2001-11-26 - 7:39 p.m.
So I caught a bad cold from my parents at Thanksgiving, and since it had been a long weekend, and I�d just had to cough up $400 to fix my car the day before after the radiator pump blew up in L.A., and then I had to spend almost five hours driving back to San Diego in the pouring rain, and by Sunday the cold had gotten worse and I didn�t feel like doing anything but assuming crash position on the couch with a nice hot cup of TheraFlu in one hand and the TV remote in the other ... I caved in and watched The Phantom Menace again.
Hey, it was either that or spend all night on the web reassuring myself that I don�t have anthrax.
I�ve had long, ridiculously heated arguments with a number of friends and acquaintances hell-bent on convincing me that The Phantom Menace is a much better movie than I or most of the rest of the world thinks. Their reasoning goes something like this: Everything major that happens in The Phantom Menace is setup for the next two movies and will take on Awesome Significance later on. Even the pissy little trade war that easily takes up at least 3/4 of the movie�s screen time.
Isn�t that like telling me I should enjoy the smell of cat shit because it eventually dries up and can be used to fertilize someone�s rose garden? That�s nice, but in the here and now, it�s still shit.
Forget Jar Jar. I can take or leave Jar Jar--the Ewoks were just as annoying and I was able to get beyond them. And the Jedi fight sequences in TPM were wicked cool--I�ll grant you that. But ... but ... but ... why oh why did they clone Cousin Oliver to play Anakin Skywalker? Why are they even bothering to pretend that the Sith master�s identity is a secret when the guy playing Palpatine can barely restrain the urge to look straight into the camera and go "mwa-ha-ha-HA-HA-HA-HA!" every time he sets foot onscreen? How dare they waste the pure, unadulterated coolness of an All-American bad muthafuka like Samuel L. Jackson? What�s with all the nonsense about "midichlorians"? And what manner of multilegged intergalactic bug crawled up Yoda�s stanky leathery ass and died, anyway?
Oh, and I agree now about the racial caricatures. I poo-pooed those accusations the first time around, figuring they were just the knee-jerk rantings of po-mo leftists who�ve been trained by their sophomore-year semiotics professors to see racists/sexists/whatever-ists in every dark corner. But ok, yeah, I get it--the Trade Federation leaders were Asian. Jar Jar and the Gungans were as minstrel-showy as movies can get now that Stepin Fetchit is dead. And that money-grubbing slave-owner with the hooked nose? Don�t get me started.
George Lucas isn�t a racist, though--just derivative. Hell, the strutting, lispy Imperial officers in the first three movies all owe their existences to the effeminate SS officer who torments the manly hero of every WWII film ever made--and the whole Star Wars saga is ultimately just a Western set in space, anyway. Once you realize that, sitting back and playing Spot the References becomes a great way to amuse yourself when the action starts to drag.
But enough of that. I just hope the Lord of the Rings movie doesn�t suck.
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