Don't forget, for Episode 4, his (now ex-)wife helped edit the original script. With the Prequels, he didn't get any kind of criticism whatsoever.

It's complex, it can kill us for generations.

arrgh - sorry about the block of text - v.tired.

It's not just that. Take a look at Lucas's first big movie, THX-1138. How many lines were spoken in that move?

Lucas is all about visuals, and that's it. If he'd realize that and confine himself to that, he could make a great visual art director in a big-budget movie.

please refer to this comment. Yes I'd rather it isn't coal too.

It's not just the teeth. You particularly notice this if you compare US and UK TV. I find it really hard to tell the actors on US TV apart, particularly the female ones who seem to mostly conform to 2-3 stereotypical appearances. The same is true for the young male ones, though at least there are some older male roles that have distinctive appearances. There are very few ugly actors. Compare this with a BBC drama, where there will be a whole range of physiques.

I find it harms willing suspension of disbelief when watching US shows. I sit there thinking 'really, everyone in this low-income school has a personal trainer and stylist? And these people manage to have perfect hair as soon as they wake up or after running through the mud?' Actually, the UK isn't immune from the last part: Sean Bean in Shape has magic hair that is immune to mud, gunsmoke, and everything else the napoleonic wars can throw at him. No matter how dirty his face and uniform get, his hair always looks as if he's just come from the hairdresser.

I don't have time at the moment to answer everything you posted here, maybe in a couple of days. My insistence on this is based on the behaviour of radionuclides in the environment. They are toxic and emit different types of radiation at various energetic levels. At high energetic levels various radionuclide types cause various types of cancers to Humans and other organisms, like plutonium-239 which is fatal at 1-10 micrograms, it's oxide an inhalant and its chloride easily dissolved into the water table. An iron analogue to the metabolism so its readily absorbed by blood and bone and causes lung cancer and leukaemia. Other types only affect childhood development and there are many different type of radionuclides, sr-90, et.al. At lower energetic levels, say Tritium they are responsible for only doing damage to the DNA in the reproductive system increasing the likely hood of birth defects, transgenic disease. Exposing children reduces brain weight to the adult. it goes on and on.

So when you add to all that that the radio isotope is toxic *and* radio active in geological timeframes is very slow and permanent when released into the environment because it is practically impossible to remove or detect in everyday life. That the more that is released is an accumulation of cancer doses and transgenic disease which is persistent h*20 where h is the half life and 20 is the amount of daughter products and the molecule can circulate in the environment to repeat the cycle.

It just makes me think we've been a little too hasty and arrogant in the handling and use of these materials. It's complex, it can kill us for generation and people don't want to deal with that complexity to build an understanding of just how slowly lethal this stuff is. Let alone the rest of the complexity of this industry.

That's a small part of why I think it is as bad, probably worse than coal. As bad as, I completely agree, coal is.

No, 4-6 were good popcorn movies. They weren't high art by any means, but they were far better than the Prequels which were trash. The reason is simple: in 4-6, other people were able to cover for George's inability. The prequels suffered for bad direction and horrible dialog (/script). In 4, his (now ex-)wife edited the script. If it weren't for her, 4 would have the same utterly horrible dialog as the prequels, and 5 and 6 might not have happened. George was also a better director back then, because his ego wasn't as big. 5 was great because it had different writers (Brackett/Kasdan) and a different director (Kershner). 6 was OK because it too had a different writer (Kasdan/Lucas) and a different director (Marquand).

With the Prequels, Lucas did everything, and no one wanted to say anything to him because his ego was so big and he had put himself in charge of everything, so the results are predictably bad. Lucas was never much good at writing a script or even directing actors, but he refuses to admit it.

It's not an easy task to build a full day's stream of funny.

A full day? Fuck, they haven't managed an inkling of funny on April 1 in years.

Seriously, movie plots? This is the sad grasping of people with no ability to do anything funny.

If you're going to be this pathetic, it's time to stop trying.

Yup, time to ignore Slashdot today.

Natalie Portman and (by most accounts) Hayden Christenson are actually good actors, but you wouldn't know it from the Star Wars prequels. When you have direction that lousy and a script/dialog that lousy, even the most talented actor is going to look bad. According to TFS, Portman even complained that after the Prequels, everyone thought she was a bad actress.

You can't judge an actor by a single movie. Cruise really is a good actor, that's one reason he's had such a long career. Too bad he's also badshit insane with that Scientology crap.

Schwarzenegger can't act but was perfect in the role of an emotionless machine that can't act.

Schwarzenegger was a good fit for several of his parts only because of his body, nothing else. His thick Austrian accent (esp. on a time-traveling robot) didn't exactly add to the realism.

From what I've seen in recent years on TV and in Hollywood movies, getting a part seems to require not so much talent, but a LOT of $$$ for dental work. Getting all your teeth re-capped and made perfectly shaped and white like that isn't cheap. And you'll need that to get any major part on even a low-budget TV show.

Pay attention when you're watching some TV show at the actors' teeth. Then look around you at the teeth on everyone you know.

And people wonder why there are so few women in tech

Is there any other technology, besides renewable energy, that makes certain Slashdot readers so darn mad? It's like they would prefer that it just didn't exist.

If you say Apple has 13% of the personal computer market, they're popping corks and doing the peepee dance. If you say a newer technology, solar energy, has reached 5%, while facing enormous geo-political resistance and the enmity of the most powerful corporations in the world, it actually pisses you off for some reason.

I'm curious. What is it about solar energy that spurs such surprising anger among this segment of Slashdot readers? What did solar energy do to you?