More Star Wars Thoughts
Cinemax has been running six-movie Star Wars marathons all month. We just watched Empire while waiting for raininva‘s WoW raid to start… I’m amused by the fact that Vader contributes to his own failures in this story. He’s so determined to be eeeeevil, and show everyone how eeeevil he is, that he pushes Lando too far and loses Luke, Leia, and Chewie in the process. If he’d just backed off a tiny bit, he’d have made a clean sweep.
His lightsaber technique’s a bit shabby near the end, too. Maybe the fact that Luke’s involved is clouding his judgement. To quote Sarek: “My logic falters where my son is concerned.”
I have to keep reminding myself that the Falcon‘s a freighter. This isn’t nit-picking, I’m completely willing to believe that Lando, Han, and Chewie have done things to it that its designers would be horrified by… but watching it fly through those asteroids is like watching a Peterbilt 18-wheeler compete in FormulaOne racing. That’s one heavily-modded cargo hauler!
I mentioned to Rain that the Falcon and the TARDIS have a lot in common… heavily-modified antiques capable of impossible things, but rarely completely functional. This movie also reminds me that the Star Wars universe is a lousy place to be a sentient droid. Clearly, they have pain-analogue circuitry, and feelings to boot, but nevertheless they’re really physically abused and treated like crap by both heroes and villians. Do you suppose Bail Organa ordered memory wipes on any of his other troops that knew of Luke and Leia’s birth?
You don’t know the power of the geek side…
Eric Burns, of Websnark.com:
“I’d like to go into depth on the Jedi philosophy, on the core of Hubris that led to the Fall of the Jedi Order, on the nature of denial and of ossification, and on the ways that Qui Gon Jinn represented, thematically, a break from all that in his methodology which led step by step to the next three movies and the redemption of the Jedi in the Expanded Universe. I would. And I’d like to show how David Willis has highlighted this succinctly. I even accept that if I did so, I’d never, ever get laid again. Somehow, this thesis would cling to me like lack of hygiene and even geek grrls would pause upon seeing me, say “well, no. Not him,” and move on.”
Instead, he just points us to this “Shortpacked!” comic. Which is freaking hilarious.
Oh, and I’ve stumbled upon a site with more remixes of the Doctor Who theme than any sane soul would ever need.
Oh, frabjous day!
Today it is my unbirthday! Following Lewis Carroll, raininva and I have decided that having two birthdays a year is funner. Hers is in November, but she picked today for mine. We are going to a Comedy Club tonight and she gave me a very nice clothing accessory Tuesday night as a present.
Last night I managed 90 minutes on World of Warcraft. I am totally a geek because I’m enjoying smelting and engineering more than I am killing stuff. I made level 10 with my gnome mage, and moved to another page of my map for the first time (but then moved back, as I have lots of unfinished quests where I was). I also replaced a dead headlight and re-aligned one that I installed improperly a few months ago. I like my little Hyundai, but it’s not great design when I have to pull the battery to get to one of the headlight lamps.
I woke up to 70 degree temperatures and sun, which makes it hard to be grumpy even when I do have to get up before 10am. I really needed the quiet night last night; my social life has been cranked up to 11 lately, which is nice, but a little overwhelming. The 1.5 hours of video-gaming was a present to myself. Lord knows when I’ll finally finish Halo 1, Jedi Knight II, Elite Force II, NOLF, BloodRayne, Tron 2.0, ./Hack, Robotech: Battlecry, Red Faction II… okay I’m going to stop working out this list because it is depressing me 🙂
Congrats to yubbie & colleenk, and nius & rainbowsaber, on their new housing developments! (Ouch. That was unintentional, I swear.)
Since everything’s all Star Warsy right now, here’s a pair of websites you should visit:
Pink Five: two of the funniest fan films I’ve seen, easily up there with Troops as fan classics. The third film should be out soon, and they posted a production blog which includes the lead actress’ reaction to meeting a fan dressed as her! I want a Pink Harvest t-shirt or button or something.
A lot of people have heard of this one, but Darth Vader’s blog has the distinction of not only being funny, but damn well written. The entry about Qui-Gon actually sent chills though me with its ineffable appropriateness. I found myself nodding, and saying to myself, “Wow… that makes sense.” And the blog even has an RSS feed.
Okay, back to working.
Mental clutch not engaging
Uggggh…
Brain is not working this morning. I am slow and stupid. Caffeine not helping. I just pray I get through the morning without embarassing myself too much.
I don’t know what the problem is, I ate well yesterday and got 6 hours of sleep last night (okay, interrupted once or twice by the cat, but I thought I was used to that by now).
Failed to dodge a spoiler yesterday for “Revenge of the Sith”, and it’s disappointing. From all I hear, the movie’s going to be quite good, but I’m disappointed that they chose to include this one little detail.
Last week’s Enterprise, however, was all style, no substance, and yet it rocked. You don’t need things to make sense when you’re having this much fun. The last 6 minutes especially… oooh, nerdgasm. The 8-year-old fan in me was royally entertained. Can’t wait to see tonight’s; at least the show’s going out fighting.
Epic Storylines
While thinking of sf/fantasy movies & TV today, it occurred to me that they’re all more ‘fun’ if the fate of humanity hinges on the outcome. That’s hard to do in episodic TV, of course, but Babylon 5 managed it, Deep Space Nine managed it, and Enterprise picked that up by its third season.
It’s in all the fan favorites; The Original Series and The Next Generation didn’t do it often, but when they did (“City On The Edge Of Forever”, “Yesterday’s Enterprise”, “Best of Both Worlds’) It was memorable. The best Trek movies did this: Khan had to be prevented from getting the Genesis Device; the Whale Probe had to be silenced; the Borg had to be prevented from disrupting First Contact).
Of course, the original Star Wars trilogy let us know practically from the opening crawl that ‘humanity’ (i.e., the Rebellion and a pair of leftover Jedi) was gambling everything on Anakin’s twins; and in The Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship knew that if they screwed this up, Middle-Earth was lost. Indeed, in SDF-Macross, the heroes almost blew it, and vast populations of human beings didn’t live to see the end of the series.
This may have been part of the problem with the new Star Wars trilogy, and the first two seasons of Enterprise. There was just no urgency in what the characters did, since we knew, in broad strokes at least, what the eventual outcome was going to be. You can make up for that with compelling character drama, but we didn’t get that either. (I know that Enterprise had a “Temporal Cold War” going on, but it was dull as dirt. We didn’t care until the Xindi zapped Earth.) Voyager eventually became character-driven and somewhat interesting, but might have had far better legs in the beginning if it had tried the Space Battleship Yamato / B5: Crusade formula and had to deal with an urgent need to get home ASAP – whether or not their technology was initially up to it.
Perhaps that’s something the writers of Trek Series 6 should think about. (I don’t doubt there will be a Series 6, next year or 10 years from now.) Make us worried, maybe not from the first episode but before too long. Make us feel like the leads are fighting not just for themselves, but for us or our kids. Give us an investment.
I bet we fans will eat it up.
Movie thoughts etc.
Why couldn’t Watto take Republic credits? They’d have to be a pretty solid currency at that time. For that matter, why couldn’t Qui-Gon find someone who’d change his Republic credits over to Tatooine ones for a fixer’s fee? “Wretched hives” always have someone who can do this.
Message to the Wachowskis: I saw some of Revolutions the other day, and I’m sorry, but your movies make a lot more sense if Morpheus. Oracle, and Architect were supplying Neo with inaccurate / incomplete information, and Zion / the tunnels were simply another layer of the Matrix. This explains too much to be dismissed, no matter what you tried to sell us in movie three. Maybe what you told us “was true, from a certain point of view.”
I remain amazed at the Tolkien fans who feel that Peter Jackson did a poor job with LOTR. He pulled off a movie-making miracle, coherently filming a epic that the original author considered unfilmable, and in the process winning the hearts of both the general public and the Academy with a fantasy film. Sure, lots of us would have made a few different choices, but I don’t care to hear anyone say he’s a hack until they personally can produce something better.
Over the weekend, a friend made some excellent conjectures on who Harry Potter’s “Half-Blood Prince” might be. At least two of them could lead to very interesting storylines; the trick will be to not have it spoiled before I can read the actual book.
Rain got her PSP yesterday. I’ll say the first thing everyone else does – “Nice Screen!” She’s enjoying a couple of the games, too. With the default settings I found on the web, 30 minutes of video are ~200 MB more or less of a memory card, so at ~$100 for a 1 GB card, it’s clear we won’t be carrying around a fistful of pre-loaded feature-length movies.
I might head to the Rocky Horror Picture Show tonight. We’ll see.
Your Sci-Fi Friday
Yoda is clearly a much better teacher of the Jedi way than Obi-Wan Kenobi. One month with Luke, and Yoda had him ready to take out Darth Vader with a match-and-a-rematch; Obi-Wan had Anakin for, what, 7 or 8 years and never quite managed to teach him that “The vengeful destruction of entire communities is *bad*, dude.”
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Spaceship engines I have invented (or helped invent):
The Noodle Drive – powered by the reaction between pasta and antipasto
The Arel Drive – twisting space by the efforts of anime fans and Nihonjin exchange students trying to get each other’s consonants right
The Warped Drive – converting the libido of freshman college students to energy (still theoretical only, every piece of experimental equipment has melted or gotten icky)
Yes, most of these inventions did involve sleep deprivation.
Yub Nub!
Y’know, the fan commentary on the release of DVD Star Wars is just further proof to me that I’m abnormal: I have never found the Ewoks annoying. I always thought their victory was a metaphor for the fact that the Empire’s arrogance and brutality were in fact its biggest weakness. Or, in the Princess’ words, “The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”
Jar-Jar, on the other hand, I’ll give you.
