Thursday, May 26, 2005
Force Feeled
Sith! Sith! Sith! Last night I saw a 140 minute commerical tie-in for ringtones, burger king, and Vaderville Amusement Enterprises. I took a twilight stroll with my friend Laila up to the looming mass of Yerba Buena and Metreon, where we met Jeannette and Jason, her long-time best friend, and not much later, we were joined by Natalie and Rick, the fittest damn couple I’ve ever et a big bacon burger in front of. Supper was tasty, if not particularly distinguished, and then we ambled over the footbridge to the theaters where Kel joined us (fresh from work herself) for the 7:50 screening of “I Married a Teen-Age Vortex of Galactic Negativity.” But I didn’t get the bug. My negativity is much more specific.
and by the way, if you really don’t want to know anything at all about the movie, don’t read this. I’ll just ruin everything for you. I can’t take that kind of responsibility right now.
There was much about the movie (this was not a film) that I enjoyed, much that was technically brilliant and ocularly overstimulating. More so than the first movies, this one was so visually complex and beautiful that I never got bored, even when the plot was particularly ploddingly predictable. This movie was also sufficiently nuanced - on paper, anyway - to make it a much more compelling vehicle than the last two releases in the series, full of moral challenges and psyches pushed to the breaking point.
So why did Kel and I spend so much of the movie laughing into our cupped hands, trying not to offend those for whom this screening was a pilgrimage akin to the hajj? And for the record, Jeannette’s friend Jason appears on-screen as a supernumerary, and has a screen credit for his work as a compositor who blended as many as fifty visual layers into a single image. Jason was cool and his work was mindboggling (though being upstaged by Jar Jar Binks has got to sting a little). I’ve got nothing from the dark side to say about this epic as a masterwork of craftsmanship. Where I get whiney is when we think about it as a character drama. I thought the first three flix were character-driven, in a landscape of incredible machinery. This movie and the two that preceded it seem to me more like movies about machines, some of which have taken remarkably human-like guise. Dialogue was unfeelingly phrased and delivered; character development seemed to happen, when it happened at all, as an external overlay and not as a change from within. Time magazine quotes a blog somewhere that suggests the movie would have been better as a silent than as a talkie; I rather agree. Having seen The 39 Steps not too long ago, the stilted conventions and simplistic setups that Hitchcock was already working through and around, seem to continue to stymie Lucas.
That’s enough of the whifty cineschool meta-analysis, eh? Let’s get down to brass tacks, or whatever they’d call brass tacks on some weird alien reptilian world where nobody ever flashes a nipple, no matter how many of them they have:
* The most lifelike character in the movie is a muppet. This is a bad sign for living actors nationwide.
* The bad guy is named after dookie. (Sorry Melbourne, your name is no less unfortunate now that it’s been taken over by intergalactic evil avatar Chris Lee, still working his Hammer magic four decades after he was outed as undead.)
* The bad guys are named Grevious and Sidious. Oh come on. Their freaking kindergarten teacher could have told us they would be cosmically evil, based on the names alone. “Grevious! Sidious! Stop pantsing the Weiner twins! Don’t you want to grow up to dishonor your given names?” I’m sure it was only with deep disappointment that Lucas accepted the fact that “Slytherin” was already trademarked.
* There is no way, no freaking way in hell, that those two enormous babies came out of that Princess Amygdala’s romantically diminutive abdomen. Kel noted that the only way they could have fit up inside of her tiny self was if she had no internal organs - unless that’s how she met her fate: maybe they ate her from the inside? Oh come on, don’t pose your hypertechnical objections. It’s possible, especially in a world where:
* During a dogfight that appears to be in space, a window gets blown out and our fearless warriors are ejected into space, though of course they crawl their way back to the safety of the shattered bridge of their crippled intergalactic winnebago. They wrestle it into a landing approach, and the hull starts to heat and burn. “We’re in the atmosphere,” one explains to his cretinous friends, who apparently never even saw Apollo 13 (Tatooine, we have a problem...). Okay, here’s the technical quibble: if they were above the atmosphere when the window got blown, then they were in space, where exposure to extremes of temperature and low pressure would trash your internals something fierce. In researching this answer, I learn that 15 seconds or so of exposure to space won’t hurt you much in the long term. To this, I call bullshit. Why don’t you try it, mr scientist, and tell me what you think of it, with your “extinct” NASA website? The experience of being exposed to open non-atmospheric space in the movie, rather, seemed only to heighten the skills of our heroes. This is because they are made up. And rather silly.
* Why does the cybernetic general cough? And how come he hacks up a cyberlung when he so much as crosses the room, but in a pinch he can drop five stories, land on his feet, turn into a cuisinart, and escape at high speed, without any additional respiratory difficulties? Did they cut the scene where he sucks his huffer, as over-humanizing his twisted metal persona?
* Irritating is his syntax. Listening him to, in my ass a pain is.
* Jar Jar is only good for comic relief. Having him show up as a chief mourner is like having Marcel Marceau show up to sing the national anthem. To blind people.
* When you finally kill the bad guy after 20 minutes of hand-to-hand combat, and a trusted aid hands you the special weapon you’d dropped long before during a death-defying fall from a cliff, and which is the essence of your character, give us a moment of acting, there, please? Are you surprised? Happy? Relieved? What we got was the look I see when someone drops litter in the bus and someone else hands it back to him: sort of, “oh yes that’s mine, I suppose, or at least till I can drop it somewhere you’re not looking.” More “strained politeness” than “elation at having my jedi soul back in the palm of my hand.” I know that joy, by the way, and I did not see it on screen. Maybe in the NC-17 version?
* Sam Jackson’s direction from Lucas probably went something like this: “Whiter, Sam. Whiter.“ Kel kept trying to remember him with the jeri curls from Pulp Fiction, but it was like they put his face on Quentin Tarantino’s body. He had no charisma, no power, no passion, and definitely no “Bad MF” wallet. And I think that sums up my problem with this movie pretty well: There was no one who was wallet-worthy in the whole mix. And while I’m at it, when Jack lost his grip on Marwan and let him smak down on the pavement, but then blew up the missle over Los Angeles, averting a nuclear disaster, we could have used some tie-fighters and a wookie or two. I kicked over 24 hours of my tv-watching time, dude; I deserve some bigger explosions!
Tomorrow: no explosions. Earth beckons, and never let it be said that I’m not a sucker for a good beckoning.
