AICN

[lukpac]

Man, reading Harry Knowles is like watching a train wreck. "Memories filled with bliss" indeed.

http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/display.cgi?id=20157

I have watched my last new STAR WARS film.

Really don’t know what to say. I’ve wanted to see Obi-Wan fight Vader on that Lava Planet since that issue of Starlog in 1978. My 6 year old reading comprehension grasping for every word of every article I could get my grubby little hands on. For me, the origin of Vader has been the Holy Grail of my geek soul. That story most coveted, but yet untold. I’m 33 years old now. 27 years lay between me and that boy that dreamt of that fight – but right now, he’s on my shoulders and we’re slapping high-fives.
[...]
We all know where we each were at the opening of all these films. In two weeks… this is your last story. I’ll never see a new Star Wars movie with my father again. I’ll see many more movies – but this is the last Star Wars, I’ll ever see for the first time with my dad. I’ve seen all 6 with him. All on either the first day – or before. It’s the mythology he’s grown old with and helped me grow up with. This one counts, this one is beautiful. This is the last one.

I can’t possibly express how profoundly odd that is to type. How weird it makes me feel. I went out after the film – I went to find a toy to sit on my desk to look at while I typed this. I went through aisle after aisle of Star Wars stuff, and I couldn’t pick something out. I think the one I most thought was cool – was this Lego play set of Anakin and Obi Wan on Mustafa. You pressed down the Lego character’s head and the light sabers lit up. Gosh that’s cool. I’ll probably buy it for my nephew… Instead I came home, played the score to REVENGE OF THE SITH and wrote this.

Remember – this isn’t a Star Wars movie to cheer for, to erupt into applause and call cool. If you really love STAR WARS – this one is heart ache. Not only is it the end of a nearly 30 year journey for us… It really is the story of how things got so bad, that the good guys had to be a rebellion, where the Jedi had to hide and how evil ruled the galaxy. Wow, I’ve seen my last new Star Wars film. Fuck.

Perhaps even better is going back a few years to E1. "Moriarty" gave a lukewarm (at best) review, and Harry felt the need to throw in plenty of "maybe he'll change his mind" and "who cares what he thinks!" stuff:

And now... It's time for MORIARTY's review. Taint orgasmic, taint awful. He's formulating a final opinion that I'm willing to bet will be moving back and forth over the coming days and weeks and months. My review is 8 days away.... It'll have all the emotion of the wait, the line, my pursuit of knowledge of this film, the success and stigma it's emblazoned upon me. And hopefully... The only emotion I want to leave the theater with is... JOY. But for now.... Here's Moriarty.... An evil genius... that's seen it!
[...]
Harry here. Let's talk about the KIDS for a second. I just got this report from a lady who has recently sent a buncha kids for an advanced showing of STAR WARS EPISODE ONE, and their reactions... As far as I know... this is the first we've heard from this age bracket. Here ya go....

After that is a note from some youth director saying how much the kids LOVED the film, and that kids know better than adults, yada yada yada...

Must...stop...reading...

[Rspaight]

AICN has exactly one reviewer worth reading, and that's Alexandra DuPont. And you can read a lot of her stuff at DVD Journal, so AICN is almost entirely inconsequential.

Ms. Dupont's Sith review is, as usual, excellent.

Ryan

[lukpac]

Link?

[Rspaight]

Rummage... rummage... rummage...

http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=20185

Ryan

[krabapple]

er..who is Harry Knowless and why should I care?


I saw the Sith thingy yesterday -- 10 good minutes at the beginning, a good half hour or so at the end, and a mostly excruciating slog in the middle. Which I suppose makes it one of the better recent Lucas contraptions.

Jesus, can that man NOT write dialogue. Or edit.

Anthony Lane's reviewin the New Yorker was scathing, and hilarious, as usual.

I'm surprised none of the reviews I 've read so far have scorched Lucas for including a 'Mendozaaaa!' scene in the new one -- you know, like they always parody on The Simpsons, when the camera pulls up and away from Rainer Wolfcastle as he cries to the heavens.

People in the audience laughed out loud at that (not the intended reaction, I suspect).

[krabapple]

AICN has exactly one reviewer worth reading, and that's Alexandra DuPont. And you can read a lot of her stuff at DVD Journal, so AICN is almost entirely inconsequential.

Ms. Dupont's Sith review is, as usual, excellent.

Ryan

Yikes..she's *way* geekier than I am, I guess. Which is scary. It wasn't *that* good. And if you read between the enthusiasm, it seems like she's doing a lot of special pleading ..mainly of the 'well it's better than I thought it would be' sort.

[lukpac]

er..who is Harry Knowless and why should I care?

[krabapple]

Yes,m I saw that, and the beard/mullet combo alone is enough to make we not want to know more.

[lukpac]

He's the owner/leader/whatever of AICN. Between his wacky reviews and need for an extra large font on everything, I try to avoid it. For some reason I end up back there every now and then, though.

[Rspaight]

The best part of the "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" remake was seeing Harry Knowles' severed head.

He makes Joe Bob Briggs look like Pauline Kael. Put another way, he's Joe Bob Briggs without the ironic self-awareness.

I saw the Sith thingy yesterday -- 10 good minutes at the beginning, a good half hour or so at the end, and a mostly excruciating slog in the middle. Which I suppose makes it one of the better recent Lucas contraptions.

Jesus, can that man NOT write dialogue. Or edit.

I tend to agree with that. Here's what I wrote earlier today on Luke's blog...

Yes, it's easily the best of the first three. It's probably even better on balance than Jedi (though the Luke/Vader arc in the last part of Jedi is some of the best stuff in the whole "saga").

I'm happy it's not as crushingly awful as Menace, or as embarrassingly inept as Clones. And yet, it could have been so much better.

Though Lucas is a fine plotter and a master visual artist, he's an awful *writer* and worse director of actors. We needed to *feel* the closeness of the relationship between Obi-Wan and Anakin in order for Anakin's betrayal have the weight it needed. That was completely absent. We needed to *feel* Anakin's obsessive need to *own* Padme (separation anxiety, anyone?) in order for his desperation to be tangible enough to explain his embrace of Palpatine. That was missing, too.

None of this is the fault of the plot (which is actually a remarkable piece of work across all six movies), or the actors (who are all capable). It's poor scripting and poor directing. Think about someone like David Lean (or Lucas' mentor Coppola) directing these movies. Sigh.

Despite all that, though, I enoyed Sith a lot. It's as good as it could have been, given its pedigree.

Ryan

[Dob]

Anthony Lane's reviewin the New Yorker was scathing, and hilarious, as usual.

This made me LOL:

No, the one who gets me is Yoda. May I take the opportunity to enter a brief plea in favor of his extermination?...what’s with the screwy syntax? Deepest mind in the galaxy, apparently, and you still express yourself like a day-tripper with a dog-eared phrase book. “I hope right you are.” Break me a fucking give.

And there's this observation:

All of the interiors in Lucasworld are anthems to clean living, with molded furniture, the tranquillity of a morgue, and none of the clutter and quirkiness that signify the process known as existence...Did Lucas learn nothing from “Alien” and “Blade Runner”—from the suggestion that other times and places might be no less rusted and septic than ours...

It's ironic that with Star Wars (Episode Four), Lucas' whole vision of how normal folks lived (Tatooine) contained plenty of rust and dust. Maybe Lucas decided that he preferred the antiseptic gleam and grand spaces of the abodes of the privileged.

[krabapple]

The best line was the one about III being better than the previous two , in the sense that death by natural causes beats crucifixion. And the bit about prenatal testing was a point one of my moviegoing companions whispered during the flick.

It was kind of odd that in the new one, you see all these shots of an aeronautically bustling (and apparently tree- or foliage free) computer-generated metropolis, practically out of the Jetsons, but scant few glimpses of any *people* other than the main characters and hordes of clones. Perhaps the 'government planet' is meant to be imperially awesome - the CGI sunsets certainly were -- but it looks kind of like a soulless, depressing grey hell to me. All the great world cities on our* planet have *some* green space in them, don't they?

It was also mildly puzzling to me to watch the way even the 'good guys' (Obi Wan) killed droids with such thoughtless berserker thoroughness -- decapitating even the ones who seemed to be running *away*, during the battle on Dooku's ship. Droids get demolished just for *being there* in several scenes. I guess robot 'life' counts for nothing to the Force, if it's working for the wrong side.

Finally, anyone notice that there's a *lot* of limb-severing going on in the Lucas' universe (human, droid, half-droid...)?