Star Wars
Hrm. Tony seems to think I should say things about Star Wars, and indeed I've got a few thoughts. I promise that only half of them will be nitpicky or snarky. They'll be plenty spoilerific though, but since I have no idea how to hide it below a fold, it's just going to be up top.
Firstly, my primary nitpick/snark: of course the film had a liberal bias, since none of the bad stuff could possibly have happened if the Jedi had access to non-abstinence-only sex ed. Or even decent reproductive health technology. Either way. Also of course the obvious takehome point: if he force-chokes you, leave him.
In reality, there's no strong political drive to the film -- epic is epic, and even the little bits of dialog that can be snipped out to pretend things swing one way or the other ("only a Sith thinks in absolutes," "from my point of view, the Jedi are evil!") can be snipped out in more or less equal proportion. The only good argument I can think of one way or the other is that the film definitely hews to the axiom that whichever side is committing the atrocities is the bad guys, and this is only left or right in the crazy version of politics. We may be living in crazy politics now, but that part of the movie was very much written in the eighties with the rest of the outline, before this axiom was twisted (like "we should listen to government policy experts," "reporters should ask everybody hard questions" or "evolution exists") into a partisan opinion, so I think we're safe on that score.
From having seen my esteemed college science fiction association's MSTing of Phantom Menace, I'm reminded of the parking shot phenomenon. For those not in the know, the parking shot is just that: a shot of something parking. While they can be establishing shots like any other, oftentimes, particularly in action movies, shots of planes, cars, spaceships, or whatever parking or coming in for a landing are just used gratuitously to add time. Phantom Menace features an approach to Coruscant involving eight separate parking shots with no dialog at all. Sith, at least, has relatively little parking, and is a relatively good movie, suggesting the value of "number of parking shots" as a measure of goodness of movie (what we might call a "cinemetric").
A nitpick more or less equal to the first is that Bail Organa seems to have forgotten to take the jets off of R2 when he had C3PO mindwiped. Funny he never gets to use them again... but that's not really the point. It seems to me that one thing that Lucas seems to get more and more into over time is slapstick. I can remember none in A New Hope, little in Empire, a bit more with Ewoks and Boba Fett in Jedi, and scads and scads in the new trilogy, all of which I've seen quite recently. In Episode III, there's a fair bit of gratuitous slapstick, and even though Lucas appears to have figured out how to make it work again after forgetting for the previous two movies, there's still enough dumb battledroid humor to bring things down. Humor is really important to the Star Wars films, but slapstick in the large sticks out unpleasantly. Most of the funny bits of episodes one and two were slapstick, so seemed annoying and out of place; episode three moved back to more character humor, which worked a lot better.
Even major points seemed, under further consideration, better than other recent movies -- even when characters seem to be carrying the idiot ball (most notably when Mace Windu spontaneously changes his mind about whether to arrest Palpatine or kill him, just in time for Anakin to see it go down) they basically act within the bounds of plausibility. I might want to shoot them for behaving in ways the movie doesn't quite motivate properly (particularly the rate at which Anakin turns evil, though smart people can disagree) but they basically don't do dumb things. So good on that.
When the apocalyptic battle between Yoda (who is, as always, awesome, not to mention the only character who should ever be permitted to say "youngling") and the Emperor starts up with the tossing around of flying donuts, y'think there's a metaphor of some sort going on? Heavy-handedness aside, the real issue for me here is that the Jedi don't have a place in the political structure. In Doc Smith's Lensman series, the Lensman (on whom the Jedi are based) are more or less in charge of everything, but nobody minds because they're also incorrruptible by authorial stipulation.* But here, who knows? Are the Jedi more or less the military? Are they in fact charged with protecting democracy? It seems like lots and lots of the plot hinges on Jedi not having a clear place in the political culture, and the exact meaning of the "Jedi code," in the sense that most of the issues seem like they'd go away if there were answers to these questions, almost regardless of what those answers are.
I think, on balance, that I liked it. Characters make hard choices, and that always wins points. Friends seem to like each other. Nobody has a thought quite as ridiculous as "I like you because you're not like sand." I'm not sure it's wholly redeeming, but it's definitely worth seeing.
*You might not want to read the Lensman novels, but let me at least say that they're kinda right-wing, very 30's, and probably the only piece of science fiction I've ever read that took science seriously (very seriously, actually) but didn't know about relativity. The really notable thing is the crazy level of homosocial stuff going on when our heros first become lensmen and see how incorruptible they all are. It's like they're lusting after each other's moral sensibility.
Firstly, my primary nitpick/snark: of course the film had a liberal bias, since none of the bad stuff could possibly have happened if the Jedi had access to non-abstinence-only sex ed. Or even decent reproductive health technology. Either way. Also of course the obvious takehome point: if he force-chokes you, leave him.
In reality, there's no strong political drive to the film -- epic is epic, and even the little bits of dialog that can be snipped out to pretend things swing one way or the other ("only a Sith thinks in absolutes," "from my point of view, the Jedi are evil!") can be snipped out in more or less equal proportion. The only good argument I can think of one way or the other is that the film definitely hews to the axiom that whichever side is committing the atrocities is the bad guys, and this is only left or right in the crazy version of politics. We may be living in crazy politics now, but that part of the movie was very much written in the eighties with the rest of the outline, before this axiom was twisted (like "we should listen to government policy experts," "reporters should ask everybody hard questions" or "evolution exists") into a partisan opinion, so I think we're safe on that score.
From having seen my esteemed college science fiction association's MSTing of Phantom Menace, I'm reminded of the parking shot phenomenon. For those not in the know, the parking shot is just that: a shot of something parking. While they can be establishing shots like any other, oftentimes, particularly in action movies, shots of planes, cars, spaceships, or whatever parking or coming in for a landing are just used gratuitously to add time. Phantom Menace features an approach to Coruscant involving eight separate parking shots with no dialog at all. Sith, at least, has relatively little parking, and is a relatively good movie, suggesting the value of "number of parking shots" as a measure of goodness of movie (what we might call a "cinemetric").
A nitpick more or less equal to the first is that Bail Organa seems to have forgotten to take the jets off of R2 when he had C3PO mindwiped. Funny he never gets to use them again... but that's not really the point. It seems to me that one thing that Lucas seems to get more and more into over time is slapstick. I can remember none in A New Hope, little in Empire, a bit more with Ewoks and Boba Fett in Jedi, and scads and scads in the new trilogy, all of which I've seen quite recently. In Episode III, there's a fair bit of gratuitous slapstick, and even though Lucas appears to have figured out how to make it work again after forgetting for the previous two movies, there's still enough dumb battledroid humor to bring things down. Humor is really important to the Star Wars films, but slapstick in the large sticks out unpleasantly. Most of the funny bits of episodes one and two were slapstick, so seemed annoying and out of place; episode three moved back to more character humor, which worked a lot better.
Even major points seemed, under further consideration, better than other recent movies -- even when characters seem to be carrying the idiot ball (most notably when Mace Windu spontaneously changes his mind about whether to arrest Palpatine or kill him, just in time for Anakin to see it go down) they basically act within the bounds of plausibility. I might want to shoot them for behaving in ways the movie doesn't quite motivate properly (particularly the rate at which Anakin turns evil, though smart people can disagree) but they basically don't do dumb things. So good on that.
When the apocalyptic battle between Yoda (who is, as always, awesome, not to mention the only character who should ever be permitted to say "youngling") and the Emperor starts up with the tossing around of flying donuts, y'think there's a metaphor of some sort going on? Heavy-handedness aside, the real issue for me here is that the Jedi don't have a place in the political structure. In Doc Smith's Lensman series, the Lensman (on whom the Jedi are based) are more or less in charge of everything, but nobody minds because they're also incorrruptible by authorial stipulation.* But here, who knows? Are the Jedi more or less the military? Are they in fact charged with protecting democracy? It seems like lots and lots of the plot hinges on Jedi not having a clear place in the political culture, and the exact meaning of the "Jedi code," in the sense that most of the issues seem like they'd go away if there were answers to these questions, almost regardless of what those answers are.
I think, on balance, that I liked it. Characters make hard choices, and that always wins points. Friends seem to like each other. Nobody has a thought quite as ridiculous as "I like you because you're not like sand." I'm not sure it's wholly redeeming, but it's definitely worth seeing.
*You might not want to read the Lensman novels, but let me at least say that they're kinda right-wing, very 30's, and probably the only piece of science fiction I've ever read that took science seriously (very seriously, actually) but didn't know about relativity. The really notable thing is the crazy level of homosocial stuff going on when our heros first become lensmen and see how incorruptible they all are. It's like they're lusting after each other's moral sensibility.
posted by Dennis at 10:45 PM
1 Comments:
Relevant and humorous.
http://www.shortpacked.com/d/20050523.html
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