Revenge of the Sith
Some friends were visiting from Denmark and they wanted to see it, so...
We had dinner at my old Hollywood hang-out, the famous-in-Los-Angeles Thai noodle place Sanamluang Cafe. I had the pad-see-yu, flat rice noodles stir-fried with pork, Chinese broccoli, and lots of garlic. Peter had the cha-po, Chinese-style roast pork, deep-fried belly pork, and roast duck over rice, with dipping sauce. Anders chose the chili soup with fish balls, fish maw, fish cake, squid, and God knows what else. I nearly said something, but figured that if he was voluntarily ordering the fish maw he must know what he was doing.
While Peter and I dug into ours, Anders poked at his vat of bright pink broth in which floated miscellaneous unidentifiable objects: a white frilly thing, white sponges, gray golf balls, and white tentacles. "This reminds me of a movie I saw once," he said. "Dumpling... Dumpling something."
"Dumpling Master?" I suggested.
"No," said Anders. "This was an underground movie about a woman who makes stew out of aborted fetuses."
I gave Anders half my noodles.
Revenge of the Sith was much more entertaining than the first two movies. However, the first two movies were two of the worst movies I've ever seen. When people enthusiastically recommend something by saying, "It doesn't suck as much as the first two!" you know that you're not dealing with a work of art, but with a cultural phenomena.
Given that, I am not going to cut for spoilers. If you don't want to be spoiled, don't read, but this is really not the sort of movie where knowing what happens ruins anything.
Rachel's theory of Distance in Combat is once more in play: the closer the combatants are to each other, the more engaged I will be in their fight. Therefore, hand-to-hand is better than light sabers, and light sabers are better than guns, and guns are better than shuttle-craft. The movie opens with a shuttle-craft fight. I am not engaged.
The first bad guy we meet is General Grievous, whose friends undoubtedly call him "Bodily Harm." Like all CGI creatures in all the Star Wars movies, he appears to have no weight and no mass, and his movements are overly fluid in the wrong ways, so he does not appear to be a real creature, but a video game character. This is not a problem with the CGI creatures in Lord of the Rings. Nor is it a problem in Jurassic Park. It's a big problem here.
The ever-entertaining Christopher Lee makes a sadly brief appearance as Count Dooku the Sith Lord. For the benefit of my non-American readers, "dookie" is a word used by small children to refer to the substance whose letters can be rearranged to make the word "sith." This is why audiences keep snickering every time someone refers to Count Dooku. Well, one of the reasons.
During the obligatory fight scene, a large piece of ceiling drops unconvincingly on Obi-Wan Kenobi. Lucas can't even get a simple effect like that to look real.
I am having a hard time recalling exactly what the war is about, but anyway Anakin, whose girlfriend calls him Annie (no wonder he turned to the Dark Side), Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor, who spends the entire movie looking like he'd rather be diving into the Filthiest Toilet in Scotland) and Senator Palpatine (notable for his strong resemblance to Pope Benedict II, and also for being the only actor in the entire movie who is actually giving a performance), return to somewhere or other. There is a horridly unconvincing reunion between Annie and Padme, who mouth awful dialogue about how much they love each other while looking like they can hardly stand to be around each other. They touch each other as if someone just off-camera was holding a gun to their heads.
Padme: "I'm pregnant! So I can't be a Senator! Because Senators are banned from getting pregnant! Or something!"
Annie (looking like he's getting an enema): "OMG! I'm so happy! Yay!"
Padme, incidentally, goes to bed wearing two strands of pearls wrapping around her arms, a huge spiky metal brooch between her breasts, and a giant metal butterfly clip in her hair. Astoundingly, Annie is the one who leaps out of bed in the middle of the night. Maybe he rolled over her pearls.
He's dreamed that she will die in childbirth. Oddly, he does not suggest that she get prenatal care or, say, an ultrasound which might reveal that she has twins, because we're not supposed to know that she has twins till the end, even though we knew that going in. Whatever.
Annie consults Yoda. Yoda tells him to let go of his desire for his wife to live. What the hell? Sensitive and compassionate Yoda is not.
Since the Jedi, throughout this movie, are depicted as a bunch of smug, self-righteous, hypocritical, controlling jerks, Annie goes to Palpatine for help. There follow a couple of scenes that are actually kind of good, as Palpatine seduces Annie to the Dark Side. Samuel Jackson, looking like he wishes he had a gun and some good dialogue, gets in a fight with Palpatine and wins. Ian McDiarmuid seizes the opportunity of lying on the floor and begging to overact like I've never seen before. Since nobody else in the movie is acting at all, this actually makes a good impression.
Palpatine turns into Saggy-face. Annie goes over to the Dark Side. Samuel Jackson goes out the window.
Meanwhile, Obi-Wan Kenobi rides an unconvincing CGI lizard and duels with Bodily Harm. Despite technology that can replace a person's entire body with prosthetics, all the bad guys have smoker's coughs and/or asthma. The price of the Dark Side seems to be bad lungs. Lucas wastes a potentially brilliant moment when Bodily Harm starts to duel Obi-Wan with light sabers in all four of his arms. The new and improved light sabers, unlike the old glowy broomstick ones, strobe, making all lightsaber duels hard to follow and headache-inducing to try.
Then Palpatine orders everyone to kill the Jedi. The Jedi all go down with barely a fight. They can sense confusion in Annie, but can't sense that their officers are all in the pay of the Dark Side and are about to kill them? The Jedi are not only hypocrites, but their mind powers and fighting skills suck. No wonder it only takes eighteen years for them to be completely forgotten.
Annie kills a bunch of Jedi "younglings." Oy. Show the scene, Lucas! Even if you can't stand to show kids being killed, at least show that young padawan going down bravely, desperately defending his charges... oh, forget it.
Meanwhile, Yoda's with the Wookies. This is actually pretty cool. Then Yoda duels Palpatine. Also cool. Then back to Padme and Annie. Uh-oh.
For some reason everyone shows up on Planet Lava, so that Obi-Wan and Annie can duel in the lava. Obi-Wan cuts off Annie's legs and stands over him, lecturing him and complaining that he used to love him, while Annie catches fire and writhes about, screaming in agony. Obi-Wan stands and watches him writhe in agony for a while, then, while Annie's still writhing and screaming and burning, walks off and leaves him to writhe and scream and burn till he dies. Exactly who are the bad guys here?
Obi-Wan collects Padme, who gives birth to healthy twins and is in perfect health herself, despite the lack of prenatal care. But she dies because she "lost the will to live." Obi-Wan does not scream at her to pull herself together and live for her kids, so she dies. Whatever.
Annie becomes Darth Vader. This was also pretty cool. Until his first words as Vader are "How's my pathetic weak-willed leather helmet-wearing wife, whom I just tried to kill? Gee, I really hope she's OK."
Can someone issue a law forbidding the line "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" No one has ever delivered that line well. Darth Vader wobbles around in an unmanly fashion-- well, what do you expect from a guy who used to be named Annie? Perhaps he was also traumatized by Obi-Wan Kenobi hacking off his legs and leaving him to burn and writhe and scream-- I'm sorry, but I'm having a little trouble letting go of that scene.
Baby Luke is delivered to Tatooine into the care of Annie's relatives, because that's the last place where Annie would look for his son. Well, clearly, it was, because he didn't. Darth Vader watches the Death Star being built, and presumably broods over Obi-Wan leaving him to slowly burn to death. And possibly over Padme, who first nick-named him Annie. A man will go to great lengths to leave that kind of thing behind.
We had dinner at my old Hollywood hang-out, the famous-in-Los-Angeles Thai noodle place Sanamluang Cafe. I had the pad-see-yu, flat rice noodles stir-fried with pork, Chinese broccoli, and lots of garlic. Peter had the cha-po, Chinese-style roast pork, deep-fried belly pork, and roast duck over rice, with dipping sauce. Anders chose the chili soup with fish balls, fish maw, fish cake, squid, and God knows what else. I nearly said something, but figured that if he was voluntarily ordering the fish maw he must know what he was doing.
While Peter and I dug into ours, Anders poked at his vat of bright pink broth in which floated miscellaneous unidentifiable objects: a white frilly thing, white sponges, gray golf balls, and white tentacles. "This reminds me of a movie I saw once," he said. "Dumpling... Dumpling something."
"Dumpling Master?" I suggested.
"No," said Anders. "This was an underground movie about a woman who makes stew out of aborted fetuses."
I gave Anders half my noodles.
Revenge of the Sith was much more entertaining than the first two movies. However, the first two movies were two of the worst movies I've ever seen. When people enthusiastically recommend something by saying, "It doesn't suck as much as the first two!" you know that you're not dealing with a work of art, but with a cultural phenomena.
Given that, I am not going to cut for spoilers. If you don't want to be spoiled, don't read, but this is really not the sort of movie where knowing what happens ruins anything.
Rachel's theory of Distance in Combat is once more in play: the closer the combatants are to each other, the more engaged I will be in their fight. Therefore, hand-to-hand is better than light sabers, and light sabers are better than guns, and guns are better than shuttle-craft. The movie opens with a shuttle-craft fight. I am not engaged.
The first bad guy we meet is General Grievous, whose friends undoubtedly call him "Bodily Harm." Like all CGI creatures in all the Star Wars movies, he appears to have no weight and no mass, and his movements are overly fluid in the wrong ways, so he does not appear to be a real creature, but a video game character. This is not a problem with the CGI creatures in Lord of the Rings. Nor is it a problem in Jurassic Park. It's a big problem here.
The ever-entertaining Christopher Lee makes a sadly brief appearance as Count Dooku the Sith Lord. For the benefit of my non-American readers, "dookie" is a word used by small children to refer to the substance whose letters can be rearranged to make the word "sith." This is why audiences keep snickering every time someone refers to Count Dooku. Well, one of the reasons.
During the obligatory fight scene, a large piece of ceiling drops unconvincingly on Obi-Wan Kenobi. Lucas can't even get a simple effect like that to look real.
I am having a hard time recalling exactly what the war is about, but anyway Anakin, whose girlfriend calls him Annie (no wonder he turned to the Dark Side), Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor, who spends the entire movie looking like he'd rather be diving into the Filthiest Toilet in Scotland) and Senator Palpatine (notable for his strong resemblance to Pope Benedict II, and also for being the only actor in the entire movie who is actually giving a performance), return to somewhere or other. There is a horridly unconvincing reunion between Annie and Padme, who mouth awful dialogue about how much they love each other while looking like they can hardly stand to be around each other. They touch each other as if someone just off-camera was holding a gun to their heads.
Padme: "I'm pregnant! So I can't be a Senator! Because Senators are banned from getting pregnant! Or something!"
Annie (looking like he's getting an enema): "OMG! I'm so happy! Yay!"
Padme, incidentally, goes to bed wearing two strands of pearls wrapping around her arms, a huge spiky metal brooch between her breasts, and a giant metal butterfly clip in her hair. Astoundingly, Annie is the one who leaps out of bed in the middle of the night. Maybe he rolled over her pearls.
He's dreamed that she will die in childbirth. Oddly, he does not suggest that she get prenatal care or, say, an ultrasound which might reveal that she has twins, because we're not supposed to know that she has twins till the end, even though we knew that going in. Whatever.
Annie consults Yoda. Yoda tells him to let go of his desire for his wife to live. What the hell? Sensitive and compassionate Yoda is not.
Since the Jedi, throughout this movie, are depicted as a bunch of smug, self-righteous, hypocritical, controlling jerks, Annie goes to Palpatine for help. There follow a couple of scenes that are actually kind of good, as Palpatine seduces Annie to the Dark Side. Samuel Jackson, looking like he wishes he had a gun and some good dialogue, gets in a fight with Palpatine and wins. Ian McDiarmuid seizes the opportunity of lying on the floor and begging to overact like I've never seen before. Since nobody else in the movie is acting at all, this actually makes a good impression.
Palpatine turns into Saggy-face. Annie goes over to the Dark Side. Samuel Jackson goes out the window.
Meanwhile, Obi-Wan Kenobi rides an unconvincing CGI lizard and duels with Bodily Harm. Despite technology that can replace a person's entire body with prosthetics, all the bad guys have smoker's coughs and/or asthma. The price of the Dark Side seems to be bad lungs. Lucas wastes a potentially brilliant moment when Bodily Harm starts to duel Obi-Wan with light sabers in all four of his arms. The new and improved light sabers, unlike the old glowy broomstick ones, strobe, making all lightsaber duels hard to follow and headache-inducing to try.
Then Palpatine orders everyone to kill the Jedi. The Jedi all go down with barely a fight. They can sense confusion in Annie, but can't sense that their officers are all in the pay of the Dark Side and are about to kill them? The Jedi are not only hypocrites, but their mind powers and fighting skills suck. No wonder it only takes eighteen years for them to be completely forgotten.
Annie kills a bunch of Jedi "younglings." Oy. Show the scene, Lucas! Even if you can't stand to show kids being killed, at least show that young padawan going down bravely, desperately defending his charges... oh, forget it.
Meanwhile, Yoda's with the Wookies. This is actually pretty cool. Then Yoda duels Palpatine. Also cool. Then back to Padme and Annie. Uh-oh.
For some reason everyone shows up on Planet Lava, so that Obi-Wan and Annie can duel in the lava. Obi-Wan cuts off Annie's legs and stands over him, lecturing him and complaining that he used to love him, while Annie catches fire and writhes about, screaming in agony. Obi-Wan stands and watches him writhe in agony for a while, then, while Annie's still writhing and screaming and burning, walks off and leaves him to writhe and scream and burn till he dies. Exactly who are the bad guys here?
Obi-Wan collects Padme, who gives birth to healthy twins and is in perfect health herself, despite the lack of prenatal care. But she dies because she "lost the will to live." Obi-Wan does not scream at her to pull herself together and live for her kids, so she dies. Whatever.
Annie becomes Darth Vader. This was also pretty cool. Until his first words as Vader are "How's my pathetic weak-willed leather helmet-wearing wife, whom I just tried to kill? Gee, I really hope she's OK."
Can someone issue a law forbidding the line "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" No one has ever delivered that line well. Darth Vader wobbles around in an unmanly fashion-- well, what do you expect from a guy who used to be named Annie? Perhaps he was also traumatized by Obi-Wan Kenobi hacking off his legs and leaving him to burn and writhe and scream-- I'm sorry, but I'm having a little trouble letting go of that scene.
Baby Luke is delivered to Tatooine into the care of Annie's relatives, because that's the last place where Annie would look for his son. Well, clearly, it was, because he didn't. Darth Vader watches the Death Star being built, and presumably broods over Obi-Wan leaving him to slowly burn to death. And possibly over Padme, who first nick-named him Annie. A man will go to great lengths to leave that kind of thing behind.