These are, by the way, some of the best reviews ever. Over the years people have been saying that the prequels suck but the critiques were never as insightful and cogent as this guy's.
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I only wish he didn't think that his misogynistic humor was so funny. His critiques of the movies are good, his editing is good, heck, I even like his pizza roll jokes. But dead wife jokes? Tied-up women in your basement jokes? Come on.
Posts: 1711 | Registered: Jun 2004
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I thought that humor was somewhat funny in the first one (it's funny because its ridiculous, not because it's misogynistic). I didn't care much for the second one, because both the humor and the criticism were kinda same-old-same-old.
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the humor was not as sharp (maybe because it had already been done- I admit that I seriously laughed out loud at the image of him showing the basement full of old toys- as terrible as that scene really was. "You're ruining my star wars review!") but as others have said, it's criticisms are spot on. I love the mumbly voice, the way a sentence is sometimes cut short to indicate it's ridiculousness, or the tired, roll eyes line: "maybe it was the force."
The star trek ones are pretty good too.
Posts: 1346 | Registered: Jun 1999
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/agree the review is good but the interludes are incredibly creepy and disturbing and really make me not want to have anything to do with this guy...
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Yeah, his personal life humor isn't really my favorite.
But having seen only the first one, I must admit my favorite scene was when he had random friends describe the different characters, to illustrate how character-less the Episode 1 people were.
Posts: 1577 | Registered: Sep 2005
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See, I actually think his reviews are hit - miss - miss - miss.
When he hits, he hits. Hard.
But when he starts getting into things like, "Why are there so many lightsabers?" he loses me.
Or the idea that some concept inherently won't work. It's not that the concept doesn't work--it's just that Lucas botched it.
The best review of Phantom Menace I've ever read was posted here on Hatrack by OSC. I used to think it was written by Dave Wolverton, using John Brown as a pseudonym, since he writes star wars books. Since then I've decided this was John D Brown, who has since published Servant of a Dark God.
quote:Originally posted by docmagik: But when he starts getting into things like, "Why are there so many lightsabers?" he loses me.
See, I agree with him on this point. In the original Star Wars, lightsabers almost felt like a holy relic. Something only accessible to a elite few, only usable by those dedicated to it, and only mastered by the elite of the elite. I didn't feel that at all in the new movies. Indeed, I felt the opposite.
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I think he's also going for a deeper point with the lightsabers thing - it's not intended as a fanboy nitpick, but an illustration of how "less is more." Lightsaber appearances were relatively few and far between in the Original Trilogy. Each film only had one lightsaber-versus-lightsaber duel. The impact on the audience was, correspondingly, greater. When you heard that "pssshewww" sound of a lightsaber igniting, you couldn't help getting excited, because you knew that a climactic moment was coming. Lightsaber duels in the OT were considered epic not because they had spellbinding choreography, but because they represented crucial moments in the story using a brilliant visual marker.
In the prequels, lightsabers pop out at seemingly every opportunity. Qui-Gon senses poison gas - LIGHTSABER! Anakin feels angsty - LIGHTSABER! Ten year old children are learning to use the Force - LIGHTSABERS! Yoda has his back against the wall - TINY LIGHTSABER! Obi-wan hears a mosquito buzzing around his head - LIGHTSABER! It's sheer lightsaber overload, and each appearance of the weapon in decreasingly-important contexts further dilutes the power that it has over the audience. Instead of feeling their hearts quicken at the prospect of seeing a lightsaber duel, the audience has to cover a yawn as yet another CGI-enhanced megasaberfest arrives to distract them from the awful dialogue.
It's a textbook example of George Lucas learning the wrong lesson from his own damn movies. Instead of understanding that lightsabers were a great visual metaphor for the underlying tensions in the story, what Lucas took away from the OT was: "Oh, kids LOVED lightsabers last time around. Surely they will love it if I add EVEN MORE LIGHTSABERS!"
Posts: 1321 | Registered: Sep 1999
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I think that's absolutely right. Lucas doesn't understand what made the first trilogy work. He had no creative challengers. The reactions to the first screening was utterly and completely priceless. The looks on their faces. Perfect. Completely true. Didn't help that he keeps inflating the myth that this was all part of some master plan. He seems to have bought into that mythology and didn't understand how they discovered the original trilogy.
I found the same problem with the Matrix sequels. Super quick, bullet time fighting good? Then let's do even more and for longer periods of time. The fights just got BORING!! Case in point, where Neo meets Seraph. "You only truly know someone when you fight them." Riiiiight. You get that out of your Daily Zen quote calendar? Cuz it sounded like you trying for some profundity and instead got a meaningless cliche.
Or take "Black Sheep". "Tommy Boy" was hysterically funny and is endlessly watchable, at least to me. But it was like they said, "hey! Chris Farley falling and getting hurt is funny. Let's do MORE OF IT! Let's get his tie stuck in the back of a car!" All so pointless.
It's interesting when people will find success with something and take the "more is MORE" approach instead of actually realizing why something worked. Most SNL movies fall into this category (with a couple of exceptions.) South Park has fallen into this. Cartman being extreme is funny? Let's push it into melodramatic and ridiculous realms (eg: Dances with Smurfs). More is MORE, right? Let's have everybody over-react profoundly like it's the end of the world (eg: Two Days before the day after tomorrow). Yes, I get that you're trying to make a point, you're using satire, you're using hyperbole. But it's NOT that deep of an idea. You take something that might work for a 5 min skit and you do it for 22 minutes instead.
That's not to say that none of these films/shows don't occasionally get it. Despite everything dumb and lost, I enjoyed the prequels because I got the story Lucas was trying to tell- or maybe that he wanted to tell. Or would have told if he had had a little more opposition to really get the creative juices flowing and to weed out all the crap. Somehow, I see that and like it for what it wanted to be. Matrix sequels had their moments, as did Black sheep. And South Park occasionally hits one out of the ball-park, like "Whale Whores" or "Super Fun time".
But most of the time you just get annoyed.
Posts: 1346 | Registered: Jun 1999
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quote:Originally posted by docmagik: But when he starts getting into things like, "Why are there so many lightsabers?" he loses me.
See, I agree with him on this point. In the original Star Wars, lightsabers almost felt like a holy relic. Something only accessible to a elite few, only usable by those dedicated to it, and only mastered by the elite of the elite. I didn't feel that at all in the new movies. Indeed, I felt the opposite.
Yup, by the end of Clones, when the full damn jedi contingent shows up and gets slaughtered by robots, lightsabers now just seemed like a somewhat impractical weapon used out of tradition.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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I still smile a bit when recalling a comment someone made on Aint It Cool News regarding the delays in the fourth Indiana Jones movie on the basis of Lucas not liking elements in the script: "George Lucas has problems with the script?! George 'You killed all those women and children, that's so hot' LUCAS has a PROBLEM with the SCRIPT?!"
I might have made the analogy before, but I have to wonder if the actors read the scripts and felt like a restaurant patron might when seeing a special that involves some apparently odd combination of truffles, citrus vinegars, goose kidneys, and chocolate: "Well, I assume, despite my reservations, that the chef knows what he's doing and these apparently contradictory ingredients work together in a way that I don't understand in the reading...?"
Sometimes the answer is no. And as has been said many, many times, it's a pity no one was in a position to tell Lucas that the answer was no.
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