I'm sick of George Lucas.
Not because he's made a mockery of the "Star Wars" series. Not because he's a mediocre director with delusions of greatness. Not even because of Jar-Jar Binks.
OK, maybe a little bit because of Jar-Jar Binks.
Lucas's Industrial Light & Magic recently announced that a computer-generated character will play a lead role in "Star Wars: Episode II." It won't be long before Lucas is doing heavy publicity for the film, and we will all be told to marvel at what a forward-thinking, savvy filmmaker he is. Lucas is, without doubt, an innovator.
The question is, does anybody really want what he's innovating? It was nice to have the re-release of the "Star Wars" trilogy, but did we really need the pompous "Special Edition?" Never before had so much hype been generated by five minutes of filler inserted 20 years after the fact.
The hype surrounding this filler was another step in a frightening movement that exploded after the release of "Jurassic Park" -- an increasing assumption that film needs to become digital in every respect.
With each re-release of the "Star Wars" trilogy, you had your local idiot who covers entertainment for the 11-o'clock news (or Joel Siegel, an idiot with national scope) gushing at Lucas's ultra-realistic computer effects. Then "Episode I" came out using even NEWER technology, and some ebullient reviewers had to breathe into a paper bag as they tried to describe how LIFELIKE the computer-generated characters were!
Maybe I have especially good eyes, for these characters do not look "real" to me. The slimmed-down Jabba the Hutt in the re-release of "Star Wars" was novel, but I was much more convinced by the old one made from 100 pounds of latex and operated by a half-dozen sweaty Teamsters.
Jar-Jar Binks was an annoyance even without taking his obnoxious dialogue into account. Whenever he was on-screen, I felt that George Lucas believed I was a complete jackass. Here is a character with skin that is too uniform and shiny, with extremely awkward body movement, whom the other characters can never quite look straight in the eye.
It's offensive. Suspending my disbelief to the point where I could visually accept Jar-Jar Binks might be hazardous to my health. The problem isn't necessarily with integrating human and non-human characters, but with Lucas, who churns out second-rate product and expects us to hail him as a visionary.
And many in the media do just that, because he's Mr. Digital. "Digital" is today what "solid-state" was in the '70s. You're just not "with it" if you aren't using your digital satellite system to watch shows on the digital HDTV that's hooked up to your digital (and solid-state!) MP3 player.
"Digital" is good business for media conglomerates and equipment manufacturers -- which are often the same entities, as in Sony and GE. It is an easy way to make products seem like the new must-have thing, and by the same token, adding "digital" justifies a price increase. Media outlets like "digital" because it provides more channels through which they can deliver content to you, the receptive consumer.
Lucas advanced his digital vision to the next step by shooting "Star Wars: Episode II" on tape instead of film. You can only get the full experience of the new movie, maintains Lucas, if you see it in a theater that has digital projection.
Why shouldn't we believe Lucas when he says that digital projection is superior? Because in nearly every respect, it isn't. Digital motion pictures, while remarkably crisp, look flat and have low resolution when compared to 35mm film. Digital projection is also extremely expensive -- a digital projector costs about $150,000, while the best 35mm projector runs about $30,000.
All this information comes from an article in the current issue of Newsweek. "Technology, of course, improves rapidly," begins the final paragraph in that piece, which then proceeds to paint a rosy outlook for digital projection after pointing out its myriad deficiencies.
Of course technology improves! In fact, one inventor has recently made an amazing improvement in conventional film technology -- but Newsweek didn't see fit to include that in its article. The inventor, a film editor named Dean Goodhill, has created a system called MaxiVision 48. It projects film at twice the traditional speed (48 frames per second instead of 24) and makes other refinements to create a picture far clearer than current 35mm systems.
I heard about MaxiVision from Roger Ebert. Not in his newspaper column or on his TV show, but in an article he wrote for the website of the International Federation of Film Critics. Somehow I'm guessing that www.fipresci.org doesn't have quite the readership that Newsweek does.
Ebert is confident that MaxiVision is how we will watch our movies in the future. I'm not sure. MaxiVision is a $10,000 system that can be retrofitted to current 35mm setups and is backwards compatible with all 35mm prints. Which upgrade do you think manufacturers would rather sell -- the $10,000 rig that works with old equipment or the $150,000 complete overhaul?
The people who run the film industry are not the same people that care about the medium of film. Mr. Digital, George Lucas, gets to deliver his sermons in Time and Newsweek and on the theater screens in the form of Jar-Jar Binks. Mr. Film, Roger Ebert, is relegated to preaching to the International Federation of Film Critics. Mr. Digital has good odds of winning this bout, and the medium of film is going to suffer immeasurably as a result.
I made a mistake at the beginning of this article. I'm not sick of George Lucas.
I'm frightened of George Lucas.
