Okay, well. So the site's back up with archives
fully up-to-date for the first time ever, and my feet are currently complaining
about yesterday's eight-plus hour yomp around London taking pictures of weird-asschurches
and otherassortedlocallandmarks.
So given my stated aims for this week, two outa three ain't bad. As the Walrus Of
Rawk has been known
to opine.
(By the way - you can't really see it in the little, ultra-compressed picture linked
above, but built into the imposing gothic facia of the church of St. Mary Woolnoth
(that's the second picture, the one with the weird, truncated mini-towers) is a
branch of Starbuck's. This tickled me, for reasons hard to fully explain.)
I'm still aiming for the three-fer and am going to have a crack at getting the Cardinals
story finished off tomorrow, but in the meantime I hope you'll forgive me digressing
a bit.
Alright, a lot.
Stream-of-consciousness capsule review of Revenge
Of The Sith: "Starts great, oh my God, ends great."
Folks, here's the difference between the Holy Trilogy and the prequels in a nutshell.
Early in Star Wars, Darth Vader captures Princess Leia's ship. When she gives it
the haughty-ruler bit regarding his actions, Vader snaps back "You're not
on a mercy mission now, your highness!" It's a throwaway line, but it immediately
and cheaply sketches in some of Leia's - and by association, some of Vader's - character
for us.
If George Lucas had made Star Wars today, he'd have taken five minutes of screen-time
to show us Leia poncing about on a technically-impressive but soulless CGI planet
handing out aid parcels to technically-impressive but soulless CGI aliens.
Yes, I know cinema's a visual medium, yes I know the axiom is "don't tell us,
show us", but somewhere along the line Lucas seems to have lost his sense of
how to pace a movie, his ability to edit, his self-restraint and most seriously
of all, his ability to say a lot with a little. Compare Anakin and Amidala's endless
tedious overwrought fucking trysting to Han and Leia's relationship. Compare mito-fucking-chlorians
to "The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It's an energy field created
by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together."
Oh, which reminds me, something else's gone, too. The dialogue of the Star Wars
movies is often picked on as a weak spot - as Harrison Ford allegedly said on-set,
"You can write this shit George, but you sure can't say it." And there's
a grain of truth in that, but it's also true to say that all three of the original
films have more than their share of great, quotable lines that stick with you after
the credits have rolled. "If you strike me down, I will become more powerful
than you can possibly imagine." "Luke. I am your father."
"I don't know! Fly casual!" "Who is more fool, the fool
or the fool who follows him?" "You will never find a more wretched
hive of scum and villainy." "Aren't you a little short for a Stormtrooper?"
"I love you." / "I know." Etcetera. Etcetera.
And so on.
How many lines have stuck with me from the second trilogy? Two. And neither of them
for good reasons. There's Obi-Wan saying "Sometimes I think you'll be the
death of me, Anakin." from Send In The Clones, which surely couldn't EVER
have seemed like a good idea, could it?
And then there's - caution, spoiler upcoming - Obi-Wan and Anakin squaring off backflipping
from tiny island to tiny island in a flowing river of molten lava in Revenge Of
The Sith (remember what we were saying earlier about George having misplaced his
self-restraint somewhere? This scene is pretty much the poster-child for that assertion).
"Palpatine is evil!" shouts Obi-Wan.
"From my point of view, the Jedi are evil!" replies Ani.
Eh?
Yes, I realise that it's probably intended to be an echo of Obi-Wan telling Luke
that what he told him about his father "...was true, from a certain point
of view." But, see, placed here not only does that line clunk like a two-thousand
horsepower coal-fired clunking machine but also the qualification seems to undermine
pretty much everything we've been asked to buy regarding Anakin's turning to the
Dark Side. It implies that he realises that his opinion about the Jedi is just that,
a subjective point of view rather than an absolute fact and reduces him from a fundamentally
noble warrior who's been driven to a fall by fate and pride to a sulky teenager
who doesn't want to do what his parents have told him to.
Plus, y'know. It's sort've hard to buy the argument that "I'm not the bad guy,
YOU are" from a fella who killed a roomful of kids in cold blood about fifteen
minutes ago. I'm just sayin', is all.
There was stuff to like about Revenge Of The Sith, don't get me wrong. In the main,
these were the helter-skelter space-battle that opened the movie, and some of the
visual imagery in the last five minutes - I particularly liked the scene of Vader's
mask going on for the first time, and the shot of Luke's adoptive father silhouetted
against the Tatooine sky in a foreshadow / echo of the first time we see Luke in
Star Wars.
Here's the thing. Revenge Of The Sith is the best film of the prequel trilogy, and
it's not even close. But it's also the fourth-best Star Wars movie, and that's not
even close either.
Okay. Well, it's taken a while, but you will now feel the might of this fully armed
and operational battle-station.
The lesson we learn from this? Backups are important, kids. Early and often. Early
and often.
The old comments are a bit screwed-up, popping up attached to wrong entries more
often than not but they should be OK going forward, so I'm chalking it up in the
"One Of Those Things" column and trying to move on with my life as best
I can.
I've taken the opportunity to transfer over another month's worth of entries from
Site 1.0 to the archives, and I'm planning
on getting the rest sorted out in fairly quick order. Of course, I was also planning
on getting Watch The Birdie finished
before Madden 2005 hit the shops, and we all know how that worked out.
That being said, I'm aiming to achieve three things this week - a) get this site
up and running, b) get my trip into London to photograph the Hawksmoor
churches referenced in From
Hell planned and nailed down, and c) writeup the Cardinals' appearance in Superbowl
XL.We're only at Monday afternoon, and one task's already down, so the mood at the
moment is one of cautious optimism, Brian...
So anyway, yeah. Hello again, world, how've you been?
