Thursday, May 19, 2005

Begun, the filibuster wars have

There's a lot of Star Wars jabbering out there so I'd better throw in my dos centavos before the buzzmoment fades.

I put one of my favorite quotes up there in the header. I also like "Only a Sith Lord deals in absolutes," which is OBK's retort to Anakin/Vader, who gets the Bushesque "If you're not with me, you're my enemy." Of course it might be more appropriate to say "Only the Sith (plural is vital) impose false balance on absolutes". Fair and balanced, someone said.

But the only Darth Vader-IS-The-New-World-Order analogy I'm really comfortable with is that Emperor Palpatine is supposed to be Dick Cheney. On second thought, maybe he's Karl Rove. I have trouble telling those method actors apart sometimes.

One thing's for sure: by this time next week, George Lucas will have deposed Michael Moore as the conservatives' pop culture whipping boy. The Voice of the Left (to be despised).

Which begs the question; whatever happened to Ward Churchill?

1 comment:

PDiddie said...

I had some more thoughts on this that I wanted to put elsewhere, but his blog won't take 'anal-retentive', so I'll drop it back over here.

Despite the unrelenting criticism of wooden dialogue between the Anakin and Padme characters, my humble O is that people my age -- I was 19 when "A New Hope" was released, but of course it wasn't called that -- weren't ever meant to be the target audience for these trilogies, and as such I've never been put off by the "I-love-you,-no-I-love-you-MORE" exchanges.

SW was always your basic fairy tale in outer space, and just because it's been eclipsed in terms of anal-retentive minutiae and obtuse insider dialogue in the sci-fi genre by LOTR and the "Chronicles" and the other comic-book flicks as well as the period battle epics and so forth doesn't make the first two episodes bad movies (granted, Lucas overreached with Jar Jar Binks and his Jamaican accent, but the anti-Semitism charge against Anakin's master was out of line).

Lucas figured out before the studio did that it was all going to be about the merchandising, and while there's quite a market for size 40 stormtrooper costumes, I'd rather have the plastic light saber patent. Or the action figures. Or the video games or the lunch boxes (well, not those necessarily; I'm not a huge Ebayer).