Star Wars: Excessive Use of the Force

[Thurston Howell IV]

I originally was going to post this in response to a thread on "Favorite Movies," but I think it might be of more general interest.

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I *really* don't mean to be negative or piss on your favorite movie, but I thought I'd share this review of Star Wars by Jonathan Rosenbaum. When it was re-released a few years back, I was interested in what Rosenbaum's review would be (he's my favorite movie reviewer). The "Special Edition" was really being hyped, but I hadn't spent much time thinking about the movie, which I had seen about 15 years before. Imagine my surprise when I opened the paper and saw a rating of "worthless!" After reading the review, I came to agree with him.

"But you'll have to admit," I can hear some Star Wars fans insisting, "it's beautifully put together." In 1944 George Orwell wrote, "The first thing we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way it should be possible to say, 'This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman.' Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being."

Now let me be fair. Star Wars may be a wall, but it doesn't surround a concentration camp. It surrounds a kind of moviemaking and a kind of humanity that it has been supplanting and making irrelevant (and milking) for the past 20 years. The success of this movie convinced studio heads that movies should be made to sell merchandise (the major point of Mel Brooks's underrated lampoon Spaceballs), that antisocial ten-year-old boys are the viewers to target, and that anyone who thinks otherwise about movies can take a hike.

The entire review:
http://www.chireader.com/movies/archives/0197/01317.html

[Poor Richard Lex]

1. Use the Schwarz!

couldn't resist