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LEFT WING LOONS Title: George Lucas hijacked the entire field with ... a talking garbage can --- a princess wearing two cinnamon rolls on her ears. Star Wars by Mark Steyn Mark at the Movies December 19, 2015 Stabilize your rear deflectors! From a galaxy far far away - the summer of 1977 - Star Wars is back, rebooted for the 21st century and in hopes that after a decade's time-out the series has shaken off its turn-of-the-century "prequels", agreed even by hardcore fans to have been disappointing. Not that it made any difference to the grosses: One of the remarkable features of the franchise is its resistance to quality control. Sci-fi wasn't boffo before Star Wars - if anything, rather the opposite: It was regarded as the upmarket intellectual end of genre fiction. Then George Lucas came along, and hijacked the entire field, with little more than a guy with a bucket on his head, a dog with a stick-on moustache, a talking garbage can and a princess wearing two cinnamon rolls on her ears. But what do I know? Star Wars is the most successful movie ever. It's supposed to be "epic" and "primal", but, if so, it beats me. A film such as, say, High Noon, which takes place in real time — 90 minutes — on one dusty monochrome main street lined with plywood house fronts and whose only special effect is Tex Ritter's plaintive rendition of the title song, is truly primal: it's big at its core. Star Wars, it seems to me, is epic only in the sense that the telephone book is epic. But, like I said, what do I know? I haven't seen the new movie yet, but on the evidence of opening day its customer base is epic on a scale never before known - as four decades ago Lucas seems to have intuited it would be. Cunningly, he began the original film like a comic book or radio serial that's already been running ten years. Most movies are concerned to simplify — eliminate this character, combine those two — but Lucas hooked his Star Wars groupies with a Tolkienesque multitude of creatures, most of whom are entirely superfluous. Twenty years later, for a "special edition" re-release, he used state-of-the-art computer technology to insert Jabba the Hutt into a scene with Harrison Ford, but for no particular reason; just 'cause he could. Every background in the new version teems with computer-generated Jurassic Park dinosaurs, out for a stroll, retrieving newspapers, looking for Jurassic lamp-posts. Though distracting, they complete the sense that Star Wars is a tale assembled from bits of other tales . There's a Tin Man — the droid C-3P0 — and a Cowardly Lion — Chewbacca the Wookie; there's a bearded, robed Biblical sage — Obi-Wan; there's a Bogart figure, Han Solo, a hill-of-beans cynic played by Harrison Ford. "I wonder if he really cares about anything. Or anybody," muses Princess Leia, although Han Solo's strangely Onanistic moniker should have been the first clue to his self-absorption. Late in the movie, Lucas suddenly remembers he's forgotten to introduce the hero's best pal, so belatedly shoves in Luke Skywalker's chum Biggs Darklighter purely for the purpose of killing him off two minutes later. If the characters are generic, the dialogue barely makes that grade: "Either I'm gonna kill her or I'm beginning to like her," says Ford, from which I think we're meant to deduce that this is what they call a love/hate relationship. Ford's acting improved over the years; for Fisher and Hamill, this was as good as it got. Such acting honors as there were went to Britain's Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin and Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan. In that sense at least, the Empire struck back. In the eleventh hour of the old century, Lucas re-opened his goldmine, and the stampede was bigger than ever. The build-up, the hype, the thrill of anticipation was going so well, you'd have had to be crazy to risk all that by opening the actual film. But after the Star Wars nerds had been camped out on the sidewalks of America for a couple of months - or was it years? - George Lucas decided to show 'em the picture. When I attended the premiere in New York, security was tighter than Ewan McGregor's buns and I was admonished not to spoil things for the fans by giving everything away. But what's to give? Lucas had gaily revealed not only the plot of this prequel, but also the next one, and the one after, and the next eight or nine pre-sequels: Anakin Skywalker, whom we meet here as an angelic young boy, will, alas, grow up to be Darth Vader, but not before having his way with Queen Amidala and fathering both Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia. An old-fashioned storyteller would hint at these developments, freighting Anakin's heroics in darker tones that presage his fall. But Lucas preferred to announce the plot in advance, thereby relieving him of the burden of characterization and enabling the rest of us to forget about the narrative and concentrate on the special effects - like, er, rubbery noses and floppy ears. This time, to combat the evil of the Trade Federation (Lucas seems to have made, entirely by accident, an intergalactic Euro-allegory) there was Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson) and his protege, the young Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor). Qui-Gon is full of wise Jedi insights for his callow chum: "Your focus determines your reality," he points out, accurately enough. Neeson himself seems woozy and distracted for most of the picture, as if there's something more interesting going on in an adjoining galaxy. His detachment is surely deliberate: if your focus determines your reality, then maybe if you're determined to stay as unfocused as Neeson is the reality of your having agreed to do this picture won't be quite so painful. Taken 3 would have been a better film had Neeson's daughter been kidnapped by Lucas for a Star Wars prequel and Neeson had to take out 7,000 Jar-Jar Binkses played by Albanian extras. In fairness to him, there isn't that much for Qui-Gon to focus on: most of the other characters are computer-generated, except for Jabba the Hutt, here played by Larry Flynt. Stung by criticism that he was a space-age Woody Allen whose films you can only get a part in if you're white or a Hutt, Lucas introduced a stereotypical "shif'less Negro", like Stepan Fetchit in the films of half-a-century earlier. He originally called in an African-American actor to get a loping shuffle down on film for Jar-Jar Binks, before eventually replacing the black guy with a computer-generated space alien. Even though Jar-Jar was meant to be a "Gungan", African-American groups denounced Lucas for peddling outmoded racist images. If you're going to be outmodedly racist, you could at least be funny. But Lucas doesn't do humor: The audience is begging for relief from the "comic relief". Poster Comment: extraterrestrial affirmative action ... yes we con --- hoax - chains ! Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 2.
#2. To: BorisY (#0)
extraterrestrial affirmative action ...
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