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Roger Ebert Answers Star Wars Questions
pamri writes "Roger Ebert, in his weekly answer-man column, answers Star War related questions, chief among them being, why he gave the "Revenge of the Sith" 3.5 stars despite his criticism of the acting and whether George Lucas be faulted for violating his own work?"
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
This guy has a great sense of humor. If you scroll to the bottom of his questions/answers section:
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o m/
Q. I greatly enjoy your reviews and the thoughtful observations they contain. However, I get a little worried about the strength of your argument in your review of "Unleashed," when you make the case for women being able to stir a man's humanity by using Ann Coulter as your example. That is the same person who claimed women should bear arms but not be able to vote.
C. Perla, Miami
A. Wouldn't you sleep more soundly at night knowing Ann Coulter was in the Army and not in a voting booth?
If you like laughing at Ann Coulter, please don't miss these stories:
http://ifuckedanncoulterintheasshard.blogspot.com
http://backinanncoultersasssaddleagain.blogspot.c
(bye karma...)
From Wikipedia: The Dragon Quest series is so popular in Japan that, following the release of Dragon Quest III in 1988, the Japanese Diet passed a law forbidding the release of new installments of the Dragon Quest series on any day other than a Sunday or a holiday, to prevent children from skipping school to wait in line for the latest Dragon Quest title.
Natalie Portman was involved in a "no-pants continuity error"? I'm surprised this wasn't on the front page as its own article.
Freedom: "I won't!"
I watched some of the originals (originals, mind you -- VHS and everything) this weekend. Conclusion: I didn't enjoy them as much having seen the first 3. They were actually made worse by the prequels.
The backstory between Vader and Obi-wan was much, much more interesting to have to imagine yourself than Lucas' fluid, undulating, oscillating animation and flat story, characters and acting.
You know what? The special effects in the original, non-special edition Star Wars movies looks cheesy. You know what? It doesn't matter. I don't care that I can't see the ice creature on Hoth very well. Does the fact that we can't see Vader's ships landing on Hoth affect our enjoyment of the movie? No! You know what? HUMAN IMAGINATION IS BETTER THAN ANY CGI. If you can imply something, fine, sometimes it's actually as good as spending a cajillion dollars on the CGI.
What imagination needs is compelling, interesting characters. And story. If you can make the audience want to imagine the characters, they will. And that's as good, if not better, as rendering the same thing in CGI.
The prequels made the characters worse. Pah.
Someone needs to go back in time to 1986 QUICK and kill George Lucas. OR, for the faint of heart, convince him that it would be really cool if he made the prequels using ONLY 1978 technology. I guarantee that would have made a much more interesting movie.
You fast-forwarded the movie? Didn't the other people in the cinema get upset?
Then maybe you should spend money on a chair.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
...His head is detached, and the power is off. Apparently, the power source (possibly the batteries) is located in the torso. Later, Chewbacca re-attaches the head, and it turns back on. Of course, C3PO continues his comedic monologue.
Now, in SW II, we see that C3PO loses his head again when an assembly tool knocks it off in the droid factory. However, the head continues to be powered and keeps talking....
One possible explanation: NiCad battery in the head, charger in the torso (where there is some kind of generator.) The battery got fried when he was shot in Empire, so he needed the juice from the charger to power up.
Another: The torso has nothing to do with head power. Chewie just happened to close a broken circuit (or open a short) when he put the head on.
Of all the possible nitpicks I've heard, this isn't really a very big one.
Watch any version of Star Wars prior to the DVD (including a bootleg of the theatrical "Special Edition.")
After killing Ben, Darth walks toward the Falcon and the iris doors close in front of him... They forgot to animate his lightsaber! He's carrying a metal stick.
Not good enough for you? Try this one: In III, Obi-Wan says goodbye to R2 after all they had been through together. In IV, he doesn't recognize him at all. "I don't remember owning a droid."
Still want more? Leia tells Luke about her childhood memories of their mother... but now it turns out that mom died on the delivery room table. Either Leia was never told (and never suspected) that she was adopted, or she sees dead people.
There. That should be enough to fuel your nitpicks for a while.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
> Anybody else remember in Empire when Ghost Obi Wan is
> talking about "he is our last hope" and Yoda says... "No, their
> is another". Exactly why was Obi Wan so clueless!!!! That was
> the first thing that popped in my head when I saw Obi Wan
> hearing the names of the two kids and seeing them off.
It's the difference between hope and despair.
I know that some people are desperate to find plot continuity errors between Episodes I/II/III and IV/V/VI in hope to justify some sort of emotional reason to reject the latter produced episodes -- "See! Obi-Wan has a different mole in Episode IV than in Episode III, so the prequels don't count!!1!" However, this isn't the case.
This isn't simply a matter of hunting down the second twin and starting her training. Remember, Palpatine and Vader killed all the other Jedi. Palpatine defeated Yoda who was the strongest Jedi (after Anakin lost his limbs). Vader struck down Obi-Wan. In short, Sideous and Vader were tough to beat.
Obi-Wan had lost hope and he really thought that Luke was going to fail. Just like Anakin's love for Padme sent him to the Dark Side, Obi-Wan thought that Luke's love for his friends would send him to the Dark Side. Obi-Wan was feeling despair and he couldn't imagine they would succeed by starting over with the other twin. He had simply given up hope.
Yoda clearly was upset, but he was optimistic enough to at least try to start over. "There is another." I guess when you're ~800 years old, you have tremendous patience, and you're willing to fail 99 times and still start over for the 100th time. So while Obi-Wan lost hope, Yoda didn't.
However, in Episode V, Yoda and Obi-Wan both failed again the same way they did in Episode III; they gave up on their friends too easily. Remember how Yoda told Luke it was okay to let his friends die? Didn't he tell Anakin the same thing in Episode III? That's one of the things that drove Anakin to the Dark Side.
The reason for this is related to a flaw in the Jedi order. The Jedi knew that passions (like hatred and anger) lead to the Dark Side. Their answer was to eschew emotions. I believe one of Lucas's themes is that their choice was wrong.
Jedi weren't allow to have attachments or to love (Episode II). The Jedi were so afraid of using the Dark Side, that they went the wrong way and became unemotional. Lucas's point is that is wrong. Love and friendship were the right course of action. That's why the Force had to be brought back into balance. In their own way, the unemotional Jedi were as bad (okay, almost as bad) as the hate-filled Sith.
Luke on the other hand felt emotion. His love for his friends brought him to rescue Han Solo and eventually save his father. So emotions were not to be eschewed, but were to be used constructively. Was there a danger to allowing love to lead to the Dark Side? Of course (case in point: Anakin). But the risk of not feeling love at all was worse.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Ebert, Roeper, that guy waiting in line in a stormtrooper outfit...they're all missing the true point of this movie. It's not about an innocent man's decent into darkness. That's just a subplot, a minor detail if you will. No, this is George Lucas's attempt at a public service announcement about the importance of contraceptives. Because if Anakin hadn't knocked up Padme, he wouldn't have had visions of her dying in childbirth, he wouldn't have searched for the power to save her, and he wouldn't have sold his soul to Palpatine in a vain attempt to do so. Because even in a world as technologically advanced, like a few inches of impermeable rubber, that make the world go round.