Lucas made these movies so a 5 year old knew who the bad guys were from the first scene, but not Bill. pic.twitter.com/RpBMHBHJhs
— Bob Schooley (@Rschooley) October 20, 2015
When it comes to climate change, let's listen to the people that enjoy seeing planets destroyed. pic.twitter.com/JFbR25iuka
— Bob Schooley (@Rschooley) October 20, 2015
Although now seeing every nerd with a political bent scream at Bill Kristol is funny. Palin was one thing, but now HE'S GONE TOO FAR.
— Bob Schooley (@Rschooley) October 20, 2015
Now that everybody’s staring at him like he’s wearing his underpants on his head, I assume Kristol will crawfish back to the “J/K!!! – don’t you nerds have a sense of humor?” defense. And if nobody else pays attention, at least the Atlantic staff will, because they seem to be taking an obsessive interest in the upcoming movie…
MomSense
Kristol continues to be an imbecile.
I’m sufficiently excited about this movie that I will actually pay for theater tickets and concession treats.
/cheapskate
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
Jeez, these people really are fucked up. Were they rooting for the nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark?
Baud
Blowing up Alderon: Not objective evidence of evil.
Got it.
Eric U.
they see the planet explode and clap excitedly, “do it again!”
Baud
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
They were the Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
benw
Bill Kristol predicted that putting the shield generator on Endor would be a “cakewalk”.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
All of the Empire figures (except Vader) had British accents. If Kristol couldn’t figure it out from there, he clearly had never seen a movie before.
Also, too, Peter Cushing doesn’t get enough credit for being scary as hell in the first film. Discuss.
Baud
@MomSense:
Same here.
goblue72
The Dark Side’s invisible sky god chokes the life out of unbelievers and ideological opponents, demands that everybody dress in the same uniform and is married to an industrial scale war machine.
The Light Side’s invisible sky god teaches restraint, respect for life, the ability to persuade (even if due to telepathy), lets everyone in their army wear whatever they want, and apparently is really into organic farming (or at least, camping in yurts in a wetlands).
Yeah, I’d say that Republicans and Democrats have pretty much correctly lined up with whom to root for in Star Wars.
Archon
I’m not a Star Wars guys but didn’t the Empire destroy entire planets of people that resisted?
benw
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): The scene where he backs Leia up into Vader’s chest is creepy as hell. Not to mention each time he gives the “fire when ready” order on the Death Star. Yep, Cushing was legitimately great.
jl
Schooley comment is priceless and appropriate.
Some people on both sides of political spectrum are guilty of straining to find some political message in just every G-damn thing. Like, what is the hidden political message of the shape of cartoon brontosaurus* bone in a Fred Flinstone cartoon. But now the reactionaries and neocons have pulled way ahead in that psychological disorder. I doubt their counterparts on the liberal side can ever catch up (not enough of them, relatively speaking, and not as rabid about it or as nutty).
*I understand that there never was one, but I am talking about the cartoon.
Arm The Homeless
Doesn’t the Empire spend most of the series making back-room deals for preferable trade pacts?
I’m sure the GOP would love their own Death Star, for those tense international negotiations.
Sometimes you have to pick up some small, crappy little planet and throw it against the wall, just to show the Universe you mean business.
trollhattan
@Baud:
Awaiting the melting-skulls scene.
jl
@Archon:
” I’m not a Star Wars guys but didn’t the Empire destroy entire planets of people that resisted? ”
That was Schooley’s point.
But anyway (snark alert) Kristol is right, it is slippery slope and liberal totalitarian states always slide to the bottom, the very pit of Hell. One day you give out tickets to freedom loving drivers for not wearing seat belts and the next you are blowing up whole planets and genociding all their life forms. Always happens, never a doubt about it.
msdc
@benw: He also suggested Jar Jar Binks for Vice Chancellor.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
Also, too, they’re still butthurt because the Obama administration refused a petition to build a Death Star:
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/isnt-petition-response-youre-looking
Betty Cracker
He HAD to be kidding. Right? Right?
J.D. Rhoades
Please. It’s clearly a joke. Not particularly funny or even original, which is what may be throwing you off.
Roger Moore
I guess it’s obvious that the implied torture of Princess Leia wouldn’t bother them in the slightest; that’s what you do to terrorists.
Baud
@jl:
Is that you, Rand?
(I actually believe he said something similar to that recently.)
hells littlest angel
I fucking hate Bill Kristol, but it’s pretty clear he’s joking.
The tell? His joke is not actually funny.
srv
The Jedi proved themselves to be quite incompetent, with a Sith Lord right under their noses the whole time. Yoda fail. All those Wise Men in their big ivory tower. At least Lucas got it.
And as you’ll see in the next movie, blonde Messiah smashing the existing regime just led to 20 years of utter chaos and war.
You people embrace Federal Rule over States Rights at every juncture, but you think you’re not tyrannical. Clue.
Brachiator
@Archon:
Lord Vader, I think that was a little too much shock and awe.
mike with a mic
Vader was the coolest thing about the original trilogy by a long shot. Like say Hannibal in Silence of the Lambs the original trilogy is a series where the evil guy steals every scene he is in and the entire series. It’s hard not to like him and even root for him at times. Hell if you go to any comic or Star Wars convention you’ll see vastly more people as Vader or any of the Sith Lords than you will as any of the Jedi, simply because they are a lot fucking cooler.
The light side isn’t that good either. They slaughter a lot of people and a whole bunch of the extended universe gets into the “tyranny of do gooders can be pretty damn horrible as well”. Plus there is the whole kidnapping infants deal. What comes out of that is that both sides (LOLOL) are pretty damn bad in their own way. Which is why Luke is not part of the light side. He’s actually gray, uses both dark and light and is able to do that without going completely down one path and being a moron. Because there is one force, light and dark are just different aspects of it. It’s also not as if the Rebels didn’t have their share of slavers, criminals, and other bad things.
But hey! Looking for political or life meaning in a fictional story about samurai space wizard ninjas is pretty fucking stupid to start with. But put me down for “Vader was the coolest thing about Star Wars”. This is about pew-pew lasers, not politics.
A guy
Right winger or left. If you are a guy that’s paying attention to Star Wars you are probably also paying to get laid.
Germy Shoemangler
open thread:
Three random thoughts of mine:
Turned on CBS morning show with Charlie Rose as I gulped my coffee. They said the liberal winner of the Canadian election planned to increase spending, after years of the previous admin lowering taxes.
And they left it at that. Now, if I didn’t pay attention to current news, and just gleaned a bit here and there, I’d be left with a negative impression: “Hmm, after years of keeping taxes low (good) this new guy wants to increase spending (bad)”
Yesterday I half-listened to my local TV news. They mentioned church arsons. Mrs. Shoemangler and I looked up at the TV (she was sewing and I was reading to the cat). The report was very brief and said a few churches had their front doors burned. It was the first I’d heard about it, and I said “I assume they were black churches?” but the report MADE NO MENTION OF THAT. Some extremely brief footage, a few seconds in length, and we could see some parishioners, (black) before a new story appeared. So I guess my local (sinclair) news station doesn’t think the arsons are related to race in any way.
Maybe TV news should just stick to sports, weather and some recipe tips.
Cervantes
@hells littlest angel:
I’m with you.
Sad_Dem
@Eric U.: I’ve heard plenty of barroom idiots explain that we’d a won in Viet Nam if we’d just used nukes. Kristol and his kind have always been in favor of destroying the
villageplanet in order to save it.Warren Terra
It lost momentum after a while, but David Brin et al’s Star Wars On Trial makes a pretty good case that the Jedi were really horrible. I don’t recall how much it does to defend the Empire.
mike with a mic
@srv:
They were too busy kidnapping small children, brainwashing them, and telling them sex leads to evil to bother searching for sith lords ;P
Baud
@Sad_Dem:
I was thinking the other day that the one silver lining up to the W. administration is that we didn’t end up using any nuclear weapons.
beltane
@Germy Shoemangler: NBC Evening News on Saturday also did a story about the church arsons without mentioning that only Black churches were involved. They only said that “different denominations” were targeted. The white washing of hate crimes continues.
gorram
This isn’t the clueless conservative you’re looking for. That would be Orson Scott Card.
NCSteve
What is the the National Review but a purveyor of anger, fear and depression, the paths to the Dark Side? Out of control militarism. Destroying worlds. The pathological cynicism of ginning up a war out of faked causes in order to build and sustain political support for an illegitimate leader. The absolute confidence in the power of raw, naked military force as a problem-solving mechanism. Torture. Authoritarianism. Execution on a whim. The corruption, subversion and destruction of democratic institution.
Make no mistake. He’s serious.
different-church-lady
There, let’s mix them metaphors.
Gene108
@Baud:
In line with Republican thinking.
Alderaan was a hot bed of rebel leadership and sympathizers. They had it coming. If they were better galactic citizens and followed the rules nothing bad would have happened.
It is like trying to block federal disaster relief for NJ after Sandy because NJ keeps sending Dems to Congress.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@mike with a mic:
I have to admit, when they had that part in “Phantom Menace” when the Jedi complained that 7-year-old Anakin was too old to train to be a Jedi, first I laughed out loud. Then I thought, “So that means that all of that time spent training Luke in ‘Empire’ was completely wasted?”
Though, to be fair to Lucas, I think he was trying to show that the Jedi had themselves become corrupted and deserved to be destroyed. He’s just a crappy writer who couldn’t pull it off.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
Actually, it was Tarkin who ordered the planet destroyed, not Vader. Vader thought the power to destroy planets was nothing compared to the force./nit
boatboy_srq
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.): Never mind RotLA, they were rooting for the Nazis in Schindler’s List.
NCSteve
@benw: Let us not forget all the time he spent playing Van Helsing to Chrisopher Lee’s Dracula, but oh he was so good as the baddie.
Redshift
@Baud: True but that bar is so low a worm couldn’t crawl under it.
boatboy_srq
@benw: “You’re far too trusting. Dantooine is too remote to make an effective demonstration – but don’t worry; we will deal with your rebel friends soon enough.” I still get chills from that scene.
Randy P
@jl:
Actually, it appears our old friend the Brontosaurus is back, according to SciAm
Can reinstating Pluto be far behind?
KG
Of course they rooted for the Empire… it’s who they are, it’s what they want the US to be, they are imperialists. It doesn’t matter that the Empire dissolved democracy and replaced it with an absolute monarch, hell, that’s a feature, not a bug. That’s why they’re in favor of things like the imperial presidency (so long as it’s one of theirs wielding the power).
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
Here’s what the emotional core of the prequels should have been: it should have been a love triangle between Padme, Anakin, and Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan should have wanted Padme for himself and been insanely jealous that she chose Anakin instead. He then takes actions through the rest of the film(s) that end up driving Anakin to the dark side and killing Padme. In penance, he follows Padme’s son to the backwater hellhole of Tattooine to keep an eye on him.
Halcyon
I’m fairly certain he was joking (badly), but just because it irks me, I’d also like to point out that Kristol is even wronger than the obvious bit everyone else is pointing out. The Empire, canonically, is a meritocracy that allows people willing to work for the Empire (in this case, specifically, “committing horrible atrocities and oppressing people”) to get ahead. So long as you’re one of the right people, at least, because it is also spectacularly racist. There’s a reason every single non-human you see is fighting on the Rebellion’s side.
boatboy_srq
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Yoda made the same complaint about Luke in TESB – though there it sounded more like he was looking for excuses not to train him rather than complaining honestly about Luke’s age. In that context it made some sense; in TPM it made absolutely no sense whatsoever.
SFAW
Who really gives a shit about Star Wars?
I’m waiting for the Lynch-directed sequel to Dune. That should be all kinds of awesome.
KG
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): I don’t think the idea was that the Jedi were corrupt, I think it was that they were too set in their ways – I think even Yoda makes mention in one of the prequels that he and the Council were preparing the Jedi for the last war, not the next one.
boatboy_srq
@efgoldman: I don’t recall where, but I read some VSP once (many years ago) who intoned that the best way to ensure nuclear detente (and possible disarmament) was to thoroughly nuke some small insignificant country every 30-40 years. His reasoning was that nuclear weapons scared the sh!t out of folks after their first use, but had lost their menace over the years – and that humanity needed periodic reminding how horrific they are.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
Yeah, I knew it was Tarkin, but wanted to pitch the joke to non SW fans who probably knew that Vader is a bad guy.
Still, a good catch.
Archon
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
Outside of the final fight scene between Obi-Wan and Anakin (which was awesome) I can’t think of one memorable moment from the entire prequels.
boatboy_srq
@A guy: I take it Vitters’ favorite served you with paternity papers as well?
jl
@Randy P: Should have known the Flintstones had the truth.
I can’t follow the Star Wars stuff, since I haven’t bothered to figure out the story lines of all the sequels, prequels and weaguels.
But, damn, the Flinstones myth is simple and pure, and they got the brontosaurus right!
A guy
Anybody in their deer stand hunting? I am. this convo is keeping me from keeping an eye out it’s so riveting
Pogonip
@msdc: Jar Jar for Speaker of the House!
Cermet
@boatboy_srq: You think your being sarcastic but you really aren’t; remember the right wing so-called christian politician who, on weekends dressed up and played the part of an SS German Officer in an SS unit!? No, these sick fuckers DO(!) in fact love and admire not just NAZI’s but the worst of the worst – the very death squad soldiers who ran the death camps/ovens themselves!
boatboy_srq
@SFAW: Hey! Francesca Annis (and yes she is one of my favorite actresses) can play the Dowager Jessica.
KG
@boatboy_srq: the now not-canon expanded universe established that the Jedi would find Force strong children at a very young age and would then approach the family about giving the child to the Order. In some cases, as a baby – which is why you have five year olds learning to make lightsabers. Which is why the suggestion by Mnemosyne (iPhone) wouldn’t have made sense – Obi-Wan was raised in the order, sexual relations were pretty much forbidden (that’s what the scene with Anikan explaining love to Padme was about).
boatboy_srq
@Cermet: Sigh. I had forgotten. But then I’ve been calling the GOTea fascist for years and pretty well meaning it.
goblue72
@mike with a mic: Well sure. The good guy was an old dude last seen building a pointless bridge in Southeast Asia just to see it blown up. The bad guy was a cool ass dude who was a warrior-wizard with a harem who shot snake arrows at Conan.
beltane
@A guy: You’re supposed to be drinking beer and smoking weed in your tree stand, not following a Balloon Juice discussion of Star Wars. Life is too short.
different-church-lady
@A guy: Oh yes, we’re all in our deer stands hunting.
Admiral Ackbar
It’s a trap!
Archon
@boatboy_srq:
I always wondered if the United States would have used nukes again if we were the only ones with that technology. I actually think the Soviets did humanity a solid by basically stealing the technology from us so soon after we developed it.
Mapaghimagsik
If Alderan had only supported open carry the empire would have never blown it up
different-church-lady
@beltane:
Especially for the deer.
Cermet
@Cermet: @Randy P: Bad pun warning!
?! Sir, you have gone too far with your humor …
Bad pun warning!
Brachiator
@SFAW:
I love much of Lynch’s work, but Dune sucked and no one is ever going to give him money to do a sequel.
The tone of the film was off, too ugly for a SF adventure. Even the producers were shocked. They thought they would have a movie that could have action figures and fast food tie-ins for the kiddies, but Lynch’s vision was too offbeat, too perverse. The casting choices were wrong, also. Even Sting was visually striking, but not good enough an actor to done justice to his character.
beltane
@different-church-lady: By distracting A Guy, we are saving the lives of innocent deer. This blog is a friend to all animals.
Pogonip
@beltane: If you’re drinking beer, does that make it a beer stand?
different-church-lady
By the way… the pork shoulder turned out EXCELLENTLY.
boatboy_srq
@Archon: Before 2000? Doubtful. 2000 onward – with a Teahadi in the WH? This is a question? Watching the modern GOTea at work I almost think that VSP was right.
Pogonip
@beltane: And why not a hot-dog stand, while we’re at it? People who walk around the woods all day work up an appetite. It would be very profitable.
goblue72
@Brachiator: So much good AND bad in that movie. I actually like the tone – felt really true to the books, which always felt like this combo of whiz-bang mid-century sci-fi space opera married to post-apocalyptic future. That actually worked for me.
The casting on the other hand was a mishmash. I like a lot of the casting of the supporting characters. But both the leads – Sting and Kyle Mclaughlan – just fell flat. And there were components of the story (like those stupid sound blaster guns) that felt like silly attempts to glue a traditional action movie onto what at core is this weird “far distant future” space opera that involves a LOT of religious-y mysticism and anti-technology (the Mentats as human computers, the Bene Gesserit witches, everyone fighting with knives)
boatboy_srq
Open thread, SO:
Anyone looking for a Microsoft/VMware guy? Mid-career, high(ish) salary, umpteen years’ experience. Metro DC preferred, but PHL/NYC/BOS are interesting if relo can be negotiated.
Ultraviolet Thunder
Epic, schmepic. I liked it better when I was in high school and it was just the best science fiction movie (singular) in years.
Here, I’ll take my shirt off so the feathers and tar go on easier.
jl
I wonder how many deer stands are also private club beer stands? I saw a couple long ago during my very limited (thankfully) hunting experience with kin in the Rockies long ago.
p.a.
Matt (well I guess I can see your point there) Yglesias doom-and-glooms the future of the Dem. Party here.
But I really do see his point.
jl
@goblue72: The monsters and weirdo pilots warped on spice were cool. That is about all I remember of it.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@A guy:
Some of us have jobs and can’t go gallivanting off in the middle of the day for our hobbies.
beltane
@jl:
All of them, Katie.
Also ice fishing shacks.
Arm The Homeless
Anyone catch Bibi laying blame for the Holocaust on Palestinians
My grandfather came to this land in 1920 and he landed in Jaffa, and very shortly after he landed he went to the immigration office in Jaffa. And a few months later it was burned down by marauders. These attackers, Arab attackers, murdered several Jews, including our celebrated writer Brenner.
And this attack and other attacks on the Jewish community in 1920, 1921, 1929, were instigated by a call of the Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini, who was later sought for war crimes in the Nuremberg trials because he had a central role in fomenting the final solution. He flew to Berlin. Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, “If you expel them, they’ll all come here.” “So what should I do with them?” he asked. He said, “Burn them.”
srv
Like I said before, it’s like a never-ending slow-motion train wreck:
Return of the Cuckies is going to be short-lived:
Brachiator
Fair point. But some people cannot accept any SF or fantasy film unless they can see it as an allegory, usually a political or religious allegory.
And some films support some of these readings, but for others it may be too much.
And some people just have a bug up their arses about “secret subversion.”
I love the film George Cukor’s 1938″Holiday,” with Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn. But I ran across some comments on the film at some web site angrily denouncing the film as anti-American and anti-capitalism and obviously communist because Cary Grant’s character does not want to work for his fiance’s wealthy father. The commenter was angry that people who wanted to make money were derided.
The film may satirize the wealthy characters, but it is hardly trying to incite revolution.
BTW, does anyone know if the earlier, 1930 version of the film still exists at all? I fear not, but it would be interesting to be able to compare it with the later version.
beltane
@Arm The Homeless: More here: http://www.alternet.org/world/israels-netanyahu-claims-it-was-palestinians-who-convinced-hitler-exterminate-jews
I was thinking about mentioning the Holocaust denial of our bestest friend in the world but it seemed out of place in a Star Wars thread.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@KG:
Sex been forbidden many times, in many places, and yet nature usually wins out. It would actually make Obi-Wan even more obsessed and frustrated — not only is Anakin breaking the rules by having the sex that Obi-Wan has always refused himself, he’s having it with the woman Obi-Wan wants.
Entire operas and reams of literature have been written about exactly this kind of conflict, but Lucas couldn’t see it in front of his face.
Arm The Homeless
@beltane: I have learned that after about 50 comments, it’s always an open thread around here.
Cervantes
@Arm The Homeless:
Well, is anyone surprised?
boatboy_srq
@goblue72: Casting was all over the map on that one. So much talent wasted (Annis, Phillips, Hunt, Jones and McGill all wasted, and even Jordan, Young, Madsen and Prochnow were thrown away – and what made them cast Ferrer and von Sydow in those roles?). The visuals were amazing – what there were of them – but OMEFFSM. The Syfy reimagining with Hurt, Reeves, Newman and Keeslar seemed truer to the text: slower, more deliberate, better pacing and far better performances/direction.
Geeno
@Germy Shoemangler: Ugh have you ever TRIED one of those recipes?
jl
@p.a.: As I bellowed in a comment yesterday (I think), I don’t see his point. As I understand his piece, MY is griping about them damn lefty policies as a distraction from lack of Democrats at state and local levels. I agree that is a problem, but I do not see how trying to but together a platform that will attract votes from a broader coalition is any kind of distraction from that problem, rather it is potential solution.
The way I read MY’s piece, Democrats are supposed to concentrate on winning more state and local elections by telling the voters… well, what are they supposed to tell them? Something like ‘Hey, we really got wiped out at state and local elections in the last couple of midterms, please vote for us so we don’t sink so bad’? Or go Webb with a patronizing pitch about caring for poor whites and standing up for ‘Scots-Irish heritage’? What does that mean, we’ll put on lots of fiddle contests and bluegrass concerts with a tastefully token presence of Confederate battle flags? Anyone who will fall for that is already captured by GOP.
So, why is not some platform that is in neighborhood of HRC/Sanders that promises to help all middle class, working class and poor people economically, and to have more control over their fates not a good solution?
If MY had any constructive advice that I missed or I misunderstood, please let me know.
Brachiator
@efgoldman:
Even if snark was intended, I find the misfire of Dune interesting, and the film does have some defenders.
Choosing Lynch for the project should have alerted some studio exec’s WTF radar.
Gene108
@Cermet:
I fail to see the pun… guess that makes it bad…
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Brachiator:
The earlier version does exist — you can see it on YouTube or Archive.org, though I can’t guarantee the print quality. It also turns up on TCM, especially when they focus on Pre-Code.
Cervantes
@beltane:
I’m pretty sure I saw Meir Kahane in the cantina.
Roger Moore
@Arm The Homeless:
So he’s going with “they started it” as his argument?
jl
@beltane: Well, if you don’t bother to try to shoot or hook anything, probably safer to hunker in your beer stand. My kin insisted on staying sober and crawling around checking out watering holes and game tracks at the crack of dawn and whatever BS that supposedly finds deer.
With ice fishing, you only have to not fall through the ice, and keep enough sensation so you don’t freeze something off.
boatboy_srq
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Lucas svcks as a director. When ANH came out, most of us who knew forgave him the horrible cutting, bad segues, out-of-sync dubbing (watch Vader on board Tantive IV confronting Leia and you’ll see exactly what I mean), and generally awful direction because the film had a budget and they probably went with the best takes they could get. TESB and RotJ made us forget about ANH – and especially about Lucas himself directing – in no small part because with wads of studio cash and new directors the franchise was generally done justice by the two films. Then TPM came out; and we saw how bad Lucas is even with a near-infinite budget and all the time in the world to create a film.
Turgidson
Bloody Bill WRONG Kristol is either taking his Most Always Wrongest Person in History candidacy very seriously, or he’s doing a bad job of making a joke. And it’s actually impossible to know for sure with him, given that every fucking thing he says is wrong.
KG
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): all very true. I wonder if Lucas felt bound by the expanded universe when he wrote the prequels. Also, writing prequels is a really tough gambit. It’s hard because everyone already knows how things end. It’s got to be infinitely more difficult when a devout fan base has been obsessing over the source material for a solid 20 years and you’ve licensed a whole expanded universe that laid a lot of the foundation you then had to fit your stories into.
Last thought: I read the book adaptations of the prequel trilogy (actually the original trilogy as well), and (entirely not) surprisingly, they were actually so much better than the movies because they had the freedom of explaining stuff through exposition that you can’t do in the movies.
Arm The Homeless
@Roger Moore: Basically, yeah.
It’s sad what the right wing in Israel can convince themselves of when it comes to their neighbors. Many Israelis are turning into the people their ancestors ran from.
Randy P
@Gene108: I fail to see it as well, and I’m being accused of making it.
Are we more or less on the topic of bad sci-fi here? Let me throw some more gasoline on the fire: Why does The Fifth Element have any fans? I’ve never understood that.
Discuss amongst yourselves.
@KG:
I was never a huge fan of Star Wars, but went to see the prequels in the theater because I thought the story of how Darth Vader turned, would be interesting. I hadn’t realized just how bad at or uninterested in character development Lucas would be. As far as I recall, the entire character arc consisted of Queen Abu-Dhabi (who strangely went from being a queen to being a housewife; the only two roles Lucas could imagine for a female?) speaking a single line (paraphrased): “Hey you’re not good anymore, you’re EVIL”.
Gene108
@p.a.:
The money edge Republicans have because of the CU decision has no clear cut path for Democrats to overcome.
The impact of the CU decision on subsequent elections gets discounted by VSP. Being able to bombard down ticket candidates with negative ads paid for by third party groups has had an impact in 2010, and after.
WereBear
@boatboy_srq: I liked that miniseries. The movie was so ineptly truncated only devotees of the book would know what was going on.
beltane
@Arm The Homeless: We can expect that this statement will go un-condemned by “serious” people.
Chris
@KG:
I believe Lucas is on record saying he imagined the Empire as a version of the Nixon-era United States taken to its logical end, with the Rebels having more of a VietCongish vibe.
SFAW
@boatboy_srq:
Now WHY would you want to put her through that?
@Brachiator:
Lynch doesn’t do much for me. And I have to confess, I have never seen Dune in its entirety. But I’ve seen YouTube clips of scenes that were relatively crucial in the book, and, as Nick Danger said to Rocky Rococo “The first of you turns my stomach.”
boatboy_srq
@Randy P: Fifth Element has some really fun humour, great scenics, and we get to watch Bruce Willis in a 3D car chase and blasting bad guys. Milla Jovovich, Ian Holm, Gary Oldman, Brion James and Chris Tucker are all great to watch: you can tell the cast had a blast making the film, and it’s always fun to watch big talent chew the scenery. As for premise, plot, etc…. meh.
WereBear
@Randy P: It is funny and watchable and a lady kicks a$$. Me likey.
Frankensteinbeck
@Archon:
I can, but I understand that most people wouldn’t find it as impressive. When they crash land on Tatooine, Jin is completely unruffled. He will walk into town, and his problems will fix themselves, because the Force is with him. I was like ‘Damn, that is one guy who deserves the title Jedi Master.’
Arm The Homeless
@beltane: Fuck that, I suspect it will be part of at least one GOPer’s stump speech. I mean, who knows more about the Holocaust than Israelis, amirite?
Chris
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
Honestly, the love scenes in the prequels were pretty broadly panned as among the worst parts of what were already less than good movies. I am really okay with the fact that Lucas didn’t let them take over the trilogy completely; I have a feeling that would’ve made it worse, not better.
boatboy_srq
@SFAW: Hey, she did it once (must’ve had a balloon payment come due, I suppose). Plus, she’s still working (and doing stuff like the Miss Marple series and Home Fires for television, at that) so might be interested in doing it again.
celticdragonchick
@Brachiator:
This. The movie simply did not work.
This one might have been fun…https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodorowsky's_Dune
Roger Moore
@Randy P:
Camp. Also, too, Mila Jovovich in a very skimpy costume.
boatboy_srq
@WereBear: I always took the movie as vignette-illustration of the book: a bit like going through all the Oz books just from the pictures. The miniseries did a decent job standing on its own.
Gene108
@KG:
The Expanded Universe came into being in 1978. There some books and a comic book and Sunday comic strip.
If anyone cared about those sources, when making movies it has never showed.
The only thing that I think sort of stuck is Brian Daley’s Han Solo books showing the Galactic Empire did not control the entire galaxy, even though no one has specifically bothered to define an actual Corporate Sector quadrant of space.
boatboy_srq
@SFAW: @boatboy_srq: Better, shorter answer: Krull.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Randy P:
“The Fifth Element” was one of the worst-marketed films I’ve ever seen. Once I realized it was supposed to be a comedy and not a sci-film, I enjoyed it a lot more.
Patricia Kayden
@MomSense: I’m cheap. I carry a large purse and buy cheap concessions outside the theater to sneak in. Looking forward to this movie though. It will be the first Star Wars for me.
Roger Moore
@Archon:
I thought there were some memorable scenes, but they weren’t great memorable. For example, pretty much everything that required Jake Lloyd to act was memorably bad.
Chris
@boatboy_srq:
I think of Lucas as the epitome of “you didn’t build that.” In the seventies, he had enough other people in the movies that could check him. Harrison Ford famously told him “you can write this shit, George, but you can’t say it!” And back then Harrison Ford and other people could say that, because George Lucas wasn’t George Lucas, he was just some guy. Twenty years later, the man is such a legend that no one can check him anymore, everyone’s too in awe of his success. And nobody’s wondering how much of it was actually his. So you get the prequels.
NotMax
Bill Kristol is mclaren? ho knew?
@boatboy_srq
We used to joke that the films were working towards a scene of a woman giving birth on Yoda’s doorstep and, before even cutting the cord, knocking and offering the newborn for training.
Followed by a peephole opening, a pause, then the muffled words “That one? Too old. Too old for training.” and the peephole going dark.
Bobby Thomson
Kristol’s attempted joke is that liberals are the real Siths. With the exception of every real world analogy, I can see his point.
Randy P
@boatboy_srq:
It’s probably forgotten by most people, even those of A Certain Age, but long before Peter Jackson’s successful adaptation of Lord of the Rings, there was a misguided attempt in the 1970s by an up-and-coming animator named Ralph Bakshi who had generated a lot of buzz. Tolkien was a huge thing in the 70s and fans had high hopes for what Bakshi would do with it.
It was a disaster. It was incoherent. Even if you knew the books intimately you couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on at any moment in the film. “A vignette-illustration of the books” is a perfect description of that movie.
I never heard anything about Bakshi after that, though his IMDB page does show he continued to get work, and in fact is apparently still working.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
ObOpenThread: “Paul Ryan is a Trojan Horse for the LGBT Lobby”:
Interesting things get distributed during campaigns in Virginia…. :-/
Cheers,
Scott.
gelfling545
I’m hoping to see Star Wars myself. It will be my annual movie theatre visit. I usually see one in-theatre movie a year because there are rarely many films I want to actually pay that much to see. I saw the very first Star Wars about 4 times when I was expecting my first daughter (the movie theatre was air conditioned & the apartment wasn’t). I may see this one with my 17 year old granddaughter whose word was Jedi. She had a little hooded sweater & her father would pull the hood up & say “Jedi baby”. One day when her hood was put on she came out with “Jedi”. Her parents were so proud.
Iowa Old Lady
@Patricia Kayden: I don’t eat at movies. It just never occurs to me to do it.
Chris
@KG:
I don’t know how bound he felt by it, but he borrowed some elements from it (Coruscant was an expanded universe invention) and he specifically told authors to stay away from the rise of the Empire era, which remained a blank until there were prequels for the books to tie into.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Chris:
I’m working on the assumption that Lucas would have been smart enough in this scenario to hire a real writer or writers like he did for “Empire Strikes Back.” We’re talking ideal universe here.
Lucas is actually a very good producer, but he’s a bad director and a worse writer.
the Conster
@different-church-lady:
LOL. Yeah, Chuck Pagano is probably a conservative, with a tenuous grasp on reality at best.
It finally sunk in that for every movie I’ve ever seen, conservatives came away sad about the bad guys losing. They’re all fucking sociopaths.
boatboy_srq
@Randy P: Seen it. Certifiably horrid. It looked like he ran out of funds (and suckers) so wrapped things up at Isengard. The pseudo-animation was an interesting approach, but (again) largely fell flat.
gelfling545
@Archon: You betcha! That’s apparently what the conservatives like about it.
boatboy_srq
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: You’re making me wish for November already – just so I can cast my vote against that h8ful schmvck.
Mike in NC
Got dragged to see the first Star Wars movie (Ep IV) when I was stationed in San Diego, and never had the urge to see another.
Chris
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
Between Star Wars, Star Trek and Stargate, my theory is that sci fi universes need an Ideas Guy who comes up with the basic concepts and then…. steps back and lets other people refine them.
boatboy_srq
@Mike in NC: Heh. My parents said the same thing about that film (the “dragged to see it” part, not the “in San Diego” part)
Jeffro
@Arm The Homeless:
It’s the same principle at work whether on a planetary or galactic scale, isn’t it?
sigh
Peale
I disagree with bloodshed Bill, but I feel the need to interject that I do not support the “Rebellion” either. Just because a culture that is far, far away has a color coded symbol system that seems like our own, doesn’t mean we should just assume that “light” is what we’re in favor of and “dark” is something to be avoided. I think we’re just too easily manipulated by these forces of light into thinking that there is a common interest and that because there is a fight, we need to show galactic leadership and take a side. Sure, the aristocracy that runs the rebellion would like us to think that we’re together in this, but really, the fact that they are far away and long ago should give us pause in supporting their cause.
I don’t see much of a case that the Jedi and Senate offered the people any more than a way to ensure that the slaves were kept in check on planets that had them and honestly the whole civil war seems like a bunch of snooty Russian nobility crying about their lost privileges. I’m fine with taking in the refugees, but we should not assume that the existence of refugees in a time of war requires us to get involved for humanity’s sake. It doesn’t. Luke, Leia, Han…well, they aren’t exactly human. They may look human, but I think an Earth First policy is in order. We’ll take the refugees, but they can take their demands for secret bases and armaments and shove it. We’ve seen how well they protect planets where their bases are. They abandon them and those planets end up as dust. All your support does is make the Empire interested in destroying our planet and so far, they’ve kept their distance.
boatboy_srq
@Arm The Homeless:
Um. isn’t that what the 2016 election is about?
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Randy P:
I saw it as a kid and it made zero impression on me. FWIW, I was a huge fan of animated movies and would go see every Disney re-release.
Other animators mocked Disney’s assembly-line approach as being anathema to creativity, but it gets shit done. Google the sad history of “The Thief and the Cobbler” to see what happened when Richard Williams tried to invent a new way of making an animated feature.
NotMax
@Randy P
Say what?
Missed the whole Mighty Mouse/”cocaine” kerfuffle in the 90s?
(Among other things, one of Brad Pitt’s first major roles was in a Bakshi film.)
Lurking Canadian
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): I don’t see your scenario working at all. If we’re doing a love triangle, why not have Padme fall for Obi-Wan, which is what drives Anakin over the edge. He cements his turn to the dark side with the rape of Padme that fathers the twins.
What is gained by making Obi-Wan the bad guy?
Matt McIrvin
If he were arguing that the Jedi and the Old Republic weren’t good guys, I’d be with him.
Lurking Canadian
@WereBear: the TV Dune (and sequel) were very true to the original. I’m not sure about the acting, although Chani the Warrior Princess was all kinds of hot.
Patricia Kayden
@Arm The Homeless: Bibi can’t get any more disgusting. Not surprised that he’s now blaming the Palestinians for the greatest crime against the Jews and employing lies to do so. Why not demonize them to justify the way he’s treating them?
Frankensteinbeck
@Randy P:
You are fantastically fortunate. I care about cartoons a great deal, and Bakshi’s belief that they should be ugly and sleazy fills me with rage.
Ironically, he made one movie I liked: Wizards. All his horrible cheap animation tricks, the ugliness and the sleaze, his general incoherence, were all on display, but he’d just happened to pick a property where they fit the theme and made weird, dystopian sci-fi/fantasy.
ThresherK
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): But that’s par for the course, and follows the trope of WWII movies to a T: Low-level soldiers speak German, mid-level officers speak English with a German accent, and most of your name-brand top-level Nazis have highbrow English stage elocution.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Lurking Canadian:
Obi-Wan wouldn’t necessarily be the bad guy in my scenario, but the good guy who makes things worse by not recognizing the reasons for his own actions. But your scenario could work as well as long as we end up with an Obi-Wan who deliberately chooses to watch over the son of the woman he loved to try and make up for his mistakes.
Peale
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: yes. As a gay man I agree. Not a day goes by that I haven’t longed for the ascendency of Ryan and the freedom it will bring.
Mike J
If your super weapon is named the Death Star, it’s sort of like having skulls on your hat.
A guy
Mnemosyne- glad you are working. work your job hard. Save money. Plan. I did 30 years ago cause I knew at this point in my life I wanted to hunt on a Tuesday afternoon. I’m also hunting Thursday morning. And don’t let your government plan your life for you. don’t let the government take your money and give It to a woman who wants 12 weeks of paid leave to have a kid. You will be severely disappointed.
cckids
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
I agree, would have worked better, except . . . the script would have had to reconcile Padme choosing the whiny, pouty, immature and much younger Anakin over Obi Wan. What’s the rationale there? It was unbelievable when she only had one choice :)
ETA: And, my personal pet peeve: Women don’t just die from sadness right after giving birth. Would have made more sense for Anakin, in his jealous tizzy fit, to have done more than just Force-choked her, leading to her death. That would also have worked to send him over to the dark side for reals.
SFAW
@boatboy_srq:
“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice … uh … won’t get fooled again.”
Matt McIrvin
As I think James Nicoll has pointed out, the Star Wars expanded universe is incredibly depressing: while there’s a huge variety of planets and cultures, there’s been little or no social or even scientific or technological progress for thousands of years, just conflict after conflict. Maybe it is what the end-state of a galaxy with incredibly fast, casually easy interstellar travel would look like after a few millennia.
goblue72
@boatboy_srq: Its funny – I saw that SyFy miniseries too – and while I thought it definitely made more sense plot wise (probably doubly so if someone hadn’t read the books) and was truer to the books, I really found it plodding and difficult to engage with. I never once forgot I was watching some made-for-TV cable mini-series with mostly second rate actors. More than once I found myself just watching it in order to get it over with.
Lynch’s hot mess was a total hot mess, but I still found it a more engaging hot mess in its totality (even if there were some WTF moments where some long stretches of plot development were compressed into a few minutes)
Still waiting for an actually good movie version of Dune.
raven
@A guy: Oh fuck you. Who would take life advice from a loser motherfucker like you?
dedc79
@Arm The Homeless: The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem’s record from that era is pretty horrific. He collaborated with the Nazis, recruited muslims to join the Waffen SS, and pushed for Hitler to extend the extermination of jews into arab lands. To be clear, I’m
not saying this supports any claim that palestinians are responsible for the Holocaust in any way. But was the Grand Mufti complicit? Yes.
NonyNony
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Remember – Yoda told Obi-wan that Luke was too old to be trained as a Jedi when Obi-wan’s ghost brought Luke to Dagobah. So if Anakin was too old at age 10, Luke was far too old at age 19 or whatever to be trained properly.
Of course the prequels established that a) the Jedi were horrible and b) the Jedi were idiots. So any claims that Yoda made about anything are suspect purely because the judgment of the Jedi as a group was so utterly terrible. (I assume that this was on purpose – that Lucas was making the Jedi Council out to be as stupid and closed-minded as the Knights of the Round Table in Arthurian myth leading to the fall of Camelot. But like much of the prequels he takes it too over the top. The Jedi come out as actively evil and stupid instead of slightly venal and clueless.)
Chris
@cckids:
This made for a pretty funny Robot Chicken Star Wars segment with “Dr. Ball, MD.”
“She’s ‘lost the will to live?’ What, is your degree in poetry? You sorry bunch of hippies! For God’s sake, don’t use the billions of dollars in medical equipment around you!“
Brachiator
@Randy P: The prequel should have been about the emperor or Obi Wan. Or almost anything or anybody else. Everything about these movies were bad. And Lucas kept beating to death a master and disciple relationship with various combinations of characters. It got quickly monotonous and did not propel the narrative forward. It was just strange to see how much Lucas had lost his film making Mojo. And he was too protective of the material, and seemed to want to make a movie for children, not general audiences. Just sad. I felt bad for him to see how stale and lifeless the prequels were.
NotMax
@Frankensteinbeck
Understand it is not to your taste, but found his execution more often slapdash than purposefully visually ugly, more of a stylistic whole (though not as expert, studied nor artistic as, say R. Crumb, for an example of someone else some people dismiss as “ugly”). Saw Bakshi’s utilization of looseness of form and often Seuss-like backgrounds as tools to simulate the flow and movement of full animation.
Now, John Kricfalusi, on the other hand, struck me as someone who deliberately utilized ugliness and sleaze as both a motif and a reaction against smoother, more traditional cartooning.
Anne Laurie
@Randy P:
I saw Bakshi’s LotR in the campus theatre when it first came out, and I loved it. Yes, the money guys got scared & pulled Bakshi’s funding halfway through production, which led to some sketchy intercuts and a hurry-up ending, but it didn’t have the bloated, literal-minded reverence of Jackson’s trilogy.
Also, John Hunt as cartoon-Aragorn telling Frodo “Then we must live without hope. There is always vengeance!” is one of my top-five movie scenes ever.
SFAW
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
I have to agree with “A guy.” It is so much more rewarding to have your tax dollars go to tax breaks or subsidies to oil companies, companies that off-shore production jobs, and jaaahb creators in general, because they are much better people than those welfare-queen moochers.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@A guy:
I inherited money from my dad. I don’t have to work, but I like it. The only thing I resent is that you’re going to live off the money that I’ve been paying into Social Security and Medicare while you bitch the whole time about other people doing the exact same thing as you.
But, hey, your political party is working hard to make sure that your own kids won’t have Social Security and Medicare, so I look forward to seeing them eating cat food in their old age because Daddy didn’t want them to have the same advantages he did.
raven
@Mike in NC: Me neither.
mike with a mic
@Lurking Canadian:
The love cycle is stupid anyways, that’s not really why people turn.
The Jedi have to kidnap kids early on, mind rape them, brainwash them, train them, prevent them from reading or learning about anything that contradicts what they are being told, or recruits are able to see through their bullshit. What ends up happening in most cases is they grow up. They are able to see through the bullshit they have been taught and have a moment of realization… just like when kids realize their fundie parents are full of shit, or hell African child soldiers finally realizing what they are involved in. So they start experimenting with things contradictory to their religious indoctrination and seeking out banned information. The more they learn the more they realize how full of shit the entire Jedi order is and how a lot of the do-gooder crap is just an excuse to boss people around and do horrible crap. Their powers also increase.
Some of them go off the deep end and do a complete 180. IE “this selfless shit is a lie and altruism is only preached by assholes who want to boss people around, so I’m in it for me and the moustache twirling lulz now”, others accept that both sides of the force are deeply problematic when taken to extremes. So they embrace the entire force and the fullness of life’s experience. But the Jedi order doesn’t really give a damn, if you aren’t completely doing what they say you are evil and thus must be destroyed. They have no nuance here at all. They are fanatics that would make ISIS stand up and clap. Plus the Republic they backed was up to it’s eyeballs in slavery, even endorsed it. Which is why a lot of the nicer places wanted nothing to do with either side in the fight.
Of course not all Jedi are child abusing religious fanatics, and not all Sith are planet destroying Dr. Evil monsters. Just most of the official ones are. Even then you still get renegades, Obi-wan is heavily implied to have carried on romantic relationships for one. The less extreme to either side the individual is the less idiotic they tend to be and the less “what the fuck is wrong you moments” they tend to have.
Which is why the fall of Vader was so stupid. Over a relationship? Makes no god damn sense. Because he realized the Jedi were full of crap and their ideology was bullshit? Again, many have and those with real power didn’t go insane even when they went bad, and a lot ended up in the gray area and totally at peace with it. There were dozens of better ways to portray and go about this than what the prequels showed. Combined with horrible acting and a nonsensical plot it just came off like shit.
If you want a former Jedi turned Sith who happened to have a wife and kids, it’s been done well. http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Revan
I’ll still see the movie and I’m still going to buy Starwars Battlefront. Because pew-pew lasers.
Anne Laurie
@Frankensteinbeck:
Ya gotta admit, “Master loves Igor! Master feeds Igor!” would be a great motto for Bill Kristol…
SiubhanDuinne
@Patricia Kayden:
I often do the same, but I’m going to be a bit more careful in future: At least one theatre I patronize regularly has started doing (admittedly cursory) purse-bag-backpack inspections before they let you in. I assumed they were checking for firearms, but more likely they’re looking for contraband candy bars and soda cans.
NotMax
@Anne Laurie
It’s not nearly as horrid as many people pretend it is. Yes, low budget and chock full of weaknesses and shortcuts, but there are definite senses of both affection and charm regarding the source material and several scenes of genuine dramatic tension and resonance. Plays much, much better on a theater-sized screen than on a TV (even with occasionally being able to see the actors through the rotoscoping).
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@SFAW:
Don’t forget, it’s more moral to pay $200 a month out of your own pocket for private disability insurance than it is to pay an extra $20 a year in taxes so everyone — including pregnant women — can have disability insurance. God hates money so much that he wants you to waste yours as often as possible.
Steeplejack
@Brachiator:
You can watch the 1930 version of Holiday on YouTube: the full movie is here, and there is a playlist of the movie in seven parts here. Quality seems to be about the same on both.
If you must have a DVD, one is available for $9.99 from ZeusDVDs.com. (No link because FYWP.)
PurpleGirl
@gelfling545: Star Wars played forever at the Astor movie theater. See it became the thing to do when you couldn’t think of something else to do. I lost count of how many times I saw it. My last viewing came a year later when my pen pal was in NYC, the movie was at a theater on the Upper East Side and Harald wanted to see it before he went home to Norway.
I don’t remember seeing the prequels; I must have seen one or two of them. But I don’t remember them all that well.
dedc79
@efgoldman: Yeah, well isn’t that the distinction I just drew above?
All I’m saying is, take a tour through the guy’s page on wikipedia. It’s not pretty. Recruiting bosnian muslims to fight with the nazis? That’s pretty bad. And then there was his propaganda:
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@efgoldman:
Vichy officials were tried for crimes against humanity for their enthusiastic deportation of Jews to the death camps during the war, but I don’t hear very many people claiming that France responsible for the Holocaust.
Call me naive, but I’m pretty sure Hitler already had some idea that he wanted to get rid of the Jews and other “undesirables” long before he talked to anyone from Palestine. He wrote a whole book about it.
PurpleGirl
@Randy P: I remember the Bakshi animation. Not that I went to see it, but I remember it and some of the buzz. I was just getting in scifi fandom and conventions around that time. From the stills I saw, it didn’t match my vision of the books. Jackson’s humans looked so much more like what I envisioned. And that story needed the landscapes… New Zealand is the real uncredited star of the trilogy.
NotMax
@PurpleGirl
Saw it the week it opened (stopped in at a record store a couple of doors down from the theater to buy the soundtrack album immediately afterward), and was compelled to drag someone else to see it the very next day. This was before it developed into a Big Thing; theater was maybe half-filled each time.
redshirt
@Brachiator:
The Prequels (and the Originals) are about the Emperor. Star Wars to date is the story of his rise to power, and then his fall. He is the antagonist that drives all action in all the movies.
That’s why I’m extra interested in the new one, as it’s the first Star Wars story that should have nothing to do with the Emperor.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@dedc79:
Have you ever read “Balkan Ghosts” by Robert D. Kaplan? I couldn’t get through the first chapter since it has a graphic and detailed description of a WWII massacre of Jews in Romania that was enthusiastically carried out by the townspeople.
The Grand Mufti was a horrible person but, sadly, he was far from alone in his enthusiasm for slaughtering Jews. It would be difficult to find any country within the Nazi sphere of influence that didn’t have equally enthusiastic murderers. But to claim that he personally convinced Hitler to start the Holocaust, as Bibi is claiming, is insane.
redshirt
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
There is a poorly executed but implied romantic triangle in Revenge of the Sith, but it’s only a triangle because Anakin thinks it is – nothing to do with any actions by Padme and Obi Wan. In deleted scenes for the movie, Anakin voices his suspicions that Padme is too close with Obi Wan.
Cervantes
@dedc79:
Do you have any idea why he might have done these things?
And to be clear, I’m not saying he should have done what he did, either.
dedc79
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Agree, completely. Haven’t read that book, but will put it on my reading list. Need to space the WW2 books out, too depressing.
catclub
@Pogonip: I’ve heard of near beer. maybe there is near deer beer.
gene108
@Chris:
The whole theme of Anakin going to the dark side because he thought Padme was going to die in child birth was stretching an already stretched suspension of disbelief in the prequels.
I can understand wanting to keep the pregnancy a secret, but a former head of state for Naboo and sitting Senator should be able to call in some favors to get good prenatal care.
There so many better ways to have pushed Anakin over the edge than something basic 21st century American medicine can prevent, let alone what can be done in a technologically more advanced civilization.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@dedc79:
The book is primarily about why the Balkan states all split up after the Iron Curtain fell, but that initial story was so horrific that I couldn’t read the rest of the book. It’s necessary to explain all of the hidden fissures in that region that the Soviets were able to paper over, but it really was one of the worst Holocaust massacre stories I’ve read, and I’ve read quite a few.
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
In fairness, that wasn’t the whole book. There was a bunch of other stuff about restoring Germany’s greatness.
Arm The Homeless
@dedc79:
The truly fucked up part is that while Germany eventually was welcomed back, cautiously, to the civilized fold. Backwaters of the Levant, Africa, much of Asia–Hell, everywhere other than Western nations, were thrown right back into chaos by realignment of the locus of world power.
Climate change will make the Syrian exodus look like a line at Disney World. The whole region will get much more dangerous before it gets better, IMHO.
Roger Moore
@gene108:
I thought that was OK as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Anakin was lured to the dark side by fear of Padme’s death in child birth, but it was his turning to the dark side that destroyed her will to live. If he had been willing to accept that visions of the future don’t always come true, or been philosophical about his inability to change them, then the bad thing he saw wouldn’t have come true in the first place. Of course, Lucas didn’t have J.K. Rowling’s skill in making that point clear.
NotMax
@efgoldman
The mythology is that it was a monster hit from the get-go when it premiered in very late May. In reality, its popularity gradually but steadily built and built and finally exploded (IIRC) in late summer.
Had just returned to Long Island at the time and it was a chore and a not short drive to even find a theater showing it – again IIRC, there were only two in all of Nassau county: one on the south shore, one on the north shore.
jl
@efgoldman: That is where sheer drinking skill comes in. Ice-fishing is all about skill, after all.
Chris
@gene108:
I always thought Anakin’s background as a slave from a third world planet that the Republic doesn’t bother to police anymore and is now run by gangsters and slave traders provided all the explanation necessary for his going Imperial. Where the Jedi still see the Republic through rose tinted glasses, he’s experienced it as distant and either indifferent or impotent depending on how you look at it. Of course he’d hop on board with a new, “strong” government. Sweep away all those useless bureaucrats and debaters! Put the Real Men in charge who’ll actually DO SOMETHING, and then lead, follow, or get out of their way! THAT’s how you run a galaxy, by god!
schrodinger's cat
@Chris: The prequels were totally forgettable. All I remember is the stupid line
And the whole theater burst out laughing at the ridiculousness and Jar Jar Binks. Star Wars is totally overrated fluff.
Just One More Canuck
@Cervantes: not Obama?
Big Picture Pathologist
@jl:
Favorite prequel scenes:
Episode 1: Pod racing
Episode 2: Arena -> HUGE battle (went a secknd time into the theater just to watch that again)
Episode 3: As you said, the duel…EPIC!!
J R in WV
@Brachiator:
I thought Dune was directed by Dino DeLaurentis ??
Or was that long ago, followed by the version you speak of?
Oops! I have revealed that I am an Old – oh, the shame!
RSA
@PurpleGirl:
This is me, too. So all the talk about moral ambiguity of the Jedis goes over my head. To be honest, to me even the tone of the latest trailer seem off, reaching for a gravitas that the three original space opera films didn’t much have.
But maybe I’m just a philistine.
Big Picture Pathologist
@Frankensteinbeck:
Hey, I saw Wizards too!
@ age 12: Mind = blown
@ age 35: Hmmm, sorta meh, but still pretty good
Cervantes
@Just One More Canuck:
Not catching your meaning, sorry.
jake the antisoshul soshulist
@Randy P:
The best way to look at The Fifth Element as the most expensive so bad it’s good movie ever made and just enjoy the goofyness.
jake the antisoshul soshulist
@Frankensteinbeck:
I sort of like Wizards. But mostly because it is the closest we have to a Vaugn Bode animated feature. But it sounds like you wouldn’t/don’t like Bode. He was highly problematic in a lot of ways, but I always appreciated his bitter form of dark humor.
Roy G.
Come on, can’t you sheeple see that Bernie Sanders is really EMPEROR PALPATINE??!!!
Citizen Alan
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
To be fair, my impression was always that Yoda et al thought that Anakin might well be the prophesied one who would “bring balance to the Force” and he thought that was BAD THING so he was scrambling for any halfway plausible excuse to keep the kid out of the Jedi. My personal pet peeve about TPM is that it makes the entire plot of /all six movies/ dependent on the fact that the Jedi are such cheap bastards that they never once considered returning to Tatooine, buying Shmi out of slavery, and setting her and the kid up in a nice home on some distant planet, conditional on Anakin never studying the force.
As Lord Dark Helmet said, “That is why Evil will always win — because Good is dumb.”
Applejinx
@boatboy_srq: Horrible cutting? Come the fuck on. First of all, it was phenomenal editing pioneering that technique of pushing the pace forward with rapid cuts not driven by the actor performances, and secondly George had nothing to do with it. That was Marcia Lucas editing. You might have seen her work in ‘Taxi Driver’?
Also, according to a 1977 Rolling Stone interview, Obi-Wan being killed by Vader was Marcia’s idea which George quickly grabbed and ran with. But mainly, come the fuck on about the cutting, Star Wars was a turning point in feature film cutting. You can argue it’s been taken too far, but it was a landmark.
Sherparick
Bill is obviously trolling. The key is his reference to the Empire as a “Liberal Regime,” although if could get him to knock down of couple of scotchs with us, he would speak fondly of the Empire’s way of dealing with those who got out of line. In real life, his first impulse is always to “bomb, bomb, bomb away.”
Sherparick
@NonyNony: Reading a couple of histories on the Plantagenet and Valois kings of medieval England and France. One insight is one should never underestimate human (or sentient being) stupidity even with very smart people. Constantly, you are asking yourself “what were they thinking.” (And frequently, the same questions were being asked by contemporaries and even by the individuals themselves.)
boatboy_srq
@Applejinx:
That doesn’t necessarily translate to either a viewable piece or to a good idea. There were plenty of scenes (again, the scene where Vader first confronts Leia stands out) where the cutting actually hurt the narrative. There’s also in your description the seeds of why the prequels were so bad: by reducing the performers to cutouts for your storytelling you deny then any ability to improve their material: Ford, Fisher, Guiness, Cushing and McDiarmid might have been able to rise above that but clearly Neeson, McGregor, Portman, Jackson and Christensen either didn’t dare or weren’t allowed to.
I’m not saying it wasn’t innovative, or that it never worked: just that it didn’t work well enough, it hurt the viewability of ANH (especially over time), and in ANH the technique suffered not from overuse but overeagerness.
vooodooo84
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
Well Toht did have that smart portable clothes hanger