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| 5/25 |
| 2005/5/31-6/2 [Recreation/Media] UID:37907 Activity:moderate |
5/31 No Sith Reviews yet?
\_ I hear there's this thing called the Internet now.
\_ Sith? What are Sith? You spoiled the fucking movie now, asshole!
\_ Sith is a plural word?? Thanks a lot buddy.
\_ It didn't suck and is worth seeing.
\_ You are a cruel son-of-a-bitch. -dans
\_ why? !pp
\_ My take on it is that I don't get the 2.5 hours of my
life back. This runs counter to pp's assessment.
Fortunately I saw it on Google's dime so at least I
didn't pay to suffer. -dans
\_ how many hours yave you spent on this stupid flame
war? Are you under the impression that you'll get
those hours of your life back?
\_ Roughly 45 minutes. But unlike Episode III, the
flamewar amuses me, and, thus, is a worthwhile use
of my time. -dans
\_ I feel sorry for you and your kind. Admit it now
that you wouldn't have been happy with anything
Lucas put out. You guys are always so overly
critical, and it's very annoying.
\_ Yah, I don't see what the big deal is. Ep3
was a flawed film with a lot of problems, but
nonetheless I still found it to be very
entertaining. That IS the point of going to a
film for the vast majority of us.... -mice
\_ Actually it has nothing to do with Lucas, or
Star Wars. The movie sucked. It was over
two hours of bad dialogue, overly long fight
scenes in need of an editor. I was not
entertained. Incidentally, I thought the
whole Lord of the Rings trilogy was basically
an unwatchable hack job too. But, really, I
can't do anywhere near the justice to how bad
Episodes 1-3 were as this New Yorker article
does: http://csua.org/u/c8d
-dans
\_ Maybe you should stop going to movies.
\_ There was recently a list published
somewhere of "100 top films of all time."
It's nowhere near perfect or complete, but
has some good, solid and artistically
worthy works. I recommend having a look
at some of them. Remember, a movie does
not have to be "good" to be entertaining,
and THERE'S NOTHING FUCKING WRONG WITH
OVERLY LONG FIGHT SCENES AND BAD DIALOGUE.
What are you, a communist? -John
\_ I can't actually tell if you're being
sarcastic or not, but, by definition,
there's something wrong with overly
long fight scenes and bad dialogue. As
the term would suggest, overly long
fight scenes are, well, overly long.
And bad dialogue is, well, bad. -dans
\_ You're obviously the kind of person
who's never come home from work to
play Doom 2 with the automatic
double-barrelled shotgun unlimited
ammo cheat. You wouldn't understand
the aethereal qualities inherent in
truly bad dialogue and overly long
fight scenes. I sentence you to
watch Errol Flynn movies. -John
\_ Oh, how wrong you are...
a) I think Errol Flynn rules
b) I'm more partial to the
chainsaw cheat
c) Sorry fanboy, Episode 3, while
better than 1 and 2, was still
that bad. I mean, for
chrissakes, Jar-Jar lives!
-dans
\_ Who you calling fanboy, you
commie bastard?! I am simply
commenting on the necessity
of bad dialogue and overly
long fight scenes. And I kind
of liked Ep2. In that case I
sentence you to Plan 9 from
Outer Space, where the bad
dialogue almost-but-not-quite
makes up for lack of overly
long fight scenes. -John
\_ Hold on a second. John,
the European socialist is
accusing me of being a
commie. That's rich. -dans
\_ Um. He lives in Helvetia.
He's no socialist. Heck,
I want to move there.
-- ilyas
\_ Yes, but despite your
intelligence, you are
completely and utterly
irrational, and
Obviously you haven't seen the girls who run around -> detached from
here on a hot summer day. ilyas is displaying -> reality. So I really
pretty sound judgment, if you ask me. -> don't consider your
opinion to be a
useful gauge of,
well, anything. -dans
\_ Please. Moving half-way around the world for opinion to be a
pretty girls? There are lots of hot chicks useful gauge of, well,
right here in SF. Variety too. -dans anything. -dans
\_ Dans, meet heil cherman
chohn guy. You probably
pirated that movie, you
damn Hollywood-hating
long hair. What would
Bud Day say? -John
\_ Well, I will readily admit that it felt
like they got the guy on the set with
plumber's ass to write all the romantic
dialogue. Thank god most of that was over
within the first twenty minutes. I don't
think I'd have been able to sit through
the film if it had gone on. -mice
\_ Maybe you should stop going to movies.
\_ Why? Because I have standards? I
thought Fight Club and Requiem for a
Dream were fantastic. Spiderman 2 was
no magnum opus, but I enjoyed it quite a
bit. Hell, I liked Hitchhikers'. -dans
\_ Implying that anyone disagreeing
with you has no standards? That's
just damn silly.
\_ I was not the one that suggested I
stop going to movies. -dans
\_ I wasn't impressed with that review. He's
clearly impressed with his own wit. But I
\_ And you clearly are not a regular reader
of the New Yorker -dans
frankly think he misses the point. He's
going off on rambles about the movie's
philosophy and "vulgarity". And character
names, for chrissake. I mean, whatever.
None of this stuff is new.
By the way, I recommend that you all go
and watch the animated "Clone Wars Vol. 1"
which helps explain a couple things and
really just has a lot of cool action and
minimum bad dialogue. A DVD rip is out
there on bittorrent if you want to stiff
Lucas and all the various production and
distribution staff out of their $15 like
I did. I haven't seen any of Vol. 2.
As for Sith, and LOTR for that matter,
I actually was more upset with some of
the LOTR aspects. Sith entertained me
more. Yes there are instances of laughably
bad dialogue and acting but overall the
sheer grandiosity of the thing was well
worth the price of admission. Assuming
you like such fluff in general.
\_ I saw Clone Wars Vol 1 and 2 and it
made me excited to watch Episode III.
I was disappointed by epIII. They
Should have made the Clone Wars into
a real movie and skipped this movie.
\_ If they were gonna skip movies,
they should've skipped EP2 and
EP1 (in that order). If you're
gonna skip EP3, you might as well
skip the whole prequel trilogy.
(Not a bad idea, actually...) |
| 5/25 |
|
| csua.org/u/c8d -> www.newyorker.com/printables/critics/050523crci_cinema It sounds to me like the noise t hat emerges when you block one nostril and blow through the other, but t o George Lucas it is a name that trumpets evil. What is proved beyond qu estion by Star Wars: Episode IIIRevenge of the Sith, the latestand, you will be shattered to hear, the lastinstallment of his sci-fi bonanz a, is that Lucas, though his eye may be greedy for sensation, has an ear of purest cloth. All those who concoct imagined worlds must populate an d name them, and the resonance of those names is a fairly accurate guide to the mettle of the imagination in question. Tolkien, earthed in Old E nglish, had a head start that led him straight to the flinty perfection of Mordor and Orc. Here, by contrast, are some Lucas inventions: Palpati ne. He made American Graffiti, which yielded with affection to the gravitational pull of the small town. Sinc e then, he has swung out of orbit, into deep nonsense, and the new film is the apotheosis of that drift. One stab of humor and the whole conceit would pop, but I have a grim feeling that Lucas wishes us to honor the remorseless non-comedy of his galactic conflict, so here goes. Obi-Wan K enobi (Ewan McGregor) and his star pupil, Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Chris tensen), are, with the other Jedi knights, defending the Republic agains t the encroachments of the Sith and their alliesmillions of dumb droids , led by Count Dooku (Christopher Lee) and his henchman, General Grievou s, who is best described as a slaying mantis. Meanwhile, the Chancellor of the Republic, Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), is engaged in a sly bout of Realpolitik, suspected by nobody except Anakin, Obi-Wan, and every singl e person watching the movie. Anakin, too, is a divided figure, wrenched between his Jedi devotion to selfless duty and a lurking hunch that, if he bides his time and trashes his best friends, he may eventually get to wear a funky black mask and start breathing like a horse. We already know the outcomeAnak in will indeed drop the killer-monk Jedi look and become Darth Vader, th e hockey goalkeeper from hellbecause it forms the substance of the orig inal Star Wars. One of the things that make Episode III so dismal is t he time and effort expended on Anakins conversion. Early in the story, he enjoys a sprightly light-sabre duel with Count Dooku, which ends with the removal of the Counts hands. A nice setup, with Palpatine egging our hero on from the background. The troubl e is that Anakins choice of action now will be decisive, and the remain ing two hours of the filmscene after scene in which Hayden Christensen has to glower and glare, blazing his conundrum to the skieswill add not hing to the result. This is especially worrying for his wife, Padm (Natalie Por tman), who is great with child. What can you say about a civilization where people zip from one solar sys tem to the next as if they were changing their socks but where a woman f ails to register for an ultrasound, and thus to realize that she is carr ying twins until she is about to give birth? Mind you, how Padm got pre gnant is anybodys guess, although Im prepared to wager that it involve d Anakin nipping into a broom closet with a warm glass jar and a copy of Ewok Babes. After all, the Lucasian universe is drained of all referenc e to bodily functions. Smoking and cursing are out of bounds, as is drunkenness, although p ersonally I wouldnt go near the place without a hip flask. Did Lucas le arn nothing from Alien and Blade Runnerfrom the suggestion that oth er times and places might be no less rusted and septic than ours, and th at the creation of a disinfected galaxy, where even the storm troopers w ear bright-white outfits, looks not so much fantastical as dated? What L ucas has devised, over six movies, is a terrible puritan dream: a morali ty tale in which both sides are bent on moral cleansing, and where their differences can be assuaged only by a triumphant circus of violence. Ju dging from the whoops and crowings that greeted the opening credits, thi s is the only dream we are good for. The general opinion of Revenge of the Sith seems to be that it marks a distinct improvement on the last two episodes, The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. True, but only in the same way that dying from n atural causes is preferable to crucifixion. So much here is guaranteed t o cause either offense or pain, starting with the nineteen-twenties leat her football helmet that Natalie Portman suddenly dons for no reason, an d rising to the continual horror of Ewan McGregors accent. Another hap py landingor, to be precise, anothah heppy lendinghe remarks, as An akin parks the front half of a burning starcruiser on a convenient airst rip. The young Obi-Wan Kenobi is not, I hasten to add, the most nauseati ng figure onscreen; nor is R2-D2 or even C-3PO, although I still fail to understand why I should have been expected to waste twenty-five years o f my life following the progress of a beeping trash can and a gay, gold- plated Jeeves. May I take the opportunity to enter a br ief plea in favor of his extermination? Any educated moviegoer would kno w what to do, having watched that helpful sequence in Gremlins when a small, sage-colored beastie is fed into an electric blender. A fittingly frantic end, I feel, for the faux-pensive stillness on which the Yoda l egend has hung. At one point in the new film, he assumes the role of cos mic shrinksquatting opposite Anakin in a noirish room, where the light bleeds sideways through slatted blinds. Anakin keeps having problems wit h his dark side, in the way that you or I might suffer from tennis elbow , but Yoda, whose reptilian smugness we have been encouraged to mistake for wisdom, has the answer. Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose, he says. If you ever got laid (admittedly a long shot, unless we can dig you up some undiscerning alien hottie with a name like Jar Jar Gabor), and spaw ned a brood of Yodettes, are you saying that youd leave them behind at the first sniff of danger? Deepest mind in the galaxy, apparently, and you still express yourself like a day-tripper with a dog-eared phrase book. The prize for the least speakable burst of dialogue has, over half a doze n helpings of Star Wars, grown into a fiercely contested tradition, bu t for once the winning entry is clear, shared between Anakin and Padm f or their exchange of endearments at home: Youre so beautiful. For a moment, it looks as if they might bat this one back and forth forev er, like a baseline rally on a clay court. And if you think the script i s on the tacky side, get an eyeful of the dcor. All of the interiors in Lucasworld are anthems to clean living, with molded furniture, the tran quillity of a morgue, and none of the clutter and quirkiness that signif y the process known as existence. Illumination is provided not by daylig ht but by a dispiriting plastic sheen, as if Lucas were coating all priv ate affairsthose tricky little threats to his near-fascistic rage for o rderin a protective glaze. Only outside does he relax, and what he rela xes into is apocalypse. Why show a pond when CGI can deliver a lake that gleams to the far horizon? Why set a paltry house on fire when you can stage your fin al showdown on an entire planet that streams with ruddy, gulping lava? W hether the director is aware of John Martin, the Victorian painter who s pecialized in the cataclysmic, I cannot say, but he has certainly inheri ted that grand perversity, mobilized it in every frame of the film, and thus produced what I take to be unique: an art of flawless and irredeema ble vulgarity. All movies bear a tint of it, in varying degrees, but it takes a vulgarian genius such as Lucas to create a landscape in which ac tions can carry vast importance but no discernible meaning, in which sty le is strangled at birth by design, and in which the intimate and the ir onic, not the Sith, are the principal foes to be suppressed. It is a vis ion at once gargantuan and murderously limited, and the profits that awa it it are unfit for contemplation. I keep thinking of the rueful Obi-Wan Kenobi, as he surveys the holographic evidence of Anakins betrayal. Wise... |