Author: alternateorg

There are some new retooled iBooks out this morning. They have finally managed to surpass the old G3 PowerBooks.

Yoda kicks fucking ass.

Episode II: Saw it with my 4-year old today. trying to view it from his perspective and remembering what it was like to see the first ones when I was his age, I think this one (and the last, for that matter) were fine additions to the list.

Why do so many people I’m around think otherwise? I think the reason is because these films don’t have the same oomph as the first series. To this I would say that the lack of interest you have is not because of the movie but because of yourself. You saw this series first when you were a child and were enchanted. You’ve seen the new ones as an adult and are not. This is not Lucas’s fault, it’s yours. The fact that you/I are incapable of having a movie affect us like we used to and like our children are is by no fault of ILG. We cannot suspend our immense disbelief long enough to accept terrible dialogue, and we cannot forget the mass amounts of marketing long enough to enjoy it without thinking about how they’re going to try and sell our children on this starship or that trooper.

But if you go back and view the first (last) three, you’ll find exactly the same dialogue (if performed by perhaps a more suitably put-together cast) said the same way, and still, you’ll find those 3 to be better than the latest 2. Why? Because you still hold onto those from a child’s perspective. And if you go about the difficult task of viewing them objectively as an adult, you’ll probably find yourself wondering why you even thought those were half as good as you did. And then you’ll come to the conclusion that hey, it’s just a movie and that it’s time to enjoy the newest ones as much as you can, because you’ll set yourself up for disappointment if you try to enjoy them as an adult. It’s what happened to me 2 years ago with Phantom Menace and I’ve resolved myself to enjoying it as much like a child as I can.

Oh, and seeing Yoda prove the reverence felt by his fellow Jedi was cool.

After dashing my childhood memories with Episode I, George Lucas felt for some reason that he needed to continue making Star Wars movies. I was commericially ravaged by it and vowed never see another one in the theater. Now the first reviews are begining to trickle out and it looks like what most critical thinking individuals would have guessed.

“And for another, while “Attack of the Clones” is many things — a two-hour-and-12-minute action-figure commercial, a demo reel heralding the latest advances in digital filmmaking, a chance for gifted actors to be handsomely paid for delivering the worst line readings of their careers — it is not really much of a movie at all, if by movie you mean a work of visual storytelling about the dramatic actions of a group of interesting characters.”

NYTimes

The recent mailbomb suspect was a member of a local Rochester, MN band called Apathy. Unfortunately their link on Angelfire has been taken down, but you can stil download their songs off of mp3.com. I think they sound like Nirvana, in a negative way.