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The Movie Mistake Mystery from "Revenge of the Sith"

fxrant.blogspot.com The Movie Mistake Mystery from "Revenge of the Sith"

Movies are handmade, and just like any other art form, sometimes the seams that hold movies together become visible to the audience. For mov...

The Movie Mistake Mystery from "Revenge of the Sith"
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The Movie Mistake Mystery from "Revenge of the Sith"
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  • Painting out these movie mistakes as part of a restoration is wrong. What's in the movie is in the movie, and altering the movie to this extent is a form of revisionist history.

    No, screw you.

    I hate this piece with a passion. The cataloguing of "revealing mistakes" effectively ruins that scene forever for everybody. That's way more annoying than cleaning up an obvious mistake in a subsequent revision. I hate movie nerd trivia for this reason.

    It's not just dumb staging goofs, either. Who can watch the "kicking the helmet" scene in Two Towers or the hand cut in Django these days without being immediately skyrocketed out of the movie and into movie trivia land? That, if nothing else, is why I don't like leaving real world injuries in movies. No matter how well the actor rolls with it some nerd with a passion for DVD extras or IMDB triva pages is going to make a listicle for other nerds to quote at each other and ruin the scene for all eternity.

    So hey, if the goof is the kind you can clean up with a computer to shut the dorks up forever, by all means, erase that crap away. Hell, even ones where there isn't technically a mistake are a bummer. I know exactly where Robert Downey Jr.'s fake torso starts in that cute flirting scene where he gets his battery pack changed by Gwyneth Paltrow and I really hope they end up giving him a CG body in a remaster some day because I don't want to be staring at the uncanny valley forever when I get to that part.

  • Painting out these movie mistakes as part of a restoration is wrong. What's in the movie is in the movie, and altering the movie to this extent is a form of revisionist history. Cinema is worse off when over-aggressive restorations alter the action within the frame. To me, this is equivalent to swapping out an actor's performance with a different take, or changing the music score during an action sequence, or replacing a puppet creature with a computer graphics version of the same creature decades after release. Movies are a moment in time. But I digress.

    I disagree strongly with this comparison. Yes, having a verion that is accurate to the theatrical release available is an important part of movie history. But director's and other alternate cuts can be superior to the theatrical release and fixing special effects or errors on post to remove distractions on older movies is comparable to digitally editing them out before release for a modern movie. Cleaning up potentially distracting mistakes is not in any way comparable to changing a performance.

    Adding new stuff like having Greedo shoot is comparable, because it changes characters. Digitally fixing a license plate falling off during a take is not.

  • The bottom line is that we put human hands on every single one of the thousands of shots that you see in Star Wars.

    Nice little bit of psyops, there. "These are not the AI you're looking for."

9 comments