I just had to register to reply to this thread...
Vader's Noooo itself wasn't so horrible, on it's own - movies have been doing that forever - but as others have said - the pose, the lighting, the camera angle, all served to make it extremely melodramatic - you notice the 'device' too much, that's all.
Luke's famous No, while equally cheesy in principle, did not and does not make me giggle much. For me, it has nothing to do with acting or story - it's all in the camera angles, scene framing, and actor pose at the moment of the shot. It was just another bloody nooo scene of many, nothing worse, nothing less. Luke's didn't last quite as long, and it wasn't quite as silly of a voice.
A good example of a ludicrous 'noo' is in the Tombstone movie w/Kurt Russell - a movie that in general I liked very well. When Kurt's brother (or friend, or whoever it was) gets shot, Kurt sits in the mud in the pouring rain and screams "Noooooo!!!" for what feels like forever...he tosses his head back and screams up into the rain while the camera kind of pans up & away from his face from a top view. It was so over the top that for months afterwards a friend and I would turn to each other and scream 'Nooo!' and giggle. And ever since then, every time I see a "noo!" scene Tombstone comes to mind and I crack up.
Anyway...to me, Vader's No falls into the Tombstone category - too overdone and shot in such a way as to make it visually riddiculous and therefore I'm laughing AT the movie, not with the movie. Perhaps if Lucas had shot it from a different angle or the lighting had been different, or if I had the sensation that Lucas was actually kind of poking fun instead of being deadly serious, I wouldn't have found it so ludicrously bad...I don't know.
Now a good use of the 'noo' bits, IMO, would be Liam Neeson's many Noo moments in Darkman. Now there's a film that knew how to merge over-the-top with emotional melodrama and turn it into something both a bit sad and hiliarous at the same time. I actually wanted more "noo's' in that movie. lol
This post has been edited by CrazyPuma: 16 June 2005 - 07:43 AM