Tag: George Lucas

6 Degrees: Friday Flix

168816805 FOR 6 DEGREES COVER PHOTO SHOT

 

Hello Film Fans! We are entering an exciting season with lots of awards and film releases that will kick off the start of Awards Season in Hollywood and around the globe. There’s the Sundance Film Festival for Independent films, followed by the Oscars in February and the Cannes Film Festival later in the Spring.

So that means there’s a surfeit of really good movies to see out there (for a change!). I’ve heard good buzz about The Shape of Water, one of my must-see’s, as well as Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and Spielberg’s The Post.

Other films in contention for top awards include The Florida Project with Willem Dafoe, Lady Bird, directed by Greta Gerwig, and Phantom Thread starring Daniel Day Lewis.

The Many Elephants in the Room: These days, there are many ways to be “Politically Incorrect” when talking about film and the Hollywood Studio System. Harvey Weinstein was just the tip of the iceberg which has set off a real earthquake which is long overdue, not only in the famed Halls of Hollywood, but as a National Conversation for Americans to begin in the workplace. At Friday Flix and on the Six Degrees blog, we’ve talked for the past year about the ways in which women are slighted in Hollywood. Not only slighted in the directors’ chair, but in women’s pay, and of course, on the infamous ‘casting couch’ which has become, thanks to serial offenders such as Weinstein, an open secret. So the fact that we are talking about these things is a positive development as we move into 2018.

There’s still a long way to go. And the diversity issue, another well-known open secret in Hollywood, has also become an issue at the Oscars, with #OscarsSoWhite trending, as well as the many barriers which still need to be broken in terms of diversity and gender. For those who believe this is a recent phenomenon, cast your minds back (if you are just a child-use the Google Machine!) to the time that Marlon Brando refused his Best Actor Oscar in 1973 and sent a young Native American woman named Sacheen Littlefeather on stage in full Tribal dress to state the reasons why Brando didn’t want to accept his Academy Award. He was, to say the least, ahead of his time on this issue. And to bring this conversation full circle, there’s a good piece featured in 6 Degrees Magazine from The New Yorker this week that asks: Can Hollywood Change Its Ways?

Looking forward to: Hostiles, the Western with Christian Bale, which has gotten good advance reviews. For more films coming soon, we compiled a list of the 2018 releases that look promising. And Tom Hardy is starring in his own Comic book film, Venom, set to release in October of this year.

The Black Panther film opening next month has received lots of good advance press and has a big following as a long-anticipated comic offering. There’s a list of books set to become films in 2018 that are listed in an article from Bustle, if you feel so inclined to read the plots and compare. There’s a list of best 21st Century films out from Gizmodo. I can’t agree with many of the films listed, but Arrival and Ex Machina, and possibly Let the Right One In would probably make the cut on my list….

I’m working to compile some of the best films of the past two decades. That would be the films of the 21st Century. In my book, 6 Degrees of Film: The Future of Film in the Global Village, there’s an entire section that features the work of George Lucas and his Industrial Light & Magic Studio. The CGI concept of film-making has really revolutionized the industry. As someone said in the book, the ideas and concepts that were simply on paper or in someone’s head can now be conceptualized with the industry’s graphic and computer capability. The only limits now are bound in the limits of the director or filmmaker’s imagination.

My gift to all of the devoted film fans of 6 Degrees is a downloadable Chapter of 6 Degrees of Film: From Star Wars to Sin City. If you’d like a copy, please sign up here for the Friday Flix and the upcoming Oscar Newsletter, and you’ll get link to receive a copy of the chapter from my book. I’ve got other upcoming gifts for Film Fans in 2018, and hope to hear from all of you during the course of the year. Until then, See you at the movies!-ML

Next Week: A look at the new Movie Pass -the Good and bad points when using the service

• Can Hollywood Change its Ways?

 

 

Back to the Future & The Future on Film in 6 Degrees

Backto future 2015

October 2015 will be the 30th anniversary of the premiere of  Back to the Future. Some of the films portrayals of a future world have been remarkably accurate. Other things were missed, but that’s the nature of predictions. Here are a few of the major things the film got right (and a few things missed):

 

 Nike Self-tying shoes: The shoes they came up with look remarkably like the type that Nike sells.
  Hoverboards: The technology is there for a few elites, but not for the general public.
 Drones & Robot Technology: The drones were imagined with uncanny accuracy.
  Biometric Scanners-for eyes/Fingerprint ID’s: This is current state of the art technology
 Google glass specs: Although they aren’t flying off the shelves, we do have Google glasses
  Flying cars: Nope. Not yet.
  TV Screens and video chats: Predated Skype and FaceTime with their imagined version.
  No Internet! Probably the biggest omission is the scope of the internet and how much it affects our daily lives
Back to the Future will be screened as part of Tampa Theatre's Summer FIlm Series this Sunday at 3:00 pm at Tampa Theatre.

Star wars logo

 

In the beginning, there was George Melies’ A Trip to the Moon in 1902. By 1939, The Wizard of Oz came along. But there were no real “cutting-edge” special effects on film for the first fifty years or so. Until Stanley Kubrick made 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 and gave audiences a glimpse into just what the filmmaker can do with a superior imagination and a large budget.

From Forbidden Planet and The Day the Earth Stood Still, to Star Wars and Jurassic Park, futurist sci-fi has advanced technologically to the point where the Special Effects completely dominate the action and the plot. Star Wars, released in 1977, was the game changer, in terms of special effects and the way the future was portrayed on film. Audiences were no longer satisfied with a flying car held up by string or a giant enlarged lizard. They wanted to see and to experience something extraordinary. And George Lucas and his Industrial Light & Magic studios delivered. They were the game changers in charge of the newly minted Cinematic Universe of the 21st Century.

Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) became so adept that the end result made one of the principal managers say, “The only thing that limits films these days are the budget and the scope of the director’s imagination. “We’re helping directors previsualize their films. Our designs are becoming more specific to the actual look of the film.”

One veteran from Industrial Light & Magic speculated of a future where film becomes an interactive experience, enabling participants…”to explore virtual worlds or even inhabit the form of computer graphics characters, controlling the action with a joystick. Players from all points on the planet could be linked through TV screens, computer modems, or game pods in arcade settings.”
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When asked if films will become obsolete, ILM Visual Effects Supervisor Dennis Muran said: “Eventually…..theaters will be able to use an electronic or laser-light projection system, which is not a new thing; it’s been around for a long time. The hard part will be getting the thousands of movie theaters around the country to upgrade and install a new $200,000 projection system”

And the man with the vision, George Lucas, who created the Cinematic Universe we now live in, said this about futuristic film :

“I see true environments being created and combined with a lot of biotech things going on, in terms of manipulating people’s sense through drugs. This combination will have the most powerful effect on the kind of storytelling we’re doing today. It’s too far off for me to worry about, and I’m no interested in virtual reality at its current level, because it’s just too crude. But if you can program virtual reality or simulator rides with biotech, you will have a very interesting non-world. The first step would be to take the simulator ride part of the environment…where you can just implant the story in a pill and live it.
That’s not outside the realm of possibility. You’d take the pill and go to sleep. It’d be like a dream and you’d have an actual, real, physical experience of something completely imaginary. What that’ll mean for society, I have no idea, and how you’d get there from here is way beyond me, but I know enough to know it’s within the realm of possibility. Because they’re already going there, creating images without actually making them, just as you create them in a dream.”

This experience would not be standard movie theater fare as we have come to know it. It would be a reality far removed from our own near future world. As long as humans aspire to dream and to create, we will be interested in watching movies in whatever form that might be.

Excerpt from 6 Degrees of Film: The Future of Film in the Global Village-ML Johnson 2013