Star Wars part 1
I saw Star Wars: The Phantom Menace for the first time last night. It was awful. I mean this in a non-ironic way. It sucked. I told M I refuse to see it again without getting roaring drunk first: If I'm going to see something that hallucinogenically bad, I don't want to remember it.
George Lucas writes adventure serials about as well as Madonna writes erotic fantasies. The followings both have garnered astonish me, and I'm saying that as a Star Wars fan club dweeb in the 70s (only for one year. I got over it). Without an editor, Lucas writes scripts which violate every rule of Screenplays 101: Major events routinely take place off camera, minor characters get the best lines, and narrative detaches itself from the story arc randomly.
Phantom Menace? What is the phantom menace? The guy in the cloak with the bad TV signal? He might be menacing if he had better underlings. His lizard lackeys fuss and fiddle and obstruct, but they never do anything. The dude with the full-head tattoo is about as bad-ass as the movie gets, and his first big scene is on a flying Vespa. Later he gets spanked by a whiny emo-boy. Theatrical menace is the product of witnessing both the heroes in the light and the villains in the shadows. There is no distinguishing foreground from background in offstage events.
The text prologue is larded drivel about senators and taxation with no apparent relevance to the subsequent scenes involving a pair of drab rags kicking ass and repeatedly failing to take names. Taxation is mentioned again, repeatedly, along with two cosmic governments and some prolonged scene where people hover around in a big hangar watching beaurocrats being beaurocratic, apparently a satiric interlude about the dangers of surrendering your free will to an indifferent government rather than to the happenstance and superstition they dub The Force. Way to stick it to The Man, George. The film halts an hour and a half later with vague beaurocratic things having changed, all offscreen, and a preteen boy swapping his token mother for a pair of token fathers. Who's the old guy? What is the relevance of Sidious? Why is Jar-Jar flopping around to suck all the air out of the scene the moment anything happens? The dialogue with narrative relevance are throwaway lines, usually followed by Lucas' hollow words of insight are grafted to characters lips and uttered with weighty portent while the camera lingers on their sad, contemplative faces. They do not appear to understand why they're saying these things. I wonder how many takes were necessary before Pernilla August and Liam Neeson, as Anakin's mother and foster father, could discuss Anakin's virgin birth without cracking up; the flow of dialogue sounds like more of the script was cut and dropped on the floor to bail out a sequence too slow and ludicrous even by house standards. And yet it seemed of greater importance than explaining why bad-TV-guy would want to control a planet with no apparent economy or industry.
Jar-Jar Binks has been the justifiable object of ridicule for years, but he's the symptom, not the disease. Lucas created a universe of lizards descended from Negros and the Chinee and stubbly Wops. Those funkless critters impounding Naboo (I can't even type that without laughing) are patterned after the generic Yellow Menace figures of cinema. They couldn't even be lipsynced properly. And their accents shift over the course of the movie. And there's the non-lizard African-American characters, nameless, loyal, bland and of no real consequence, rote Good Negros out of earnest 40 year old social dramas, who would also be offensive if it wasn't for every other character being of little consequence. It's easy to call Lucas racist, but these sketches are the products of somebody uncomfortable around anybody unlike himself, a product of the 1960s that took place not in the crowds of the cities but the isolationist suburbs. To overextend this psychological read, it's not just non-honky races that are alien, but women and laborers as well. Lucas is ignorant of the breadth of humanity. All these are protrayed as the distillations of exposure through literature, television and film rather than first-hand experience, and Lucas' attempts at sympathetic portrayals are as detached from reality as the work of any comic book artist who has never drawn from life. He is the ultimate nerd for which a vast ranch in California serves as his mom's basement. Jar-Jar, for all his mush-mouthed liverlipped slumping, shucking and jiving, is a sympathetic character, and I'm guessing he becomes a Jedi eventually since all his fumblings turn out to his advantage. Darn that fate. When the major characters are given names like Obi, Amidala, Sidious and Maul and the male star is routinely called Annie, the minor characters are not going to get away without compensatory flaws, such as blackface makeup or generically Oriental court robes.
Character motivation is nil, and Lucas obviously never tried speaking his own dialogue aloud, forcing the good actors down with the bad to uniform performances uttering silly phoneme-laden verbiage without context or motivation, phrases so meaningless the only emotions they can evoke are whatever the director told the actors to try. The director appears to have left them alone.
Only Liam Neeson, playing whoozisface (Qui Gon Jinn; it was only mentioned twice at most and was therefore not as important as the interstellar beaurocracy), comes out of this respectably as the only actor to elevate himself above the community theater-level performances of the rest of the cast. He also has the most screen time, and may have been the only actor for which any scripted continuity was available. The rest of the actors, whether previously famous or not, well, they suck. Twentysomething Obi Wan is forced by the script to be a mewling bitch. Queen Amidala and her body double are not only interchangeable with each other, but could easily have been swapped out for any of the senators, droids, Jedi, or other vague unindividuated figures in Inigo Jones pageantry.
And that gets back to the other part of the Jar-Jar problem: A few years ago a popular net meme was the edit of The Phantom Menace in which the story was intact after Jar-Jar was edited out, proving that he wasn't important. This isn't because he was comic relief with too much screen time, it's because no individual is important to the story. Any single character of "The Phantom Menace" could be removed unnoticed. In place of dialogue Lucas uses monologue and declarations, so there is no give or take to disrupt. When something is important, a couple different people remark on it. If it's something really important, such as the urgency of living in the moment, it becomes a catch phrase.
For a movie featuring virgin birth, indifferent heroes, ethnic sidekicks, wacky chase scenes and interstellar middle-management, it would take so little for this movie to have been played for laughs, and George Lucas could have been the American Douglas Adams. And mitochlorians? Mitichrondians? I think it's a genital infection, per Qui Gon's description of them being microscopic parasitical symbiotes.
M says the next movie is worse. I don't think that's possible. I'll find out this weekend. And then we'll go to see the new one.
(Edit: Some double negatives fixed.)
George Lucas writes adventure serials about as well as Madonna writes erotic fantasies. The followings both have garnered astonish me, and I'm saying that as a Star Wars fan club dweeb in the 70s (only for one year. I got over it). Without an editor, Lucas writes scripts which violate every rule of Screenplays 101: Major events routinely take place off camera, minor characters get the best lines, and narrative detaches itself from the story arc randomly.
Phantom Menace? What is the phantom menace? The guy in the cloak with the bad TV signal? He might be menacing if he had better underlings. His lizard lackeys fuss and fiddle and obstruct, but they never do anything. The dude with the full-head tattoo is about as bad-ass as the movie gets, and his first big scene is on a flying Vespa. Later he gets spanked by a whiny emo-boy. Theatrical menace is the product of witnessing both the heroes in the light and the villains in the shadows. There is no distinguishing foreground from background in offstage events.
The text prologue is larded drivel about senators and taxation with no apparent relevance to the subsequent scenes involving a pair of drab rags kicking ass and repeatedly failing to take names. Taxation is mentioned again, repeatedly, along with two cosmic governments and some prolonged scene where people hover around in a big hangar watching beaurocrats being beaurocratic, apparently a satiric interlude about the dangers of surrendering your free will to an indifferent government rather than to the happenstance and superstition they dub The Force. Way to stick it to The Man, George. The film halts an hour and a half later with vague beaurocratic things having changed, all offscreen, and a preteen boy swapping his token mother for a pair of token fathers. Who's the old guy? What is the relevance of Sidious? Why is Jar-Jar flopping around to suck all the air out of the scene the moment anything happens? The dialogue with narrative relevance are throwaway lines, usually followed by Lucas' hollow words of insight are grafted to characters lips and uttered with weighty portent while the camera lingers on their sad, contemplative faces. They do not appear to understand why they're saying these things. I wonder how many takes were necessary before Pernilla August and Liam Neeson, as Anakin's mother and foster father, could discuss Anakin's virgin birth without cracking up; the flow of dialogue sounds like more of the script was cut and dropped on the floor to bail out a sequence too slow and ludicrous even by house standards. And yet it seemed of greater importance than explaining why bad-TV-guy would want to control a planet with no apparent economy or industry.
Jar-Jar Binks has been the justifiable object of ridicule for years, but he's the symptom, not the disease. Lucas created a universe of lizards descended from Negros and the Chinee and stubbly Wops. Those funkless critters impounding Naboo (I can't even type that without laughing) are patterned after the generic Yellow Menace figures of cinema. They couldn't even be lipsynced properly. And their accents shift over the course of the movie. And there's the non-lizard African-American characters, nameless, loyal, bland and of no real consequence, rote Good Negros out of earnest 40 year old social dramas, who would also be offensive if it wasn't for every other character being of little consequence. It's easy to call Lucas racist, but these sketches are the products of somebody uncomfortable around anybody unlike himself, a product of the 1960s that took place not in the crowds of the cities but the isolationist suburbs. To overextend this psychological read, it's not just non-honky races that are alien, but women and laborers as well. Lucas is ignorant of the breadth of humanity. All these are protrayed as the distillations of exposure through literature, television and film rather than first-hand experience, and Lucas' attempts at sympathetic portrayals are as detached from reality as the work of any comic book artist who has never drawn from life. He is the ultimate nerd for which a vast ranch in California serves as his mom's basement. Jar-Jar, for all his mush-mouthed liverlipped slumping, shucking and jiving, is a sympathetic character, and I'm guessing he becomes a Jedi eventually since all his fumblings turn out to his advantage. Darn that fate. When the major characters are given names like Obi, Amidala, Sidious and Maul and the male star is routinely called Annie, the minor characters are not going to get away without compensatory flaws, such as blackface makeup or generically Oriental court robes.
Character motivation is nil, and Lucas obviously never tried speaking his own dialogue aloud, forcing the good actors down with the bad to uniform performances uttering silly phoneme-laden verbiage without context or motivation, phrases so meaningless the only emotions they can evoke are whatever the director told the actors to try. The director appears to have left them alone.
Only Liam Neeson, playing whoozisface (Qui Gon Jinn; it was only mentioned twice at most and was therefore not as important as the interstellar beaurocracy), comes out of this respectably as the only actor to elevate himself above the community theater-level performances of the rest of the cast. He also has the most screen time, and may have been the only actor for which any scripted continuity was available. The rest of the actors, whether previously famous or not, well, they suck. Twentysomething Obi Wan is forced by the script to be a mewling bitch. Queen Amidala and her body double are not only interchangeable with each other, but could easily have been swapped out for any of the senators, droids, Jedi, or other vague unindividuated figures in Inigo Jones pageantry.
And that gets back to the other part of the Jar-Jar problem: A few years ago a popular net meme was the edit of The Phantom Menace in which the story was intact after Jar-Jar was edited out, proving that he wasn't important. This isn't because he was comic relief with too much screen time, it's because no individual is important to the story. Any single character of "The Phantom Menace" could be removed unnoticed. In place of dialogue Lucas uses monologue and declarations, so there is no give or take to disrupt. When something is important, a couple different people remark on it. If it's something really important, such as the urgency of living in the moment, it becomes a catch phrase.
For a movie featuring virgin birth, indifferent heroes, ethnic sidekicks, wacky chase scenes and interstellar middle-management, it would take so little for this movie to have been played for laughs, and George Lucas could have been the American Douglas Adams. And mitochlorians? Mitichrondians? I think it's a genital infection, per Qui Gon's description of them being microscopic parasitical symbiotes.
M says the next movie is worse. I don't think that's possible. I'll find out this weekend. And then we'll go to see the new one.
(Edit: Some double negatives fixed.)