tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32144308723742304042024-02-18T19:44:44.147-08:00Niima OutpostHerb Mallettehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00733851301791453856noreply@blogger.comBlogger51125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3214430872374230404.post-39843716155216296552020-09-03T18:49:00.002-07:002020-09-03T18:49:57.759-07:00Listen, Big Deal.<p>Sometime last week, I re-watched Solo as the next film in my reverse-chronological journey through the Star Wars saga. Surprisingly, I didn't find myself with much to say about it. Even more than Rogue One, it's very much its own thing, and felt more distinct from the other films than any that came before it in this current rewatch.</p><p>Tonight, though, it did occur to me that when Han Solo tells Finn, "Women always figure out the truth," in The Force Awakens, he was talking at least in part about Qi'ra seeing through his self-image as a scoundrel and telling him he was the Good Guy.</p>Herb Mallettehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00733851301791453856noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3214430872374230404.post-40060212246666035532020-08-14T20:05:00.004-07:002020-08-14T20:07:50.702-07:00What Is It They've Sent Us?<p>I've really been slacking on my reverse-order Star Wars rewatch, but I finally got to Rogue One this week, and wow, what a movie! It never ceases to amaze me that there are Star Wars fans who don't like this film.</p><p>Watching it in proximity to A New Hope and the subsequent films really shows off the artistry of Rogue One, both visually and as a singularly constructed story that's entirely its own thing (except for what's essentially an epilogue that serves as a bridge to the next movie). We meet a set of six terrific protagonists, learn who they are in brief by the various tastes of tragic history we get for them, and see them each complete a growth arc within the framework of an action-packed, aesthetically gorgeous quest for redemption and purpose. The music and cinematography soar and dance together, the villain is uniquely banal in his petty, empty quest to prove himself, and despite the fact that everyone dies, it manages to be great fun for almost its entire length.</p><p>New impressions from this viewing:</p><li>Everybody goes on about Darth Vader being so much more dynamic and intense in this movie compared to the OT, especially his presentation in Episode IV, but honestly, the most athletic thing he does is twirl his lightsaber in a circle one-handed to deflect blaster bolts. He Force-pushes a guy to the ceiling, which is no more drastic than tossing around the heavy machinery the throws at Luke in ESB. Aside from that, he's just walking down a hallway. Yes, he kills a fair number of guys in a very compressed time-frame, but really, it's downright mild compared to the things we see him do in Rebels.</li>
<li>The Threepio/Artoo cameo stuck out as a bit more forced to me this time ... while simultaneously making more dramatic sense as a bit of foreshadowing that we'd end the film on the Tantive IV heading right into the opening scene of ANH. It was an odd moment of contradiction to recognize both of those things at once.</li>
<li>Another complaint I've seen is that there's no explanation of how Vader followed Leia's ship to Tatooine from Scarif, and the answer was obvious to me this time around. In ESB, Vader orders his underlings to calculate all possible destinations along the Falcon's last known trajectory when it disappears from the fleet's screens. If he used the same trick after the last scene in Rogue One, one of those destinations would clearly have been Tatooine, and he certainly wouldn't discard that as a mere coincidence. Just as his intuition convinced him the rebels were on Hoth in ESB, it would have told him to head for his own homeworld as soon as he found out it lay along the hyperspace routes accessible from the point Leia's ship went to lightspeed.</li>
<li>The context of The Clone Wars and Rebels series makes Saw Gerrera immensely more compelling in this film. If you watch TCW, then Rebels, then Rogue One, you see his entire journey as a lifelong insurgent fighting the Empire, and you see how diminished his chosen path of extremism has left him.</li>
<li>CGI Leia remains the single worst thing in the film for me, and even as such, I really don't mind her.</li><p>Having now gone through 4 of the 5 Disney films bracketing the OT, I can honestly say, the people who think Disney has somehow ruined Star Wars are hopelessly out of touch with the things I value in Star Wars. All taste is subjective, and my opinion is certainly worth no more than theirs. But it's crystal clear to me that those people just like Star Wars for reasons other than the ones that attract me to the SW universe.</p><p>On to Solo!</p>
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</style>Herb Mallettehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00733851301791453856noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3214430872374230404.post-27530293485282690092020-07-25T12:22:00.001-07:002020-07-25T12:25:23.952-07:00You Were Supposed to Bring Balance to the Force, not Leave it in Darkness!Taking a break from my series on watching the SW saga backwards ... I wrote this bit as a thread on Twitter and got enough positive response on it that I figured I'd post it here too. The context is the contention by some in fandom that Palpatine's return in The Rise of Skywalker ruins Anakin's fulfillment (in Return of the Jedi) of the Prequel-era prophecy of the Chosen One.<br />
<br />
The importance of the Chosen One prophecy in the PT is that the Jedi simultaneously place too much importance on it and don't take it seriously enough. That exactly parallels how a lot of fans treat the prophecy.<br />
<br />
The Jedi believe in the prophecy, but instead of saying, "We're going to trust in this prophecy and see where it goes," they say, "The boy is too old," and "He's too dangerous to be trained." Instead of trusting their Chosen One's instincts to be right, they tell him to repress his emotional attachments and ignore his awful premonitions. They train him and tell him he's incredibly important, but they refuse to trust him. And that leads to their downfall. Their fear leads to his anger and hatred, which leads to mass suffering.<br />
<br />
It's the same with fans. They seize upon Anakin's importance, but they refuse to have enough faith in that importance to trust the Sequels and look for all the ways the ST provides closure to the prophecy.<br />
<br />
The balance needed by the Force was never about defeating a particular bad guy. It was always about undoing the misguided Jedi insistence on repressing certain emotions. As guardians of the Force, the Jedi had decided that they should avoid mistakes at all costs ... even at the cost of shutting themselves off from normal human relationships. Luke's triumph in ROTJ showed that they were wrong about the Dark Side being a path from which one could never return. But his training still focused on fear and anger being emotions one should avoid.<br />
<br />
It took the hard lesson of losing Ben Solo and retreating into ineffective solitude for Luke to understand the truth that he conveys to Rey in her final lesson in TROS: <i>Confronting fear is the destiny of a Jedi.</i> Not avoiding or suppressing it, but facing it and recognizing that through mistakes, we grow -- <i>if</i> we choose to learn from them.<br />
<br />
The people who cling to Anakin being the Chosen One as a key message of the PT/OT sequence miss the point entirely, because in our daily lives, we don't have a Chosen One walking around doing stuff. There's no lesson in that aspect of the narrative for us to learn from. But we *can* learn to confront our fears, forgive our mistakes and the mistakes of others, and grow as people by taking in the lessons of those mistakes.<br />
<br />
That's what Star Wars is about. That's why it's important.<br />
<br />
Not because some fictional Chosen One prophecy was or wasn't completely fulfilled when a hero tossed a villain over a guard-rail.
<br />
<br />
I mean, correct me if I'm wrong and there's somebody out there who has been in that precise circumstance and, thanks to Return of the Jedi, was able to voluntarily disarm themselves so their dad would chuck an evil emperor down a hole.Herb Mallettehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00733851301791453856noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3214430872374230404.post-406787195815514772020-07-18T10:05:00.005-07:002020-07-18T10:12:37.485-07:00Old DataHoly *bleep*, how has it taken me 43 years to realize that when Artoo shows Luke that part of Leia's message it's not an accidental glitch? He deliberately baits the poor sap with just the most enticing part of the recording to trick him into removing the restraining bolt.<br />
<br />
I've finally gotten to Episode IV in my reverse-chronology viewing of the Star Wars films, and wow, there's <i>so</i> much to see here.<br />
<br />
Of course, since Artoo's memory was never wiped, he knows exactly where he is when the Jawas drop the droids off at the Lars homestead. So he uses the message both to tempt Luke into freeing him and to name-drop Obi-wan Kenobi in hopes of gaining more information on how to find him. Luke helpfully tells him Obi-wan lives out beyond the Dune Sea, so Artoo heads that direction the instant he's able to, which explains why Old Ben is so close when Luke catches up and encounters the sandpeople.<br />
<br />
Somewhat more sinisterly ... Artoo tells Luke and Threepio about the life forms approaching from the south, doesn't object when Luke goes to investigate, and doesn't warn Luke about how close one of those life forms is getting. Is he deliberately setting Luke up in order to get back to business? Or does he simply hang back out of easy warning range because he thinks Luke is doing something foolish that might endanger his mission? Hmm.<br />
<br />
People have made a lot out of the fact that Ben doesn't acknowledge Artoo even though he surely would have recognized Anakin's faithful droid, but there's an easy explanation for that: admitting he has a history with Artoo would open Ben up to questions about that history from Luke -- or even from Artoo, through Threepio -- and it's extremely obvious from the ensuing dialogue that Ben wants to tightly control what Luke knows about the Jedi, his father, and what happened between them twenty years earlier.<br />
<br />
There's also a richer context for Ben telling Luke that his uncle didn't hold with his father's ideals and thought he "should have stayed here." If we think of Anakin as the teenage Jedi whom Owen met in Episode II, the quote doesn't make sense -- why would Owen think some guy he'd never seen before ought to stay on Tatooine? But if we consider that Owen knew Shmi Skywalker for years and understood how important her son was to her, along with how hard it was for her when he left, the picture becomes totally different. If Anakin had stayed, Owen might literally have had him for a brother while growing up, and his step-mother would certainly have been much happier in all the years he knew her.<br />
<br />
It's worth noting as well how deliberately restrained Obi-wan is in this film, and how intensely Alec Guinness's expressions imply that there's a greater context to virtually everything he sees in and says to Luke. In the wake of the prequels, I found Obi-wan's character much darker in A New Hope -- an idealistic but now somewhat bitter man who's been in hiding for decades and seems perhaps a bit out-of touch and over-zealous when he says, "You must learn the ways of the Force, if you are to come with me to Alderaan." But with the much wider view of his character as portrayed in The Clone Wars and Rebels, his devotion to Anakin and to Luke brightens those expressions with more of their long-ago nobility for me. And it's now clear that he learned a lesson about trying too hard to dictate to Anakin how a Jedi should behave and what the right path was.<br />
<br />
As for the original movie's place in the nine-episode arc, now that it's complete ... I think my key takeaway is that Star Wars was always, from the very start, a story about people much more than a story about war amongst the stars. Despite the much flashier special effects of the space battles in subsequent movies (even just one movie later in ESB), the attack on the Death Star in A New Hope remains riveting because everything about it focuses on making the participants feel real. The scene of the Rebels preparing their ships for takeoff is a masterpiece of staging, composition, and editing that immerses the viewer in the intricate mechanics of the effort these people are going through, and the pilots' actions within their cockpits, especially as they start experiencing malfunctions and damage to their fighters, makes it clear that flying one of these contraptions is <i>really hard</i>. The whole movie works like crazy to make its people feel real, even the least-important of the extras, and the result is a film that we as human beings can connect to on a level science fiction rarely achieves.Herb Mallettehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00733851301791453856noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3214430872374230404.post-16857992462330112602020-07-07T20:04:00.001-07:002020-07-07T20:04:20.516-07:00You Must Unlearn What You Have LearnedNumber five in my reverse-order rewatch of all the Star Wars movies!<br />
<br />
I'm not sure I actually have all that much to share about this one. For a very long time, Empire was my favorite movie and the asteroid field scene my favorite scene in all of cinema. It would sometimes switch places with A New Hope at the top of my SW rankings depending mostly on mood or whim, but as one of six films, it stood out pretty powerfully as the most successful combination of substance and entertainment in the saga.<br />
<br />
The Disney era has undermined that to a certain extent -- not by presenting any singular film that achieves a greater degree of success, but by evolving Star Wars into hundreds of hours of richly varied storytelling with dozens of triumphant arcs that make it harder and harder for me to justify calling one particular chapter the best.<br />
<br />
I will say that watching ESB right after ROTJ showcases Episode V's strengths a lot better than watching it as the follow-on to the chronological threesome of Solo, Rogue One, and ANH. Filmically, it's head-and-shoulders above ROTJ for me, whereas ANH has always been strong competition, and both Solo and Rogue One are so visually gorgeous that the more dated aspects of ESB's production values suffer in proximity.<br />
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Thematically, the biggest realization I had this time around is the need for Yoda to listen to his own messaging. He and Ben repeatedly tell Luke that there's no coming back from the Dark Side, both in this film and in ROTJ, and their insistence on that point is the perfect example of two of Yoda's best ESB quotes. One of them is the title for this post. The other is, "That is why you fail." As with his Episode II complaints about the Jedi becoming overconfident, these are powerful examples of Yoda being so close to the truth that the moment desperately needs, but not quite grasping it.<br />
<br />
The contrast with his wonderful scene in TLJ, in which he pushes Luke to solve things not as the Jedi would have solved them, but by treading a path informed by their mistakes and his own, creates a terrific through-line stretching between all three middle-of-the-trilogy films.Herb Mallettehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00733851301791453856noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3214430872374230404.post-37691087163232375552020-06-20T11:18:00.005-07:002020-06-20T11:22:18.670-07:00That Bad, Huh?Okay, folks, here we are at the fourth entry in my reverse-order rewatch of the eleven Star Wars movies: Return of the Jedi. To give a little context, 16-year-old me left the theater in 1983 <i>extremely</i> disappointed with this one on opening day. Luke and Leia are siblings? Darth Vader is a weird-looking bald guy under his mask, in heavy pancake makeup? Han Solo basically does <i>nothing</i> right in the entire movie? Teddy bears? Are you fucking kidding me -- <i>teddy bears?!?</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
In the years since then, I've come to consider Luke's moment of triumph in this film to be one of the greatest scenes in movie history. And the line, "I am a Jedi, like my father before me," may be my favorite piece of dialogue in any movie ever. But wow, do I still squirm at some of the stuff in this film.<br />
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So how is it as a follow-on to the next three episodes in the saga?<br />
<br />
Let me tell you, maybe it's just me, but I don't think ROTJ benefits from being viewed directly after The Force Awakens and the other two Disney sequels. And it's not just that virtually every aspect of filmmaking advanced so significantly in the 30 years between the end of the OT and the debut of the ST. The plain fact is, the Disney films are simply better structured than this one is, and all three of the OT leads put in better, more nuanced performances in the later movies than they did in ROTJ -- and were given better dialogue to deliver as well.<br />
<br />
Whew. Well, with that said, here are some interesting things I noticed or had reconfirmed this time around.<br />
<ul>
<li>When Artoo and Threepio are approaching Jabba's palace, Threepio keeps going on about how scared Artoo would be if he'd heard half the things Threepio has about Jabba. Artoo's response is a series of quivering, trembling bleeps that I always previously considered a kind of dumb attempt to make Artoo seem skittish and easily spooked by Threepio's greater knowledge. But this time I realized that actually, Artoo knows <i>tons</i> more about Jabba than Threepio. He remembers everything that happened on Tatooine in The Phantom Menace, as well as everything that happened with the Hutts during the Clone Wars series. He's not scared by what Threepio says -- he's <i>mocking</i> him with those beeps. He's basically saying, "Oh no! I'm so <i>frightened</i>, Threepio! What ever will we do???" Threepio is the one who's terrified, and although he tries to get Artoo to agree with him, the astromech has complete faith in Luke's plan from start to finish.</li>
<li>Rogue One Mon Mothma greatly improves ROTJ Mon Mothma, whom I used to find absolutely insipid.</li>
<li>With the revelations in the sequels about Leia's Jedi powers, the fact that she has memories of her mother and Luke does not kind of implies that her Force abilities are inherently <i>greater</i> than Luke's. I used to hate the fact that Revenge of the Sith committed the apparent continuity error of having Padmé die without Leia meeting her. Now I think the implications of that are pretty damn awesome.</li>
<li>Andy Serkis' performance as Snoke in the Throne Room sequence of TLJ is fantastically reminiscent of Ian McDiarmid's Palpatine delivering the same sorts of taunts to Luke at the end of ROTJ.</li>
<li>Force Ghost Hayden Christensen > Force Ghost Sebastian Shaw. I never felt even a remote connection to the spectral Anakin Skywalker showing up at the end next to Obi-Wan and Yoda, because I had no investment in Shaw's one-scene portrayal of Anakin before his death. Putting Hayden in the final scene instead does a couple of things for me: first, it brings a much greater sense of resolution relative to the prequels, and second, Anakin's visible youth is a bit of a poke at Old Ben and Yoda, who are now eternally locked in their aged, proven-wrong forms, while Anakin has returned to his true self.</li>
</ul>
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Next up ... The Empire Strikes Back!</div>
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<br />Herb Mallettehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00733851301791453856noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3214430872374230404.post-14806117946769342592020-06-13T21:36:00.000-07:002020-06-13T21:36:28.573-07:00The Belonging You Seek Is Not Behind You ... It Is AheadThird up in my reverse chronological order viewing of all 11 Star Wars movies: The Force Awakens!<br />
<br />
I think I actually noticed more things that sit differently in TFA, after The Rise of Skywalker, than struck me in The Last Jedi. Here are a few of them:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>When BB8 tells Rey that where he comes from is classified, Rey says, "Me too. Big secret." It's a cute, flippant remark on her part -- but now we know that it's also completely true in a huge way.</li>
<li>The scene where Snoke tells Ren, "There has been an awakening" is made even more similar to the Vader/Palpatine scene in Empire Strikes back by the knowledge that Palpatine was behind Snoke all along. Both have the holo-projected master looking down on the apprentice and warning of a new enemy arising.</li>
<li>When Finn tells Rey, "I was ashamed of what I was," his resolve to be better than his past is setting her up for finding her own resolve against her origins two movies down the road.</li>
<li>There's a fresh and dark second meaning to Maz's line, "Whoever you were waiting for on Jakku, they're never coming back. But there's someone who still could."</li>
<li>When Starkiller Base destroys the Hosnian system, Finn is the first one we see turning to look at the sky. He does so because he hears screams of shock and terror ... but we don't actually see anyone around him screaming or wailing. We <i>do</i> hear almost identical cries on Hosnian Prime as the people there see the blast burning through their atmosphere. Was anyone at Maz's place actually screaming at the lightshow in the sky? Or did Finn hear the people of Hosnian Prime through the Force? Is it possible that when he shouts at Rey in TROS, "I never told you --" the end of the sentence might have been, "-- I felt the destruction of the Republic through the Force"?</li>
<li>In light of the TROS scene between Ben and Han, a lot of Leia's dialogue sounds eerily prescient: "Luke is a Jedi. You're his father." And, "If you see our son, bring him home." I always previously interpreted those lines as kind of wishful thinking on Leia's part, and thought she kind of screwed Han over by encouraging him to try something that ended up getting him killed. But now we know how that last touch he gave his son, before falling off the bridge, stayed with Ben and really did end up bringing him home.</li>
<li>Leia's Jedi training also puts a different light on a number of things, like her choice to say, "There's still light in him" rather than "There's still good in him." Likewise, a lot of fuss was made over the fact that Leia didn't acknowledge Chewie when the Falcon returned after Han's death. But we now know that Leia sensed who Rey was almost from the start and knew how critical it was to give her that sense of belonging that she always craved.</li>
<li>When Rey has Kylo all but beaten in their lightsaber duel and is circling him like a predator, there's something in her movements that hits me as very similar to the scene in ROTS when Palpatine admits to Anakin that he's a Sith, and circles around him trying to sink his lure.</li>
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Closing thought: I have no idea how people to this very day insist that TFA is just a beat-for-beat imitation of A New Hope. I mean, the Falcon Flies Again sequence alone is absolute peak Star Wars, and there's nothing in Episode IV that remotely lines up with the duel in the snowy forest at the end -- much less the Rathtar sequence (which I love and will never understand the hatred for). This is a damn good Star Wars film, and I honestly think it's made even better by both TLJ and TROS.</div>
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Herb Mallettehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00733851301791453856noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3214430872374230404.post-59431580320316337912020-05-30T21:23:00.001-07:002020-05-30T21:23:09.467-07:00There's Nothing You Can Say To Change My MindWell, my reverse-order rewatch of The Last Jedi was way overdue, but I finally got to it tonight. I wish I hadn't delayed so long; part of the idea behind an endeavor like this is to have the films benefit from close juxtaposition. But things have been weird lately, and a couple of nagging worries made me less enthusiastic about watching TLJ than I wanted to be. One, of course, was the exhaustingly intense squabbling in the fandom over TLJ being better than TROS or TROS being better than TLJ. There's been so much ugly strife over these films, and I didn't want it at the forefront of my thoughts as I watched. Another bit of anxiety was the possibility that rewatching TLJ would bring down my opinion of TROS ... or that having liked TROS so much would lower my appreciation of TLJ.<br />
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But after watching TROS a few weeks back and watching TLJ tonight, I can safely say, people who hold one of the two up as a masterpiece while trashing the other are kind of full of it. Either they're both great filmmaking, or neither one is. Both of them have lots of dumb things in them, and both of them have amazing scenes and performances and a terrific underlying spirit.<br />
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I'm going to go with both of them being great, and please don't bother trying to debate me on that.<br />
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Anyway, some thoughts on TLJ in the context of TROS:<br />
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Knowing that Leia completed her Jedi training years ago makes her Force abilities in The Last Jedi really leap out. When Kylo Ren is shooting up the cruiser and swinging around to target the bridge, the intercutting of their faces and the interaction of their expressions couldn't be more obviously a Force connection. When Leia uses the Force to fly back into the ship after the bridge gets blown out, it's clearly something she intended to do, not just an instinctive activation of latent power. When Luke arrives at the end, gives her Han's golden dice, and kisses her forehead, she totally knows that he's not really there.<br />
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Next, what's likely a very unpopular opinion: Rose Tico is just okay in this movie. Kelly Marie Tran's performance is fine but unexceptional, and the character has no developmental arc of her own to speak of. She's a foil and a catalyst for Finn's growth story, she has some endearing qualities, and she's admirable for being a very ordinary person demonstrating heroism. But while I really wish TROS had given us more of the scenes they supposedly filmed between her and Leia at the base, the people who expected Episode IX to put her on equal footing with the main three characters obviously had a whole different experience of her in this movie that I did. If TLJ had been bold enough to actually have Finn die flying into the battering ram cannon, I would have been fine with her becoming the third leg of a trio in the final movie. As it is, though, TROS really needed to showcase the relationship between Rey, Finn, and Poe, because they'd never been together prior to that. So I'm fine with her not tagging along to Pasaana and elsewhere.<br />
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Another possibly contentious admission: this viewing confirmed my opinion that people are simply off-base when they say TROS retconned TLJ or demeaned and insulted it. This movie starts off with Luke tossing away his father's lightsaber, but it ends with him deliberately choosing to appear on Crait with that same saber. We're expressly shown that he has changed his thinking in radical ways over the course of the film. He spends most of the movie insisting that Kylo is beyond redemption, then tells Leia at the end that, "No one's ever really gone," in response to her saying that her son is truly lost. He literally does exactly what he said he wouldn't do by walking out with a laser sword to face down the whole first order and be the inspiring hero Rey asked him to be at the start. So in TROS, when he talks about having been wrong, he's only stating out loud the things we see him acting upon at the end of TLJ.<br />
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Likewise, the next film doesn't run down Admiral Holdo or write off the Holdo Maneuver as a fluke. It establishes very plainly that people are aware of Holdo's heroic sacrifice and want to be like her. It even shows a Holdo Maneuver having worked over Endor at the close of the movie. The fact that Poe thinks it can't be reliably duplicated isn't a diss -- it's a testament to how well Holdo timed her lightspeed jump and how well she piloted the ship.<br />
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So ... how did The Last Jedi hold up in the context of The Rise of Skywalker? Well, the fact is, the unexpected death of Snoke ought to rank right up there with "I am your Father" as one of the great cinematic shockers in science fiction. The confrontation between Luke and Kylo on Crait is similarly right up there with some of the best moments in all of Star Wars. And the reveal that Luke is still back on Ahch-To is frankly genius-level stuff. I saw TLJ nine or ten times in the theater, and that revelation audibly blew people's minds over and over.<br />
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It's a heck of a film.Herb Mallettehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00733851301791453856noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3214430872374230404.post-66490137598418887122020-05-14T18:38:00.000-07:002020-05-14T18:38:38.026-07:00He Went Completely the Other WayI've decided to try a Star Wars viewing order I don't think I've ever heard anyone talk about. Now that The Rise of Skywalker is on Disney+, I'm going to make my way through all eleven films in reverse chronological order: IX, VIII, VII, VI, V, IV, Rogue 1, Solo, III, II, I. Whatever interesting insights or observations occur to me, I'll blog as I go along.<br />
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First up, The Rise of Skywalker!<br />
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Let me say, for all the fuss about Finn never saying what it was that he meant to tell Rey, I think it's become pretty obvious he was going to tell her about finding his connection to the Force. Right from the first sequence of TROS that he's in, he's getting feelings and intuitions about things that haven't happened yet or are happening elsewhere. I don't think I paid any mind to it while in the theater (six times), but when he says, "I was just thinking that," in response to Poe's suggestion that they boulder the TIE fighters, it's not just because he's in tune with Poe and they're both strategizing -- it's because he's in touch with the Force and getting impressions of his surroundings or of impending possibilities.<br />
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I'll also say that from a purely filmic perspective, Rose Tico is actually in this movie a <i>lot</i> for someone who isn't playing a major plot role. I think she has more screen time than Hux, who was downgraded from one of the principal villains in the first two films to a bit part in this one. And of course, Captain Phasma didn't come back at all. Now, there's probably someone out there right now ranting at the computer screen about how JJ Abrams and Chris Terrio made a horrible mistake in choosing not to give her a major plot role, but (a) I believe it when they say she originally had a much larger part, but that many of her lines were cut because they were scenes with Leia where the CGI wasn't working the way they wanted, and (b) it's actually <i>really hard</i> to give large numbers of characters significant plot roles in the course of a film. Yeah, yeah, you've seen it lots of times, but that doesn't make it easy. And when you're plotting a story, you inevitably make choices about where your focus will be. For TROS, the filmmakers chose to leave Captain Phasma out, cut Hux off at the knees, have Maz Kanata appear without showing any of her plucky personality, put Luke in only a single scene, and separate Rose from the big three characters so that the audience would have an important character back at the base to play against the hodgepodge of repurposed Leia footage. This isn't some kind of crime against humanity; Yoda played an enormous role in the middle installment of the OT, and then had almost nothing to do in Return of the Jedi. Count Dooku was the main villain of Episode II and gets only a single scene in Return of the Sith. Boba Fett was hyped like crazy for Empire and sparked a fan base that has spent 40 years waiting for him to have a major film role, but literally got thrown down a hole in ROTJ. All three of those disappointed me, as did Rose's small role in TROS. The tradeoff is, we got to see our three main characters interacting a ton in this film, unimpeded by any need to establish Rose's place in what would then be a quartet instead of a trio. And for people who thought Rose was merely okay in TLJ, that was probably a much bigger payoff. People need to stop treating straightforward story choices like personal affronts to their very being. You can be disappointed without screaming that the screenwriters need to rot in hell for all eternity.<br />
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Okay, getting off that particular soap box and maybe onto another one ... like the prequels, TROS is a movie that does a huge amount of storytelling through implication, putting its trust in the viewer to connect the dots. Kylo Ren is the Supreme Leader, and from the conference room scene, we know he can pretty much do whatever he wants. He's clearly chosen to elevate General Pryce over Hux, yet keeps Hux around <i>just</i> for the purpose of rubbing his nose in his fall from near-greatness. None of these three characters has a single line of dialogue explaining that motivation or describing Pryce being put in charge or Hux being functionally demoted. But by playing the characters off one another in the way that they do, the filmmakers tell us plainly what has happened in the year since Kylo took over.<br />
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The same thing occurs when Rey calls Leia "master." That one word makes it clear that Leia hasn't just been helping Rey train because she's the leader of the Resistance and tangentially knows stuff about the Jedi from her brother. She's taken her on as a padawan, which validates the way Leia saves herself from the bridge explosion in TLJ. That wasn't just a fluke or an instinctual use of the Force; it was the action of a powerful Force user who fully knows what she's doing -- to the extent of comfortably taking on the role of master to an apprentice. It also explains why Leia goes up to Rey and hugs her when she gets off the Falcon at the end of The Force Awakens. The two of them have never met, but Leia <i>knows</i> there's already an important bond there because of Han, and because of their Force connection.<br />
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When Rey watches the children laughing at puppets in the desert of Pasaana, we're being told that she recognizes and appreciates their freedom to <i>be</i> children, despite living in a physically harsh environment similar to the one where she grew up. Also on Pasaana: when Kylo steals Rey's necklace, the camera stays on her while she's <i>thinking through</i> the implications of him taking it. She doesn't tell us or her friends that she knows the necklace will let Kylo figure out where they are; we know her thought process without any dialogue at all.<br />
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The whole movie is full of that kind of stuff. This is JJ's famous "mystery box" technique, which he gets criticized for all the time because people think it's an empty trick rather than a thoughtful method of storytelling. By <i>showing</i> us something that provides us the opportunity to fill in the blanks ourselves, he's able to squeeze a much greater amount of story into the film and keep it moving at a much faster pace, because the characters don't need to tell each other and the audience every little thing. Not only that, but since we're filling it in ourselves, it becomes more meaningful to us and involves us more deeply than if we were led through it by the hand with dialogue.<br />
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There's lots more I could say about this movie, but I'll leave it here for now. For one thing, I think it's very likely that rewatching The Last Jedi next, even more connections within TROS will come bubbling up for me.<br />
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Overall: The Rise of Skywalker is a tremendously fun movie that ties together all three of the sequel films as well as the saga itself. We start with Palpatine and with Anakin being foretold as the one who would bring balance to the Force, and we end with Palpatine and with Anakin telling Rey that she can return things to balance too.Herb Mallettehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00733851301791453856noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3214430872374230404.post-49856781941334146912019-09-07T22:19:00.001-07:002020-01-28T05:39:14.750-08:00I Guess I Was Wrong. There Was No Danger At All.<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Okay, so I’m going through the movies in a slow-mo marathon of one every couple of weeks in the runup to Episode IX, and tonight I watched Attack of the Clones.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I always go into it worrying that somehow, I’ll finally see what the naysayers see and the film will let me down. But nope, every time it’s miles above I and III, and above most of ROTJ (though of course it can’t touch “I am a Jedi, like my father before me”).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Not only are the colors and landscapes and music just gorgeous from an aesthetic point of view, and not only does the movie deliver the thematic heart of the entire prequel trilogy, but it's rip-roaring fun from beginning to end, with only a few hiccups along the way.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I have a vivid recollection of being in the theater on opening night and seeing Obi-Wan jump through that window without a second's hesitation and deciding right then and there that, unlike The Phantom Menace, this was damn well a Star Wars movie. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">So here's a list of some of the things I love about Star Wars Episode II.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The big silver flying wing approaching Coruscant from the bottom up, rolling over to re-orient itself, gliding across the clouds and then down and through their misty obscurity. Absolutely beautiful, with terrific, moody music accompanying it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Mace Windu patronizingly telling Senator Amidala that Count Dooku couldn't possibly be behind the assassination attempt on her because Dooku used to be a Jedi, so it simply wasn't in his character. The Jedi are meant to be putzes in the prequel trilogy, which a bafflingly large number of fans manage to overlook or deliberately ignore, and Windu's mansplaining here really hammers the point home.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Virtually every line Ian McDiarmid speaks.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Small echoes of Jake Lloyd in Hayden Christensen's performance as Anakin. One might argue that they're simply both failing as actors in the same stilted way, while speaking lines that Lucas wrote in the same stilted way, but the fact is, if you listen closely, their dialogue and delivery is extremely consistent. The way Anakin interrupts Padme on Naboo when she says he's just a Padawan learner harkens right back to his "I'm a person, and my name is Anakin," line when she calls him a slave in Episode I.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Jar Jar's dramatically reduced yet much more important role. He is still annoying, but he's there for a clear purpose, which we finally see when he plays the patsy by making the motion to give Palpatine emergency powers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Anakin's rebellious insistence that "Investigation is implied in our mandate," and the awkward discomfort his argument with Obi-Wan engenders in everyone else in the room. The fact is, he's right. But Obi-Wan is being too by-the-book and too I'm-your-teacher to see or admit it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The speeder chase. Sure, parts of it are cheesy, but it's a sustained sequence of the Jedi being absolutely amazing, doing the things they're good at, full of great kinetics, wild sound effects, and multiple holy-crap-did-he-really-just-do-that? moments.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Obi-Wan's gentle chastisement of Anakin when he catches up to him outside the club. He truly feels like a patient mentor here.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Anakin's shift from "Who hired you? Tell us," to "Tell us NOW," and the look of hopeful respect Obi-Wan gives him in between the two lines.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Jango Fett.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The scene of Padme packing, where she very reasonably defends Obi-Wan's actions as a mentor in response to Anakin's teen surliness. A lot of people find Anakin too immature and creepy in this scene, but that's pretty much the whole point. And Padme deals with his immaturity perfectly ... up until his gaze unsettles her.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Yoda bemoaning the fact that even some of the older, more experienced Jedi have become too sure of themselves. He's going down the hall with Obi-Wan and Mace Windu, who nod knowingly at his wisdom -- and all three of them fail to realize that they're the ones he's really talking about. The irony is absolutely savage.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Dexter Jettster, the four-armed diner owner. He's so amiable and Obi-Wan is so clearly delighted by him as a friend. It's also clear that he has more than a touch of unsavoriness in his backstory, and that presages Ben's ability to negotiate the scum and villainy of the cantina in Episode IV.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">"Aggresive negotiations."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Anakin's dislike of sand, which tons of people seem to think is dumb because it comes out of nowhere and is basically a dude saying, "I don't like that" in response to his crush's description of something she enjoyed. But his clumsiness at romance is totally believable given his upbringing, and the sand line is a clear call-back to his childhood and his formative identity as someone who fixed things in an environment that was constantly breaking them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">"I'd be much too frightened to tease a senator." The whole scene where Anakin and Padme debate the merits of the Republic's version of democracy just exudes the influence Palpatine's guidance has had on Anakin and foreshadows Anakin's eventual role in the dictatorship of the Empire. Yet he segues into genuine charm and humor when the object of his affection becomes concerned at the things he's saying, and deflects her worries like a true pupil of the manipulative Chancellor.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Obi-Wan inspecting the troops on Kamino. Despite a lot of weirdness and awkwardness in his dialogue with the Kaminoans, this moment is a chilling harbinger of the stormtrooper legions we know it will eventually give rise to.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The verbal duel between Obi and Jango in the Fetts' quarters. I find the feigned politeness and tension between these two endlessly entertaining, and the dialogue here is really good.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Hayden's performance during the fireplace scene on Naboo, and to a lesser extent, Natalie Portman's as well. There's a lot of truly cringe-worthy dialogue here, but Hayden delivers it like a trooper, and for the most part, Natalie does too. If the writing had been just a little bit sharper (well, maybe a lot sharper), this would have been an amazing scene.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The actual duel between Obi and Jango on the landing pad. Exciting, great music, great use of weather as both a visual backdrop and an integral part of the fight itself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The return of Watto. Honestly, I find his scene in this film one of the best performances by a CGI character in any live-action film I know of. He's a terrible person in the way a lot of ordinary people are terrible, and yet his genuine affection for Ani and the squalor into which he has fallen bring out an unavoidable sympathy in me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Cliegg Lars. This dude is Tatooine wrapped up in a nutshell.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The shadow-puppet imagery as Anakin prepares to go after his mother, where we see the shape of Darth Vader's helmet cast by Anakin's hair.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Anakin's "Duel of the Fates" ride through the sunset Tatooine desert. Not the greatest green-screened sequence, I'll totally admit. But it's visually stunning nonetheless, and the re-use of "Duel of the Fates" at this critical juncture in Anakin's life is a fantastic piece of musical storytelling.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Freakin' seismic charges in space. I swear, the delayed explosion sound is probably the single dumbest piece of physics in any movie ever, but it's so awesome in combination with the visuals that I love it twice as much.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The reversed Pieta image in Shmi Skywalker's death scene. It's flipped left-to-right from Michaelangelo's statue and flips mother and son as well, and it foreshadows Anakin's fall to darkness instead of a resurrection, and it's just not the kind of fine-arts allusion you expect to find in a Star Wars film.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Every word Christopher Lee says.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The garage scene where Anakin reveals his slaughter of the sandpeople. Hayden Christensen is fantastic here. You could also argue that there's a subtle critique of Padme's background as part of a colonizer culture in her willingness to tolerate her boyfriend's murder of indigenous people, right down to the children.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: large;">That incredible arena sequence and its transition to the Battle of Geonosis. These are both vast, ingeniously conceived and executed action scenes, full of eye-popping architecture, creatures, and tech designs. I could probably write a whole blog post about all the things I love from each one of them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Obi-Wan bringing Anakin to his senses by asking what Padme would do if she were in his place. It's another bravura scene for Hayden, and here Ewan MacGregor is at a similar emotional peak.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Badass Yoda. People have weirdly mixed reactions to this, but I didn't hear anything mixed in the theater I was in on opening night. The crowd went wild. I loved it then, and I will always love it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Dumbass Yoda. I mean, what the hell, Yoda? Don't you remember the part where, oh, an hour and a half ago, you were telling Obi and Mace what a shame it was that even the older, more experienced Jedi were getting too sure of themselves? And now you're going to just keep toying with your old Padawan Dooku and taunting him while Obi-Wan and Anakin are lying injured on the floor? This is the ultimate payoff for the earlier scene, and the cruelest commentary on the fallibility of the Jedi.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Dooku's solar sail spaceship. Another makes-no-sense torturing of the laws of physics, but it's beautiful anyway.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">"Begun, the Clone War has." The first full-throated appearance of the Imperial March ringing out through the literal sunset of the Republic, with the vast machinery of conquest on full display while poor Bail Antilles is able to do nothing more than ineffectually clench his fist against a balustrade -- this is one of the most vivid and meaningful scenes of the whole saga for me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The musical modulation from the Love Theme to the closing-credits theme. I find this a very close second place to the credit transition in The Empire Strikes Back. The juxtaposition of melancholy romance and rousing symphonic triumph nails the ending of the film for me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">So, no, not even close to a let-down, even after 17 years worth of viewings.</span><span style="font-family: -webkit-standard;"></span></div>
Herb Mallettehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00733851301791453856noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3214430872374230404.post-28419161112250798142019-09-07T20:45:00.004-07:002019-09-07T20:45:47.242-07:00I Promise To Return And To Finish What I Started ...<div style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Yikes. I just realized that I haven't posted here since before The Last Jedi came out!</span></div>
<div style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Maybe I can get back in the swing of things with The Mandalorian and The Rise of Skywalker coming out ...</span></div>
Herb Mallettehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00733851301791453856noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3214430872374230404.post-86352221427162419932017-12-01T19:25:00.000-08:002017-12-01T19:25:01.590-08:00Burn the First Order Down!The Last Jedi is getting close, so I decided to get started on my pre-Episode-8 marathon. Last time around, I watched everything in chronological order. This time, I decided to try the fabled "Machete" order (4, 5, 2, 3, 6), except that I'm a completist, so I'll put The Phantom Menace in there after Empire Strikes Back, and I decided I'd begin with Rogue One. Having taken the day off today, I put R1 in the Blu-ray player and got started.<br />
<br />
Despite the weirdness of CGI Tarkin and the awful weirdness/weird awfulness of CGI Leia, I think Rogue One is the best-made Star Wars film, and this viewing did nothing to change that opinion. It's the only SW movie to pay major attention to the way external lighting conditions affect the interior illumination aboard spaceships, for instance -- one of many touches that make it such a visually beautiful and immersive film.<br />
<br />
What I was really eager to see, though, was how it affected my viewing of A New Hope ... so eager, in fact, that since I had the day off, I put in Episode IV after little more than a lunch break.<br />
<br />
Two things worried me, going into the experience. First, would the modern cinematic sophistication of Rogue One make the original film look really cheesy in comparison? And second, would the action-packed, drama-packed, emotion-packed war movie make Star Wars seem too slow and too popcorn-fluffy?<br />
<br />
But I settled in and tried to put myself in the mindset of some total neophyte who had somehow watched Rogue One as its own movie and was now watching Star Wars: A New Hope as a sequel that just happened to have been made 40 years earlier.<br />
<br />
A great deal of surprising entertainment ensued!<br />
<br />
To start with, Imaginary-Star-Wars-Newbie Herb appreciated the 20th Century Fox fanfare reminding him that he was about to watch a really old movie. Reign in those special-effects expectations, Imaginary-Star-Wars-Newbie Herb! Then the "A long time ago..." screen popped up and made me feel like, "Oh, look! Total continuity!"<br />
<br />
Main Title Theme, logo, and screen crawl: these piled on the expectations of a hugely different tone and approach than Rogue One. The decision to avoid a crawl in Rogue One turns the ANH crawl into a distinguishing element that completely resets the viewer's mood. Everything described in the text is familiar from the "previous" film, but couched so differently that it eases you into the film and prevents the 40-year jump in filmic technique from being too jarring. Plus, we find out the name of the creepy CGI chick from the end of R1.<br />
<br />
And then, <i>Bam!</i> The Star Destroyer pursues the fleeing Rebel Alliance ship across the screen with really chintzy laser blasts and explosions, but surprisingly good ship visuals. Inside the ship, we see those two robots who showed up in the rebel base last movie for no apparent reason, and it turns out now they're going to be important.<br />
<br />
Let me tell you, the moment Leia puts that data disk into Artoo becomes stunning in light of Rogue One. Before, the disk was just some flimsy little data-transfer device of no real significance -- all the meaning of the scene was bound up in Leia and Artoo interacting. This time, that disk was the thing everybody in the last movie <i>died</i> to get hold of. Suddenly, instead of being our cute robot hero being given a mission by the movie's female lead, what we see is the transfer of <i>the most important thing in the galaxy</i> to this little droid who doesn't even speak a human language.<br />
<br />
What follows is a long sequence of seemingly low-key adventures (compared to the action of R1), but with the slow pace turned on its head by the knowledge that <i>no one in the whole first half of the movie has any idea how important this information is!</i> (Except Artoo, and he can't tell anyone.) Owen ordering Luke to take the droids into town and have their memories erased changes from a curmudgeonly uncle trying to stave off trouble into a horrifying command that would render Jyn and Cassian's deaths meaningless.<br />
<br />
I read and heard a lot of people saying that Darth Vader's display of power at the end of R1 was inconsistent with and would undercut the drama of his actions in Episode IV. But for me, it had the opposite effect. R1 Vader does a lot of Force-lifting and throwing, but he really doesn't move any quicker than ANH Vader. And the opening of ANH shows us that Vader behaves very differently when a situation is under complete control than he did when in the middle of a pitched space battle. The 1977 Darth Vader basically served as Tarkin's henchman for most of the movie. But within the context of Rogue One, we can now see that he stands behind Tarkin not because he's a lackey, but because the two of them have very firmly established spheres of authority, and Vader is totally comfortable letting Tarkin run the bureaucratic part of the Death Star's activities. <br />
<br />
Another cool thing about Episode IV as a direct sequel to Rogue One is the sophisticated slow build about the Jedi. In Rogue One, we hear them mentioned as figures revered by Chirrut and Baze -- and Chirrut mentions that khyber crystals power the Jedi's "lightsabers." Having this in mind when Obi-Wan reveals that he was "once a Jedi knight, like your father" creates a far greater sense of things coming together than that line does in the original film alone. <i>This dude is one of the guys Chirrut and Baze looked up to ... and not only that, but this Luke kid who wouldn't last two seconds in a fight with Jyn or Cassian is the son of another of those guys!</i> Seeing the lightsaber turn on for the first time becomes a fulfillment of the anticipation set up by Chirrut's reverence for the Jedi in R1.<br />
<br />
This viewing also marked the first time I could really see Obi-Wan through Owen's eyes. Thanks to the willful isolationism of Saw Gerrera, meeting this "strange old hermit" lent a lot more credence to Owen's line, "That wizard's just a crazy old man." Saw and Obi-Wan have both sought refuge in desolate wastelands. Both of them are aging and unkempt. Obi-Wan's still in one piece, but he looks even older than Saw, and he moves like an old man as well. And the look in the Jedi's eyes when he tells Luke, "You must learn the ways of the Force, if you're to come with me to Alderaan," has a clear echo of Saw's unhinged fanaticism.<br />
<br />
Which brings us to Luke's response that "It's all so far away." By virtue of the completely different pace, and the total naiveté of our young farmboy hero compared to the protagonists of Rogue One, this line finally feels entirely real, not just the excuse of someone who's not ready to take up the hero's mantle. What we've seen in ANH to this point really is whole worlds away from what we saw in Rogue One. Luke isn't just attempting another teenage dodge here -- he's genuinely reacting to information and events that are alien to him.<br />
<br />
Other fun elements of Episode IV as a Rogue One sequel:<br />
<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>The Easter egg of seeing those two guys who bumped into Jyn in Jeddha City again.</li>
<li>The idea that ISWN Herb would have been surprised to realize that Red Leader and Gold Leader from Rogue One were actually in the 1977 film.</li>
<li>The worry that "Red Five" was not necessarily an auspicious call-sign for Luke to be given.</li>
<li>The extraordinary continuity of technological design, like the Imperial plug-in sockets that both Artoo and K2SO use, and the Scarif tower interfaces compared to the tractor-beam controls.</li>
<li>The subtle return of that blue milk from the Erso farm.</li>
</ul>
<br />
There was more, but that's probably enough for now.<br />
<br />
On to Episode V ... !<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Herb Mallettehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00733851301791453856noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3214430872374230404.post-53078271298047943992017-04-08T15:14:00.000-07:002017-04-08T15:20:42.611-07:00I'm So Sorry ...I went to a big-screen showing of 2001: A Space Odyssey this past Monday, and for some reason, I started imagining the alternate reality where Pete the Retailer and Alex Robinson from <a href="http://www.starwarsminute.com/">Star Wars Minute</a> did their podcast about Kubrick's masterpiece instead of Lucas's.<br />
<br />
With no further ado ...<br />
<br />
Highlights from <i>2001: A Space Odyssey Minute</i><br />
<br />
Minute 1<br />
<br />
(Theme music: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upHBlyLDhvI">disco version of "Also Sprach Zarathustra"</a>)<br />
<br />
PTR: Hello, and welcome to 2001: A Space Odyssey Minute -- the daily podcast where we analyze, scrutinize, and celebrate Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey. I'm Pete the Retailer, from petetheretailer.com.<br />
<br />
Alex: And I'm Alex Robinson, from comicbookalex.com.<br />
<br />
PTR: Today, we'll be talking about minute one of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Minute one begins with a completely black screen showing while a bunch of really strange music plays, and it ends one minute later with a completely black screen showing while a bunch of really strange music plays.<br />
<br />
Alex: This is some really strange music.<br />
<br />
PTR: That it is. You know, the movie was originally scored by composer Alex North, but Kubrick decided at the last minute to throw North's music out and replace it with classical and contemporary orchestral music.<br />
<br />
Alex: I did not know that.<br />
<br />
(20 minutes later)<br />
<br />
PTR: ... then join us tomorrow for another 2001: A Space Odyssey Minute.<br />
<br />
Alex (crosstalk): 2001: A Space Odyssey Minute.<br />
<br />
Minute 2 <br />
<br />
(Theme music: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upHBlyLDhvI">disco version of "Also Sprach Zarathustra"</a>)<br />
<br />
Alex: Welcome back to 2001: A Space Odyssey Minute -- the daily podcast
where we analyze, scrutinize, and celebrate Stanley Kubrick's
masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey. I'm Alex Robinson, from comicbookalex.com.<br />
<br />
PTR: And I'm Pete the Retailer, from petetheretailer.com.<br />
<br />
Alex:
Today, we'll be talking about minute two of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Minute two begins with a completely black screen showing while a bunch
of really strange music plays, and it ends one minute later with a
completely black screen showing while a bunch of really strange music
plays.<br />
<br />
(18 minutes later)<br />
<br />
Alex: ... then join us tomorrow for another 2001: A Space Odyssey Minute.<br />
<br />
PTR (crosstalk): 2001: A Space Odyssey Minute.<br />
<br />
Minute 6<br />
<br />
(Theme music: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upHBlyLDhvI">disco version of "Also Sprach Zarathustra"</a>)<br />
<br />
Alex: Welcome back to 2001: A Space Odyssey Minute -- the daily podcast
where we analyze, scrutinize, and celebrate Stanley Kubrick's
masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey. I'm Alex Robinson, from comicbookalex.com.<br />
<br />
PTR: And I'm Pete the Retailer, from petetheretailer.com.<br />
<br />
ToCo: And I'm Tony Consiglio, from mini-comics such as Double-Cross!<br />
<br />
Alex: Thanks for joining us today, Tony. We're glad you could make it.<br />
<br />
ToCo: My pleasure. Now, am I getting this right? Are we talking about a different minute each day?<br />
<br />
PTR: Yes, that's right.<br />
<br />
ToCo: Because the DVD you sent me -- it just had the same thing 5 times, and no video.<br />
<br />
Alex:
Well, we'll get to that. So, to set the stage, today, we'll be talking about minute six of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Minute six begins with a completely black screen showing while a bunch
of really strange music plays, and it ends one minute later with a
completely black screen showing while a bunch of really strange music
plays.<br />
<br />
ToCo: Now, let me tell you, when it comes to a movie screen, Kubrick really knows how to paint it black.<br />
<br />
Alex: Wrong podcast.<br />
<br />
(20 minutes later)<br />
<br />
Alex: So, Tony, will you be able to join us again tomorrow?<br />
<br />
ToCo: Um, couldn't you just replay today's episode? Like, four more times?<br />
<br />
PTR: I'm afraid that's not how we do it.<br />
<br />
ToCo: Okay, if you say so.<br />
<br />
Alex: 2001: A Space Odyssey Minute<br />
<br />
PTR (crosstalk): 2001: A Space Odyssey Minute<br />
<br />
ToCo (delayed): 2001 ... A Space Odyssey ... Geez, by the end of the week, I'll be dead!<br />
<br />
Minute 14<br />
<br />
(Theme music: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upHBlyLDhvI">disco version of "Also Sprach Zarathustra"</a>)<br />
<br />
Alex: Welcome back to 2001: A Space Odyssey Minute -- the daily podcast
where we analyze, scrutinize, and celebrate Stanley Kubrick's
masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey. I'm Alex Robinson, from comicbookalex.com.<br />
<br />
PTR: And I'm Pete the Retailer, from petetheretailer.com.<br />
<br />
Josh: And I'm Josh Flanagan, of the upcoming Goodfellas Minute podcast.<br />
<br />
Alex: My hat's off too you, Josh. I don't know how you guys are going to do that. I mean, sooo much happens in every minute of Goodfellas. Your episodes are going to be hours long.<br />
<br />
Josh: Well, we're going to give it a go. You guys really inspired us.<br />
<br />
Alex: Today, we're talking about minute 14 of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Minute 14 begins with the sun rising on the horizon, and ends one minute later, with a bunch of ape-men sitting around a water hole.<br />
<br />
PTR: I know the first three days were tough, Josh, but a lot happens in today's minute.<br />
<br />
Alex: Action packed.<br />
<br />
Josh: I was getting pretty tired of sunrises, so this minute was a relief.<br />
<br />
... <br />
<br />
Minute 18:<br />
<br />
PTR: Today's episode of 2001: A Space Odyssey Minute is brought to you by Hallo Fresh.<br />
<br />
(jaunty advertising music)<br />
<br />
Alex: Hey, Pete! What's that amazing smell?<br />
<br />
PTR: I just finished making dinner.<br />
<br />
Alex: Mmmm! Flat trays of orange stuff, green stuff, brown stuff, and yellow stuff! My favorite!<br />
<br />
PTR: Careful, don't burn your fingers. Those are right out of the heating unit.<br />
<br />
Alex: Wow, this is so much better than those old space meals that we had to drink through straws. How did you make such an amazing meal?<br />
<br />
PTR (aside to audience): Should I tell him? Should I tell him these trays of stuff came from Hallo Fresh? No, I'd better keep it secret.<br />
<br />
Alex: Come on, Pete, tell me how!<br />
<br />
PTR: I'm afraid I can't do that, Alex.<br />
<br />
(Theme music: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upHBlyLDhvI">disco version of "Also Sprach Zarathustra"</a>)<br />
<br />
...<br />
<br />
Alex: Today, we're talking about minute 18 of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Minute 18 begins with the ape-men sitting around their water hole, and it ends exactly 60 seconds later with the ape-men sitting around their water hole.<br />
<br />
...<br />
<br />
Minute 56<br />
<br />
(Theme music: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upHBlyLDhvI">disco version of "Also Sprach Zarathustra"</a>)<br />
<br />
Alex: Welcome back to 2001: A Space Odyssey Minute -- the daily podcast
where we analyze, scrutinize, and celebrate Stanley Kubrick's
masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey. I'm Alex Robinson, from comicbookalex.com.<br />
<br />
PTR: And I'm Pete the Retailer, from petetheretailer.com.<br />
<br />
Jacob Siroff: And I'm Jacob Siroff, from ihatestanelykubrick.com.<br />
<br />
Alex: Today, we're talking about minute 56 of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Minute 56 begins with the camera slowly tracking along the length of the U.S.S. Discovery One to the solemn strains of Gayane's Adagio, and ends one minute later with the camera slowly tracking along the length of the U.S.S. Discovery One to the solemn strains of Gayane's Adagio.<br />
<br />
PTR: We're really glad you could join us, Jacob.<br />
<br />
Alex: And what a minute to start off with! This is the controversial third straight minute of the camera tracking along the length of Discovery. Any thoughts?<br />
<br />
Jacob Siroff: Okay, so, like every other minute of this movie, this one just proves that 2001 is one of the worst movies ever made. And by that I mean, it's a Kubrick movie. To me, there's Kubrick, and then there's all other horrible movies ever in the entirety of history.<br />
<br />
PTR: Wow. That's an unusual stance.<br />
<br />
Jacob Siroff: I don't care. And if anyone says any different, I'm going to prove them 100% wrong.<br />
<br />
...<br />
<br />
<br />
Minute 72<br />
<br />
(Theme music: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upHBlyLDhvI">disco version of "Also Sprach Zarathustra"</a>)<br />
<br />
Alex: Welcome back to 2001: A Space Odyssey Minute -- the daily podcast
where we analyze, scrutinize, and celebrate Stanley Kubrick's
masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey. I'm Alex Robinson, from comicbookalex.com.<br />
<br />
PTR: And I'm Pete the Retailer, from petetheretailer.com.<br />
<br />
Chris R: And I'm Chris Radtke of the Wookie Dance Party podcast.<br />
<br />
Alex: Today, we're discussing minute 72 of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Minute 72 begins with Astronauts David Bowman and Frank Pool eating different colors of goo from rectangular trays, and it ends one minute later with Hal 9000 saying that he first came online in the year 1992.<br />
<br />
PTR: 92.<br />
<br />
Alex: So, Chris, any opinions on just what it is that the astronauts are eating?<br />
<br />
Chris R: I can't tell. But it kinda looks like garbage.<br />
<br />
...<br />
<br />
Minute 143<br />
<br />
<br />
(Theme music: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upHBlyLDhvI">disco version of "Also Sprach Zarathustra"</a>)<br />
<br />
PTR: Welcome back to 2001: A Space Odyssey Minute -- the daily podcast where we analyze, scrutinize, and Hal gets lobotomized --<br />
<br />
Alex: (laughter)<br />
<br />
PTR: Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey.Herb Mallettehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00733851301791453856noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3214430872374230404.post-39301123651351277322017-04-08T13:41:00.000-07:002017-04-08T13:41:56.319-07:00What's in There?Discussion on the ever-entertaining Star Wars Minute Listener's Society page on Facebook recently turned to <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/j_j_abrams_mystery_box">J.J. Abrams' Ted Talk</a> about the "Mystery Box." Consensus seemed to be that the talk exemplified a problematic side of Abrams as a filmmaker -- an emphasis on mystery over substance and a habitual technique of keeping the audience in the dark without providing payoff for the many unknowns he introduces to hook the viewer's curiosity.<br />
<br />
I certainly have occasional nits to pick with most of Abrams' work, and his <i>Revolution</i> show was an <a href="http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-10-dumbest-things-tv-so-far-this-season/">abomination of television</a>. However, I love <i>The Force Awakens</i>, really enjoyed <i>Lost</i> and <i>Super 8</i>, and felt he had a 50-50 record with <i>Star Trek</i>. And the elements I have disliked in his work had nothing to do with mysteries and everything to do with good old-fashioned dumbness. So I figured I'd better check out this Mystery Box talk and see what everyone was going on about.<br />
<br />
(SPOILERS! Hereafter, I give away pretty much the whole Ted Talk, so you might want to view it first.)<br />
<br />
In a nutshell, Abrams presents the Ted audience with a box from a magic shop he and his grandfather used to frequent. It's a "Mystery Box" purportedly containing over $50 of magic for only $15. He's kept it all these years as a reminder of his grandfather, and has never opened it. He likes the sense of design of the box and enjoys having it around, but if he opened it, the mystery would be gone.<br />
<br />
The takeaway for most people on SWMLS seemed to be that Abrams was saying that what's inside a creative work isn't important. Rather, having a cool exterior and a sense of mystery is sufficient.<br />
<br />
It seems like a really terrible analogy for storytelling, if one has any respect for the audience and for art as a means of expressing truths.<br />
<br />
Another criticism of the talk was that it just kind of rambled along and never really went anywhere. Abrams never brought the analogy to a clear moment of focus, never explained exactly what he meant by it. He just put it out there and surrounded it with some clever anecdotes and funny jokes and talked a bit aimlessly about the creative process, storytelling, etc.<br />
<br />
But here's the thing. J.J. Abrams' "Mystery Box" Ted Talk is itself a Mystery Box.<br />
<br />
What do I mean by this? Well, Abrams is very direct about the fact that the actual contents of the box don't really matter. But he's also very direct about the fact that the box itself is tremendously meaningful to him. As a collection of objects, pieces put together by the magic shop owner, it's just a bunch of stuff. But in the context of his relationship with his grandfather, it becomes a quasi-religious relic for him, a symbol of great importance that he has invested with immense personal significance.<br />
<br />
In other words, the Mystery Box is much more than the sum of its parts, because Abrams uses it to represent something deeply human and unattainable. His grandfather is dead -- there's no way to bring the man back. As a result, opening up the box and seeing the knick-knacks and tricks inside would only diminish the memories it stands for.<br />
<br />
Creative work is the same way. Writing, filmmaking, art ... all of these consist of simple tricks and nonsense. Words. Special effects. Imagery that specifically creates a false sense of reality. The inside of the box may be a $50 value, but only from the perspective of the retail customer. Wholesale, it must have cost less than the $15 price, and since the shop owner probably couldn't move that particular merchandise otherwise, he was actually losing money by keeping it on his shelves. But dressed up in mystery, it took on greater value.<br />
<br />
More importantly, J.J. Abrams' act of buying the box as a means of paying tribute to his grandfather gives it far more than $50 worth of value.<br />
<br />
And sharing the humanity of that act with his Ted Talk audience spreads this deeper meaning farther still.<br />
<br />
This is what creative people do. We take words and objects and make them into things with human meaning beyond what they previously possessed. Abrams' meaning of remembering his grandfather is far more substantial than the shopkeeper's meaning of increasing store revenues. But he wouldn't have had that meaning without the shopkeeper's earlier creative act of repackaging excess stock.<br />
<br />
So why didn't Abrams come out and explain these aspects of his analogy?<br />
<br />
Because his job as a creator isn't to tell us what to think. It's to give us the opportunity to find meaning in the world, beauty that we can translate into personal value.<br />
<br />
His presentation was itself a Mystery Box. If he opened it up for us, he'd be doing the exact opposite of what he was talking about.Herb Mallettehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00733851301791453856noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3214430872374230404.post-6809673758984203312016-11-30T18:38:00.002-08:002016-11-30T18:38:52.725-08:00A Bit of an Acquired Taste<div data-contents="true">
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<span data-offset-key="dfko-0-0"><span data-text="true">Maybe this will clarify things about prequel "apologists" or maybe it will just get me more derision, but here are a couple of stories that I think bear light on the subject.</span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="7tvlq-0-0"><span data-text="true">Not long out of college, I read a couple of books by Gene Wolfe: <i>Soldier of the Mist</i> and <i>Soldier of Arete</i>. The first one <i>amazed</i> me -- brilliant, literate, and highly entertaining all at once. But the sequel just plain baffled my brain. I found it a total chore to get through, a maze of mythological allusions and deep dives into what I think was the history of the Peloponnesian Wars. The ending made no sense at all, and I finished the book thoroughly dissatisfied. Not long after, I got into a debate about the book on GEnie (yeah, this was pre-WWW for me) with a guy who said <i>SoA</i> was just as good as <i>SotM</i>, if not better. You just had to be willing to work at it more, he claimed. I pretty much blew him off, arguing that Wolfe had managed to make the first book not just comprehensible, but gripping, and that he should have done the same thing with the second one.</span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="21lit-0-0"><span data-text="true">Also not long after college, I re-read <i>The Lord of the Rings</i>. I'd first read it in seventh grade and found it absolutely tedious. Having devoured <i>The Hobbit</i> multiple times and knowing that everybody and his dog loved <i>LotR</i>, I expected the trilogy to be wonderful, and instead it put me to sleep. I spent all of high school and most of college thinking its popularity just represented people jumping on a bandwagon without knowing what fantasy ought to be like. But a friend of mine insisted I must have been too young to appreciate Tolkien's opus, and I respected his opinion enough to give it another try. And ... I still thought it was boring and overblown, full of cardboard characters and melodrama. But in my early thirties, yet another friend I respected let me know in no uncertain terms that I was wrong, so I tried it again. And finally, I saw what everybody else saw -- a phenomenally rich fantasy world layered with brilliant allegory on what it means to be alive and human.</span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="7j78d-0-0"><span data-text="true">In retrospect, I'm positive the <i>Soldier of Arete</i> fan knew what he was talking about. If I'd put the effort in, I would have found that book extremely rewarding. But here's the thing: I didn't <i>want</i> to put that much effort into it, and I still don't want to. Gene Wolfe is a genius. I've read a bunch of his books, and the man is on a whole other plane. But I don't get most of his stuff. I just don't get it, and I don't want to put in the effort that I know it will take for me to get it.</span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="bpbeh-0-0"><span data-text="true">I'm not saying George Lucas is another J.R.R. Tolkien or Gene Wolfe. But when tons of smart people are able to speak passionately about the intricate elements of a fictional world and the meaning they find in that world's characters, it probably means there's something there. I was wrong to look down my nose at all the <i>Lord of the Rings</i> fans in high school. I was wrong to assume that the guy on GEnie was just full of himself.</span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="941gd-0-0"><span data-text="true">And <i>you're</i> wrong to scoff and sneer at prequel supporters. You're simply wrong. It's fine that you dislike the movies. It's fine that they don't click for you. It's fine that you don't want to devote any brainpower to analyzing the films in search of things that might make you like them better.</span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="941kc-0-0"><span data-text="true">But it's not fine for you to ridicule people who find something deeper in these movies. They're <i>right</i>. There IS something deeper there. You're <i>wrong</i> to tell them that they're mistaken. </span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="19lcj-0-0"><span data-text="true">There are millions of people around the world who have no business ever trying to read <i>The Lord of the Rings</i>. That's not because they're dumb or ignorant, but because the reward they'll get out of it is far less than the effort it will take for them to finish it. It's just not a book for everyone.</span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="vsbi-0-0"><span data-text="true">The prequels aren't for everyone. But they <i>are</i> for some people. Hate them however much you want, but at least try to acknowledge that you dislike them because their flaws make them indigestible to you personally, not because they lack any inherent value or aesthetic accomplishment.</span></span></div>
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Herb Mallettehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00733851301791453856noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3214430872374230404.post-40056142667513407342016-10-30T10:49:00.000-07:002016-10-30T10:49:48.727-07:00I am a Slow Learner<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Herb Mallettehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00733851301791453856noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3214430872374230404.post-43289539387224487322016-08-23T06:22:00.001-07:002016-08-23T06:22:21.390-07:00He Has Too Much of His Father in HimRecently, I've seen people complaining variously that The Force Awakens wasn't true to the Star Wars "feel" because some scenes were too much like Guardians of the Galaxy or too much like Firefly.<div><br></div><div>Am I the only one who thought <span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Guardians of the Galaxy and Firefly were the way they were because they were trying to be like Star Wars? James Gunn explicitly said as much in interviews about Guardians of the Galaxy, even.</span></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">People find the most ironic things to complain about.</span></div>Herb Mallettehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00733851301791453856noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3214430872374230404.post-64003661382582370422016-06-05T12:52:00.002-07:002016-06-05T13:24:45.882-07:00From a Certain Point of View<div>
I recently ran across <a href="https://medium.com/panel-frame/who-was-anakin-skywalker-a06ca33cef95#.ethidhcac">this article</a> purporting to describe all the ways the prequel trilogy "forgot" about the version of Anakin Skywalker established in the original movies. The author's contention is that the OT films lay out certain concrete story elements related to Luke and Leia's father, and that by ignoring those elements, the prequels gave us a less interesting story.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Now, there's
no argument that much better scripts could have been written for Episodes I - III. And I don't think there's much argument that all of us old-school fans would have been less annoyed by the prequels if they'd followed our expectations.</div>
<div>
</div>
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But if you assume that the story of the prequels leads to the
story of the OT, most of the inconsistencies raised in the article disappear with
just a little examination. For example, the article's author wonders why Owen and Beru talk as though they knew
Anakin, even though they basically met him only once in their lives. But the answer to this is simple: Owen and Beru both lived with Shmi Skywalker for some period of time -- months or years in Beru's case, and almost certainly years in Own's case. So Shmi would have told them all about Anakin ... probably more often
and in more detail than they wanted to know. It doesn't take any
reaching or straining to get to that conclusion. Anakin was Shmi's
entire life. He was everything to her. There's absolutely no way she
didn't brag about him and wonder aloud how he was doing and where he was
in his adventures while the Lars family worked and lived around the
moisture farm. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Another complaint is that Ben speaks as though it
was his idea to train Anakin, whereas the prequels reveal that the burden of doing so was thrust upon him by the death of Qui-Gon Jinn. How do we reconcile this? Well, the prequels also reveal that Obi-Wan idolized Qui-Gon and
blamed himself for Anakin's fall, explicitly saying, "I have failed you, Anakin." We, the audience, don't put a lot of stock in Kenobi's announcement of his own culpability -- it's obvious to us that the entire Jedi order failed Anakin, starting with Qui-Gon. But Obi-Wan isn't the kind of person to point fingers at friends and colleagues, and he took the role of teacher to Anakin's padawan learner very seriously. Rather than admit that his mentor made
a mistake by thrusting this responsibility on Obi-Wan when he wasn't
ready, and rather than admit that he spent his life in service to an order that got so many things wrong, Kenobi bends over backwards to assume blame himself. He has a compelling subconscious reason to do so, above and beyond the fact that he's a stand-up kind of guy: if Qui-Gon blew it, and if the Jedi blew it, then Obi-Wan's entire life has been spent in service to futility.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
The
fact is, the great majority of our OT Anakin knowledge comes from Ben
... and Ben explicitly acknowledges that the things he has told Luke
have only been true "From a certain point of view." Once we understand
that Obi-Wan failed Anakin -- and KNEW he had failed him -- it becomes
clear that Kenobi has spent 20 years struggling with his guilt and
trying to find some way to reconcile his Jedi beliefs with the seduction
of his friend. The idealized version of Anakin that emerges from this
inner conflict is his solution: blame the Dark Side for the corruption
of this terrific guy, and keep telling yourself that once the Dark Side
seduces someone, it's game over, with nothing else to be done. In this way, he can preserve his faith in the Jedi order and his friends, and he can absolve himself of the responsibility to track Darth Vader down and attempt to bring him back to the light.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
The
prequels undoubtedly would have been much more adventurous and
enjoyable if the Anakin we imagined from Ben's descriptions had been
real. But that doesn't mean the prequels forgot about the OT Anakin. It
just means what we already knew from Ben's dialogue in Jedi: the Anakin
of ANH was a sugar-coated version of reality. We simply didn't know the
degree of sugar-coating until we saw the prequels.<br />
<br />
Now let's circle around to the other part of the article's thesis: that our OT-inspired expectations of Anakin Skywalker would have yielded a more interesting story than the story in the prequels. Frankly, I think this is bunk. A fair chunk of Star Wars fandom dismisses The Force Awakens as a mere retread of A New Hope. But I've yet to hear anyone say that TFA was as badly written and acted as the prequels are always accused of being. Even detractors generally admit that J.J. Abrams delivered some good popcorn-flick dialogue and managed to draw good-to-excellent performances out of his cast. So why don't we take a moment and imagine what the reaction would have been if Episode VII had featured the same clunky dialogue as the prequels, delivered with the same flat quality of performances. Imagine that all the practical effects had been obvious CGI instead.<br />
<br />
Abrams would have been crucified, right?<br />
<br />
And if we flip it on its head, how would people have responded to the prequels if they'd been full of snappy dialogue and compelling performances? The love story from Attack of the Clones is usually cited as the abominable nadir of Star Wars filmmaking, but what if it had been delivered with fantastic chemistry between the two leads and every line written to perfection? Jar Jar's annoying omnipresence and intolerable, offensive accent <i>aren't</i> elements of the prequels' storyline. They're bad choices in presentation. Remove them and replace them with genuinely clever dialogue, and there's no way he would be remotely as hated.<br />
<br />
In the end, some people try to find fault in every aspect of the prequels that they can. But in truth, the story these movies tell is solid, consistent with the original trilogy, and much more subtle and socially relevant than the story we all expected.<br />
<br />
Lucas just told the story in highly problematic, inaccessible ways, and ultimately, that's the crux of it: the prequels were badly directed.<br />
<br />
We really don't have to go any farther than that.<br />
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Herb Mallettehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00733851301791453856noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3214430872374230404.post-17639460062821285692016-05-13T19:44:00.002-07:002016-05-13T19:44:58.522-07:00You're Free!If, unlike Pete the Retailer, you like fantasy books, my novel <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Last-Tragedy-Delvonian-Tales-Book-ebook/dp/B006HUQWT0">The Last Tragedy</a> is free from May 14 to 18!Herb Mallettehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00733851301791453856noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3214430872374230404.post-9414078126064961602016-05-06T19:26:00.003-07:002016-05-06T19:36:52.698-07:00It's Not a Story the Jedi Would Have Told YouSo ... not too long ago, someone on Star Wars Minute Listeners Society Facebook page wondered if Pete and Alex might be the first people to finally unravel the "labyrinthine" plot of Attack of the Clones, once SWM gets to AOTC in the fall.<br />
<br />
Of course, the answer is, "No," because the plot of Episode 2 is actually fully comprehensible if you just do a little literary interpretation.<br />
<br />
Here we go:<br />
<br />
In the ten years or so since The Phantom Menace, Supreme Chancellor Palpatine/Darth Sidious has been hard at work setting up the doom of the Galactic Republic. His game-plan is simple -- stir up a war so that the Senate will give emergency powers to the Supreme Chancellor, enabling him to transform the democratic government into a totalitarian one. It needs to be a war that will seem to put the Republic in genuine danger, but it can't be a war that the Republic might lose.<br />
<br />
To this end, Sidious recruits Count Dooku, who marshals a faction opposed to the Republic, the Separatists. Simultaneously, he arranges the creation of a clone army for the Republic, so that when the full-scale war breaks out, the Supreme Chancellor's side will be positioned to win -- especially since he effectively controls the leadership of both sides.<br />
<br />
Are Sifo-Dyas (who the Kaminoans say commissioned the army) and Tyranus (who Jango Fett says hired him) the same person? Evidently not, if you check the Wookieepedia article. But the details don't really matter. One way or another, Palpatine's maneuvering has resulted in a clone army, with the genetic source for the clones being hand-picked by Tyranus/Dooku.<br />
<br />
Of course, the only way to arrange this two-sided charade is for Sidious to have a charismatic and highly capable ally maintaining tight control over the Separatists -- and of course, any charismatic, highly capable wartime leader is going to be ambitious as well. So Sidious knows that eventually Dooku will attempt a coup of his own. This means Sidious needs a replacement apprentice to deal with Tyranus once the latter has served his purpose.<br />
<br />
Thus, we begin Episode II after ten years of Dooku consolidating his power among the Separatists, Palpatine in full control of the Senate, and Anakin already well under the wing of his future master. Anakin's discussions with Padme are littered with hints that Palpatine is mentoring him and planting the seeds of discontent in him, like the notion that Anakin is "ahead of" Obi-Wan in many ways.<br />
<br />
What happens, then, during the film?<br />
<br />
First, Padme's ship gets blown up in an attempt on her life. Is this a real attempt, or just a way to manipulate Padme's actions? The answer is that either Padme's death or her seclusion from Senatorial affairs suits the Chancellor's purposes perfectly well. If she dies, it means one voice fewer in the Senate speaking for peace and reconciliation. If she lives and is forced into hiding, he has the chance to arrange things so that she and Anakin end up in close proximity, which he has undoubtedly Force-foreseen as a situation likely to lead to Anakin being more vulnerable to corruption.<br />
<br />
Next, another attempt on Padme's life occurs ... utilizing a weapon (deadly centipedes) that the Jedi are easily capable of defeating. Jango Fett provides the centipedes to an assassin who is much less competent than he is himself. He then tracks or trails the speeder chase that results in order to be in a position to kill the assassin with a distinctive dart that points toward Kamino.<br />
<br />
What's up with this? If the drone can cut holes in the window for the centipedes to enter through, why doesn't it just fill the room with poisonous gas or napalm? Because by this time, events have made it clear to Sidious that the Anakin/Padme connection is likely to be fruitful. Additionally, Sidious <i>wants</i> the Jedi to find the clone army on Kamino, because he needs the Republic to be aware of this resource when the moment comes to activate it. So it's no slip-up that Jango uses a Kaminoan dart.<br />
<br />
With the second attempt on her life such a near miss, Padme has clearly had her safety compromised, and Palpatine is able to encourage her sequestration in the company of Anakin. Meanwhile, Obi-Wan goes to investigate the dart, also according to the Sith Lord's plan.<br />
<br />
On the trip and after arrival on Naboo, Anakin presses his courtship of Padme. She goes from dismissive to resistant to conflicted under his steady stream of manipulation. Is this a natural response? Maybe. But it's equally likely that Anakin is not just psychologically manipulating her, but consciously or subconsciously projecting his romantic desires into her with the Force. We see him explicitly and admittedly abusing his Force powers to entertain Padme, so clearly he isn't tightly restricting his use of the Force to the very limited rules of engagement laid out by the Jedi Code. And the intensity of his obsession with her makes it clear that he is at or beyond the limits of his own personal restraint.<br />
<br />
Obi-Wan heads to Kamino, where he discovers the clone army and encounters Jango Fett. Jango takes Obi-Wan's arrival as a cue to immediately depart and head for Geonosis. Has he been instructed to do so by Dooku? Or does he react this way on his own? Given how cool-headed he is throughout the film, the latter is doubtful. Jango is an immaculate professional operating as part of a meticulous plan. If he's been left unaware of the fact that a Jedi is going to show up on Kamino sooner or later, it's either because the conspirators want him to be captured and eliminated, or because they want him to be unsettled and make a quick dash to his superiors. Since Dooku has clearly provided Jango with knowledge of where the Separatist leadership is gathering, it again seems likely that this move must be according to plan.<br />
<br />
Anakin's every attempt to wear Padme down comes to naught on Naboo. They reach an impasse at which Padme acknowledges having the emotions Anakin wants her to have, but still refuses to act on them. For the relationship to move forward as Sidious doubtless wants it to, something needs to happen. And then something does -- a particularly bad dream about Anakin's mother compels him to go to Tatooine. Is this coincidence? The will of the Force? Sidious using the Force to somehow implant these dreams in Anakin? That's hard to say. But once the dream occurs, the young Jedi doesn't hesitate to use it as a means of milking Padme's sympathy and taking out of her comfort zone on Naboo into his own home territory.<br />
<br />
Obi-Wan makes it to Geonosis and proceeds to spy on the Separatists. It's difficult to tell whether he accomplishes this on his own talents, or if he's allowed to do it ... but it does turn out later to play into the plans of Darth Sidious.<br />
<br />
Anakin tracks down his mother and reaches the Lars homestead. As he is about to set out on the hunt for the sandpeople, he has a parting conversation with Padme that is among the most wooden of their interactions -- and it is presented as a shadow-puppet play. Is this a hint that his Force manipulation of her is taking hold? It's interesting to note that when she is defending Obi-Wan earlier in the film ("that's what mentors are supposed to do"), and when she is warding off Anakin's advances on Naboo, her delivery of her dialogue is much more naturalistic than in any of the scenes where she gives in to these romantic impulses.<br />
<br />
Finding his mother, only to have her die in his arms, Anakin goes berserk and slaughters the village of Tusken Raiders. Then he breaks down and admits this to Padme. Here, he pulls a deep and genuine sympathy from her. Is it because she's already attracted to him and empathizes with his suffering? Is it because his emotions are so wildly out of control that he's exuding his most powerful Force influence on her yet?<br />
<br />
Obi-Wan is captured -- but not before he gets a message out to Anakin. Coincidence? Good luck on the part of the heroes? Maybe. But he doesn't actually acquire that much useful information -- certainly not the critical information that the Geonosans are planning to build a Death Star.<br />
<br />
Anakin and Padme receive Obi-Wan's message. Suddenly, for the first time, instead of finding a way to wiggle around the specifics of his orders, Anakin acts as though there's nothing he can do to help Obi-Wan. It takes Padme's initiative to get him to attempt a rescue. Inconsistent behavior on Anakin's part? Or a subconscious understanding that with Obi-Wan out of the way, he has a much better chance of making things work with Padme and becoming a full-fledged Jedi instead of just a padawan -- or possibly of simply running away with the object of his heart's desire?<br />
<br />
Dooku goes in to see his Jedi prisoner and makes a fairly heavy-handed attempt to lure
Obi-Wan into his influence. Does he really expect this to work? It's
probably in the "worth a shot" category for him, even though he knows
Kenobi is likely to refuse. The two have known each other a long time, and their connection through Qui-Gon makes it plausible that
Dooku might be able to entice Obi-Wan away from the Jedi. Certainly, if
Kenobi could be convinced, he would make a fine apprentice for Tyranus,
and one who might well be capable of helping dispatch Palpatine once
Dooku is ready to make his move. And if not, he'll simply dispose of Kenobi in the arena.<br />
<br />
The remainder of the film is really just the pieces falling into place. "Representative Binks" playing the part of the Supreme Chancellor's patsy and moving for the Senate to convey extraordinary powers on Palpatine. Anakin and Padme captured. Padme allowing their hopeless situation to break her resolve against telling Anakin her feelings. Arrival of the Jedi. Massed combat in the arena. The death of Jango Fett. All appearing to be lost. Miraculous cavalry-charge of the clone army.<br />
<br />
Two important thematic moments appear amidst the high-action of the last act. We see young Boba Fett discover his father's head, and we see Anakin directing the clone troopers on how to target the weak points of the Federation starship. In Boba Fett's case, this is the moment in which he is orphaned, and goes from the obedient son of a meticulous bounty hunter to a boy on his own with lots of shiny equipment, a lot of anger, and no one to guide him. Is it any wonder that the adult Boba Fett is so scuffed and unkempt compared to his polished father? Any wonder he ends up in company so much more sordid than Jango Fett's employers? In Anakin's case, this is a key moment in his transition from maker to destroyer. Previously, he's used his mechanical talents to build things, to create. Now he's using them to tear apart and bring down.<br />
<br />
The close proximity of these two coming-of-age moments underscores one of the main messages of the prequels: the importance of family and of healthy relationships in the development of individuals, especially those on the border between good and bad.<br />
<br />
The Jedi confront Dooku. He defeats Anakin and Obi-wan, but has to flee from Yoda. Even so, this is only a defeat for Dooku -- not for his master. If he'd been able to kill Yoda, the Count might well have found the path to defeating Sidious as well, and taking his place as Emperor. But having been humbled here, he must stay in Palpatine's shadow. When they meet on Coruscant, it is clear that everything in the movie has gone according to plan. The schematics for the Death Star are in the Sith Lord's hands for future use. The war has been launched. And from the perspective of the Separatists, the initiation of the war is actually due to the Republic's military assault in response to the attempted execution of three spies.<br />
<br />
The movie closes with:<br />
<br />
Yoda acknowledging that they've all been played, and that the war none of them wanted is now upon them.<br />
<br />
Palpatine overseeing the military might that's been handed to him on a platter.<br />
<br />
Anakin and Padme being married in a secret ceremony, to the tragic strains of their love theme, with Anakin's awkward metal hand emphasizing how unnatural the moment is.<br />
<br />
As with The Phantom Menace before it and Revenge of the Sith after, Episode 2 is, ultimately, about the ascendance of evil due to the faulty vigilance of good.Herb Mallettehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00733851301791453856noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3214430872374230404.post-32947228539838143332016-04-29T16:57:00.000-07:002016-04-29T16:57:02.079-07:00Help Me, Obi-Wan Kenobi ...When discussion in the <a href="http://www.starwarsminute.com/">Star Wars Minute</a> Listener's Society <a href="https://m.facebook.com/groups/1046810995351458">Facebook group</a> turned to definining moments in the Star Wars saga, it reminded me that prior to the release of The Force Awakens, I had mulled over what it would take for Episode VII to knock it out of the park.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
My main hope, contemplating the arrival of the first new Star Wars film in 10 years -- and the first to advance the chronology in more than 30 -- was for the filmmakers to score a "Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi" moment in the film -- an image and/or line transcendent enough to become an indelible part of film history -- one encapsulating all the elements of personality, history, theme and plot that bring a science fiction or fantasy movie to life. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Empire, of course, has "No -- I am your father." Jedi has "I am a Jedi, like my father before me." But "Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi ... you are my only hope" is possibly the greatest McGuffin in all of film -- mysterious, personal, instantly sympathetic, pulling us and our young hero inescapably into the action that follows.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
My response to TFA was tremendous, and I considered it a whole-hearted success from my very first viewing. But I hadn't thought to measure it against my original bar until reminded by that Facebook discussion.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
So how did the movie do, on those grounds? Is there such a pivotal, captivating, transportive moment?<br />
<br />
As much as I love the film, I'm inclined to think the answer is, "No." And I suspect that's a big reason why it's dismissed as derivative by a certain corner of Star Wars fandom. There are tons of things in TFA that we've never seen before. But they're all part of the general flow of the story. None of them stops the action and hits you on the head with an understanding that film history is being made here. "Help me Obi-Wan" does that. "I am your father" does it so well that even people who've never seen a Star Wars movie know about that line.<br />
<br />
The moments that define Episode VII don't have that same ability to stand on their own without context.<br />
<br />
"I'll come back for you. It'll be all right!"<br />
<br />
Rey licking her plate in the shadow of the fallen AT-AT's foot.<br />
<br />
"Hey, I'm not the one who chased you down with a stick."<br />
<br />
"The droid ... stole a freighter."<br />
<br />
"The one I'm pointing to."<br />
<br />
"You <i>are</i> the Han Solo who fought with the Rebellion. You knew him."<br />
<br />
"This was a mistake!" / "Huge!"<br />
<br />
"I never ask that question until after I've already done it."<br />
<br />
"It's true. All of it."<br />
<br />
"<i>You</i>. You're afraid ... that you'll never be as powerful as Darth Vader."<br />
<br />
"It would take a miracle to save us now," followed by the cut to those blast doors opening up to reveal Han and Chewie.<br />
<br />
Rey prowling in a circle around the defeated Kylo Ren.<br />
<br />
Line for line and scene for scene, I think The Force Awakens is easily playing in the ballpark of the original trilogy. But its high points don't reach quite high enough to make that leap from art to archetype.<br />
<br />
In a way, I wonder if that was actually a smart move, maybe even a deliberate one. By having TFA demolish so many records and fulfill so many people's expectations (though obviously not everyone's) <i>without</i> breaking any obviously new ground, they set Rogue One and Episode VIII up to go even bigger -- if those two movies top the artistic success of this one.<br />
<br />
Whatever you want to say about TFA's lack of originality, there's nothing in the Rogue One trailer to suggest that it's going to be a retread of any Star Wars story we've seen before. Did it just sort of happen that way as a fluke? That strikes me as a bit unlikely.<br />
<br />
Surprisingly, I'm fine with there being no "Help Me, Obi-Wan" moment in TFA. It shows that you can have a terrific Star Wars movie without resetting the bar for pop culture. My desire for the movie to reach that lofty achievement didn't come to fruition ... but then, Leia never ended up meeting Obi-Wan, either.<br />
<br />
Instead, she met Han and Luke, just as we met Rey and Finn and Poe.<br />
<br />
TFA, it turns out, was not our only hope.</div>
Herb Mallettehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00733851301791453856noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3214430872374230404.post-58444995601236850422016-04-10T06:58:00.001-07:002016-04-10T07:00:55.283-07:00Whatever You Do, Don't StareI went into the grocery store this morning to get some coffee and creamer, and what did I see the second I walked in the door?<br />
<br />
The end-cap where they display the latest big release, with a big-screen TV over shelves of whatever DVD they're showcasing.<br />
<br />
And what image was on the screen?<br />
<br />
<i>Bam: </i><br />
<br />
The Falcon's belly gun getting stuck in the forward position during the ship-chase scene on Jakku.<br />
<br />
I stopped and watched for a few seconds, then had to force myself to move on before I got stuck in the forward position too -- because I could easily have just stood there staring through the entire rest of the film. Luckily, the sound was either off or too low for me to hear from my position in the doorway, with the entire row of registers between me and the television. I'd have been sunk if the music and dialogue had gotten their hooks in me.<br />
<br />
All the Star Wars films bear rewatching. Even the bottom half (which for me consists of I, III, and VI) have plenty of set pieces and performances that never grow old.<br />
<br />
But The Force Awakens may be the most beautiful of the films to date. Not the <i>best</i> -- I still put Star Wars and Empire ahead of it. But Episode VII has forty years of cinematic advances on those movies, and the overall film-making in TFA matches or beats anything else in the series.<br />
<br />
Tonight I'm going to a friend's house to watch the movie on video for the first time. I have my own copy of the blu-ray, and I watched the deleted scenes reel, but I've so far maintained the willpower to avoid putting the movie itself on and watching it over and over. In part, that's because I knew my wife would mock me ("Aren't you going to Rick's to watch that on Sunday?"), but in part it's because I've had a bunch of stuff that needed doing, and if I'd indulged in my copy of TFA, I wouldn't have gotten <i>anything</i> accomplished since Tuesday night. Yesterday alone, I caught myself four or five different times and held back from putting the disc in. If my kids hadn't hogged the TV at a couple of crucial moments, I'd have grabbed it and been mesmerized.<br />
<br />
And damn if Rogue One doesn't look like it might be even better.<br />
<br />
I'm probably too embarrassed to watch The Force Awakens today while my wife is around.<br />
<br />
But maybe I'll think of something else I need from the grocery store.Herb Mallettehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00733851301791453856noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3214430872374230404.post-20136542449247296032016-04-09T19:14:00.001-07:002016-04-10T06:27:55.791-07:00I Guess You Don't Know Everything About Women YetA story popped up in my Facebook feed about "Star Wars fans" being upset that
Rogue One has a female lead. I found this asinine for several reasons, chief among them the fact that all real Star Wars fans knew Rogue One
had a female lead by last summer at the latest. No one acting surprised and
disappointed now that the trailer is out is a real Star Wars fan.<br />
<br />
More importantly, every day, millions upon millions of cretins and morons make sexist comments on Twitter and the Internet. The fact th<span class="text_exposed_show">at
it suddenly becomes newsworthy if Star Wars is involved is actually
almost as sexist as the comments themselves. And making the headline a
blanket statement about Star Wars fans pretty clearly shows that the
media isn't really interesting in combating marginalization. </span><br />
<br />
<div class="text_exposed_show">
I'm not linking to the story itself because I don't want to give more
traffic to this clickbait, faux-righteous, fan-insulting trash.<br />
<br />
Can't we all agree that giving trolls a louder voice, just because they latch onto something we love, is worse than useless?<br />
<br />
As for whoever those dipweed trolls actually are, they're obviously in need of a lot more female advice. </div>
Herb Mallettehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00733851301791453856noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3214430872374230404.post-68060927137360957402016-04-07T05:47:00.001-07:002016-04-07T05:47:44.518-07:00This is Gonna be a Real Short TripI'm pleased as Ponda Baba to have my Force Awakens blu-ray ... but dang, I thought there'd be more to the deleted scenes section!<div><br></div><div>On the plus side, Leia's deleted scene showed Carrie Fisher pulling out a pretty good performance. The scene itself wasn't amazing, but she was good in it.</div>Herb Mallettehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00733851301791453856noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3214430872374230404.post-87559916676211746722016-03-30T18:58:00.001-07:002016-03-30T18:58:19.801-07:00A Surprise, To Be Sure, But A Welcome OneWhen <i>The Phantom Menace</i> came out in 1999, I bought two tickets premiere day: one for the very first midnight showing, the other for a matinee the next afternoon. The brilliance of the trailers had me convinced this would be the best movie of the year, and I put so much faith in it that I simply knew I'd want to watch it again right away.<br />
<br />
And if I hadn't done so, my feelings about the movie might be very different today.<br />
<br />
Although I didn't react as badly to Jar Jar as many fans did, somewhere around the time the pongo surfaced in the capital of Naboo, I realized that Episode I was not the movie I'd been waiting for. I kept waiting for the fantastic scenes from the trailer to arrive, and then kept being disappointed when they did.<br />
<br />
One of the biggest duds came in the Senate chamber, where Queen Amidala appears in her most magnificent, opulent, aesthetically spellbinding costume to plead the case for her planet. Yes, she uttered that iconic line, "I was not elected to watch my people suffer and die while you discuss this election in a com<i>mitt</i>ee." But on either side of her big speech, we see her looking absolutely lost and forlorn. I couldn't understand why George Lucas thought it made any sense to show us this young girl totally out of her element one moment, then have her give an electrifying address that topples the most powerful man in the Senate, only to return to a look of hopelessness immediately thereafter.<br />
<br />
The film continued to let me down repeatedly, until somewhere around 2:00 a.m., the credits rolled and I walked out of the auditorium thinking, "Well, that kind of stank."<br />
<br />
I felt so dejected that I considered going to the theater the next day and getting a refund on my matinee ticket. With finances pretty tight for me at the time, any waste of money, even just the price of a movie matinee, made me uncomfortable. But I remembered how cool the lightsaber battles were, and that the pod race had been a nice bit of spectacle, and I figured that maybe with my disappointment confronted, I might enjoy it more the second time around.<br />
<br />
I went to the theater. I sat down and watched. Much of it played out just as it had before ... mostly okay, occasionally stilted and wince-inducing, even more occasionally breathtaking. And then, the Senate.<br />
<br />
The scene I'd found so inconsistent before absolutely blew me away.<br />
<br />
What I hadn't known that first time through was that immediately after departing the Senate, the young queen would take Senator Palpatine completely by surprise and then defy his advice by insisting on a return to Naboo. With that context in my head for the second viewing, I no longer saw Padme as a lost little girl being manipulated to fulfill the villain's schemes. Instead, I saw a brave and bright and highly idealistic young woman coming to the realization that the galactic democracy she believes in is a failure.<br />
<br />
Suddenly, her fiery denunciation of Chancellor Valorum took on an entirely different light -- the passion of a true leader, furious with governmental impotence, who knows that she has no further recourse but to go back home and die with her fellow citizens.<br />
<br />
And then, in the apartment afterward, another scene of incongruity resolved itself the same way. We open on Amidala and Jar Jar talking, the queen staring out the window almost distractedly. On my first viewing, it came across as an utterly passive moment from this girl who had just upset the whole Republic's applecart, only to be followed by another zig-zag shift of demeanor as she announces her return to Naboo.<br />
<br />
But seen holistically, that distant stare became contemplative: the look of a tightly controlled mind awash in fatalism, the decision to die already made. Until ...<br />
<br />
Jar Jar brags about the Gungans' mighty army, and the queen's eyebrow twitches.<br />
<br />
Armed with this new information, she springs into action as soon as Palpatine returns. His political maneuverings no longer hold the least interest for her -- already determined to head home, she is now galvanized with the knowledge that her return may not be suicidal after all.<br />
<br />
What had been a bumbling, incoherent mess on my first viewing, disjointed and portraying our heroine as a ping-pong ball of erratic moods, now became a seamless revelation of her intense intellect processing multiple consecutive pieces of world-tilting information and pulling them together into a plan of action rooted in stubborn hope.<br />
<br />
As I walked from the matinee that day into a wash of sunlight, I found myself startled to realize that the hot mess of a film I'd seen the night before actually held depth and subtlety beyond any expectation I might have had.<br />
<br />
It was a bright day, and I felt very lucky to have bought that second ticket.Herb Mallettehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00733851301791453856noreply@blogger.com0