That's pretty fascinating.

I love deep looks inside movie-making magic like this.

*promote

Movie making is crazy impressive.
Tom Cruise is more of a bad ass than i had thought.
This was more entertaining than the movie could ever be(i'm guessing).

Hmmm... I can understand the intent is to drum up the hype & interest for Solo, but really, I think the PR machine is just spinning in circles and going through the motions for the paychecks. These teasers are not going to convince the hard core SW fans that the movie will be good/worthy of the SW name. Oh well, it is meant for the general public.

For as a rich universe as Star Wars, I can stomach the terrible movies. I can mental-block those because there are plenty of other mediums that can tell much better SW stories. Sadly I put ever less and less hope that the big movies can kindle the love of the property. As many of the movie-making analysis videos say, modern SFX bonanza is really more of a hindrance than complimentary to better film-making.

My main enjoyment of SW now comes from the books, comics and the model kits I build. The movies, not so much.

The preparation---and the importation of the Hong Kong movie making skills in "flying by wire---contributed more than I had appreciated. Thanks for posting this!

I got sucked into the Spawn for awhile in its beginnings.
I think I still have all those issues.

It was the one of the better Image brands.

Digital Comics are pretty awesome.
Comixology keeps improving their tablet/phone app.
I would have never read Atomic Robo or the Walking Dead or even Invincible if it wasn't for Comixology.

Right now I am reading X-O Manowar, because Valiant is joining the movie making business...google it.

Laters.

"Automatically ok"? Not necessarily. But in cases where it makes sense, at a stretch even "plot sense" for the character to be there; yeah, I think that is OK.

The Last Samurai isn't a documentary. But, the general historical justification for Tom Cruise's character being in Japan is pretty much valid. Meiji was interested in the West -- clothes, technology, weapons, and military. He actually did hire Westerners to train his army, although from what I read it sounds like they were German, French, and Italian rather than American. Still, the movie portrays the general situation/setting with at least *decent* broad-strokes historical accuracy. LOADS of movies deviate from even this degree of historical accuracy *way* more without drawing complaints; particularly if their main purpose is entertainment and not education / documentary.


Your hypothetical reverse movie makes some valid criticisms. Even though it would have been historically possible for a Westerner to be in Japan at the time -- even to be involved with training a Western-style military -- it would be unlikely for such a person to get captured, run into a Shogun that speaks English, become a badass (or at least passable) samurai warrior, and end up playing a major role in politics and significantly influencing Emperor Meiji.

My defense against those criticisms is that, for me at least, the movie is entertaining; which is kinda the point. Your "Union Samurai" movie might be equally entertaining and therefore given an equal pass on historical inaccuracies by me.

The whole characters as a "lens through which the audience can appreciate a culture/history outside their own" issue is (slightly) more weighty to me. I don't think those are often necessary, but I don't feel like my intelligence is being insulted if the movie maker feels that they are in order to sell tickets.

I love the Chinese historical novel "Three Kingdoms". A few years ago, John Wu made the movie "Red Cliff", mostly about one particular battle in the historical period portrayed in that book. For the Chinese audience, Wu made the movie in two parts, summed up about four and a half hours long. For the US / West, he made a version trimmed to just over two hours. Why? Because he (and a team of market researchers, I'm sure) knew that very few Westerners would go to see a 4+ hour long movie, entirely in Mandarin Chinese (with subtitles), about a piece of Chinese history from ~1800 years ago that very few in the West have ever heard of or know anything about.

I think the full 4+ hour long movie is great. In my personal top 10 favorite movies of all time, ahead of most Hollywood stuff. But I also understand that there's no way that movie would appeal to all but a tiny, tiny fraction of Western viewers in that full-on 4+ hour format. But, even though I personally think the cut-down 2 hour "US" version is drastically inferior to the full cut, I am glad that he made it because it gives a suitably accurate introduction to the subject matter to more people in the West (just like the "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" and "Dynasty Warriors" videogames do), and makes that tiny, tiny fraction of Western people that know anything about it a little less tiny. While being entertaining along the way.

For other movies, sometimes the best way that a filmmaker can sell a movie to an audience that otherwise might not accept it (at least in large enough numbers to justify the production costs) may be to insert one of these "lens" characters for the audience to identify with. I don't think there is inherently anything wrong with that. It might not work for movies that are taking a more hardline approach to historical / contextual accuracy (ie., if Tom Cruise showed up in "Red Cliff" in circa 200AD China), but outside of those situations, if that is what the studio thinks it will take to sell tickets... Cool.

The Last Samurai is, like @ChaosEngine said, a movie primarily about an outsider learning a new culture (and accepting his own past). He serves as that lens character, but actually the hows and whys of his character arc are the main points of interest in the movie, at least to me.

I'm sure that an awesome, historically accurate movie could be made dealing with young Emperor Meiji, Takamori (who Katsumoto seems to be based on in The Last Samurai), and the influence of modernization on Japanese culture at the time. It could be made with no Western "lens" character, no overt influence by any particular individual Westerner, and be entirely in Japanese. But that movie wouldn't be The Last Samurai, wouldn't be attempting to serve the same purpose as The Last Samurai, and very likely wouldn't sell as many tickets (in the US) as The Last Samurai (starring Tom Cruise!) did. That wouldn't make it a worse movie, just an apple instead of an orange.

I've also cheered for his retirement from the movie making world, especially due to the German tax laws he exploited. However, as a friend pointed out, he's really good at being really bad at making movies.

For a good example, my favorite movie of his is Postal. It is so absolutely horrible that I actually enjoyed it. Don't pay for it, though, he doesn't deserve any residuals. The whole movie is on YouTube, strangely enough. If you watch it and feel like you should pay, just send money directly to Dave Foley.

Though you might enjoy this, regarding sound in movie making http://youtu.be/UKRiVyJRtnI

Agreed...I want more. But then again, Michael Bay did drop a harsh truth. Dude's movies make bank, even though I hate that fact.

Not every movie makes such a big deal about how It's So Realistic, though. When you make that the point of all of your marketing and all of the word of mouth... yeah. You're going to get called on it.

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@Shepppard first of, I think it's a great action movie.
But there are many points in this video i would say are right. For example I didn't see the Cpt. America movie... and why should I? They didn't film a coherent story like Lord of The Rings or Star Wars where it's expected you see the movies in order.
I don't like to be forced to watch for example Cpt. America, just to know what the Tesseract is. It's standalone movie and should be understood without the other movies. In the case of the Avengers it should be enough to know who the Characters are.

In my opinion this is just bad movie making. If you have a film that is based on a book for example, it also shouldn't be necessary to read the book to understand the film. It's nice to have something in the movie only Fans fully understand. But it definitely shouldn't be the main object the story is driven by.
It would be like watching Lord of the Rings, without anyone explaining what the ring does. And after the movie you ask some fan and he says "Yeah you have to read the book to understand that."

P.S.: On a side note, Peter Jackson did not make a good job in explaining what the ring is/does/makes so important but at least he tried.

>> ^EMPIRE:

amazing CG.
But I can't help but get the feeling that this is Kung Fu Panda 3.
And by the way Blizzard... Seriously? You can't reach into your pockets and grab 150 million dollars or so, and just create a damn feature length movie already? It's not like you don't have the money, and it's not like it wouldn't make more than enough money back.


That or Kung Fu panda was written by a guy who saw the Pandarans in Warcraft 3 and decided to make a movie about that. Let's check the timeline.

But yeah, why the hell did they decide to go with a live action WoW movie when they are themselves brilliant at CG. Square made the transition to movie making. . . it was a miserable failure, but still.

sweet JEBUS people, just like with everything, there is a human tendency to dive in too deep and too fast initially, then we figure it out, pull back a bit, gain perspective, and find balance.

the same thing is happening with CGI and the film industry.

for movie making that is ahead of the curve, IMHO check out Sherlock Holmes - Game of Shadows and District 9