Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

Be a traveling stable for those who can’t find room at the inn.

There is one struggling party in US right now, and it’s not the Democrats.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

When the time comes to make an endorsement, the pain of NYT editors will be palpable as they reluctantly whisper “Biden.”

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

T R E 4 5 O N

If you cannot answer whether trump lost the 2020 election, you are unfit for office.

When we show up, we win.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

“Why isn’t this Snickers bar only a nickel?”

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

The US Supreme Court is on the ballot in november.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

Motown is Joe-Town!

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about it’s history.”

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

You are here: Home / Politics / Politicans / Cruz-ifiction / Open Thread: Well, Kauffmann Was Right About Some of Them…

Open Thread: Well, Kauffmann Was Right About Some of Them…

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New Republic film critic Stanley Kauffmann, back in 1977:

… This is Lucas’ tribute to Flash Gordon, and is now enthralling all those who feel that Flash Gordon needs a two-hour, eight-million-dollar tribute. There’s a glitzy attempt at profundity in the opening title which tells us that the story took place on a galaxy far away “a long time ago.” It really takes place in the science-fiction future, a place which is as fixed and fictitious for bad sci-fi writers as the Old West is for bad Western writers. Lucas’ script has Good Guys, Bad Guys, a princess, intergalactic imperialist war, staunch defenders of human and humanoid rights, secrets that will not be surrendered to the warlords—a whole spectrum of simplified earthly problems projected onto cardboard and illuminated with interminable ray-gun flashes and lastminute huge explosions…

But I saw at last—after about, say, 20 minutes—that Star Wars wasn’t meant to be ingenious in any way; it was meant to be exactly what it is. From Lucas’s view it certainly has not failed. I kept looking for an “edge,” to peer around the corny, solemn comic-book strophes; he was facing them frontally and full. This picture was made for those (particularly males) who carry a portable shrine within them of their adolescence, a chalice of a Self that was Better Then, before the world’s affairs or—in any complex way—sex intruded. Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and their peers guard the portals of American innocence, and Star Wars is an unabashed, jaw-clenched tribute to the chastity still sacred beneath the middle-aged spread…

***********

…. Annnd today, to take advantage of a NEW HOPE!!!!

Reader Interactions

129Comments

  1. 1.

    Mnemosyne

    I saw it when I was 8 and was thrilled to death that pretty princesses could shoot guns, too! I doubt we would have Buffy or the other TV and movie action girls without Princess Leia.

    (Yeah, there was Batgirl, but she didn’t even get to kick people properly despite the fact that Yvonne Craig knew judo.)

  13. 13.

    Ken

    Cruz better be careful. Star Wars(TM)(C)(R) is owned by Disney now. They’ve sued day care centers for unlicensed use of their intellectual property.

  15. 15.

    Joel

    On the other hand, we have John Podhoretz slobbering over the Phantom Menace.

    ENOUGH with the whiny movie critics complaining about the new ‘Star Wars” movie. Like them, I was fully prepared to hate the thing when I arrived at the screening, but that prejudice was overcome by the movie’s wondrous look and by its fascinating, multilayered plot. ‘The Phantom Menace” takes twists and turns you don’t expect.

  20. 20.

    schrodinger's cat

    @Adam L Silverman: Hollywood has a wider reach, and most movie going audiences have no clue about what goes on in other countries’ movie industries.

    A. R. Rahman has composed haunting scores for Tamil and Hindi movies but he got an Oscar for the thoroughly mediocre Jai-Ho in the incredulity stretching Slumdog Millionaire which populated with 2 dimensional characters.

    My Chinese friends had similar things to say about Crouching Tiger.

  24. 24.

    Cacti

    @Dupe1970:

    Yes. Yes, he is. He might think the Empire are the good guys in the movies.

    Sure, the rebels are the good guys in George Lucas’s civil war.

    Jedi vs. Sith though, I’d say the Sith are a lot more honest and straightforward that their goal is to obtain and hold onto power, vs the Jedi who are a passive-aggressive mind control cult with the same ambition.

  30. 30.

    NotMax

    @Ken

    First, a cease and desist request is not a suit. It may contain reference to the capability or intention of suing for non-compliance, but is not in itself such. And as much as one might rail against heartless corporate bureaucracies and shark-like lawyers, it is questionable if such actions are what they desired to do.

    Not a pretty picture, for sure, but legally they are required to act in such a fashion if made aware of such instances of unauthorized use, otherwise the copyright could be deemed abandoned by example of non-enforcement.

    Not meant to be an apology for Disney, rather a statement that these things are not as black and white as they might appear.

  34. 34.

    Ken

    @NotMax: Oh yes, I understand the corporation’s legal obligations in these situations, and also that the PR department gets migraines every time something like this happens.

    Also, Cruz’s people (or whoever made this) shouldn’t think that being a political campaign gives any sort of immunity. After all, many campaigns that have been sued for using music without permission.

  39. 39.

    Adam L Silverman

    @redshirt: @Omnes Omnibus: What bothers me about Campbell was not necessarily his scholarship, rather it was things like what he did with Lucas. Campbell was convinced that we had lost a sense of myth and the fantastic and decided it was his job to try to find a way to give it back. From what I learned about his efforts he would do anything to do so. If that meant helping someone rip off someone else’s work, then that was what he had to do. As someone who has had his work plagiarized, it bothers me both personally and professionally.

  43. 43.

    Adam L Silverman

    @redshirt: I cannot recall where I saw it written up all these years later, but I remember reading that Campbell discussed with Lucas doing a movie that would accomplish his goals and recommending that he focus on/adapt The Hidden Fortress. While Lucas does now acknowledge that he this film was a primary inspiration for Star Wars, the same article indicated that he denied that for years.

  47. 47.

    maeve

    I saw it in 1977 when I was a student doing a summer research thing at Brookhaven National Lab on Long Island – as might be expected of us science nerds we made the trek to see the movie (We also went to a baseball game where Reggie Jackson hit a home run into the stands near us).

    Being into Science Fiction before that – it was thrilling to see a movie that had image that lived up to the books. Even then i realized it had various cliches – but actually for me it was all to the good – I was also an aficionado of old movies and recognized the references to Errol Flynn swinging to the rescue and Perils of Pauline when the garbage smasher closed in on our heroes/heroines

    The latter movies lost that – it even lost it by the third movie – haven’t seen this one yet.

  57. 57.

    PurpleGirl

    @Adam L Silverman: Somewhere in a stack of old VCR tapes I have a series that Joseph Campbell did for PBS. I tried reading him and found him ponderous. I quickly tired of “finding your bliss”.

  58. 58.

    J Alfred Press

    @Adam L Silverman I don’t know from Star Wars really (I thought the first three were pretty okay when I was a kid and then that was the last I thought much about it) but I like your opinions on Joseph Campbell and Kristol the Younger.

    At least Bill Buckley’s kid managed to get himself shit-canned from his dad’s old rag.

  59. 59.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Steeplejack: In the movie, the heroes were Delta Tau Chi. They were called Deltas. The is a real world fraternity called Delta Tau Delta, nicknamed Delts. The sorority was, IIRC, Pi Pi Pi, which could be a complicated play on the Tri-Delts.

  60. 60.

    Redshift

    The Breitbart page reminds me – Google keeps putting occasional Breitbart (and Fox) articles in my “news” feed because I’m “interested” in politics. While they’re usually pretty annoying, yesterday’s Breitbart headline was pretty amusing: “PAUL RYAN BETRAYS THE COUNTRY!”

  63. 63.

    Adam L Silverman

    @redshirt: I think we’re talking past each other. You asked and I explained that Campbell encouraged Lucas to rip off Kurosawa, which Lucas did. To me encouraging plagiarism isn’t very professional. Yes, it is true that Lucas did not have to do so. And it is also possible he would have done it anyway. But encouraging intellectual theft isn’t a good thing.

  64. 64.

    lamh36

    DAMNIT!

    I forgot to set my DVR…I’m hoping NBC rebroadcast it

    I was busy watching Luther and I didn’t even change the channel once…lol

  65. 65.

    Adam L Silverman

    @PurpleGirl: The guy who runs the Campbell Institute is always on Ancient Aliens. Says something right there. Though this can’t be blamed on Campbell as he’s dead.

  72. 72.

    Steeplejack

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    It has been decades since I have observed the Greek scene, but I seem to remember there was/is a (real-world) sorority called Delta Delta Delta, from whence tri-Delt.

    I don’t remember what any of the fraternities were called in Animal House, except that the misfit/heroes were Delta something, hence “Delta House.”

  73. 73.

    Adam L Silverman

    @J Alfred Press: Everything you need to know about Kristol, pere et fils, is summed up excellently in this anecdote:

    I remember back in the late 1990s, when Ira Katznelson, an eminent political scientist at Columbia, came to deliver a guest lecture. Prof. Katznelson described a lunch he had with Irving Kristol during the first Bush administration.

    The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle’s chief of staff, and how he got his start in politics. Irving recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat Moynihan, then Nixon’s domestic policy adviser, and got William an internship at the White House; how he talked to friends at the RNC [Republican National Committee] and secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach at Penn and the Kennedy School of Government.

    With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving what he thought of affirmative action. ‘I oppose it,’ Irving replied. ‘It subverts meritocracy.’

    http://www.bradford-delong.com/2009/09/republicans-to-the-manor-born.html

  75. 75.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Omnes Omnibus: Took care of it as soon as I saw it. If I’m around commenting or working on a post, as soon as I see something trapped in the filter, I try to get it out. Unless I can’t tell if its spam, then I leave it there and let someone more knowledgable worry about it.

  80. 80.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Steeplejack: Like I wrote above, I cannot remember where I read about Campbell’s involvement with Lucas, just that it always stuck with me. If I could remember the citation I would provide it. If you want to take it as anecdotal, please do. I can’t prove I read it.

  81. 81.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Adam L Silverman: I vaguely remember it, but that is it. I was more a nerd for vaguely historical fiction. Sabatini (hence the ‘nym), Costain (fiction and non), Kenneth Roberts. We all tread our own paths.

  83. 83.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Anoniminous: Yep. Some of Brooks’s stuff I can plow through and enjoy. The first book was hard going. In my defense I was 8. But the most recent one I couldn’t get all the way through. I’ve left a couple of Ohmsfords and a Leah princess stuck somewhere with the Rovers over the Prekendorren. The ones I thought were particularly well done were the twelve or so that connecting contemporary time in the US with how we get to the Four Lands of the Shannara books.

  84. 84.

    MBunge

    That Kauffman review is hilarious in how bad it makes him look. If anyone was guilty of drinking way deeply of the Chalice of Self, it was him.

    As for the new film, it’s a lot of fun but I’m not sure any sequel has ever been so entirely recycled and rehashed.

    Mike

  85. 85.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Steeplejack: It is entirely possible I got the piece to read from a former professor. In fact I’m pretty sure that might be the case. And as I recall he and Campbell did NOT get along. Regardless, it did stick with me.

  89. 89.

    PurpleGirl

    @Omnes Omnibus: I haven’t thought about Thomas B. Costain in ages. At one time I had a bunch of his novels in hardback — Below the Salt, The Black Rose, other names escaping me now. I loved him. (I was a very eclectic reader as a kid/teenager.) (Gee, even remembered the full name.)

  90. 90.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Omnes Omnibus: For fiction I find myself finding authors I like and then reading them book after book. Sometimes if they have more than one series I’ll get hooked on those too, sometimes not. So I’ve gone through all the John Sandford books, Parker’s Spenser, Hillerman’s Navajo Tribal Police novels, Cussler – though now I just read the Oregon Files, Brooks though I’m currently stuck, all of Feist’s stuff. Non fiction depends on what catches my fancy at any given time.

  91. 91.

    Temporarily Max McGee (Soon Enough To Be Andy K Again)

    @Joel:

    And Kurosawa ripped off Dashiell Hammet’s Red Harvest for the basic plot of Yojimbo. Go figure.

  95. 95.

    Adam L Silverman

    @efgoldman: I know, for some reason this one just bugged me and stuck with me. Perhaps its someone with a PhD encouraging plagiarism, which we’re trained to avoid like the plague. Though all too often that training doesn’t seem to take. Or maybe that Star Wars just never did it for me. Don’t get me wrong the first movie was fun, it did a lot of things not yet done and started paving the way for a lot of breakthroughs. But its not one of those movies that I’ll watch as a repeat because I saw it when I was younger and it always stuck with me.

  98. 98.

    lamh36

    @lamh36: Talking about the Running Wild with Bear Grylls episode with POTUS.

    Hear it was pretty good.

    POTUS was is usual urbane, joke cracking self. Plus they had him doing “confessionals” straight to the camera like a real reality show…lol

    Bear Prepares a Salmon Meal for President Obama – Running Wild with Bear Grylls (Sneak Peek)

    …“The fact that he told me this salmon was left over from a bear. I dunno if that was necessary; he could’ve just left that out.”

    Hope NBC puts it on HULU, if not I’ll have to find a pirated copy on YouTube or elsewhere

  100. 100.

    Srv

    I’m wondering where all the super CIA and FBI men went that saved us every time in Clancy’s books.

    > Hillerman

    Remember my creative writing prof, decades back. She was a real hillerman fan. Chaired a discussion at some writers conference on hillerman and was appalled when Native American protesters showed up and spoke truth to all the white folk on the stage.

  103. 103.

    Anne Laurie

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Mystical rabbits? I ask you…

    Who needs mysticism more than those so low on the food chain?

    And how can you not love, “If they catch you, they will kill you; but first, they must catch you.”?

  105. 105.

    Villago Delenda Est

    This is such utter bullshit. Depicting dominionist fuckface Cruz as a “defender” of the Constitution is outright heresy.

  106. 106.

    Anne Laurie

    @MBunge:

    As for the new film, it’s a lot of fun but I’m not sure any sequel has ever been so entirely recycled and rehashed.

    After JJ Abram’s “reboot” of Star Trek, should him doing something similar to Star Wars come as a total surprise?

    (Mind you, I quite liked Abram’s ST reboot — especially his take on Capt. Kirk — and I was an OG Trekkie who never quite ‘got’ Wart-mania… )

  107. 107.

    jl

    Is there a pixilated Ted Cruz animated adventure film with light sabers?
    I’ll watch that.

    Or, at least skip through for the funny bits.

  109. 109.

    Anne Laurie

    @Adam L Silverman: If you liked Hillerman, have you tried Craig Johnson?

    (The two authors share a similar sense of extremely dry humor, IMO. Hillerman called his memoir Seldom Disappointed.)

  110. 110.

    brettvk

    @PurpleGirl: When I was a tween I read my mother’s copy of “The Silver Chalice” and a three-volume history of the Plantagenets. The latter started me on a lifelong love of British history; the former, I later learned, was made into a movie, one of Paul Newman’s first roles, and in which IIRC he loathed his performance.

  111. 111.

    Eric S.

    I didn’t just get home from seeing Episode VII, it wasn’t just awesome, and I’m certainly not going straight to bed without saying anything else.

  115. 115.

    NotMax

    @Anonimous

    TSoS was as close to a 1:1 rip-off of LoTR as a person could without getting sued.

    Fairly certain The Song of the South appeared first.

    ;)

  116. 116.

    divF

    @efgoldman:

    not English drawing room stuff. Agatha Christie boreds me no end.

    OTOH, we have Raymond Chandler’s view on classic English detective fiction:

    The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.

  117. 117.

    Hitless

    @Adam L Silverman: One more rec for Martin Cruz Smith. The Renko novels were all very good. Plus, I just read December 6 (also known as Tokyo Station) this summer and I thought it was excellent as well. I have a feeling you might like it, given the eve of the Pacific War setting.

  121. 121.

    Ruckus

    @John Revolta:
    You are thinking of the actual constitution.
    Conservatives have, like everything else in their world, misunderstood, misread, plundered, lied, ignored reality to create a fictional constitution. It’s an ideal that allows full, unfettered freedom to them and nothing, or even less than that, to anyone else. You know, like the confederate one. Wasn’t there a book or movie that said something to the effect that it’s alright to ignore or create a new reality if it fucks with your vision of the world? Because that’s the unwritten manifesto of the conservative mind.

  122. 122.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Adam L Silverman:
    Do you write fiction? In nonfiction, plagiarism is very clear-cut, but as a fiction author… well, when everybody up the thread is talking about who ripped off who, it’s not an indictment of any of those creators. You have to rip off really hard to actually rip off another fiction writer. I haven’t seen A Hidden Fortress, although I loved 7 Samurai to death, and consider it natural that it has inspired so many works since. Star Wars is wildly unoriginal, but it’s not about cheating other creators, it’s just that Lucas is himself a shitty, shitty writer.

  123. 123.

    Sherparick

    @brettvk: Actually, I think it was four volumes: Thomas Costain’s “The Conquering Family,” “The Magnificent Century,” “The Three Edwards,” and “The Last Plantagenets.” http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/235344.The_Last_Plantagenets Costain was a full medieval romantic. I am reading new history on the Plantagenets right now, which starts with Henry II’s grandfather, Henry I, son of William the Conqueror (also known as the Bastard), which has a more modern view. Whatever else one can say about them, they have been a great source material for literature from Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s history plays, to “Becket” and “The Lion in Winter” (that Peter O’Toole did not win at least one Oscar out Lawrence, Becket, and Lion in Winter, particularly that last role, shows that life is not always fair.)

    As two literary critics how helped this non-English major understand English speaking literature, Paul Fussell and Harold Bloom point out, almost all fiction and poetry is derivative. No one stole, and stole with more creativity then Shakespeare. I apply the metaphor of Jazz to fiction writing. The tropes, metaphors, and plot points probably have not changed to much since the telling the stories around fires in the cave at Lascaux, but the riffs on the notes can be either pedestrian and dull or height of human ingenuity.

  124. 124.

    Sherparick

    @Ruckus: The vision of the Constitution that serves the reactionary mind. The longing for 1860 remains strong in these people.

  125. 125.

    MBunge

    @Anne Laurie: After JJ Abram’s “reboot” of Star Trek, should him doing something similar to Star Wars come as a total surprise?

    Nah. It’s just that this time he seems to have created the Platonic ideal of a sequel, very well made yet entirely derivative.

    I enjoyed Abram’s Star Trek for scraping a couple decades worth of barnacles off the concept but Into Darkness showed he didn’t really have anything to offer outside that. Given that the trailer for the third Trek reboot flick looks like utter garbage, hopefully Abram’s Star Wars won’t follow the same path.

    Mike

  126. 126.

    Chris

    @Cacti:

    Jedi vs. Sith though, I’d say the Sith are a lot more honest and straightforward that their goal is to obtain and hold onto power, vs the Jedi who are a passive-aggressive mind control cult with the same ambition.

    The Sith are Ayn Rand in space, the Jedi are the Catholic Church in space. Draw your own conclusions about who’s worse…

  128. 128.

    Mike G

    @Mathguy:

    A comic book and Star Wars—Cruz certainly knows his audience.

    This is Republicans we’re talking about, it should be “Start Wars”.

  129. 129.

    Sad_Dem

    @PurpleGirl:

    I quickly tired of “finding your bliss”.

    Only after selling my house just before the crash did I have enough money to spend a week at an arts workshop that ended with a full professor’s using that dreadful term during the goodbye lecture. I’ve never gone back. Being a grownup, I refrained from making any rude noises.

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