Tag Archives: George Lucas

Indiana Jones and the Rewatching of Movies

I used to work at a job where I had to watch cable TV all day. (It sounds more fun than it was.) One of the networks I had to watch would often replay the same movies over and over again. At that time I was studying screenwriting and wanted to write movies myself, so it was instructive to watch a single movie multiple times to deconstruct it and figure out what the filmmakers did right or wrong, how and why. I tend to avoid rewatching movies unless it’s one of my absolute favorites, and even then, only years later when I don’t remember it too well. But for this job, I wound up seeing the same movie multiple times in a single day, or two days in a row, or several times over the course of a week/month/year. I saw both good movies and bad movies this way—and some movies that I thought were good when I first saw them, but by the fifth or tenth time realized it wasn’t very good in the first place. One movie (or group of movies) that I repeatedly watched at my job was the Indiana Jones franchise. 

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The New Star Wars Trilogy That Could Have Been

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With the conclusion of the latest Star Wars trilogy, and supposedly the end of the Skywalker saga, I’ve been thinking about the series as a whole and its legacy. I liked each movie in the new trilogy upon first watching them. They were all enjoyable and exciting in-theater experiences with seemingly had everything you’d want in a Star Wars story: the Force, the Dark Side, lightsabers, space battles, aliens, planets, robots, Jedi, Sith, old masters, young apprentices, new characters, old characters, science fiction concepts, and more. I truly had a great time watching each movie the first time around, but it was only upon later reflection that I realized the parts didn’t quite add up to the whole. The acting, writing, and direction were all top-notch, especially compared to episodes 1-3, but the problem with this new trilogy, and the one area where the prequels were superior, is perhaps the most important part of all: story. Continue reading