors and let them act. That's what actors are for; and it's why you have auditions, to see if a particular actor's performance matches your vision. You then fine-tune it in rehearsals, and then you do take after take after bloody take until you have what you want--and even then you spend hours in the cutting room trying to decide which take you prefer, which one best matches your vision...and at that, done right, you can chop up the takes and use a piece of take 1 here, a bit of take 2 there, and so on.
I think ultimately that is why Star Wars eps 1-3 failed so miserably, both as entertainment and as art: because Lucas had 100% control over the entire thing.
* * *
Occasional Superheroine is a blog I happened to find, and which is interesting reading. And it led me to:
The John Byrne Forum on Byrne Robotics.
Not being heavily into the American comics scene, I don't know who any of these people are. But clicking on links on the latter page led me to the first "new" Funky Winkerbean strips I've seen in years. Decades. A damn long time.
And they're good.
* * *
Speaking of comic art, I've had the hankering to do some drawing, but the instant I put pencil to page, I lose my enthusiasm. I hate that. It's the artistic equivalent of impotence, and it sucks.
I've had this problem with writing on and off over the years. I suppose it was inevitable that I'd have the same problem with drawing.
But at least now I know why it happens: because while I want to draw, I don't have anything I want to draw. The output buffer is empty, no jobs pending.
That's why I haven't added anything to Megumi's Diary even though it's the most successful effort I've had since American Dawn. I started doing layouts for AD in 1998, and finished pages a year later. Most of it is still layouts, but I have twice as many pages of AD as MD.
MD, however, I started working on in 2006. And despite the fact that Magical Angel Selene has existed as a concept since 2001, I've got a handful of pages for it at best. Crisis Angel has character designs for one character and a basic framework for the first couple issues. SubaruCo at least has character designs for the main cast; my unnamed "Atlantean princess" story doesn't even have that--it's got a character design and a fuzzy outline for the first issue.
But I can't get interested in working on this stuff for some reason. I sit down just to draw a picture of a character and can't even do that; and if I try to force it, what I get is an unappealing mishmash.
Being a creative person it therefore bothers me considerably when I can't create.
Writing has been the same way over the past couple of months. I've got ideas that are worth working on; but I can't seem to work on them. The problem isn't that I don't know what to do next; it's that I just don't want to put the words on paper. (...into memory. Whatever.) I don't have any desire to continue working on these things; and so they languish.
I think it must be because I know what happens next--and because I know what happens next I don't feel any pressing need to explain it. Unfortunately, that's not how you write a story so that others can possibly get some enjoyment out of it.
Oh well.
* * *
Current anime playlist:
Pretty Cure Max Heart
Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's
Bamboo Blade
Blue Drop
PCMH I don't need to discuss. It's still good. I'm about halfway through now; and when it's over, there are two movies--but after those are exhausted we're out of the original continuity and into the follow-on stories. *sigh*
MGLN-A's is just as good as the other two Nanoha series were. In A's, Fate has come back and we are introduced to Signum, Vita, Shamal, the dog-guy who's name I can never remember, and Hayate.
Hayate, at the beginning of the series, is confined to a wheelchair. I look forward to seeing how that gets corrected, because she sure as heck didn't need a wheelchair in StrikerS.
I also have to wonder how Arf--Fate's familiar--gets turned into "Little Arf" in StrikerS. In the first series, and at least as far as ep 2 in the second, Arf ain't no puppy! She's got bouncy boobies and is plenty hawt; but her brief appearance in StrikerS showed a little-girlish Arf. WTF.
Bamboo Blade has some genuine laugh-out-loud moments, even in the first ep; a LOL is a hard thing to elicit from me when a series is just starting, for some reason. But it's very well-done.
Blue Drop, after two episodes, is just awesome. I don't know how they did it, but I instantly cared about the main character, and I'm fascinated by the story. The artwork is great, too.
Speaking of which, it's time for me to watch some more.