Star Wars marathon: liveblogging
May 29th, 2005 | by Scott Jennings |2:49pm: about twenty minutes in. Got a late start today on account of slow going cleaning up after the fundraiser. I considered postponing for another day, but I was talked into a 2:30 start (and a 5am finish). I’m already beginning to regret it — Scott Jennings, meet Jar Jar Binks. Yeah, I know I was warned, I remember that was the huge outrage, but this is beyond horrifying. Every word he says makes me incredibly uncomfortable, my vague liberal guilt is rising quickly.
And wait, this whole movie is about a trade dispute? And a galatic senate? Maybe… maybe the prequels started a little too soon.
I’m not following ANY of this. Perhaps God did not intend the films to be viewed this way.
Roll call: me, Katy, Moser, Ross, Ethan, Kit, Jon, Diana.
3:13pm: the wipes between scenes are going to drive me crazy.
3:16pm: Anakin: “Did you come here to free the slaves?”
Qui-Gon Jinn: “No.”
Anakin: “Well, why did you come here?”
Ethan: “Well, it’s a trade dispute…”
3:21pm: Ross makes an excellent point: perhaps Anakin wasn’t the result of a virgin birth, perhaps it was just a Jedi mind trick. “You came to the bar alone tonight. (waves hand) You’ve never met me. (waves hand)”
3:38pm: watching the pod-racing scene, I now know what was missing from Ben Hur: obnoxious and cartoonish commentators.
3:46pm: first casualty is Jon Miles. He says he’ll be back for the theater outing. I doubt it.
3:48pm: Ben, mocking Anakin’s mother: “now, just promise me you won’t grow up and dress in all black and kill lots of people.”
Me: “Wait, what?”
4:04pm: Ethan: “Hang in there, Scott. It’ll get better around 11 o’clock tonight.”
4:55pm: starting Episode II. Episode I was god-awful, from the “I don’t get any of these winks to the nerds” perspective. I just realized that these movies were a bit longer than I assumed they would be, so now we’re planning to catch the 8pm showing of Episode III at the Lumina, setting us all the way back to, oh, I don’t know, an 8am finish.
CeCe Garcia gets her nerd card revoked for loaning me a FULLSCREEN copy of Episode II. We’ve been booing lustily.
Ross observes that while the first episode was about a trade dispute, this episode is about a senate vote. Oh, I’m EXCITED!
5:32pm: Slowing down already. I’m getting more and more annoyed by my friends’ snide remarks, makes me think I should have just watched these by myself so I’d have the benefit of forming my own opinion. I know I’d hate the first two, but I’d like to hate them on my own, you know? I’m remembering why I didn’t invite Kit in the first place.
Roll call: me, Katy, Ross, Diana, Zach, Ben, Ethan, Austin, Kit.
5:49pm: I get it. Having Anakin act all the prick, talking about wanting a dictatorship, yeah, ok. He’s gonna be the bad guy in a few hours. I’ve figured it out!
6:25pm: I KNEW IT! They just totally forshadowed the Darth Vader music!
6:27pm: Katy is disqualified, she slept for about an hour. Andi arrived a few minutes ago, I’m hoping to get her to start swearing again soon. Diana is being totally creeped out by Ross and Ben. And CeCe just called to say she’s joining us at the Lumina. That’s your Lady Update.
6:48pm: This movie is a total waste. Completely plodding, all the action straight from a video game, this big coliseum scene is straight out of Coneheads, and I have a strong feeling everything we’ve established will be completely redundant in the next film. Yeah yeah, Anakin’s evil, he fell in love with his babysitter, the Jedi aren’t in tune with the Force, the Republic’s falling apart. I get it. This could all be ten minutes in the start of Episode III, and I think I’d be just fine.
7:19pm: Episode II, at long last, is finally finally over. Going to hop into cars to see the third one in the theater, we’ll be back soon.
10:31pm: I’ve decided that was the worst good movie I’ve ever seen. It really worked well when they weren’t talking, the dialogue was universally terrible, but the action was engaging (except when they were wedging more shitty dialogue in). General Grievous was completely unnecessary. I made Katy promise not to die in childbirth. I don’t care how groundbreaking the “wipes” between scenes were in 1970-whatever, they’re driving me up the WALL.
And I think I was the only person on the planet who was honestly surprised when the second baby was named “Leia.” Seriously! I didn’t know!
I need A New Hope.
10:42pm: I wish they’d give up on tapping the keg.
11:01pm: Roll call: Katy, me, CeCe, Andi, Ben, Kit, Laine, Siegel, Ethan, Zach, Jon, and Diana. Ross had to go home on account of being covered in beer from the failed first attempt to tap the keg. Dave Siegel saved the day.
I like where the third movie ended and the fourth movie picked up. So far, so good.
12:59am: Getting harder and harder to blog. Episode IV was the best of the lot by far, naturally. Most glaring between the trilogies are the differences between the dialogue and the choreography. You pick what works.
As annoying as I thought Anakin Skywalker was in the first three, Jesus Christ, I was ready to deck Luke. Jeez-o-man, what an annoying twit.
Roll call: me, Katy, Austin, CeCe, Kit, Ethan, Diana, Jon. Thank God that goddamn dog is gone.
Five minutes into Empire. I’m told this is the best one. Bologna and cheese and diet Dr. Pepper to keep me going. Hopefully, I’ll soldier on. Christ, this was a bad idea.
1:43am: This is just a 1:43am working theory, so bear with me. But I think Star Wars movies are better when there aren’t eleventy billion Jedis strolling around, shakin’ and wavin’ their lightsabers everywhere. I mean, I just got sick of force force force forcity-force — I think having an adult Luke Skywalker struggle to learn a lost art is much more compelling than “who’s got more force in THIS scene?”
Also, forty-five minutes into Empire, and I feel confident saying: George Lucas is a shitty shitty shitty director. Watching a film directed by someone else is good for a second wind right here.
2:24am: WHY DOES ANYONE GIVE A SHIT ABOUT CHEWBACCA? Seriously. There’s absolutely jack-shit to this character, I’m so fucking sick of his “waaaahhhh!”
I wonder if Lucas had made these films in episode order, if he’d have made any effort to keep the viewer in the dark about the whole “Luke, I am your father” thing. On the one hand, it’s not uncommon to tip cards to the viewer and let him see the character’s journey to that discovery. On the other hand, one can’t help but wonder why one of the eighty characters who knows what’s going doesn’t say, “listen asshole: you’re Darth Vader’s son, you’re going to have to go defeat him now, so just do shit our way, all right?”
For the next week, whenever I’m done talking to you, I’m going to wave my arm in front of my face at a random angle before I move on to talk to someone else.
Stephanie wants attention! Kitty kitty!
Ethan: “Yoda was getting into Jar Jar Binks territory just then.”
3:13am: Final lap! Roll call: me, Ethan, Diana, Ben (official), Austin (loser), Katy (sleeper), and Kit (not invited).
You know what’s hilarious? Singing:
Star Wars! Episode Six! Return of the Jedi! Dah dah dah daaaaaaahhhh!
Empire was probably the best of the five films so far, but I really do have problems with the whole tell Luke/don’t tell Luke thing. Personally, watching the whole series in order, I think Luke needs to know exactly what he’s up against before jumping in to get his ass kicked.
Also, why do all the lightsaber duels get chopped up? In Episode III, the Obi-Wan/Anakin showdown should have been huge, but it got split into like three parts. Same with the Vader/Luke fight in the last film. I mean, Lucas obviously knows the value and importance of the fights to the movies, but it’s almost as if he doesn’t trust their value in advancing the story and telling their own part of the story. Weird.
Two hours to go. I don’t have a good feeling about Jabba the Hutt. But now, Spaceballs is HILARIOUS.
By the way, I have the shits.
3:30am: Did Austin just go to bed? What a wuss.
This Jabba the Hutt shit is NOT doing it for me. And the wedged-in dance number sure didn’t help matters.
Hey, this’ll keep me up: everytime Billy Dee Williams gives you that look, you say coldcocked!
4:21am: I’m really not enjoying this movie at all. The whole Jabba part was pointless, I could have done with a trademark en medias res battle to free what’s-his-name, and then on to the meat of the film. This Ewok shit isn’t working for me, either. It’s taking for-fucking-ever to disable this fucking shield, when all I want at this point is to get to the showdown. I’ve spent fourteen hours of my life on this now, get me to the showdown.
I’m getting more and more certain that the decision to make it clear to the audience who Luke and Leia’s parents are was just about making the nerds happy, since we’d have “already known it anyway.” It completely spoils the pop of the big reveal in Empire, and I just can’t get past how dumb it was of Obi-Wan and Yoda to not clue him in at any point along the way. If you don’t tell Luke what he’s going up against, then you make it far too easy for him to get surprised, which is basically what happened. And shouldn’t R2D2 have known Yoda? His memory wasn’t wiped. And boy, aren’t C3P0 and R2D2 super gay gay gay?
This is why prequels, in general, are terrible. Have we talked yet about the series finale of Enterprise? Now THAT was awful. Not Episode I awful, but definitely Episode II awful.
We’re still mired in Ewoks, which is why I’m typing this to stay awake. Do something! Do something! For the love of God, just do something!
5:04am: I’m having a hard time buying Luke as being as powerful as everyone says he is — the first three movies were all about Anakin and how hard he worked at his skillz, but we really haven’t seen where Luke got all his. He’s some sort of straight-up natural? That’s not how he behaves. All we got out of Luke was the mantras.
Is the moral of the story supposed to be that there is no pure good, no pure Jedi? At some point, all our Jedis go a little un-Jedi to some extent, and the feeling seems to be that if they hadn’t given in to their anger or whatever, the job wouldn’t have gotten done.
5:19am: Episode VI: thumbs way down. How this the Return of the Jedi? We’ve only got two, and they’re siblings. We defeated another big spherical contraption, and discovered that Darth Vader’s a quitter. The Empire falls! Now we celebrate! I want to go find a ubiquitous bottomless pit to fall into. The Jedi are still mostly dead.
5:22am: YOUR final rankings:
1. Episode V
2. Episode IV
3. Episode III
4. Episode II/VI (tie)
6. Episode I
Bottomless pit, here I come! Ethan, Ben, and Diana, excelsior! We’ll be mystery siblings 4EVA!
12:45pm: good morning. I’m not crazy about the whole Star Wars thing, my friends. They’re just not my kind of movies — stunning visuals, groundbreaking filmmaking, but they were groundbreaking popcorn films, and I’m not a popcorn kind of guy. The story is interesting, absolutely, but the writing throughout the six films just isn’t that fabulous — even these worshipped original films, there are truck-sized holes all over the place. And like I tried to bitch eight hours ago, the original trilogy just doesn’t follow the prequel trilogy at all.
Star Wars was at its best when it was about the action; zoomity zoomity spaceship shoot shoot shoot, and whoosh whoosh jumpity flippity lightsaber stuff. Star Wars seriously dragged when the focus was on the dialogue, especially in the new trilogy, but face it: the original trilogy had some cute lines and some cute moments and much better acting, but it still failed to really draw me in and make me care about this story, or, for that matter, really pay it off in a satisfying way.
On the other hand, Star Trek was at its best when it was about the story and the acting, by and large. Yeah, there’s been a lot of shitty shitty Star Trek, but when you pump out that much material, some of it’s going to clunk. I don’t think well over half of it clunked like Star Wars, I think by and large it was good stuff. (Although I did stop watching most of the Berman and Braga tripe, at least they never introduced a babbling black stereotype.) But Star Trek successfully spun any number of compelling stories, drew me in, and left me satisfied. Star Trek II, III, IV, VI, and First Contact are all better films than Star Wars Episode V. On the whole, there’s no real contest for me: I’m taking Star Trek.
Hey, why would the Empire build those walker deals if their skinny-ass legs are such an obvious weakness? And if Leia’s got the force, why does she wait until the very very end of the line to realize it? Wouldn’t Luke have sensed the force in her? Or Vader, for that matter? Ugh. Unravel this lazy unnuanced shit, and I’ll try to like these movies more.
So, finally, here’s my bottom line. The original trilogy: neat movies, must see flicks, wraps up all nice and neat. The new trilogy: pissed all over ‘em, ruins the story for the next three, just exist to make videogames. George Lucas: either weak-minded or just an asshole. Watching the six films in episode order: not recommended.
