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brokenmusicboxwolfe · 7 years

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I saw:

Star Wars- If you don’t know the story you won’t care. Why bother summerizing when you can rant!

Yep, I still call the first film “Star Wars” or “the original Star Wars”. Look, I’m old enough that as a little girl I saw it more than once in it’s original release back in 1977, and it was just called Star Wars then. It was called that for a long time. Wanna see how much history I had with Star Wars before the rebranding?

When I saw my first academy awards (or actually fell asleep a few minutes in...I was little!) hoping to see it win Best Picture. Halloween and me in a Princess Leia costume Mom made me and then R2D2 on my birthday cake. I saw The Empire Strikes Back and The Return of the Jedi at their releases, each at least twice. My family had the 8mm cut down film version, then I worked my ass off one summer to buy the films at rental price, then eventually upgrading to a VHS widescreen set. I’d seen the movies 100 times each before the 20th anniversary, and I know because I counted! The Star Wars Holiday Special (yes, it’s original airing), the fun animated Droids and Ewoks, the so bad I never wanted to see them again Ewok tv movies, tons of making of specials and guest appearances of people from the films. The entire run of the original Marvel comics. I fell asleep to the music on 8track every night and then during the day I’d play my drums and cymbals to the vinyl soundtrack. (My parents were very understanding! LOL) I’d also listen to the “Story of Star Wars”record (flip as the tractor beam pulls them in), that Meco disco album, and upgraded the soundtracks, first to tape and then CD...more than once. I had lightsaber battles so feirce with my brother we had to get new ones to replace the smashed up old ones. My room had several posters and I wore Star Wars tee shirts. I collected tons of action figures, dolls, plushes, model ships, blasters and the like, right up until the figures went on clearance post Jedi (just found an old package yesterday between books). Too much merchandise to count. I wore my Han Solo vest every day one year in high school, purchased through the fan club I’d been a member of since it started. I read every single book or magazine to do with the movie or spun off it I could find. And through all of it back then Star Wars was still the default title of the first film....

So, as you can tell, I had a long history of just knowing it as Star Wars. Childhood. Teen. Young adult. While the “A New Hope” subtitle was added to the crawl in one of the rereleases, it was just Star Wars when anyone talked about it. I can’t remember now exactly when the rebranding got aggressive, with the anniversary in 1997 or the release of the prequels, but for at least 20 years I only ever heard anyone call it Star Wars.

When Lucasfilms started to try to make “A New Hope” a thing I kind of rolled my eyes. No one was confused by the film series for Planet of the Apes, The Thin Man or The Pink Panther sharing a name with their first films, so why bother? Now, I can get that after the subtitle got added to the opening crawl that it would make sense technically to make the titling of the films uniform. But I also knew it didn’t matter. It isn’t like it was a person asking you to use another name. The only people that cared were the more obsessive fans that liked to be smug about knowing the “real” title and George BLOODY Lucas. I rolled my eyes and doubted people would rewrite their memories just to make them happy.

I was wrong.

And so here we are at a time where people mock you if you call it “Star Wars” insteas of “A New Hope” So why do I still defiantly cling to the original title? Because it’s part of the mutilation and rewriting Lucas started doing. I’d been bothered reading interviews when I was a girl where he would contradict himself on the stories behind the stories, going so far as to claim things were “always” intended that reading early drafts showed no mention of. But ok, I knew creation is a process and some people want everyone to think it’s actually just a miraculous whoosh springing out fully formed. And despite the fact I knew full well that other people worked on the films, in the case of Empire and Jedi other directors and writers, I still shrugged it off and gave him the ultimate credit for everything. He was flawed and human, with an ego under that mild exterior, some of what he said was total BS and maybe my brother was right after watching an interview when he said the god of the Star Wars universe had no one anymore to question him...but still I trusted Lucas.

I was wrong.

Never mind the mind blowingly huge problems with the prequels, my disilusioning started right here, with the Special Editions. Most of the changes were pointless but some actually seemed to damage the films. Take my top three grumbles:

1) Tatoonie should NOT be a rosy pink! Before it was bright clear sunlight, unrelenting hot, parching and desolate, unforgiving...now it’s all pretty, colorful and warm. It reduces the sunbaked heat, but more important the dry barren sense of a colorless place Luke would ache to leave.

2) Han’s conversation with Jabba should not be in this film. I know it was filmed originally and cut for technical reasons, I’ve had a bootleg of it since my first convention, but loosing it was a good thing. Jabba should remain a shadowy unseen threat, someone that wants Han’s hide enough it looms over our scoundrel until the third film. The reveal of Jabba gains power in Jedi because you don’t know the extent of his powers but he’s supposed to be scary and we see him up in a position or authority over the room. Here Jabba looses power by not only being on the same level as Han and seeming smaller, but for crying out loud there is the gag of Han stepping on his tail while seeming completely unconcerned! And speaking of people being reduced...Boba Fett is this mysterious bounty hunter not just some damn henchman to Jabba. What part of mysterious don’t they get!

3) Mos Eisley does not need to me so cluttered up with CGI characters! This is a middle of nowhere planet with a scattered population and a climate many people wouldn’t enjoy. Sure it’s a spaceport but with buildings, many of which are at least partly underground as relief from the environment. The streets actually gain a sense of unease by being underpopulated, giving a sense that people (of whatever sort) could be watching from doorways. Like you could be attacked and no one would notice. But nope, now it’s bustling, so full of effects life that they actually wreck the look of shots by having gratitous critters and droids moving to block us seeing our characters.

Yes, I didn’t mention the Greedo thing. It doesn’t bother me as much as the rest, but you all know that if Lucas HAD wanted to film it that way originally it would have been just as easy as what we got.

Still, I wouldn’t be bothered at all if this was just an alternate version. Blade Runner, E.T. and others have given you a choice of which version to watch in DVD sets. I was sure both versions would stay easily available.

I was wrong.

Lucas decided that whatever version was his current take should be the only one out there. The DVDs with the original (close enough) cuts long ago went out of print (and in my case the DVDs failed!) so if you want to see Star Wars not going to look at all like my first 100 times seeing it.

And that’s my problem. Rejiggered versions have become the only version. If out of preference, curiosity or nostalgia you want to see something from before the monkeying around you have to look to illegal means. As far as Lucas is concerned he would like everyone to pretend any prior versions existed. History is rewritten and we aren’t supposed to grumble. All hail the genius of Lucas or some rot and forget anything you saw on screen and anything he said before. And it bugs me because I resent being told to forget

Retitling the movie, not subtitle but what we are supposed to call it, is just a tiny part of the emperor’s dictates. And my refusal to use that name is symbollic. In fact this insignificant gesture is a bit like something....Now what’s the word?

Ah yes.

Rebellion.

LOL

But not to worry. My generation will die off eventually. Those that grew up without special editions, prequels, and so forth will die out. In 100 years everyone will call it “A New Hope” and will not even realize anything was ever changed. But for now some of us still remember another Star Wars.......

One last note: I think the double whammy of the SEs and the prequels did something I thought impossible....I fell out of love with Star Wars. I rarely watch it since I only have the SE and when I do I spend some of the time grumpy at alterations I don’t like and all of it a bit empty. It’s the only time in my life that I’d ever stopped loving anyone or anything. For me usually live cools but the warmth remains to quickly rekindle. When the Force Awakens came out I felt my affection return a bit to the franchise for the first time this century and I thought my love could be reborn. But tonight, rewatching Star Wars, I realized something has been permanently lost. It no longer hurts to watch but the heart has gone out of it for me........

#movies #star wars

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djscrewhead · 6 years

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Screwhead - In Memoriam

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It's been a year since you left us. I got that final phone call that they were stopping resuscitation attempts at 4:20 in the morning, Valentine's Day, and had to laugh; it was get-laid-day, at smoke-weed-o'clock, two of your favorite things!

We had all sorts of times, both good and bad, in my 36 years of knowing you.

You got me into reading. I don't think I was much older than 8 or 9 when you first gave me Dune, Salem's Lot and Pet Sematary to read through. I’d read It and Tommyknockers before the TV Miniseries aired. Read through all your Dean Koontz before I was 12. All those small Conan reprints by Sphere.

You got me into comics, and what always stood out for me were those comics with the Jack Kirby art; Kamandi, Devil Dinosaur, and all those Marvel Treasury Edition reprints of Avengers, Thor and The Fantastic Four.

I still remember the day Superman died; you gave me a note to bring to school, telling them I had a doctor's appointment in the afternoon and that you were picking me up at lunch time so that we could make sure to get to Hero Comics and buy a few issues before they sold out.

We'd pull the same thing two other times; first for Batman Returns and then Jurassic Park both came out on the last day of school, so you'd given me a note that we were going away on vacation and had to leave early, and I would only make the half-day. You picked me up at lunch time so that we could catch the first showing of them while everyone else was still stuck in school.

You just barely missed Doctor Strange and Iron Fist, and you would have loved them! The Punisher would have absolutely blown your mind away. First episode and there was a fight scene set to Tom Waits and I couldn’t help but think you’d have gone absolutely nuts seeing that. Defenders was pretty good, too. You'd have loved Guardians of the Galaxy 2, if just to see throwbacks to Kirby art in the visual style of a ton of the effects. Black Panther comes out this week and it looks fucking amazing.

You got me into movies, even horror movies, a genre you weren't a fan of. Poltergeist was the first movie you rented when we got our first Betamax, and it’s the first movie I ever remember watching. You saw Steven Spielberg on the box and figured it couldn't be THAT scary!

For my 11th birthday, I was bugging you to rent a horror movie because I always wanted to see one, so you said OK, as long as you pick the movie. We made it up to the dog scene in The Thing before turning it off and switching over to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but I spent weeks getting nightmares from that, and it's now one of my favorite movies of all time. Apocalypse Now, The Killing Fields, The Deer Hunter, anything with Harvey Keitel in it, The Usual Suspects.. So many incredible movies that you recommended I watch that I probably wouldn't have watched otherwise.

And of course, Ghostbusters. I was 3 in the summer of '84, and Cecile was working for a newspaper and she'd gotten a bunch of tickets to an early showing of the movie, and she'd already seen it and said it was a great movie, so she gave you a couple of tickets to it and holy shit was she ever right!

But out of everything you'd introduced me to that helped make me who I am today, music probably had the biggest impact. You had a huge record collection and you were always listening to something different. Then when you had some money, you started getting into the audiophile gear, I learned to really listen to music, and not just hear it. The little details that most wouldn't notice, like the faint rustling of the robes of a choir, the two dogs barking at each other at the start of Amused to Death. You taught me not to just hear music as a fun distraction, but to really listen and appreciate the artistry of it.

Aside from that brief stint of wanting to be a Ghostbuster, which, if I'm being completely honest, I'd still absolutely love to be if it were a real thing, I don't think I've ever wanted to do anything with my life that wasn't firmly rooted in music. You got me my first guitar and amp. You helped me out getting a laptop and soundcard/ram upgrade. When I wanted to start DJing, you got me my turntables and mixer, and let me order 200$ worth of records from Chemical Records on your credit card. Any time I wanted to do anything that involved music, you would help me out and encourage me. Any time I'd make something, even if it wasn't the kind of music you were into, you'd still listen to it.

So, this is me, as a DJ, trying to find some way to put something together with all the music that was important to me that you introduced me to.

↓Track List follows ↓

Frank Zappa - Willie the Pimp

I don't think this one needs any explanation, especially for those that knew you. If you had a theme song, this was it. Frank Zappa was your favorite singer/musician, and was the one act you'd seen the most live in concert, back when you had a nice camera and a fake press pass to get into every concert you wanted to see.

The Fugs - CCD/I Couldn't Get High/Saran Wrap

I mean, it's hard not putting the whole Golden Filth album in this thing. In hindsight, I was probably listening to some music I *REALLY* shouldn't have been listening to! The FBI's File on The Fugs called them “The Most Vulgar Thing the Human Mind Could Possibly Conceive". The benefits of a Coca Cola Douche. A lesbian dwarf tomato orgy leading to doing more drugs than a human should ever do. Using saran wrap as an impromptu condom. None of my friends at school believed that I wasn’t just making up songs when I told them about these until finally you weren’t home one day and they came over and I put the album on.

King Crimson - 21st Century Schizoid Man

You had many stories of going to concerts with a camera and a fake press pass to get in for free. You’d always tell me the one about that first time you saw King Crimson in this tiny venue, and at the very end of their set they turned on a strobe light. As the song progressed, the time between the flashes of light got longer and longer until the room was pitch-black for 5-10 seconds at a time in between brief camera-like flashes of light, until one by one the band members disappeared from the stage while they kept playing their instruments, until finally everyone was gone from the stage, and on what would have been the last flash of the strobe, they abruptly stopped playing and all the lights in the venue came on.

In ‘99 you got me tickets to their side-project, ProjeKct Two, and later in 2000 or 2001 to a proper King Crimson gig, but that ProjeKct Two show was mindblowingly amazing!

Dr. John - I Walk on Guilded Splinters

You listened to a lot of music, and I heard a ton of stuff growing up that most kids never heard. This was probably the first thing I can remember really thinking that it was SO much different than anything I'd ever heard before. It wasn't really rock, jazz, blues, funk, or anything else.. There was something weird and different about this one in a way I couldn't explain or understand until much later. It's that voodoo swamp vibe and I don't think I've ever heard anyone else do anything even remotely similar to it since. It's like listening in on a secret voodoo ritual going on deep in the swamps of New Orleans.

Tom Waits - What's He Building

Another one of those weird tracks, a bit of a theme going I guess. No one tells a story quite like Tom Waits, and I'll get more into why his music means so much to me a little later on. But this is another one of those that, as soon as you got the album, you knew I'd love it, but specifically this track, and you were totally right. I even did a bootleg remix of it a while back!

Dire Straits - Money for Nothing

Back when we lived on Davignon, any time ground beef was on sale, you'd get a whole bunch of it and spend a whole Sunday morning making chili. This was our making-chili album, but we'd always start on Money for Nothing. You had those huge Cerwin Vega speakers and you'd crank the music up so loud that those synth chords and tom-toms had so much power to them I was almost scared that one day we'd bring the walls down with the power behind that intro.

Roger Waters - The Ballad of Bill Hubbard/What God Wants, Part I

Any time you got a new piece of stereo gear, whether it was a new amp, speakers, or even just new cables/interconnects, this is the first album we'd listen to from start to finish, but it's those first two tracks that were the real test; at 11 seconds in, the dogs barking to each other. The mixing and mastering on this album is easily the best I've ever heard. No other album manages to give you what feels like a full surround sound experience from two front speakers, and no one writes a concept album quite like Roger Waters. I'd already understood that religion was an absolute crock of shit at a much earlier age than this, but this album was the first time that I'd ever heard anyone else really saying the same sort of observations about religion and the world that I'd been making for nearly as long as I could think and observe people and current affairs.

ZZ Top - Viva Las Vegas

You often played ZZ Top and I’ve always loved their music. When I was 12 or 13 they came to Montreal for a concert and I wanted to go see them. Before getting tickets, though, you wanted to make sure that I understood that their concerts weren’t going to be like their music videos or album artwork; it was going to be the band playing, and there weren’t going to be any scantily clad women dancing around. I told you I understood, and you got the tickets. The night of the concert, again, you reminded me that this was a concert and not to expect any scantily clad women dancing around.

Then Viva Las Vegas came on, and lo and behold, a parade of scantily clad Las Vegas showgirls came out and started dancing on stage and we spent the whole song laughing!

Green Jelly - Three Little Pigs

We were watching Much Music one day and the music video came on. As soon as it was over we went out to HMV so you could get me the cassette!

Motorhead - Ace of Spades

I remember this like it was yesterday. I was 11, and while going through your records together, you jokingly said that this is the best record you could ever use to wake someone up with. I don't remember you having ever put it on before, so I don't think I'd ever heard it, but, that weekend, I woke up before you did, got the record out, cued it up, and turned the sound system aaaaaaaaaall the way up. You (understandably) woke up COMPLETELY freaked out, ran out of your room, saw me in the living room laughing and realized how you'd absolutely set yourself up for that. We ended up going for breakfast at that place across from Center 2000 and spent the whole day laughing about it.

KISS - Domino

Another one of those "probably not appropriate for an 11 year old to be listening to", but it was a great and catchy rock song that we would often blast in the car as we would drive around. I’m pretty certain this is the first time I’d heard any Kiss. Before this, the only thing I knew about Kiss was that you had the first issue of their Marvel comic.

Marilyn Manson - I Put a Spell on You

Another one that I remember like it was yesterday. It was boxing day 1996. I was living with mom at the time, so for boxing day I went to meet you downtown. We ate at Bistro Duluth, had some coffee at Deux Maries, and then we went to HMV because, amongst other things, you'd given me a gift card for there. I'd started going goth about a year or two before, but other than a couple of KMFDM tapes that Fuzzball Mike had given me, I really only listened to Bauhaus, Sisters of Mercy, Dead Can Dance, and similar type of goth music.

I had never really gotten into music that was too heavy or aggressive, but stuff like Type O Negative and Nine Inch Nails was starting to slowly seep into what I was listening to. I was looking through the more industrial-metal section, and couldn't make up my mind on what to get, since I didn't really know any of the bands I was looking at. You came by and saw Marilyn Manson - Smells Like Children, and in your typical joking-but-dead-serious tone, said you'd heard of Marilyn Manson and that I should get that one because it would probably piss off my mother.

So I did!

At the time there was still Magic and boardgames nights every friday at the Croissanterie across the street from McMagic, so we parted ways and I decided I would walk there since it was only a few metro stops away. I put on the CD and instead spent the next two or three hours walking through the streets of Montreal, from around 7-9pm as the snow was gently falling, getting my mind absolutely blown away by these sounds I'd never heard before.

A few years later, you watched Lost Highway and immediately called me to ask me if I could make you a copy of the soundtrack. You thought his cover of I Put a Spell on You was one of the best and truest covers you'd ever heard, making the song even creepier and more sinister than the original. Also, you liked the Rammstein tracks, because they weren't the same sort of "headbanger thrash shit" that you normally thought of whenever someone mentioned metal.

Bohren & der Club of Gore - Midnight Black Earth

By this time I was completely into Drum and Bass, and you’d listened to some and didn’t really like it much, but you knew that one of my favorite things about DnB was the deep bass. You discovered this album when you still had your house up north and your stereo was still in full working order. I came over one weekend and, after we’d eaten supper, you said you had something to listen to. You turned off all the lights, and we sat down in the living room and you put this on and we silently listened to the whole thing. It immediately became one of my favorite albums of all time. Because of my tinnitus, I can’t sleep without music playing, and this is one of the albums that I put on whenever I go to bed.

Tom Waits - Big Joe and Phantom 309

There was only one place I could put this song, and it was right at the very end of this mix. 1991 was a pretty rough year. I'd been living with my mother, but constantly getting into arguments and fights with her until finally I moved in with you. You were living with Claudine at the time in a small 3 1/2 in St-Leonard. It was one of those tiny "we turned the garage into a rental and just added a B to our address because it was too small to get a real address" type of deals. We used Bobone's address to keep me registered at the school I was at in Laval so that I wouldn't have to change schools and have to make new friends.

Every day we'd wake up at 5am so that we could both be ready and drive all the way from St-Leonard to Laval for the 8am bell. Being a garage-turned-3 1/2, there was only one bedroom, a living room, and a kitchen/diningroom combo. But you still had those huge, beige foam sofas that were 100% foam, no wood or any sort of support structure within, that weighed nothing and were SUPER comfortable.

Every night when it was time to go to bed, we'd move the sofas and pouf around to give me a little nook up against a wall that I could sleep in. For those first few months, every night that I went to bed, you'd sit at the foot of my little nook, and we'd talk about how my day was, how I was handling things, and you would always reassure me that, even though things weren't ideal right now, everything was eventually going to work out.

Then, as you saw that I was starting to nod off, you'd take out Nighthawks at the Diner, and put on this track, and sit with me as it played through and I drifted off to sleep. Every single night until the lease on the 3 1/2 was over and we could move to a new place in Laval that I could have my own room in, you were there to make sure I knew I was loved and cared for.

You didn't really know of any stories that you could tell to help me fall asleep, so you entrusted the telling of my bedtime stories to the greatest storyteller in the world, Tom Waits.

So this is where I'm going to end this mix; with the hope that somehow, somewhere, all this music and what it means to me reaches you. Sleep well.

#in memoriam #rock #Screwhead

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