10 years later, ‘Star Wars Kid’ speaks out

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 9, 2013 at 8:52 AM - 0 Comments

(Mathieu Rivard/L’actualité)

Almost a billion viewers across the planet know him as the Star Wars Kid, but they’ve never heard him speak, until now.

Ghyslain Raza was a normal high-school student in small-town Quebec back in 2002, a shy 14-year-old who liked to make videos. In 2003, classmates posted one of those videos on the Internet without his knowledge–in it, Raza wields a makeshift light saber, clumsily imitating a Star Wars Jedi knight.

The video went viral, and the Trois-Rivières teen became one of the earliest and highest-profile victims of a massive cyberbullying attack, one that played out among classmates and strangers online.

“What I saw was mean. It was violent. People were telling me to commit suicide,” the now-25-year-old recalls.

Continue…

Walt Disney + Star Wars = endless possibilities

By Scott Feschuk - Friday, April 26, 2013 at 2:00 PM - 0 Comments

Photo illustration by Sarah MacKinnon

Walt Disney Co., which paid $4 billion for George Lucas’s film company, has announced that, beginning in 2015, it will release a Star Wars movie every year—yes, every single year. Let’s look ahead:

2015: Although many are eagerly anticipating J.J. Abrams’ take on the series, some are apprehensive that he will introduce to the Star Wars universe the element of time travel—which would enable a middle-aged Luke Skywalker to encounter his younger self, his older self and, quite possibly, a very confused Spock. On the other hand, it could also bring together seven Yodas for the most backwards-talking, ass-kicking climax in film history. Let’s agree to let the time-travel thing slide so long as Abrams uses the device to have two incarnations of Jar Jar Binks beat each other to death.

2018: The franchise is entrusted to other directors, beginning with Michael Bay—who opens his film in flashback with a 14-minute shot of a young Princess Leia (Megan Fox), clad in cut-off jeans, leaning over a landspeeder to tinker with its engine. On the radio we hear the sounds of Alderaan’s best Aerosmith cover band. Continue…

Why Disney’s Iron Man overkill threatens the brand

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, April 25, 2013 at 1:30 PM - 0 Comments

Iron Man and Captain America in a scene from "The Avengers" (AP Photo/Disney)

When Disney buys a franchise, it exploits that franchise for all it’s worth. Six months after purchasing Lucasfilm for $4 billion, Disney announced its plans for the Star Wars movies: there will be new sequels in 2015, 2017 and 2019, and in the years between, the company plans to bring out other films based on characters from the franchise—meaning there could be a new Star Wars movie every single year.

This kind of overkill could backfire: in the ’90s, Disney’s decision to release an animated musical every year may have killed off the genre. But moderation may not be an option. Disney is releasing few films of its own, and this month announced layoffs of much of its in-house animation staff. That makes it even more important to wring every cent out of well-known brands such as Pixar, Marvel and Star Wars. The company recently demanded theatres turn over a bigger share of ticket revenue from the next Marvel blockbuster, Iron Man 3, and the AMC Entertainment theatre chain, North America’s second-largest, temporarily stopped selling advance tickets in protest. “Clearly, they are under some kind of financial pressure,” the head of AMC told the Los Angeles Times. So was the guy who owned the golden goose.

Harrison Ford will reprise role of Han Solo in Episode VII

By Jessica Allen - Friday, February 15, 2013 at 1:17 PM - 0 Comments

Movie scoop hunter El Mayimbe of The Latino Review announced an exclusive bit of news so tasty that even Jabba the Hut would be satiated.

“Like a Corellian smuggler I went on the prowl and I came up with something BIG,” wrote Mayimbe earlier today. “Harrison Ford is back as Han Solo. How awesome is that?!”

Mayimbe spilled the scoop of galactic proportions to Victor Garcia, who referred to his guest as “one of the premiere sources for news out there regarding movies,” over at Fox News Latino in a video. Mayimbe explained how difficult it can be to report on movie news when actors and directors lie to the media about their involvement in yet-to-be-released films. He cited an example from the Dark Night when Marion Cotillard “went on a red carpet and bold-faced lied to a reporter” about not appearing in the film. (She later apologized.) Mayimbe also referenced J.J. Abrams who denied he was directing the next Star Wars, news that The Wrap exclusively broke three weeks ago.

Mayimbe assured Garcia that he had triple-checked his Ford/Solo sources. He also emphasized how significant the scoop is, considering Ford has “had a complicated relationship with Star Wars in that he wanted to get killed off in Return of the Jedi, but George Lucas was against it because [Han Solo] was a bestselling figure at the time and you can’t sell dead Han Solo toys.”

Truth, but you can sell toys of Han and Leia’s kids, who are rumoured to appear in Episode VII and I will buy them.

CEO says Walt Disney Co. working on stand-alone ‘Star Wars’ films outside new trilogy

By The Associated Press - Tuesday, February 5, 2013 at 9:41 PM - 0 Comments

LOS ANGELES, Calif. – Disney is mining The Force for even more new films.

Walt Disney Co. CEO Bob Iger said Tuesday that screenwriters Larry Kasdan and Simon Kinberg are working on stand-alone “Star Wars” movies that aren’t part of the new trilogy that’s in the works.

“There has been speculation about some standalone films that have been in development, and I can confirm to you today that in fact we are working on a few stand-alone films,” Iger told CNBC.

Iger said the movies would be based on “great ‘Star Wars’ characters that are not part of the overall saga.” The films would be released during the six-year period of the new trilogy, which starts in 2015 with “Star Wars: Episode VII.”

Disney confirmed last month that “Star Trek” director J.J. Abrams will direct the seventh installment of the “Star Wars” saga.

Disney bought “Star Wars” maker Lucasfilm last year for more than $4 billion.

The last “Star Wars” trilogy, a prequel to the original films, was released from 1999 to 2005.

May the force be with you, J.J. Abrams

By Jessica Allen - Friday, January 25, 2013 at 10:19 AM - 0 Comments

Disney to make new ‘Star Wars’ movies, buy Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion from George Lucas

By The Associated Press - Tuesday, October 30, 2012 at 9:27 PM - 0 Comments

LOS ANGELES, Calif. – A decade since George Lucas said “Star Wars” was finished on the big screen, a new trilogy under new ownership is destined for theatres after The Walt Disney Co. announced Tuesday that it would buy Lucasfilm Ltd. from him for $4.05 billion.

The seventh movie, with a working title of “Episode 7,” is set for release in 2015. Episodes 8 and 9 will follow. The trilogy will continue the story of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Princess Leia beyond “Return of the Jedi,” the third film released and the sixth in the saga. After that, Disney plans a new “Star Wars” movie every two or three years. Lucas will serve as creative consultant in the new movies.

“I’m doing this so that the films will have a longer life,” Lucas, the 68-year-old creator of the series and sole owner of Lucasfilm, said in an interview posted on YouTube. “I get to be a fan now … I sort of look forward to it. It’s a lot more fun actually, than actually having to go out into the mud and snow.”

Disney CEO Bob Iger said Lucasfilm had already developed an extensive storyline on the next trilogy, and Episode 7 was now in early-stage development. He said he talked with Lucas about buying the company from him a year and a half ago, but they didn’t decide on a deal until very recently as Lucas set in motion his retirement.

“The last ‘Star Wars’ movie release was 2005′s ‘Revenge of the Sith’ — and we believe there’s substantial pent-up demand,” Iger said.

The blockbuster deal announced Tuesday will see Disney pay half the acquisition price in cash and half in newly issued stock. The company expects it to add to earnings in 2015 and said that as an example of its earnings power, Lucasfilm made $550 million in operating income the year “Sith” came out. Along with the cash, Lucas will end up owning about 40 million Disney shares, which is about 2.2 per cent of the 1.83 billion shares that will be in circulation when the transaction closes. Disney did not say when that would happen.

The deal includes Lucasfilm’s prized high-tech production companies, Industrial Light & Magic and Skywalker Sound, as well as rights to the “Indiana Jones” franchise. Lucasfilm will continue to be headquartered in San Francisco’s Presidio park, and employees are to remain in their current locations. Disney has its headquarters in Burbank, Calif., near Los Angeles.

The deal brings Lucasfilm under the Disney banner with other brands including Pixar, the Muppets, Marvel, ESPN and ABC, all companies that Disney has acquired over the years. Coincidentally, Lucas created Pixar as a division of Lucasfilm to develop computerized filmmaking techniques before he sold it to Apple’s Steve Jobs, who later sold it to Disney.

Twitter went wild with the news as fans speculated on mash-up titles for future movies, using the hashtag “DisneyStarWars.” Among the amusing attempts were “When You Wish Upon a Death Star” and “Bambi Wan Kenobi.” ”Star Wars,” ”LucasArts,” ”Disney,” and “Indiana Jones” were all trending topics on Twitter after the deal was announced late Tuesday afternoon.

Fan club co-founder Ming Pan, a graphic designer in San Francisco, said he was glad audiences would get another “Star Wars” movie but worried whether the franchise would thrive after Lucas passes the torch.

“It’s something that I thought may happen down the line, but I just didn’t expect it to happen while Lucas was still alive because he has always expressed such a tight control over the ‘Star Wars’ license,” Pan said.

Lucas was hailed as a cinematic visionary when the original “Star Wars” came out in 1977. But he had become an object of often-vicious ridicule by the time he started releasing 3-D versions of all six films in the franchise this year.

Die-hard fans had been vilifying Lucas for years, convinced that he had become a commercial sell-out and had compounded his sins by desecrating the heroic tale that he originally sought to tell.

They railed against him for adding grating characters such as Jar Jar Binks to the prequel trilogy, which Lucas directed and which came out from 1999 to 2005. They attacked him for tinkering with the original trilogy that spanned 1977 to 1983, too. Revisions in special editions and home video releases — such as making the Ewoks blink and having a green-skinned alien named Greedo take the first shot at Han Solo in a famous bar scene — were treated as blasphemy.

The criticism grated on Lucas, who vowed never to make another “Star Wars” movie.

“Why would I make any more when everybody yells at you all the time and says what a terrible person you are?” Lucas told The New York Times earlier this year.

“Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” the fourth film in another lucrative franchise, subjected Lucas to even more barbs when it came to theatres in 2008. Fans of those films were especially outraged about an opening scene that featured Indiana Jones crawling into a lead-lined refrigerator to survive a nuclear bomb blast.

Lucas was fed up by the time he released “Red Tails,” a movie depicting the valour of African-American pilots during World War II, earlier this year. He told the Times he was ready to retire from the business of making blockbusters and return to his roots as a student at University of Southern California’s film school, where he once made a movie about clouds moving in a desert.

Kathleen Kennedy, the current co-chairman of Lucasfilm, will become the division’s president at Disney and report to Walt Disney Studios Chairman Alan Horn. She will serve as executive producer for the new movies. Directors for the new movies have not yet been announced. The movies are destined to be live action, not animated, Iger said.

In the YouTube video, Lucas said the decision to continue with the saga didn’t contradict past statements.

“I always said I wasn’t going to do any more and that’s true, because I’m not going to do any more, but that doesn’t mean I’m unwilling to turn it over to Kathy to do more,” Lucas said.

He said he has given Kennedy his storylines and other ideas, “and I have complete confidence that she’s going to take them and make great movies.”

Kennedy added that she and Lucas had discussed ideas with a couple of writers about the future movies and said Lucas would continue to have a key advisory role. “My Yoda has to be there,” she said.

The scope of the “Star Wars” universe is staggering with hundreds of books, comics and other storylines that Lucasfilm has approved.

In May 1991, author Timothy Zahn’s “Heir to the Empire” took up the story of Luke, Leia and Han five years after the events in “Return of The Jedi,” which hit theatres in 1983. The characters go on to fight remnants of the evil Empire, marry, have children and battle a new crop of Force-powered enemies.

Season 5 of the animated series “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” is currently airing on Cartoon Network.

To date, the “Star Wars” movies have grossed $4.4 billion, and even years after the last film, the franchise continues to make money from merchandising. Disney’s chief financial officer, Jay Rasulo, said that this year alone, “Star Wars” is on track to generate $215 million in licensing revenue. He added that, adjusting for inflation, the latest three releases in theatres would have generated $1.5 billion each at the box office today.

Disney plans to make movies, games and TV shows and expand on “Star Wars” theme park attractions that are already present in parks in Anaheim, Calif., Orlando, Fla., Paris and Tokyo.

Disney chief executive Iger, a former weatherman who rose through the ranks of ABC, has orchestrated some of the company’s biggest acquisitions, including the $7.4 billion purchase of animated movie studio Pixar in 2006 and the $4.2 billion acquisition of comic book giant Marvel in 2009.

Jobs bought Pixar from Lucasfilm in 1986 for about $5 million and later sold it to Disney. When that happened, Jobs became Disney’s largest single shareholder with a 7.7 per cent stake. Those shares are now held in a trust.

Disney shares were not trading with stock markets closed due to the impact of Superstorm Sandy in New York. They closed on Friday at $50.08, near its 52-week high of $53.40. Shares are up 34 per cent so far this year.

Live: A very long night for a very long bill

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, June 13, 2012 at 4:41 PM - 0 Comments

Welcome to live coverage of tonight’s C-38 votes. It was expected that voting would begin around 5:30pm, but some procedural fussing about by the Liberals seems to have delayed those votes by a few hours. Stay tuned throughout the evening (and morning?) as we follow the parliamentary festivities.

4:43pm. If you’re only now tuning in, you just missed a fascinating series of points of order, during which Liberal MP Kevin Lamoureux twice asked the Speaker to clarify the rules of the House (Speaker Devolin invited Mr. Lamoureux to read the standing orders) and Bob Rae objected to the Defence Minister’s earlier use of the word “mendaciousness” (Peter MacKay duly stood and withdrew the remark). The House is now at the time reserved each day for the presenting of petitions and will soon move to the final period of report stage debate on C-38.

4:51pm. The New Democrats held a photo op this afternoon to demonstrate how they were preparing for tonight’s votes. Mostly this seems to have involved Nathan Cullen removing his jacket and writing “C-38″ on a giant white pad of paper.

5:04pm. The Liberals have chosen now to discuss Mr. Cullen’s point of privilege. And now there is some discussion between the Speaker, Elizabeth May and Denis Coderre about how long one can speak when responding to a question of privilege.

5:15pm. With Mr. Lamoureux still responding to Mr. Cullen’s point of privilege, Conservative MP Bob Zimmer rises on a point of order to question Mr. Lamoureux’s point of privilege. The Speaker stands and reads the rules pertaining to questions of privilege, specifically that such interventions should be “brief and concise” and that the Speaker has the right to “terminate” the discussion. Liberal MP Massimo Pacetti rises on a point of order to object to Mr. Zimmer’s point of order. Mr. Lamoureux attempts a point of order to respond to Mr. Zimmer, but the Speaker suggests he carry on with his point of privilege, but then Mr. Coderre rises on a point of order to complain about the Speaker’s desire to move things along. The Speaker asserts his impartiality and attempts to straighten this all out, but Mr. Coderre rises on another point of order to clarify his respect for the Speaker, but also to express his desire that Mr. Lamoureux be allowed to give a full response to Mr. Cullen’s point of privilege. Mr. Pacetti rises on a point of order to add his concern that Mr. Lamoureux be allowed to speak fully. The Speaker says he was merely reminding everyone of the rules and gives Mr. Lamoureux five minutes to finish and, finally, we’re now back to Mr. Lamoruex’s point of privilege.

5:30pm. The Speaker stands and calls an end to Mr. Lamoureux’s remarks and attempts to move to the last hour of report stage debate on C-38, but now Mauril Belanger is up on a separate point of privilege.

5:32pm. The Speaker cuts off Mr. Belanger to move to deferred votes on two opposition motions and one private member’s bill. MPs have 30 minutes to report to the chamber.

5:40pm. Conservative MPs Blaine Calkins and Brian Jean seem rather excited about tonight’s sleepover. Continue…

Space police

By Tom Henheffer - Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

U.S. Air Force/Reuters

An orbiting weapons platform, a spy plane, or a decade-old, billion-dollar money pit. The U.S. Air Force’s X-37B space planes are a cloak-and-dagger project, but their secret orbits are known, and that discovery was made, in part, by Canadians. They’re part of an international organization of volunteer skywatchers who’ve been tracking secret government satellites for over 30 years.

The purpose of the planes is now a closely guarded secret, but they started as an open NASA project before being moved to the air force, so some information about them is known. The first X-37B is on the ground following its initial mission, which lasted from April to December 2010, and its sister is currently in orbit. They look like miniature versions of the space shuttle, with stubby wings for gliding at high altitudes, a solar panel array that keeps them powered in space, and a cargo bay about the size of a standard pickup truck’s bed. They’re also fully robotic, and their launches led to speculation, especially from the Chinese and Russian governments, that the U.S. was attempting to weaponize space.

But well before the rocket boosters ignited, members of SeeSat-L, a mailing-list-based international organization of skywatchers, were already working to crack the secret of the crafts’ orbit. “There’s this question of secrecy, and how much should the public know about what’s going on in space,” says Ted Molczan, 58, a Toronto-based lifelong skywatcher and director of SeeSat’s online newsgroup. “If it’s in an orbit that isn’t published, then it’s of interest to us.”

Continue…

The 16 nerdiest sights of FanExpo

By Tom Henheffer - Monday, August 30, 2010 at 5:45 PM - 0 Comments

RELATED ARTICLE
FanExpo: freaks, nerds and corporate takeover—Are bigger comic cons better? Veterans Stan Lee and Lloyd Kaufman tackle the issue

A videographer tries to instruct a giggling group of costumed anime fans

Next page

How news-savvy are you?

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 4:11 PM - 5 Comments

Click here to take the Newsmakers Quiz

Two sides of Moore's Law

By Colby Cosh - Monday, February 15, 2010 at 10:48 AM - 25 Comments

I suppose a lot of you have seen the astonishing video of the Intellectual Ventures Mosquito Death Ray. It’s a can’t-believe-your-eyes proof-of-concept so irresistible that the time to it being monetized as a mass-market product that sits on your porch must surely be a matter of months. Remember how quickly Apple went from being a computer manufacturer to being a music company that happened to have a sideline in computers? You think the same thing could happen with Microsoft and pest control?

Devised for malaria eradication in Africa, the Mosquito Death Ray seems like promising ground for the One Laptop Per Child business model (which has failed, so far, to get very many laptops to very many children); use Western punters to cross-subsidize humanitarian uses for a cool technology.

But I’m a morbid pessimist. What I think of when I see a Mosquito Death Ray built with cheap parts from eBay isn’t malaria: I think “Gee, seems like guidance systems for ground-to-air rockets would be well within the financial range and design abilities of a clever hobbyist now.” Then I think, “Hey, haven’t we seen rather a lot of news stories over the past few years about pilots being mysteriously scanned with green laser pointers?” Then I just kind of curl up into a fetal position.

(But let’s not let that stop us from enjoying more fun from Intellectual Ventures: reverse-engineering the secrets of Avatar.)

The Psycho Effect

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, February 11, 2010 at 12:00 PM - 2 Comments

The censors didn’t know what to make of the shower scene. No one had seen anything like it. The shock of the curtain being ripped open. Janet Leigh’s scream as the knife comes down. The flashes of nudity, a cubist montage, cut to the shriek of that stabbing violin. Leigh’s hand clutching the shower curtain. Her body sliding down the white tile, slumping to the floor, as the curtain is torn from its hooks. The lazy swirl of blood being washed away. Then the drain dissolving into a full-screen close-up of the victim’s cold, dead eye.

The censors objected. They’d seen a flash of a navel, a breast in profile. Some swore they saw a nipple. But with so many cuts, how could they know? The 45-second shower scene contained 78 pieces of film. By today’s standards of strobe-like editing, that’s almost leisurely, but it was unheard of at the time. Director Alfred Hitchcock reassured the censors that there was no untoward nudity, and no shots of the knife hitting flesh. He said it was all in their imagination, a conjuring trick. So the scene survived. Psycho ushered in a new age of erotic horror. And cinema has not been the same since.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Psycho, which was released in June 1960. The movie caused a sensation at the time, and its influence is still being felt. Just as Star Wars (1977) is cited as the game-changing film that launched three decades of sci-fi and special effects, Psycho is the picture that shattered Hollywood’s taboos around sex and violence. In a new book, The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder, David Thomson, America’s pre-eminent film historian, says it opened the floodgates. “Sex and violence were ready to break out,” he writes, “and censorship crumpled like an old lady’s parasol. The orgy had arrived.”

Continue…

Week in Pictures: May 7th – May 13th, 2009

By macleans.ca - Friday, May 15, 2009 at 2:31 PM - 0 Comments

Star Trek’s perilous enterprise

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 12:20 PM - 2 Comments

Believe it or not, there are inhabitants of earth, including at least one editor at this magazine, who still get Star Trek and Star Wars mixed up. But who can blame them? Both franchises are space operas with fanatical cult followings, and, for the uninitiated, it may be hard to keep it all straight—to tell your Romulans from your Rodians and your Klingons from your Kowakians, never mind whether you should slice your aliens with a hand phaser or a lightsaber. So patiently you explain that these worlds are polar opposites. Star Trek is techno science fiction set in a foreseeable future; Star Wars is mythic fantasy set in a past. Star Trek is an expanding universe, a promiscuous TV franchise that’s been cloning itself for over four decades, while spawning a string of ho-hum spinoffs for the big screen; Star Wars is a finite saga that George Lucas has forged into a monumental series of blockbuster epics, all bigger and more lucrative than any of the Trek films.

Continue…

Adventures in geekdom

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, April 2, 2009 at 3:37 PM - 1 Comment

Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart try their luck at romance in 'Adventureland'

If you’re not craving a fix of fuel-injected testosterone this weekend—and can resist the lure of Vin Diesel, Paul Walker and Michelle Rodriguez re-igniting the Fast and Furious franchise—you can choose between two decidedly less macho alternatives that tap an altogether different vein of nostalgia. Adventureland and Fanboys are both are geek coming-of-age stories set in a pre-9/11 world. And the one I’m recommending, heartily, is Adventureland, a delightful romantic comedy about a shy college grad who puts his virginity on the line while working as a carnie in the summer of 1987. Fanboys is more sophmoric fare—a cute but underwhelming road movie, featuring a whole posse of geeks on a quixotic mission to invade George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch in 1998.

Adventureland

This sweet midway ride through the ageless carnival of post-teen angst comes from filmmaker Greg Motolla, who directed the priceless high school hijinks of Superbad. While still blessed with a healthy measure of adolescent naïveté, Adventureland is Motolla’s own script and it’s more mature piece of work, a romantic comedy that’s tilted toward romance. It’s a smart, believable and genuinely touching movie—the tale of a young man staring into the chasm that lies between him and adulthood. And it’s one of those rare films that lives up to the gold standard set by The Graduate over four decades ago. Motolla’s script is semi-autobiographical, and it shows. He conjures a world, both physical and emotional, with the kind of telling details that cannot be made up. Balancing rough-edged realism with tender sentiment, it rides the rom com formula without succumbing to it. Continue…

It's a Trap!

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, March 31, 2009 at 8:41 PM - 9 Comments

This scene from last night confirms that Admiral Akbar’s line from from Return of the Jedi is now a full-on universally-acknowledged meme. Because I am lacking in Star Wars knowledge, I never used to know what people meant when they would yell “It’s a trap!” and then giggle. But eventually it became clear.

I guess mocking one weird or redundant line in a movie is nothing new. My Dad told me that he and others used to quote a moment in this one movie where Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez said “The sheep have come in!” Just quoting “the sheep have come in!” was a meme before the word “meme” was invented.

Actually, “It’s a trap!” references appear to go back to the ’90s, the same time that Dave on NewsRadio was being pilloried by his co-workers for knowing that Boba Fett Continue…