Simple Tricks and Nonsense

Breaking News: Deep Throat Revealed!

Way back in February, I commented on rumors that the public would soon learn the identity of "Deep Throat," the legendary anonymous source that led investigative journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to the truth behind the Watergate scandal. Today the rumors came true.

According to an article in the new issue of Vanity Fair, Deep Throat is a man named Mark Felt, who was Deputy Director of the FBI at the time of the scandal. These days, Felt is a frail 91 years old and lives with his daughter in California. Woodward and Bernstein have issued a statement confirming the magazine's claims, and their former editor, Ben Bradlee -- who also knew Deep Throat's identity -- was quoted as saying, "The thing that stuns me is that the goddamn secret has lasted this long."

So it looks like another big historical mystery is solved. Kind of anticlimatic, really, and regrettable, too. Like I said the other day in regards to Blackbeard's lost pirate ship being found, it's more fun to have some things remain unknown.

One interesting note (well, interesting to people who live in Salt Lake, anyhow): the local TV news says that Felt ran the Salt Lake office of the FBI for two years in the 1950s. Strange how often these big stories have some kind of Utah connection. Sometimes I think my home state truly is the nexus of the universe... and that scares me on many, many levels.

Friday Afternoon Reading

If you're still hanging around the computer on this beautiful, sunny, pre-MemDayWeekend afternoon, you're more than likely looking out the window and longing for anything other than work to occupy your attention. Allow me to help by tossing out a few links I've been meaning to post for a while...

First up, sadly, is a gaggle of obituaries and related materials for three celebrities whose names may not mean anything to you but who you'll most likely recognize once you start reading.

The first of these is actor and impressionist Frank Gorshin, best known for playing The Riddler on the campy old Batman series. In my mind, however, he'll always be black-on-the-right-side Bele in the classic Trek episode "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield." That's the one that serves up a heavy-handed (but effective) allegory about the stupidity of racism, in this case involving a species whose skin tones resemble a high-quality pair of spectator shoes, i.e., black-and-white shoe polish. The "superior" race among these people believe themselves better because their black is on the right side, while the underclass types sport their black shoe polish on the left. It sounds pretty silly, but that was the point, and the episode's conclusion -- when Bele and his quarry Lokai return to their homeworld to find everyone dead from race-inspired civil war and they still can't put aside their pointless hatred for each other -- is chilling, even now, far removed from the turbulent 1960s.

I missed a chance to meet Gorshin a few years ago because I was too cheap to pay his requested $25 for an autograph. In retrospect, I wish I'd just bit the bullet and reached for my wallet. He died on May 17 at the age of 72, from a combination of lung cancer, emphysema, and pneumonia (they ought to be an adequate anti-smoking message for today, don't you think?). The L.A. Times ran a good obit for him, and I also found a nice tribute here.

Moving along, it may surprise some of you to learn that I am a fan of The Andy Griffith Show, the old black-and-white '60s sitcom about a small-town sheriff and the assorted loonies he calls friends and neighbors. The show is gentle and sweet-natured, very unlike modern comedy in a lot of ways, and not even especially funny to modern eyes. But my hometown wasn't so different from the show's fictional setting of Mayberry when I was growing up, and I enjoy the reminder of how things used to be. I also like the show's characters, who I would argue are among the best-defined ever seen on a television comedy. One of the most memorable of these characters was a goofball hillbilly named Ernest T. Bass, a lovelorn eccentric who had a thing for chucking rocks through plate-glass windows. Ernest appeared in only five episodes of a show that ran (I believe) nine seasons, but he made a deep impression... deep enough that he even has his own Website.

Howard Morris, the gifted comic actor who played Ernest, died on May 21 at the age of 85. You can find a detailed obituary here, and here is a nice tribute from a North Carolina newspaper columnist. (Mayberry is supposedly in North Carolina, not far from Raleigh.)

Finally, Thurl Ravenscroft, a brilliant voiceover artist you hear every time Tony the Tiger tells you how great Frosted Flakes are, passed away on the 22nd. He was 91. "They're Greaaaatt!" may have been his signature piece, but he did a lot of other things that Baby Boomers and we older Gen-Xers are sure to recognize, too. For example, he sang "You're a Mean One" in the animated classic How the Grinch Stole Christmas and his voice is heard all over Disneyland, notably in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride (my personal all-time favorite Disney attraction, even before the movie). Here is his L.A. Times obit.

As usual, Mark Evanier, who lives and breathes 1960s animation, television, and comedy, has made some nice comments on all three of these men. He shares personal memories on Gorshin here and here; he discusses Ravenscroft (isn't that an awesome name?) here; and he talkes about Morris here and here. He also corrects something the official obits of Morris get wrong in this entry.

As I mentioned above, Pirates of the Caribbean is my favorite Disney ride. Perhaps because of childhood experiences with that ride, real historical pirates are also one of my myriad interests, so I was very intrigued to learn that researchers are salvaging Blackbeard's ship, the Queen Anne's Revenge. At least, they think it's the QAR, which the notorious Blackbeard (who, according to legend, wove burning fuses through his impressive facial hair to give himself a more fearsome appearance) supposedly ran aground off the coast of North Carolina in 1718, shortly before his capture and execution. In a way, I almost think it's sad that technology has advanced to the point where we can actually find all these legendary shipwrecks. Somehow it's much more interesting to have them remain missing, don't you think?

If looking into the sea doesn't interest you, how about a ride into orbit? Diet 7-UP is holding a promotional contest wherein the lucky grand prize winner will receive a ticket good for one free suborbital flight on a not-yet-built spacecraft similar to the successful SpaceShipOne. The most likely candidate for fulfilling the ticket is Virgin Galactic, the only company so far that has licensed the SpaceShipOne technology. If no one is able to take the winner for the ride by 2009, the ticket is redeemable for cash. Personally, I'd rather get my ride...

And lastly for today, remember that Gilligan's Island episode where the castaways run into a Japanese soldier who's been marooned for years and doesn't realize World War II is over? Well, it seems we have a real-life case version of that scenario in the Phillipines, where officials are looking into reports that two elderly men are Japanese soldiers left behind in the jungle after the war. It is believed, however, that these guys are well aware that their war did, in fact, end a long time ago.

Apparently, however, there was a guy found back in 1974 who didn't know and initially refused to surrender. It's a funny old world sometimes...

Getting Back Down to Earth, and Worrying About Friends

While I've had my head off in the galaxy far, far away, a couple of real-life dramas have developed much closer to home.

First of all, I've recently learned that a good friend from my high school and college years who is now in the military has been posted to Iraq. He'll be serving as an operations officer at a supply depot somewhere north of Baghdad, which sounds to my admittedly non-military ear like a prime target for insurgent attacks. Needless to say, I am worried for my friend's safety, and I'm having a hard time imagining that the gentle boy with whom I used to talk about Star Trek and Dr. Who is now walking around a desert war-zone in a suit of body armor. Especially since he's actually in the Navy and has spent most of the last fifteen years on nuclear submarines a mile underwater. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me that he'd end up on the ground somewhere, but apparently the Joint Chiefs operate by a logic I don't understand.

For the record, I am politically opposed to the war for reasons I don't wish to go into right now. But that doesn't stop me from hoping for the best possible outcome over there and that all the men and women who are far from home will soon be back with their friends and families, alive and intact.

My best wishes also go out to another old friend, a wonderful woman who has spent years trying to make a difficult relationship work and who has now decided that it's time for her and her daughter to find a better way to live. I haven't heard from her in a while, and I want to let her know, if she's reading this, that I hope she's okay.

The Best Laid Plans of Wookiees and Men

So are we all sick of talking about Star Wars yet? I'm not, myself -- I have a whole list of possible SW-themed entries that I wanted to write before Opening Day and didn't get around to -- but I can see how the topic may be getting a little old for my three loyal readers. Therefore I'm going to move on to other subjects, for your sakes. Because that's the kind of guy I am. I care. Well, and also because I worry that I'm driving everyone away with my monomaniacal fanboyism.

Anyhow, I'm going to let Star Wars rest for a bit (although I may still work up some of those ideas I mentioned and post them from time to time). I'll be back later today with my first post-Sith, non-Star Warsy entry. Also, I'm thinking about making a few changes to the site. Nothing major, just a couple of things to freshen the place up, so be watching for those in the next few days/weeks. I may even add some items to my long-neglected photo gallery...

Film Review: Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

[Ed. note: Sorry it's taken me so long to post my thoughts on ROTS, but like I said in a comment for an earlier entry, this movie is a big deal for me and it's taken a while to absorb and process it. Given that it's been out for a week and the box office returns for last weekend were flat-out astounding, I'm going to assume that half the planet's population has already seen it. If, however, you are one of the handful of folks who didn't come down with "Jedi flu" last week, be warned that this entry contains more spoilers than my usual movie reviews. Sorry for the inconvenience, but it can't be helped in this particular case.]

I finally got to see my long-imagined lava-pit duel as well as the planet of the Wookiees (although the latter amounted to little more than a teasing glimpse). By themselves, these bits of fanboy wish fulfilment would probably be enough to earn Revenge of the Sith my personal thumbs-up. But as it turns out, the sixth and final Star Wars movie gave me a lot of other reasons to like it, too. It was, in fact, everything I was hoping for, a redemptive finish to the generally lackluster prequel trilogy and a successful, plausible bridge into the "next generation story" told in the original trilogy.

That's not to say that Sith was a perfect movie, or even a perfect Star Wars movie. But I thought it was a surprisingly good movie, and, for me at least, a completely satisfying one.

Before I elaborate on that, however, let's be clear about something: I'm not the most objective viewer when it comes to movies bearing the Star Wars label. My affection for George Lucas' fictional universe is so deeply rooted that anything short of an Ed Wood-style debacle is going to get at least a "not bad" from me. That means that, yes, I basically liked even Episodes I and II. They weren't great movies, they weren't the movies I would've made, and they both could've benefited enormously from a couple more revisions to their respective screenplays, but when you get right down to it, I enjoyed them. I know a lot of other people out there did not. Sorry for your pain. But I did, so there.

What I'm trying to say with this little statement of defiance is that I approached Revenge of the Sith with a predisposition toward liking it. I wanted it to work for me, and it did. Curiously, however, the parts of the film that worked best for me are the elements for which George Lucas is most often criticized: the quiet, dialogue-driven, character-based scenes. I was actually somewhat bored by the large-scale combat scenes that are being pushed so heavily in the film's advertising.

Take, for example, the film's opening sequence, a titanic space battle in the skies over the Galactic Republic's capitol world, Coruscant. It's a space-opera smackdown like something out of a Patrick O'Brian novel, only with Star Destroyers instead of sailing ships. The image of entire fleets of huge spacecraft exchanging broadside laser-salvos has long been a staple of literary space fantasy, but has never been fully realized on the screen. I've always wanted to see something like this in a movie, and it should've been amazing. But it wasn't. It was... tiresome. There was just too damn much going on in the frame -- big ships, small ships, debris, explosions, laserfire, missiles, droids, all flashing past the camera at just-barely-comprehensible speeds. I'm probably showing my age with this complaint, but I kept thinking this all might have been cool and wonderful if only we viewers could actually look at some of it. Honestly, what is the point of creating all this amazing imagery if it zips by so quickly that no one can appreciate it?

(I recall an interview George Lucas gave years ago in which he said he was interested in testing the limits of what humans could perceive in the cinematic medium; that is, he wanted to see how much information he could pile into a scene and how quickly he could deliver that information, and still have the viewer make sense of it. I think he has his answer now... and I also suspect he's as bored with it as I was.)

As the opening sequence continues, our heroes, Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi, board an enemy ship in search of the kidnapped Chancellor Palpatine. There, Anakin must confront the evil Count Dooku in a scene that bears some nifty parallels to the end of Return of the Jedi, but this moment is somewhat derailed because it feels as rushed as the battle outside the ship. It's as if GL was thinking, "Okay, I've got to tie up the loose end of Dooku, check; I've got to plant the seeds of Anakin's destruction, check; and now those things are out of the way, we've got to get back into the big spectacular spacey stuff and get that over with, too. Check, check, check." The sequence ends with Anakin somehow piloting a fragment of a destroyed space cruiser into a survivable crash landing... despite the fact that the engines were in the ship's other half, the half that we just saw blow up.

At this point of the film, I was worried. We were 26 minutes into the last Star Wars movie ever and so far I just didn't care about any of it. It was like watching a demo for the latest Playstation game from LucasArts. I started preparing myself for a wrenching disappointment...

And then something interesting happened. In the very next scene after the crash, the pace downshifted, and the film's tone began taking on a melancholy quality. There was a quiet moment of dialogue between Anakin and Obi-Wan, and it felt... real. There was warmth and humor between them, a genuine sense that these two men actually were comrades, friends, even brothers. I found myself thinking that I really liked these two characters. And suddenly I was hooked.

From there, the movie progressed smoothly, with a confidence and a sense of inertia that the first two prequels lacked. (My sense is that everything that follows the opening battle is the actual backstory that George created thirty years ago, and that everything that precedes it -- including the first two prequel movies -- was mostly filler to tide us over until the meat was served.) The plot this time around was straightforward, not at all muddled or forced as The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones often felt. There were few surprises -- if you're a Star Wars fan, you pretty much know exactly how this story is going to run -- but George managed to make the details of Anakin's fall from grace interesting, and, by the time the young Jedi makes his fateful decision, I was fully invested in the story. As I admitted the other day, I spent the last hour of this movie choking back sobs.

Yes, it's true, Revenge of the Sith made me cry like a little kid with a skinned knee. As silly as it may sound in our post-ironic, hipper-than-thou world where movie sentimentality of any kind is generally frowned upon, I so completely bought into this film that not even knowing how it all must end could save me from feeling absolutely heartbroken when it all came down. Actually, now that I think about it, it's possible that knowing where the film was headed was exactly why it had such power over me -- I've long felt that the prequels only work if you're familiar with the original trilogy, and that someone who's never seen any of these movies can't start with Episode I and view them in order, because it just wouldn't be effective. In any event, seeing with my own eyes what crazy old Ben Kenobi described in a handful of sentences in a movie I saw when I was seven was deeply moving for me.

I cried more in this film than I remember doing in any other movie I've ever seen, including the last film that really moved me in this way, The Return of the King. I cried when Anakin turned to evil, and I cried that he did so for what he thought was the right reason. I cried when uber-cool Mace Windu was defeated, and when the rest of the Jedi were slaughtered, and when wise, lovable old Yoda took upon himself the blame for everything that had happened. ("Failed, I have.") I cried when Anakin cold-bloodedly cut down Nute Gunray, the pathetically craven leader of the Trade Federation who has been a constant throughout the prequels. And of course I cried when Anakin turned on his beloved Padme, followed by his friend and mentor Obi-Wan, and then I cried some more when Obi-Wan won the fight and Anakin met his final destiny.

I even cried over moments of this film that weren't especially tragic, times in which I just plain loved these characters: when Anakin and Obi-Wan say goodbye before departing on their respective missions, the last time they would part as friends; when Yoda tries to talk Obi-Wan out of reviewing the Jedi Temple's security tapes, to spare him the pain of what they both knew he would see; when Chewbacca and Yoda share a moment of screentime, an admittedly fanboyish moment that didn't need to be there, but which worked for me anyhow; when Luke and Leia take their first breaths; and, of course, over the film's closing scene, when Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru look out into the familiar double-sunset of Tatooine, an obvious but nevertheless beautiful metaphor for "a new hope."

Hell, I even cried when that idiot Jar-Jar and the slobbery ruler of the Gungans appear at Padme's funeral, because it was just so damn appropriate.

Now, as I said earlier, ROTS has its problems. I agree, for example, with those who say the hotshot Jedi were too easily killed, by stormtroopers no less. (I suspect that this sequence was so perfunctory because of time constraints in an already-long movie. Sith probably could've been done as a four-hour mini-series; indeed, maybe all the prequels should've been done for TV, where they would've had the space to really explore all the details that got glossed over. You could also argue that the Jedi had grown arrogant and couldn't conceive of their own troops as a threat, an idea that's somewhat supported by dialogue in Attack of the Clones.)

I also think the droids were badly used by this script, as they have been throughout the prequels. Artoo fares a little better than Threepio, who has no purpose in these stories at all, but both of them are out of character, extraneous to the action, and not very funny in their little bits of business. Lucas always said in the old days that the droids were the true heroes of the entire saga and would figure prominently in any Star Wars movie, but that's not how it turned out, and I am disappointed by that.

As I've already complained, the space battle over Coruscant and the big combat scenes on Utapau and Kashyyk were hyperkinetic messes. The Emperor's shuttle seems to cover the distance from Coruscant, at the center of the Galaxy, to Mustafar on the Outer Rim, in about a minute and a half, a little far-fetched even by the standards of this universe. And when did battle droids acquire personalities?

In addition, this movie's guest-star bad-guy, General Grievous, doesn't amount to much -- he's basically just a macguffin to get Obi-Wan off Coruscant while Anakin turns dark, and he's also one more in a long line of Star Wars villains who are little more than a cool-looking costume. (Boba Fett and Darth Maul, anyone? Wouldn't it have been much cooler if Maul had been fleshed out as an actual character and been an on-going troublemaker throughout the prequel trilogy instead of creating new Sith Lords and new secondary bad guys in every film? Yeah, I thought so, too.) And my viewing companion Anne was absolutely correct when she suggested that Anakin's attack on the younglings would've been more effective if we'd seen him interacting with them earlier, teaching or playing with them like an older-brother figure.

Those quibbles aside, however, I am surprised by how few complaints I really have with Sith. For the first time in a very long time, I feel like the good in a Star Wars movie outweighs the bad. Visually, this one looks the best of all three prequels -- either I'm just getting used to it, or all that computer-generated crap finally looks real. It didn't bother me that Padme and Anakin didn't know she was carrying twins (although I'll concede it could've been better handled somehow) and her death from a broken heart, while unrealistic as hell, didn't trouble me either. It's a common motif in fairy tales, and we have to remember that Star Wars is, at its core, a fairy tale. (Although, again, I'll concede it probably would've been better to have her go off to Alderaan with Bail Organa so as to better match Leia's recollections in Return of the Jedi. As it is now, Leia must have one amazing brain to remember her mother from a thirty-second glimpse right after being born.)

I flat-out disagree with those critics who are still carping on about lousy dialogue and poor acting, because I just don't see it that way. I've never thought the acting in these films was all that bad, to be honest. (Well, Captain Panaka in Episode I makes me cringe, but I'm talking about the leads here.) The characters do speak in a fairly flat, formalistic way, but I suspect that was deliberate, either because Lucas was trying to say something about the culture of the Republic "before the Dark Times" -- i.e., it was a more formal time when people behaved in a more buttoned-up, "medieval" fashion -- or because he wanted these films to reflect an old-fashioned style of filmmaking. People today don't understand that our modern sense of realism hasn't always been the dominant mode of acting in films; by our current standards, a lot of older movie performances come across as fairly stiff, too. In any event, I don't think it's fair to criticize this prequel on the acting front. Hayden Christiansen does just fine as Anakin Skywalker, Ewan MacGregor has always rocked as Obi-Wan, and Ian McDiarmid is downright amazing as Palpatine. Seriously, I think McDiarmid deserves an Oscar nom for this one, although it will never happen. He slides effortlessly from helpless and kindly old Palpy to cunning politician to seductive Mephistopholes figure and finally to the familiar, scary Emperor we remember from Jedi, often within a single speech. The scene between him and Anakin in the operahouse, when Palpatine reveals the history of the Sith, is freakin' brilliant. I never really cared for the Emperor as a character before, but McDiarmid's work in the prequels has been compelling.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I liked this movie because it cleared up all the loose ends and made the prequels feel like an organic part of the original Star Wars trilogy. My biggest complaint with Episodes I and II has never been Jar-Jar or seeing Anakin as a little kid or any of the things most people hate about them. What has bothered me is that they didn't feel right, that they just didn't seem to be chapters of the same story. Now they do. Partly this is accomplished through a number of in-jokes and references to the original films -- the appearance of the Tantive IV, for example, the royal Alderaan spacecraft that Princess Leia uses, or Chewbacca's "Tarzan yell," which is a direct nod to a gag in Return of the Jedi. The Millenium Falcon even appears in the skies of Coruscant, if your eyes are quick enough to catch it. But Sith also closes the gap between the new and old films by addressing pretty much all everything we haven't understood up 'til now -- the mystery of Anakin's virgin birth, what exactly Palpatine has been up to with all his skulldudgery, why Yoda and Obi-Wan disappear when they die, how Luke and Leia came to be raised separately, and, of course, why Threepio never seems to have a clue in the original films about what's going on. Oh, there are still a few small details left dangling -- why would Luke have kept his family name "Skywalker" when Leia did not, for example -- but I am satisfied with pretty much all of it.

I'm also intrigued by the way Sith deepens the moral scheme of the Star Wars universe and causes us to reinterpret some of what we took for granted. Anakin turns to the Dark Side for what appears to be a noble reason -- to save the lives of those he loves. He suggests to Obi-Wan at one point that good and evil are fluid concepts that vary depending on one's point of view (which reinforces something Ben will tell Luke in ROTJ). Also, Anakin makes Padme the same offer that he later makes to his son -- together we can end the conflict and rule together -- which I've always taken as a ruse, but now think is a sign that Anakin wants family connections, even as he uses and exploits them for power. That indicates to me that he's lonely, and that perhaps is the greatest price for going to the Dark Side. Even Palpatine displays some degree of tenderness and compassion when he comes upon the ruined body of his apprentice; he genuinely cares for his Darth Vader, even as he uses him. Fascinating, and not at all how we've interpreted their relationship all these years.

I've gone on much too long at this point and probably have very few readers who've stuck it out this far, but as you can see if you are still here, I'm very enthusiastic about Revenge of the Sith. I've said before that I would've been perfectly content if George Lucas had never made any new SW films beyond the original three. I still feel that way, and I also remain doubtful that the prequels will be as well remembered in fifty years as the original trilogy. But in the end, the prequels are here, and I think the last of them is remarkable. It has restored my faith in my boyhood hero, George Lucas, and allowed me to finally accept six very different movies as parts of the same story. As I said way back at the beginning of this entry, I am satisfied.

Your mileage may vary.

The Circle Is Now Complete

I just got home from the theater. It's late, and I've got a heavy day of work tomorrow, so any kind of detailed review will have to wait. But I will say this much:

Twenty-two years ago, I cried at the death of Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi.

Tonight, I cried at his birth in Revenge of the Sith.

This movie is everything I hoped for, and probably not at all what most of the people going to see it are expecting. It's not heroic summertime derring-do, as all the other Star Wars films have been. This one is nothing short of a Greek tragedy.

As far as I'm concerned, Uncle George has redeemed himself, at least as far as the prequel trilogy goes. As for the Not-So-Special Editions of the original trilogy, well, that's another case entirely...

Time to Line Up Myself

Just a quick note to let you all know I'm heading off the theater to line up for my 8 PM screening... because advance tickets may guarantee a seat, but they don't guarantee a good one!

See you all on the other side of the galaxy!

Almost There... Almost There...

A little under one hour from now, the long wait will be over and the die-hard fans will walk into the first 12:01 AM screenings of the last Star Wars movie ever. And then I'll do the same eighteen hours after that.

I have to admit that my feelings at this moment are bittersweet. In a way, it's like the last day of high school. I'm eagerly looking forward to signing yearbooks, accepting my diploma, and having the time of my life at the all-night graduation party, but I'm also sad because I've realized that a really big chapter of my life is coming to an end. As the Emperor once said to Luke Skywalker -- or will say, depending on how you look at it -- "Only now, at the end, do you understand."

What I understand is this: the whole Star Wars saga, all six episodes, and all the fanboy craziness that goes along with it, will be finished after this weekend. There will always be DVDs, of course, and tie-in merchandising and conventions and our memories. According to Uncle George's recent statements, there will be a new cartoon show and a live-action TV series set in the SW universe. But the communal experience of Star Wars as a series of movies seen with a thousand strangers in a big, dark theater -- the experience that truly defines the Star Wars phenomenon -- will be done. There will never again be a movie phenomenon like it. Not on the same scale, not in the same way. Not one that will span generations and decades, as Star Wars did. Something special and magical really is winding down.

Driving home from work tonight, I passed the Century 16 movie theater in Salt Lake. It's a big multiplex on the corner of two major cross-streets. There was a line of people wrapped around the building, from the box office all the way to the rear parking lot. I had no way of telling how long they'd been waiting. Maybe they'd been there since before the sun set; maybe they'd only recently queued up. But they didn't seem to be impatient or grumbly, as people waiting for something to happen so often are. On the contrary, everyone I observed in that line while my car idled at a red light was happy.

There were people dressed as Jedi and Sith, and even one lone Tusken Raider. There were kids whacking away at each other with toy lightsabers and grown-ups brandishing plastic blasters. There were people playing board games, and talking to people they've just met, and telling stories and laughing. There were stereotypical fans, the sad, overweight, socially awkward slobs who for once felt as if they belong. There were closet fans who looked perfectly ordinary and un-slob-like. And there were families of fans, parents my age who saw the original trilogy as children and who are now sharing the new trilogy with their children. The anticipation of these people in line was palpable. Like the Force, it was a genuine, organic energy generated by all those living beings, and directed toward the one thing they all have in common: the desire to see one particular movie. That energy made me smile. It made me reluctant to drive away when the light finally turned green.

And it made me wish that this weekend wouldn't pass as quickly as I know that it will. Because I don't foresee another film series coming along that will produce this kind of excitement. At least not for people my age. Maybe the children of the early 21st Century will experience something similar before they grow up. But for us Gen-Xers, it ends tomorrow and will likely not come again. Not for us. And that thought makes me feel very old.

We've been here before, of course. We thought the Star Wars saga was over with once before, back in 1983. And that's something else I've come to understand: that whatever their flaws and disappointments, the prequels have been a tremendous gift to us thirtysomethings, because they've allowed us to re-experience something we thought we'd closed the book on twenty-two years ago. Maybe the recent episodes of the saga don't deserve the excitement we older fan-types have heaped upon them. Maybe our anticipation is entirely artificial, whipped up by skilled marketing flacks and our own overheated childhood memories. Maybe people like me are so eager to feel like kids again, if only for a brief time, that we're acting like Pavlov's famous dogs, salivating to the sound of a badly tuned bell. But the excitement is there, and it is real. I felt it in '99 and I felt it again in '02 and I'll be feeling it tomorrow night when the lights go down and the Twentieth Century Fox logo appears.

I'll probably have my complaints with Revenge of the Sith. I'll probably start picking it apart within hours (if not minutes) of seeing it. I know a lot of other people will hate it. But I am confident that for the two hours and forty minutes the film will take to unspool, I will be a wide-eyed little boy of seven again, sitting in a giant room filled with a bunch of other grown-up children.

We owe George Lucas our thanks for that much, at least.

My First Experience with "Spoilers"

It was the springtime of 1980, and the future was bearing down on me like a runaway bantha.

I was ten, the school year was winding down, and very soon the fifth grade would be behind me. So would elementary school. Come fall, I'd be spending my days in that great, fog-shrouded unknown called middle school. I'd been hearing rumors about what I could expect when I got there, and frankly I wasn't looking forward to it. No one could tell me the point of changing classrooms and teachers multiple times during the day. There were stories about massive amounts of homework. Some said they held activities where they made you dance with girls. (I was never one of those stereotypical boys who disliked girls on principle, but the thought of dancing filled me with terror.) Then there was the transportation issue. My elementary school was within a stone's-throw of my house, and I'd always walked to and from home; now I'd have to take the bus, one of those big, rattling, smelly yellow things that you always had to worry about missing. And what was this nonsense about having to take a shower... with other boys... at school? Revolting!

Thankfully, though, I had things to distract me from my middle-school anxieties. There was a whole three months of summer vacation coming up, and with them was the promise of all the bike-riding, Slurpee-swilling, and treehouse comic-book reading I could stand. My parents were planning to take me and my cousin Stacey on a camping trip to the Grand Canyon as soon as school was over. And, oh yeah, there was a new Star Wars movie about to premiere.

I could hardly wait.

I didn't know much about this new film, only what had been revealed in a "special sneak preview" that had played with the re-release of the first Star Wars the previous summer. I could confirm that the new film took place somewhere cold because there was snow and Han Solo was wearing a coat in the preview, and I was also absolutely certain that The Empire Strikes Back wasn't going to be anything like the would-be sequel novel Splinter of the Mind's Eye, a debate that still raged among my friends even at that late date. But everything else about the movie was a mystery to me.

It hadn't been easy to keep it all a secret. The comic book adaptation was out by then, and the novelization, too. There were copies of them already in my house, and I ached to sit down and lose myself in their pages, to find out everything that was going to happen to my heroes next. But I had so far resisted the temptation, admittedly with a lot of help from my mom. She was keeping the books for me in her dresser, where I couldn't get to them. She'd sat down when she had first bought them for me and explained how knowing what was going to happen in a movie before I ever set foot in the theater could affect my reactions. Reading those books, she said, could "ruin" the movie experience for me. I thought I understood, and agreed that it would be best to go into the theater fresh, or "unspoiled," as modern-day fanboys say.

Unfortunately, not all of my schoolmates understood the corrosive effect of what we now call "spoilers," i.e., plot details that become public before the movie opens. There was one kid a year or two younger than myself who had heard something about Empire, something shocking and mind-blowing, something that would completely change everything. And he desperately wanted me to know about it, too.

This kid, who I'll call Bob so as to spare him any embarassment in case he's reading, came running up to me one day shortly before school ended for the summer and said he had to tell me something. I had a hunch of what it was about, so I said, "No way. I don't to ruin the movie for myself." Bob insisted that it was really important, and again I told him no.

He kept pressing the issue, though. He was terribly excited, practically jumping up and down with the eagerness to unburden himself, and it was obvious he was going to just blurt it out if I didn't get away from him. I couldn't let weeks of monastic self-denial go down the garbage chute, so I started walking. But Bob followed me, trying to convince me I needed to hear this. I told him I didn't want to hear it and started walking faster. I headed for the stairs, thinking I could maybe get down them and out the front door before he could spill the beans.

The main staircase of my old elementary school was a wonderful thing, a broad, double flight of steps with a wooden bannister faded and worn smooth from years of kids sliding down it. Between the two flights was a spacious landing and a huge, arched window that overlooked the school's front lawn. The window was segmented into several semi-circular rows of curved panes. It reminded me of the Millenium Falcon's cockpit canopy. I suppose it is appropriate, then, that this was the spot where Bob could no longer hold his tongue.

I was halfway down the stairs, on the landing beside the window. I glanced up to see if he was following me. He was still standing on the top floor, his hands on the railing that looked down into the stairwell. We made eye contact and he sort of lunged toward me, as if he were going to vault over the railing and drop down beside me. Instead, he shouted out the words I'd been trying so desperately not to hear:

"Darth Vader is Luke's father!"

A lot of time has passed since that day, and my memory has no doubt been embellished by imagination. But as I recall, my reaction to this news wasn't much different than Luke Skywalker's. Except I had no bottomless shaft to leap into, only one measly flight of stairs.

Bob, perhaps seeing that he'd mortally wounded me and it would be best to leave me alone, or maybe having simply fulfilled his evil mission, turned and strode away without another word.

A few days later, I saw The Empire Strikes Back for the first time.

It was everything I'd been hoping for, an exciting return to the galaxy far, far way, filled with new environments, new creatures, and new spectacles unlike anything I'd seen on a movie screen before. I'd convinced myself that Bob was full of crap, that he'd heard a false rumor like all those people who believed that Splinter of the Mind's Eye was going to be the next SW movie. Vader couldn't be Luke's father. It was a silly thought; they didn't even share the same last name. And who knew what was under that mask? Vader probably wasn't even a human being, I thought...

Except, as everybody knows, Bob was right. I was literally on the edge of my seat when the climactic scene approached. Luke was defeated, his weapon gone and his hand with it. Vader was going to kill him. But then the icon of ultimate evil lowered his weapon and said... exactly what Bob had said that afternoon at school.

That's when I fully understood what my mother had been trying to tell me about the concept we now call spoilers. I wanted to cry because this big, earth-shattering revelation, this thing that should've hit me like a blow to the stomach, wasn't a surprise at all. It was just another line of dialogue. I still loved the movie, but I could only try to imagine what it could've been if I hadn't known.

I wanted to find Bob that day and punch him in the stomach. But I never did. Because the sad truth is, he thought he was doing me a favor.

Some favor.

The Dark Side of Marketing Clouds Everything

Up until a couple days ago, I was thinking that the hype machine had been curiously subdued on the matter of Revenge of the Sith. I just wasn't seeing the kind of overheated, artificial hysteria that preceded The Phantom Menace back in '99 -- all the fast-food tie-ins, the TV commercials, the billboards, the collectible Pepsi cans, the flood of new toys. That was overkill, even for someone like me, a compulsive collector who loves a good graphic design that incorporates beloved characters and logos.

I thought maybe we were getting a different approach with Sith, something more organic and natural, based on word-of-mouth like the buzz that fueled the success of the original Star Wars in 1977. I thought perhaps the bean-counters had realized that they really didn't need to advertise this one much, aside from the usual movie trailers, because everyone already knew it was coming.

Apparently I just wasn't paying attention.

While watching TV this morning, I've seen five separate ads using Star Wars characters to shill for five different products. Maybe these have been airing for a while and I've missed them somehow. Maybe they just started airing as part of the final push leading into Thursday's Big Event. I don't know, so apologies if this stuff is old news for you. But it's all new to me. The ads themselves range from the sublime to the utterly lame.

The best of them is the Diet Pepsi spot in which Yoda snakes a cheeseburger and fries from some dude in a diner. This one is utterly inspired, and genuinely funny. It's brilliant because it plays off the public's general conception of the Yoda character as a wise old Zen master who is above worldly concerns and desires, like, say, the craving for a big greasy plate of french fries. This ad produced genuine laughter from me, a rare thing.

The Dark Side M&Ms ad, on the other hand, garnered only a chuckle. Yeah, it's kind of satisfying to see that obnoxious red M&M-guy get a Force-choking, but the thing about Vader choking people who displease him... well, it's kind of obvious, isn't it? Almost a cliche, actually. The Yoda ad works because it surprises us, whereas this is... expected. Keep trying, guys.

Next up was a Cingular ad featuring Chewbacca in a recording studio doing take after identical take to create the perfect Star Wars cell-phone ring. I thought this one was just plain dumb, given that Chewie actually makes a wide range of sounds throughout the original trilogy. (Oddly enough, Chewie also appeared on Live with Regis and What's-her-name this morning to plug his new movie; the interview was conducted with subtitles, naturally.)

I also didn't think much of an ad in which Vader shows up on a guy's doorstep after he wins a lottery or something (I was so unimpressed I didn't even catch what the ad was for) and tries to convince the dude that he needs to share his winnings. When "I am your father," doesn't sway the lucky winner, Vader tries "I am your uncle!" He gets a door slammed in his face for his troubles. So why didn't I like this one? Well, this is going to sound very Comic Book Guy-ish (like the thing about Chewie didn't, I know), but the "I am your father!" scene in Empire is arguably the most powerful moment in the entire six-part saga, and I don't like it being used as a punchline. I don't like Vader being used as a punchline, actually; the character should be treated with more respect. Besides, anyone who slams a door in the face of a Sith Lord is just asking for it.

Finally, there's a Burger King ad running that gives me the creeps: Vader stands face-to-face with BK's disturbing new plastic-headed mascot and the two of them just... breathe. No dialogue, no action, just these two faceless beings breathing on each other. If this is supposed to be funny, I don't get it. The whole thing is an exercise in unbroken tension, and I keep waiting for the Burger King guy to start killing puppies or something. But then any ad involving the BK Regent tends to provoke that "danger" response from me. He's just so... wrong-looking. A textbook example of what cyberneticists call the "uncanny valley."

Hopefully, I can avoid seeing that one too many more times before Thursday...

The Last Voyage of the Starship Enterprise

As I've said before, I was never a fan of Enterprise, the fifth and most-likely final televised incarnation of the venerable Star Trek media franchise. I didn't hate it. It just wasn't my cup of "tea, earl grey, hot." I watched three or four episodes when it premiered, saw that it looked like more of the tired old same, and decided to spend my valuable TV-viewing time on other things. A couple of friends who stuck with it say I really missed out on something good, that the show picked up in subsequent years and that, as an old-school Trekkie, I would've liked the homage-heavy final season. Maybe they're right. But I'll never know, because I couldn't break through my indifference long enough to give the show a second chance.

Nevertheless, I was somewhat curious about the series finale that aired last Friday. Not curious enough to watch it, apparently, because I forgot it was on, but I have wanted to know how the Trek franchise was going to end after so many years. (Yes, I do believe it's over, regardless of what the misguided optimists say about a new Star Trek series debuting after a "rest period." It's a beautiful dream, you crazy kids, god love ya. If it happens, I owe all of you a Coke.) Luckily, there's plenty of commentary about the finale floating around the blogosphere today, so I've been able to get a pretty good sense of how it all went down, both pro and con.

On the less-than-impressed end of the spectrum, we've got Peter David, a writer who has dabbled in this particular universe on both a personal and professional level. (He's written a number of ST tie-in novels and comics, but he also identifies himself as a fan.) David thinks the uninspired finale, which focused more on guest star Johnathan Frakes (Commander Riker from ST:TNG) than the series regulars, was a sort of meta-comment on the Trek fan scene:

Basically, the last episode of "Star Trek" consists of a guy in a Starfleet outfit sitting around watching a rerun of "Star Trek," and even creating his own fanfic by writing himself into the story and making himself a wise, wonderfully intelligent individual who all the crewmembers unburden themselves to.

Meanwhile, James Lileks takes the contrary view -- as usual -- by defending what he thinks was a perfectly appropriate finale, despite the grumbling fans who feel betrayed by the producers' decision to make the end of Enterprise an accessory to a ten-year-old episode of The Next Generation:

[The finale] was essentially a holodeck story. But please. What else could we have had? ...There’s almost nothing else left to do. And so we saw the entirety of the Enterprise story as something that had become Distant History, a story you read in second grade. The ship was Old Ironsides -- interesting, inert, historical, a relic. That was a fun tour, let’s have lunch. It was a contrast between the tone of a standard episode (what happens now is incredibly important and the Federation hangs in the balance and any one of our heroes may be killed, despite the fact that they have signed a contract for the next season) and the cool regard of history, for whom these events are simply a matter of record. What Riker was worried about [in the finale's frame story] would be history in the same way, eventually. That’s the point. We think that Today is incredibly vital and pertinent; surely history will see it as we do, feel it as we do. Well, no. Not unless it’s a very bad day, and certainly not if it’s a nice one. Battles turn into paragraphs. Sunk ships are footnotes, if they’re lucky.

As for myself, I can't comment on a show I didn't see. I think if I had been a fan of Enterprise, I would be among those who are torqued off about the finale revolving around a character from another show. But I have to say that I found Lileks' point about history and our perceptions of it very compelling. It actually mirrors something I've been thinking about the last couple of weeks, namely the sobering realization that the things that have always been so important to me -- things like certain TV series, movies, music, even the evolving landscape around my home -- are not eternal, no matter how much I wish them so, and will not be appreciated in the future the way I have appreciated them. The fact is, there's a whole generation that has grown up with no memory of seeing Star Wars in a theater, or of watching the original Star Trek on TV, or, here locally, of playing in alfalfa fields and learning to drive on dirt roads. My frames of reference, the environment and technology and popular culture that shaped me, are increasingly out-of-date and irrelevant. I don't think that invalidates my continuing affection for the things I loved as a kid... but it does make it very difficult to explain to modern kids why these things matter.

Anyway, if you're at all interested in Star Trek -- and I can only assume that you are, if you've read this far -- I suggest you read Lileks' comments in their entirety. He reviews the entire history of the franchise and makes some more excellent points (like the fact that the writers and producers of all the various Trek spin-offs were generally incapable of creating a believable male-female relationship, although I disagree with him re: Worf and Jadzia). If you're not familiar with James, though, be warned that he can be curmudgeonly in his opinions. For example, he has little use for the type of hardcore fan that The Simpsons so brilliantly captures and satirizes in the form of the Comic Book Guy character. But he more than makes up for his burst of bad attitude with his concluding anecdote, a heartwarming experience he once had at the Smithsonian with James "Scotty" Doohan and the filming model of the original, '60s-era Starship Enterprise.

What Kind of Key Am I? What Kind of Question Is That?

It's been a wild day here at the Bennion Compound -- there's a storm approaching, and high winds have been causing havoc with the electricity all afternoon. The power lines across the street keep brushing together, which results in a cool sound-and-light show but also leaves me sitting in front of a dead monitor and feeling frustrated because I've just lost another half-finished blog entry. (I've had three attempts at an entry vanish into the ether today, thanks to that damned wind! Must... buy... a UPS!) Things seem to be quieting down now -- which means the rain should begin anytime -- so hopefully I can reconstruct my work from earlier without any further problems.

While I work on that little task, though, I thought I'd leave you with something to look at. I see that my LiveJournalling friend Jen has recently taken one of those weird on-line quizzes that purport to tell you which animal/character/intangible concept/inanimate object you would be if only you were an animal/character/intangible concept/inanimate object. I don't entirely see the point of these quizzes -- under what circumstances would I ever become an intangible concept or an inanimate object? -- but they're fun timekillers, and it's a fast way to come up with something to post. So, without further ado, here are my results to the question "What sort of key are you?":

You are a stone key, and you unlock old and magical
secrets. What you have to offer is powerful and
difficult for many to understand, but
invaluable to the few who can truly grasp it.
Give the things you have carefully and
wisely, because not everyone will use them for
good.


What sort of key are you and what do you unlock?
brought to you by Quizilla

Hope that provided you with some kind of insight into my character. If it did, would you mind explaining how? Not to mention, what that insight may have been? Thanks.

I'll be back with at least one more post later this evening, assuming the lights stay on...

Another Voice in the Dark

After a year and an odd number of months spent watching me spew my thoughts into the void and argue with total strangers about nothing, my friend Mike Chenoweth -- a name you may recognize from his frequent comments here on Simple Tricks -- has decided he wants his own little piece of the blogging action.

Mike's got a very different perspective from my own; we've occasionally had some real knock-down-drag-outs over various issues. But he's been a good friend for a long time, and he's got a good head on his shoulders. I look forward to seeing what's on his mind...

It's Like We're Living in the Future!

I'm sure it won't suprise anyone to know that I've already got my tickets for Revenge of the Sith:

I would like you to note that even though I'll be seeing the movie on opening day, I'm not attending the very first midnight screening, or a wee-hours-of-the-morning screening, or even a matinee. I'm going to an evening show like a civilized human being. It's not that I've gotten too old to do the midnight shows; I just choose not to in this instance. Because I'm not that much of a fanboy. I can be patient, just like any other grown-up who has a real life and who doesn't think that a most-likely inferior prequel to a movie he saw almost thirty years ago is some kind of highlight of the whole frakkin' year.

Besides, all the midnight shows were already sold out.

Incidentally, I would like to briefly note how amazing it is to me that you can order movie tickets a week in advance over the Internet, then walk into the lobby of your local Megaplex, stick a credit card into a machine, and watch the machine automatically print out your tickets for you without you having to do another thing. I remember when I was working at a theater a little over a decade ago and we thought same-day, in-person advance ticket sales were pretty cutting edge. This, however... this is real "twenty minutes into the future" kind of stuff, kids.

Now, if only somebody would get to work on those flying cars. Or even just levitating cars, like Luke Skywalker's landspeeder. I could really get into driving a landspeeder. Or better yet, one of those snazzy speeder bikes from Return of the Jedi. Yeah, there we go...

Junger on Adventure

I'm not one to go rock-climbing or bungee-jumping, but I have nevertheless longed, from time to time, for a taste of adventure in my largely unexciting suburban life. I therefore found the following comments on the subject most interesting:

Modern society, of course, has perfected the art of having nothing happen at all. There is nothing particularly wrong with this except that for vast numbers of Americans, as life has become staggeringly easy, it has also become vaguely unfulfilling. Life in modern society is designed to eliminate as many unforseen events as possible, and as inviting as that seems, it leaves us hopelessly underutilized. And that is where the idea of "adventure" comes in. The word comes from the Latin adventura, meaning "what must happen." An adventure is a situation where the outcome is not entirely within your control. It's up to fate, in other words. It should be pointed out that people whose lives are inherently dangerous, like coal miners or steelworkers, rarely seek "adventure." Like most things, danger ceases to be interesting as soon as you have no choice in the matter. For the rest of us, threats to our safety and comfort have been so completely wiped out that we have to go out of our way to create them.

--Sebastian Junger, "Colter's Way" in the collection Fire

A Wallet Full of Bread Cards

I was seven years old in the summer of 1977, the prime age of susceptibility to a story featuring young, swashbuckling heroes, strange-looking creatures, and scary -- but not too scary -- villains. (See also Potter, Harry, modern kids and.) I'm sure I must've seen a few movies on the big screen before then -- I vaguely recall a couple of early-70s live-action Disney films about people in really bad polyester knits -- but the first truly memorable film I saw in a theater...

Wait. Stop.

I'm not going to continue with that thought. My experience of seeing Star Wars for the first time couldn't have been much different than a lot of other people's. We were all kids, we'd never seen anything like it, we stood in lines that went around the block (literally, in my case -- I saw the film at the long-lost Centre Theatre in Salt Lake; there was no lobby to speak of, and the only place to queue up was outside, on the street), big spectacle, big excitement, tiny little brains melting, lifelong obsessions forming, blah blah blah.

We were all there, weren't we? And those of you who weren't have probably heard about it from someone who was. It was the defining communal experience of our generation, at least until the towers fell.

But here's the thing that was unique about my personal experience: I didn't actually want to see Star Wars. I had no interest in it whatsoever, and, in fact, I remember being frightened of it. I don't recall why, but something in the TV ads gave me a major case of the willies.

This wasn't unusual for me. I was a sensitive, overly imaginative child, prone to wicked nightmares based on images I saw on television. I remember a particularly horrible one inspired by a 1950s "Big Bug" movie called Tarantula, wherein an experiment gone wrong causes a spider to grow to the size of your average elementary school. I've seen Tarantula since then and couldn't believe it frightened me so badly as a child -- the special effects were phony even by the standards of the '50s -- but I know I woke up screaming the night after I first saw it.

The commercials for Close Encounters of the Third Kind got to me, too. In those, the camera rushed down a dark highway toward a hill that had a brilliant light glowing on the other side, and I remember that I absolutely did not want to know what was making that light, because, you know, bright lights on the other side of the hill are bad. And scary. And this was before I'd ever even heard of Las Vegas. My parents dragged me kicking and screaming to that movie, based on word-of-mouth from some friends whose children had enjoyed it. I, of course, subsequently loved it.

Star Wars was the same way. Maybe it was Vader's fearsome mask, or Chewbacca's bloodcurdling roar, or the Tusken Raider shaking his gaffi stick while making unearthly hooting sounds, or maybe it was something entirely innocuous to adult eyes, something I no longer remember because it wouldn't seem even potentially frightening to me now -- but something about the TV commercials had me convinced that Star Wars was a scary movie, and I absolutely did not want to see a scary movie. Because those were bad, and if I saw one I'd have bad dreams, and that would be... well, bad.

Fortunately (or so I thought), my parents didn't have much interest in the story of a boy, a girl, and a galaxy. Not at first, anyway. Not until midway through that summer when my mom's cousin asked my dad if we'd seen "that wild space movie" yet. I can still recall the circumstances of that fateful conversation. My dad and me and Mom's cousin, a big, weightlifting, would-be ladies man named Jack, were standing in our garage. The men were drinking beers and I was admiring the chrome handlebars of Jack's motorcycle. Jack asked my dad if he'd seen the movie, and when dad said no, Jack proceeded to tell him all about this grand spectacle, this amazing thing filled with knights and ray-guns and weird monsters and lots of action. People in this show fought with swords made of light and swung across bottomless pits on ropes. And it was funny, too, Jack said. Dad was intrigued... and it wasn't too many days after that that the Bennion family was on the freeway, headed into downtown Salt Lake on a balmy late afternoon with the westering sun chasing us through gaps in the Oquirrah mountains.

I was nervous. Mom and Dad hadn't told me what we going to see, but I had a hunch. I kept asking Mom if it was going to be scary, and she did her best to assure me everything would be fine.

I don't think I need to say much about how it turned out. Just like my experience with Close Encounters, all my genuine fear was in the anticipation, and it melted into wonder after about a minute of film had run through the projector. From my first glimpse of the massive Star Destroyer coasting onto the screen from above my head, I was hooked. Even the scary stuff in the film, like the smoking skeletons or the garbage-pit monster, amazed me. I wanted that movie never to end.

As soon as I got home that evening, I grabbed a pencil and a notepad and lay down on the living room floor, where I put my limited artistic abilities to the task of sketching out everything I'd just seen, from the growling TIE fighters to the squeaking "mouse" robots that scurried about the polished floors of the Death Star. I wanted to remember it all, you see, and this was in the days before home video, the days when it was very likely that you never would see a movie again once it left the theaters. I couldn't draw worth a damn, but this was the first thing I could think of that would make the ephemeral experience I'd just had tangible, to give me something I could wrap my fingers around. I knew that what I'd seen was big, maybe the biggest thing I'd ever see, and I had to find some way of preserving those unearthly sights and sounds for future reference.

I needn't have worried, of course. By the end of summer, the merchandising was kicking in and the sights and sounds of Star Wars were everywhere. I soon had comic books and the novel and the storybook record album, and within another year I'd have action figures and other toys, too. Best of all, I was able to replace my crude first-thought artwork with official trading cards that featured actual photographs from the movie in a small, convenient-to-carry format. Some of them even came with gum, if you could call those chips of pink, crumbly, Formica-like stuff gum.

You could buy bubblegum cards at the 7-Eleven that stood a couple blocks from my house, and once a week or so I was down there blowing my allowance on a banana Slurpee and a pack of Star Wars cards. If I remember correctly, they came seven to a pack, with a sticker -- which always ended up either on the front of our old fridge or on the three-ring binder I used at school -- and, of course, a stale slab of that so-called gum. (Honestly, I think the cards themselves probably had more flavor than that awful gum-like facsimile; still, I wouldn't mind having a piece of it now, just for old times sake, or at least for its bubblegummy odor.)

The gum cards had a lot going for them -- the sets were large, and there were multiple sets made, so there was a great variety of photos to be found and saved by a burgeoning collector like myself. Also, the backs of the cards were printed with trivia notes, games, and segments of photos that you could assemble like a puzzle. The gum cards were definitely a kid's idea of cool. But my favorite Star Wars trading cards were the ones that came with loaves of Wonder Bread.

There were only twenty or so of these cards to collect, so you could more easily put together a complete set (even at the age of seven, I was a completist), and I preferred their classy black borders and sharp image quality to the often cheesy-looking gum cards. I liked the bread cards so much, in fact, that I took to carrying my collection around in my wallet. (Yes, I had a wallet at the age of seven -- eight, actually, by the time I started collecting cards. My grandmother gave it to me, probably for that eighth birthday, a nice leather one with a large folding plastic thing for pictures. It was like fate bringing together the threads of my life...)

Where a grown man might whip out his wallet to show off photos of the wife and kids, I used to proudly flash my set of Star Wars Wonder Bread cards for my friends. Whenever there was some point of contention caused by our fast-fading memories of the actual movie, out came the cards to prove what the Millenium Falcon really looked like, or whether Chewie really did have blue eyes.

After a while, my mom became my co-conspirator in collecting. I'd complained about getting too many repeats of cards I already had, so she started shaking down the loaves of Wonder Bread in the store, trying to get the card to slide into one of the clear spots on the package so she could see which one it was. She carried a list in her purse of which cards I needed and would try to find loaves containing those cards. When she got home from the store, she'd remove the card from the bag before I mangled the bread trying to get to it, then I'd carefully trim the edges from the cards so they'd fit into the clear plastic windows in my wallet.

Unfortunately, a wallet is not the best environment for paper and cardboard collectibles, and my old Wonder Bread cards soon started looking pretty shabby. I didn't care, though -- I wasn't as particular about condition when I was in elementary school. It was more important to me to just have the cards, to have a physical reminder of the movie that had so deeply affected me actually on my person at all times, like talismen. In a way, collecting was more fun back then, when I didn't care so much about keeping things eternally nice.

I still have those bread cards, in case you're wondering. They're in rough shape today, scuffed and creased and faded, smeared from moisture and crooked along the edges where I thought I'd done such a good job of cutting them with the scissors. I've got a mint-condition set, too, which I keep in protective sleeves so I can look at them without risking my investment. But I'll bet you can guess which set means the most to me.

My original hand-drawn mementoes, sadly, have disappeared into the mists of time.

Gaiman on Punk

I'm not a big fan of punk music, which was always too unrelentingly angry and anti-everything for my tastes. But I did find Sandman writer Neil Gaiman's recent comments on the subject interesting, and even inspirational:

I think that the punk ethos of you don't need anything, you just need to do it and figure out what you're doing as you go, has probably informed everything I've done since [the punk movement]. It seemed a pretty sensible and refreshing idea at the time. Likewise the idea that you ought to be enjoying what you're doing and be doing it because you think it's cool and fun. The idea that mistakes are part of what make things interesting, and it's probably wisest to get it right and move on and not spend the rest of your life polishing it.

(It also left me with the idea that a black leather jacket was an appropriate sartorial item in any possible context.)

The Myth, The Man, John Pecorelli

I've received another e-mail from someone who is acquainted with John Pecorelli, the journalist I recently compared to the late Hunter S. Thompson. Her message paints a colorful picture of what the U of U's resident gonzo, a guy I knew only by reputation and my own assumptions, has been up to in recent years. I'm going to reprint this message in full below the fold for anyone who may be interested. Sensitive readers be warned, though; there is some naughty language toward the end.

Dear Jason,

I can only assume that you are writing about my friend, John Pecorelli, in your web blog.

Ok, if it's the same John Pecorelli who went to the University of Utah--or some equally bland school--it's the same guy. And, yes, he's still out there.

I found your observations about John pretty amusing, but maybe there's more to the guy than you think.

I first met John in Des Moines, Iowa, of all places. He was writing about Slipknot, I was a bored writer stuck in Iowa at the time and we instantly bonded over our equal hatred of ...well everything... and love of pills.

In light of Hunter's death, especially since at the time I was surrounded by writers and editors who knew him personally and worked with him, and going back over his stuff, well it's great, no kidding, but what's different from then to now... is that there was room for someone like that to make their name. Today, it's so much different. If a young Hunter walked through the doors of most major magazines they
wouldn't even give him the code to the bathroom door. The days of fantasizing or even having the balls to do "gonzo" journalism are far gone.

John, however, still is full of acerbic, wonderful wit. I look forward to our 2 a.m. phone calls about whatever crap is going on and then bitching about it incessantly--or until one of us passes out. He is to
this day one of the few writers who still has the drive to seek out the untellable stories, to hang with the people no one will talk to, to take a few punches to his jaw so much that he has to get a root canal,
and then still road trips to Mexico for a healthy supply of pills. John is one of the few reporters to this day who has the desire to really pull out the great story. And that is what is completely lacking in this current environment and our profession in general.

I have no doubt John challenged tenured professors into heated arguments and won. I have no doubt that he had the will to do things that made other writers cringe. What makes me cringe is there's no audience for the kind of work that John does anymore--and that's invesigative, living-it, in-depth reporting and writing that no one seems to value.

And that is just fucking sad. We need to grow some balls people.

Molly

I've exchanged a couple of e-mails with Molly since receiving this note, and she's even offered to forward my name to John himself. I have no idea what I'll say to him if he does contact me, considering I never actually knew him, but this could turn into something interesting. I'll keep you posted about any further developments...

Yeah, But Will I Like It?

The Sith reviews, both professional and otherwise, are starting to trickle in, and, so far, they're generally positive. Just about every one I've read takes the obligatory potshot at Uncle George's less-than-stellar dialogue-writing abilities, but the emerging consensus is that ROTS is the best of the prequel trilogy -- a dubious distinction, I'll concede, but hey, you take what you can get. A few reviewers are even enthusiastic enough to rank it alongside the original Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back as the best of the entire saga.

That's good to hear. Because of those reviews, I am finally beginning to relax a little. There's never been any question that I would see this movie regardless of the reviews, nor have I worried about whether everyone else in the theater hates it except me. I figure I've been in the position of defending the indefensible plenty of times before, so what's one more battle? But I have worried that maybe I wouldn't like Revenge of the Sith. And I really, really want to like this one.

It's hard to explain that desire to someone who sees these movies simply as movies. It's hard to explain even to myself, since I'm not a huge fan of the prequels. While I have stubbornly maintained that they aren't the disasters everyone says they are, despite their very obvious flaws, Episodes I and II didn't generate any deep affection in me like the original Star Wars films did. In part, that's because they were so disappointing on so many levels, but I think it's also because, historically speaking, I've never really wanted to see any SW films beyond the original trilogy. Unlike many fans, I was satisfied at the end of Return of the Jedi that the main story was complete and we knew as much of the backstory as we needed to know. I had no great curiosity about the legendary nine-part saga that Lucas supposedly planned to make (in part because I always doubted the veracity of his claims that it was already planned out), and I had little interest in stories that didn't feature my beloved childhood heroes, Han, Luke and Leia. In short, I would've been perfectly happy if three SW movies were all we ever got.

Once the prequels became inevitable, however, I found that I wanted them to turn out well. I wanted the phenomenon we all experienced back in the late '70s to repeat itself, for everyone to fall in love with these movies and get excited about them and want to share them with friends and family. And that just hasn't happened. It's a different time and a very different culture now, obviously, but the big problem has been the prequels themselves. I don't think any movie could've lived up to the expectations that have been placed on these prequels, but I can't deny that they haven't been very good on their own terms either. And it sucks to have to admit that.

It also sucks that something that used to be pretty much an unalloyed good for the people of my generation -- the entire Star Wars saga -- is now tainted with the stink of artistic failure and empty hype and overblown commercialism. It sucks that fans are now divided into factions and filled with anger and bitterness toward each other, and toward George Lucas for not being the god we always assumed he was. Revenge of the Sith is George's last chance to undo some of the damage he's done, to make amends and settle arguments (if he can), and to finally get it right, or at least as right as possible given what he's got to work with. This is the film that will tie the prequels to the original trilogy, and, since it's going to be the final film in the series, it will probably be the one that leaves the lasting impression on ordinary film-goers who don't live and breathe this stuff.

And for me personally, it will be the culmination of a lot of complex emotions that I still haven't quite sorted out. I feel like I've been on a very long journey with these movies, all six of them; we've faced adversity together, they've let me down at times, and my faith in them has waxed and waned. And now we're coming down to the end of it, the final act, our last few moments together before we disband and head for home. And I just want it all to end well. I want to feel satisfied in the end, like I felt the first time I thought it was all over, back in 1983. I want to be able to hold my head up again and say, "I'm a Star Wars fan," without fearing that I'm about to get into an argument, or have someone snigger at me.

For the last couple of years, I've dealt with the relative failure of the prequels by compartmentalizing them away from the original trilogy in my mind. I've tried to think of the two trilogies as two entirely different animals that have only a slight relation to one another. I have plenty of reasons why I don't think they fit together as a contiguous story, ranging from the look of the films (the slick new CGI doesn't visually match the grungy photography of the originals) to the timeline (the ages of Anakin and Obi-Wan don't map properly between the prequels and the originals, among other things). I really don't think the success or failure of the final prequel is going to affect my feelings and ideas about the three movies I grew up with. But it is possible that it might.

And maybe that's what's really been bothering me. Maybe I fear that if ROTS sucks, I'll no longer be able to watch my beloved originals without thinking of Sith's failure. I've been preparing myself for disappointment for months, but there's disappointment and there's disappointment. If ROTS ends up being no better or worse than the other two prequels, well, I expected that. No big deal. But if it's so bad that it takes the entire Star Wars saga down in flames... I don't know how I'll handle that. What do you do when something you've loved your entire life suddenly turns into a joke? Perhaps it's unhealthy to invest so much emotion in something as inherently superficial and disposable as movies, but that's what I've done, for better or worse.

And that's why I'm very pleased that the early press is looking good. Because I need this film to look as if Lucas at least tried to make it work. I'd love to see him knock the ball out of the park and restore the faith of all those apostates who've turned away from the Way of the Force, but I'd settle for evidence that he just really tried this time. And so far, that's the impression I'm getting.

Happy Mother's Day

My mom is out of town this weekend, so no fancy brunches or breakfast in bed for her today. I'd still like to do something special for her, though, so I thought maybe I'd give her a little taste of immortality, in blog form, by relating a few anecdotes that may illustrate her innate coolness.

My mom was never much like the other examples of traditional motherhood that I saw around me during my childhood in 1970s Utah. She didn't sew, quilt, crochet, embroider, or knit. She had little interest in crafty activities, she didn't bake her own bread, she was never a Cub Scout den-mother, and she only participated in the PTA if members of the school board showed up on her doorstep with a butterfly net.

She didn't hang out with many other women, didn't belong to Relief Society (that's a Mormon women's group, for any out-of-staters who might be reading), didn't read romance novels, and didn't sit at anyone else's kitchen table gossiping away the mid-morning.

She didn't drive a station-wagon or a four-door, like all the other moms. She drove a '56 Ford pick-up truck and, a few years later, a '73 Mustang Mach One with a jacked-up rear-end and mag wheels. (Dad has often remarked that he started dating her because she was the only girl he'd ever met who owned her own pick-up and ski-boat.)

She never seemed to want a whole platoon of children, an unusual attitude here in Utah. And I never saw her in a dress unless there was a funeral to attend.

Now that I think about it, she resisted most of the things that defined femininity back then. She was, in many ways, still the tomboy I imagine she must've been as a young girl. She's always been happiest outdoors, basking in warm sunlight and working with her horses -- she could stand alongside her old Thunder, whom she raised from a foal and only recently lost, for hours, brushing and currying and stroking and speaking to him in the same soft voice she used when she spoke to me. When she wasn't in the corral, she was in her yard, down on her knees with her hands in the dirt. Once, a long time ago, my mother's flowers inspired the neighbors and provoked a kind of gardening arms-race, with Mrs. Sorenson to the north of our house and Jack and Rayola Smith to the south vying to out-do the much younger woman who lived between them.

Her one concession to "girliness" was her hair and make-up. She'd trained and worked as a cosmetologist during the late '60s, and even though she stopped working after I was born, she could never quite give up her love for an elaborate coiffure and exaggerated "war paint." Her hair color changed so frequently when I was little that I was almost a teenager before I realized my own brownish shade came from her. I never thought it strange that she was a blond one week and a brunette the next; I did think it was strange that my friends' mothers mostly had short, dowdy haircuts that never changed.

(For the record, she finally settled on being a redhead sometime around Ronald Reagan's first election, and she's been some variety of red or auburn ever since.)

After horses and the Great Outdoors, Mom's big love has always been music. Back in the pre-Walkman, pre-iPod days, she used to tote around a transistor radio, and both her truck and the Mach One were fitted with eight-track tapedecks that cycled endlessly as she drove around town. Her tastes ran (and still do run) toward good straight-ahead rock and roll. Nothing too hard-edged, just a three-minute single with a catchy backbeat and a guitar, and preferably a lot of bass. If you could dance to it, it was all the better. From my mother, I learned to appreciate Motown, Credence, the Doobies, the laid-back "California sound" of the Eagles and Poco, and, of course, Elvis Presley. Yes, my mother is an Elvis fan, who once probably boasted of owning every single album the man ever recorded on vinyl. But before you jump to conclusions, let me assure you that she's not one of the fanatics who has a candlelit shrine in the corner of the living room, and she is absolutely certain that he really, truly is dead.

Mom used to do a lot of things for me -- and with me -- that other kids' mothers didn't. She took me to my first rock concert when I was twelve, Rick Springfield's Halloween night stop in Salt Lake during his 1981 "Working Class Dog" tour. On other Halloween nights, she spent hours making me up, pulling out all of her cosmetology knowledge to transform me into the creepiest vampire or ghoul on the block. She looked the other way everytime I came in from riding my bike and drank half of her nice, icy glass of Coke. When I was in fourth grade, she let me stay up to watch Saturday Night Live with the original Not Ready for Prime-time Players, and when I was in middle school she sat up half the night with me watching bad early-80s fantasy and sci-fi flicks on video tape. (Rather than outright forbidding me to watch R-rated movies as other kids' moms did, she functioned as an early form of CleanFlicks by simply standing in front of the screen when the too-adult bits came on. Thanks to this technique, I was able to boast of seeing a lot of pulpy stuff that my friends could only envy. Stuff that still haunts me, like Conan, Excalibur, and -- God help me -- The Sword and the Sorcerer.)

Shortly after I became a Star Wars fanatic, she brought home a copy of the novelization from the grocery store as a surprise for me. Then, in 1980, she brought home a paperback comic adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back, and locked it in her nightstand until after I saw the movie, because she knew me well enough to know that I wouldn't be able to resist looking at it and spoiling the movie for myself. To this day, she still occasionally brings me a surprise from the grocery store, a package of my favorite cookies or a magazine with a cover story she thinks will interest me. Sometimes, just for old times' sake, she even brings me a new action figure, even though I'm a grown man of 35; I've got one of her surprises, a three-inch-tall Darth Maul, glaring at me from atop my computer monitor even as I type this.

Like I said, she's not much like other moms. And that's what makes her so damn cool. So Happy Mother's Day, Mom. I'll see you when you get back...

Questioning Myself, and Recommended Readings About (What Else?) Star Wars

With only thirteen days to go until Revenge of the Sith opens, I'm still considering exactly what I want to say here on Simple Tricks about the whole Star Wars phenomenon. It's a big subject, at least it is for me, because I've quite literally been thinking about it my entire life. I've got a lot of Star Wars-related ideas that I could share -- anecdotes, theories, memories, speculations, and, of course, my own highly subjective opinions. Enough material, probably, to keep me blogging non-stop for the next couple of months.

But part of me wonders if I should bother writing on this subject at all. My love for these movies is crystal clear to anyone who either knows me or has been hanging around this blog for very long, and just about everybody in their thirties can tell similar stories of what it was like to grow up with The Trilogy during the '70s and '80s. How many people reading this post stood in lines that stretched around the block to see the original film at a grand old theater that probably doesn't exist anymore? Weren't we all equally blown away as children by our first glimpse of an Imperial Star Destroyer? Or of all the monsters in the Mos Eisley cantina? Do I have anything to say about Star Wars that my loyal readers haven't already heard, or thought, or experienced themselves? I honestly don't know.

While I wrestle with that question, I figure you might appreciate a couple of links to follow -- it is Friday, after all, and everyone needs some good 'net-surfing material to help you kill time on those long, tedious, springtime afternoons.

First up is an article on George Lucas that's currently appearing in Wired magazine. You may have heard about this one already, especially if you frequent political blogs. (For some bizarre reason, a handful of conservative bloggers are taking remarks George made about Fahrenheit 9/11 as evidence that he's another one of them godless libruls. O-kaaay... that's not how I read those remarks, which seemed to be more about how "non-fiction" is inevitably filtered through our pre-conceived notions whereas "fiction" is not. But then I'm not inclined to see every little comment made in the media as evidence of an ideological -- specifically liberal -- bias, either.)

I found the Wired piece interesting because it seems to bolster a number of my pet theories about The Great Flanneled One's thinking, and why the prequels haven't been quite what we fans were hoping for. (I've long held the opinion that Lucas felt trapped by the success of the original Star Wars trilogy, and that he really didn't have much interest in making the prequel films, at least not as far as wanting to tell more stories set in the SW universe. The article provides some confirmation for this idea.) However, while I personally believe Lucas will be remembered more as a technological innovator than a writer or director, Lucas himself thinks he'll be remembered as a filmmaker, and he hopes that his Star Wars movies never become too dated for people to enjoy them. Ironic, since the tinkering he did on the Not-So-Special Editions in '97 was out of concern that the old films looked shabby alongside newer spectacles. But then George has a long history of contradicting himself in interviews.

The Wired article also boasts some sharp writing and a number of good quotes from Lucas' friends and colleagues. For example, this nifty passage, which encapsulates so much of what went wrong with the first two prequels:

While the original film had the scruffy vitality of a garage band making its big break, the recent episodes can seem like a whirlwind tour of [special effects shop] Industrial Light & Magic's interplanetary showroom.

"For me, those films pummel you into submission," [George's THX-1138 collaborator Walter] Murch says. "You say, OK, OK, there are 20,000 robots walking across the field. If you told me a 14-year-old had done them on his home computer, I would get very excited, but if you tell me it's George Lucas - with all of the resources available to him - I know it's amazing, but I don't feel it's amazing. [Emphasis added by yours truly.] I think if George were here and we could wrestle him onto the carpet, he'd say, 'Yeah, I've gotten into that box, and now I want to get out of that box.'"

Much of the relevant press I've been seeing this week focuses on Uncle George's plans for a post-Star Wars future. But perhaps you're more interested in the past, in which case I recommend a fascinating essay called "May 25, 1977: A Day Long Remembered". As the title suggests, this piece details the earliest days of the SW phenomenon, and includes a lot of interesting trivia.

For example, exhibitors had so little confidence in George "American Graffiti" Lucas' little space movie, that it opened in only 43 theaters across the United States. Forty-three... that's an astoundingly small number even by the relatively modest standards of 1977. Movies today routinely open on thousands of screens; back then, there were far fewer theaters, and virtually no multiplexes, so larger pictures would open on a few hundred screens. By comparison to Star Wars' paltry 43, the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me opened on 200 screens, while Smokey and the Bandit got 300. As this essay helpfully notes, the movie everyone expected to be huge that summer was the thriller The Deep, which got an opening push of over 800 screens. By the end of August, however, that little space fantasy had come into its own and was running in some 1100 theaters across the U.S. and Canada.

"A Day Long Remebered" also provides some history that might interest the fanboys waiting in line at Grauman's Chinese in Hollywood -- Star Wars opened there only because William Friedkin's Sorcerer had been delayed, and when that movie was ready, SW got bumped somewhere else, only to return after Sorcerer flopped. SW then played non-stop at the Chinese until June of 1978, a full year. (I vaguely recall that it played at Salt Lake's Centre Theatre for a full year, too, although I may be mistaken about that.)

Oh, as for the original Star Wars being called "A New Hope?" That wasn't so in '77. The Episode IV tag was added for a 1981 re-release, after The Empire Strikes Back had already come out...

E-mail Questionnaire from Anne

I'm pretty ruthless when it comes to screening my personal e-mail. Commercial spam, of course, is at the top of the "delete" list, but I also have little patience for all the crap that people forward because they think it's fun or somehow useful to me: the jokes, the heartwarming "true stories," the calls for boycotts on this or that, and, worst of all, the "public service messages" that nine times out of ten turn out to be urban legends. (Actually, I sort of enjoy those, because then I have the pleasure of debunking them for whoever sent them. But I've noticed that people don't much send them to me anymore, probably because my debunkings take the fun out of it for them.)

All that stuff that eternally floats around the comm channels wore out its welcome for me very soon after I started using e-mail. All except for the questionnaires. I still like those. You know, those lists of random and essentially superficial questions that are supposed to provide insight into our friends.

I got one from Anne awhile back, the first one I've received in a long time. Considering that these questionnaires are essentially the same thing as the LiveJournal memes I occasionally put up (and the fact that I don't have anything else ready to post today), I thought I'd reproduce it here, along with my sure-to-be-fascinating answers:

1. What time is it: 11:29 am

2. Name as it appears on birth certificate: Reginald Jason Bennion

4. Piercings: One, but I let it close over a while back

5. What is the most recent movie you've seen in the theater: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

6. Eye color: Brown

7. Place of birth: Salt Lake City, Utah

8. Favorite foods: Philly cheesesteaks, dry salami, snap-peas in the pod, and Hershey bars with almonds

9. Ever been to Africa: No, but it's on The List.

10. Ever been toilet-papering: Yes

11. Love someone so much it made you cry: Yes

12. Been in a car accident: Yes

13. Croutons or bacon bits: Croutons.

14. Favorite day of the week: Sunday -- it's the only one when I usually have no obligations to meet

15. Favorite restaurant: Ruth's Diner

17. Favorite sport to watch: None... except maybe surfing. Or cheerleading. Neither of which is on TV much...

18. Favorite ice cream: Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia. Or homemade strawberry.

19. Disney or Warner Brothers: Warner Bros, of course. Disney shorts are too namby-pamby.

20. Favorite fast-food restaurant: AstroBurger

21. What color is your bedroom carpet: Pale blue shag

22. How many times did you fail your driver's test: None

23. Before this one, from whom did you get your last e-mail: I've actually had this questionnaire in my possession for a while, so I'll just say the last person I got an e-mail from, which was my friend Robert

24. Which store would you choose to max out your credit card: I would never max a credit card; I'm pretty straight-arrow about credit. But since the point of this is probably to see where I'd like to go on a shopping spree, I'll say... Best Buy. (DVDs for everyone!)

26. What do you do most often when you are bored? Write blog entries! Or read, or watch a DVD...

27. Bedtime: No earlier than midnight, usually.

28. Who will respond to this e-mail the quickest? Non-sequitur, since we're now in blogspace.

29. Who is the person you sent this to that is least likely to respond? Non-sequitur, because of that blogging thing again.

30. Who are you most curious about their responses to this questionnaire? Non-sequitur. Again. Because this is a blog. Sheesh. Get a clue, you silly questionnaire.

31. Favorite TV shows: 24, Lost, CSI (the original Las Vegas edition), Joan of Arcadia, The Amazing Race

32. Last person you went to dinner with: Anne

33. Ford or Chevy: Ford, although both have their charms

34. What are you listening to right now: The Revenge of the Sith soundtrack, specifically "Anakin's Dark Deeds."

35. What is your favorite color: Red

36. Ocean, Lake or River: Rivers, although they all have their charms.

37. How many tattoos do you have: None; I've never been able to think of anything I'd still want to look at in fifteen years.

38. Time you finished this e-mail: 11:36 am

39. How many people are you sending this email to: The entire blogosphere...

Film Review: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

It's tough to explain The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to someone who's doesn't already know of it, in part because it's been so many different things over the years. It began as a British radio serial, way back in the late 1970s. The radio show led to a novel, which begat several sequels, and there was also a BBC TV series and an early text-based computer game that I understand is still rather popular in certain circles. (You can probably find a playable version of it out there on the InterWeb Thingie, if you're curious.) And now, of course, it's also a big-budget feature film spectacle.

Through all these different incarnations, H2G2 -- that's what the cool kids call it -- has told more or less the same story, an absurdist comedy about an Englishman named Arthur Dent who wakes up one morning to find that his home is about to be bulldozed to make way for a new traffic bypass (that's a freeway to us Americans). As he argues with the hard-hearted bureaucrat who wishes to destroy his home, he is unaware that the exact same variety of bureaucrat is about to destroy our entire planet for essentially the same reason, to make way for a hyperspace express route. Arthur is saved from the rest of humanity's fate because his friend Ford turns out not to be from a London suburb but is, in fact, an alien who's been living on Earth for the last fifteen years. The two of them hitch a ride on a passing spaceship just in the nick of time and they proceed to have a string of adventures involving eccentric characters, bizarre (and funny) twists on standard science-fiction tropes, and, of course, the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. Exactly which adventures they have depends on which version of H2G2 you're experiencing, but all the versions hit basically the same major notes, and they all share the same tone and voice -- at least, they did until the movie version.

As with Sahara the night before, H2G2 gave me the feeling that I was watching imposters who were using the names of people in a book (and TV series) I once loved, but otherwise had little to do with the original property.

The movie wasn't a disaster. I was entertained. I did laugh, quite often actually. I enjoyed the fact that all the aliens were realized through puppetry and makeup instead of CGI (nothing better than good old-fashioned rubber monsters). Alan Rickman freakin' rocked as the voice of Marvin, the Paranoid Android. The tour of the planet-building facility on Magrathea was eye-popping. There were even some nice in-joke references to the old TV series (notably the appearance of the original Marvin in one scene). But overall, this movie just didn't feel like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to me.

The problem, I think, is that for the first time a version of Hitchhiker has been created without the full participation of Douglas Adams, the man who invented this whole crazy franchise and who personally wrote every earlier variant of the story. Adams passed away before completing his screenplay draft for this movie, and it's pretty easy to tell which bits were his and which were added by someone else. The familiar events that Adams has written of many times before -- the destruction of Earth, the Vogon constructor fleet, the discovery of the planet Magrathea and of the true nature of Earth -- these all felt right. The new stuff, like the sidetrip to the Vogon homeworld to rescue one of the crew or the sequence involving the always-bizarre John Malkovich, felt out-of-place and grafted on.

There was also a real problem with the film's tone, which feels like a back-and-forth power struggle between an American sensibility and a British story. For example, one of the more endearing things about earlier versions of H2G2 is the way everyone in the story is basically clueless. That's a conceit common to British comedy, and it's present in the scenes lifted from other versions of the story, as it should be. But in the new scenes, like the aforementioned rescue mission to Vogsphere, Arthur Dent is suddenly acting like a man with a backbone, out to kick butt and take names instead of just looking for a good cup of tea. That's how an American hero acts, and it's jarring to someone who is familiar with what Arthur is supposed to be like.

Also, the movie tries hard to let Arthur manufacture some sort of meaning for his adventures, and there is some added dramatic business about him and Trillian (another survivor of Earth) trying to come to terms with the destruction of their homeworld. But that's not H2G2; in every previous version of this story, the point was that there wasn't a point. The book and the old TV show presented the idea that the Universe is fundamentally screwed up -- it doesn't make sense, and it's never going to, regardless of how much we think about the meaning of it all -- so you may as well find a good party and enjoy yourself. As for coming to terms with losing Earth, Arthur makes occasional comments in the other versions about being upset, but basically he just carries on without too much regret, aside from wishing he could find a decent cup of tea.

And that leads me back to the characters, which are generally too far off from the earlier versions to feel authentic. The characterization of Arthur is all right, but Trillian has gone from an adventure-seeking genius/ditz to a mopey damsel-in-distress. Ford Prefect, who, admittedly, was always the least-well defined character in the earlier versions, is practically invisible through much of this movie. And then there's what they've done to poor Zaphod.

In the book, Zaphod Beeblebrox is essentially a fraud who's afraid people will discover he's not as cool as he presents himself to be. In the old TV series, he comes across as a bumbler, but it's the bumbling of a rock star who's attended one too many of his own parties and has the brain damage to show for it. In other words, he's an idiot, but he's cool. In the movie, he's just a plain old garden-variety idiot, oozing with feckless vanity and requiring a lemon-powered thinking cap to achieve even borderline functionality.

Sam Rockwell turns in a good performance in the part, I just don't like the way he's chosen to play him, nor do I like the way the filmmakers chose to handle the issue of Zaphod's second head. (In the old TV show, the second head was a phony-looking -- but funny -- puppet attached to actor Mark Wing-Davies' shoulder; here the second head is kind of below the "main" head, hidden inside the guy's shirt, and the two have a kind of constant struggle for dominance. It's too disturbing-looking to really be funny.)

At this point, assuming anyone is still reading this very long entry, I'm going to guess that you're thinking I shouldn't be comparing H2G2-the-Movie to the earlier versions, because the movie is its own animal, and a lot of people in the audience won't have had my experience with the BBC or printed variants. True... but I suspect they won't be following the story very well, either. The screenplay left out enough detail from the book that I think you have to have a fairly good working knowledge of the story going in to understand what's happening a lot of the time. The film doesn't strike me as overly friendly to the uninitiated, and as I've explained, there are too many problems for a genuine fan to fully appreciate it, either. So what does that leave us?

With yet another big special-effects remake that fails to capture what made the original a success in the first place.

And on that note, I don't see any alternative but to mix myself a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster and call it a night...

Film Review: Sahara

Over the weekend, I had the frustrating experience of seeing two movies based on books I've loved for years, both of which completely failed to capture what I find so appealing about those books. The first of these was Sahara, which, as the opening titles kindly point out to anyone who didn't know, is "A Clive Cussler Dirk Pitt Adventure."

If that means nothing to you, I'll explain: Dirk Pitt is a character created by an author named Clive Cussler in a series of best-selling novels that read like a combination of Indiana Jones and James Bond, with a smidgeon of Jacques Cousteau thrown in for flavor. These novels don't begin to qualify as good literature, but they are good reads -- they're fun, exciting page-turners that are perfect for lazy summer afternoons and long airplane rides. I first discovered them when I was in my early teens, and I've loved them ever since. I'm not at all ashamed to admit that Dirk Pitt was a hero of mine as I was growing up, and, like a lot of people who have favorite literary characters, I have a very definite image in my head of who and what he is.

That's why I decided weeks ago that I wasn't going to bother seeing Sahara. As I explained in an earlier entry, I had grave misgivings about the casting of the terminally bland Matthew McConaughey as Dirk, and I figured it would be best to spare myself (and my unfortunate friends and readers) the aggravation of seeing one of my heroes brought to life badly.

Fate, however, had other plans, and when my foursome couldn't get into The Interpreter on Saturday night, I was outvoted on which film got to be our second choice. Anne braced herself for my inevitible post-movie tirade, while our friends Jack and Natalie both tried to convince me I should lay aside my preconceptions. None of them will believe this, but I honestly did try to judge the movie on its own merits and not compare it to the books I've known since puberty.

I will concede that if you've never read a Cussler book, then Sahara is a perfectly serviceable summertime action-adventure flick. There's nothing particularly wrong with the film, at least not as far as action-adventure movies go, and there were some moments that raised a smile even from me.

The plot involves a pair of treasure-hunters -- Dirk Pitt and his sidekick, Al -- looking for a long-lost Confederate warship in the most unlikely of places, the Sahara desert. They cross paths with Eva Rojas, a doctor searching for the source of a mysterious African plague. Their mutual quests become intertwined and, in the end, the bad guys will be bested, secrets revealed, fantastical stunts performed, and a potential new movie franchise will be born. All fine and dandy. Except for that part about the movie being "a Clive Cussler Dirk Pitt Adventure." Because that, my friends, it most definitely is not. As Anne put it afterwards, this is a movie in which the characters have the same names as people in a book I once read, but that's about as far as it goes...

Interestingly, my primary complaint isn't with McConaughey after all, although I still found him to be too laid-back and dimply-cute to be convincing as the rugged man's-man Dirk. (I actually had a bigger problem with Steve Zahn as Al Giordino. In the books, Al is as competent and generally cool as Dirk himself, except when it comes to the ladies, but Zahn plays him as bumbling comic relief, a grubby redneck whose unfunny running gag is fretting about the loss of his favorite trucker cap. Arg.) No, the big problem for me was the film's tone. The books may be intended for lightweight hammock reading, but they have a thread of darkness woven through them. There is some genuine brutality in any Cussler novel, and not all of it comes from the villains. Dirk Pitt himself can be a real son-of-a-bitch when the moment calls for it. But it's not just the ruthless determination of the hero that defines a Cussler novel -- it's also the sense of wonder when historical treasures are brought back into the light, the near-reverence the regular cast members hold for the past. It's the wildly unlikely stunts that Dirk and Al cook up to free themselves from a jam. It's the harsh justice that ensures evil will be fittingly (if disturbingly) punished. And it's the feeling of deep satisfaction in seeing how all the disparate threads of the plot fit together.

For me, a successful Dirk Pitt movie would have the same general feel as Raiders of the Lost Ark. (Not the later Indy films, which polished down some of the sharp edges in favor of comedy, but Raiders, which is a good deal grittier than many people remember.) As in Raiders, the stakes in a Dirk Pitt movie should be big, and the audience should really feel them looming over everything. You should wince in sympathy when the hero takes a punch. The jokes should be wry and understated, not laugh-out-loud slapstick or obvious punchlines. The hero should be, as Belloq notes of Indiana Jones, not all that different from the bad guys. And when the object of the hero's quest is uncovered, it should be a moment of soaring awe, as when the sun hits the Headpiece to the Staff of Ra and shows Indy where the Well of the Souls is located.

Sahara the Movie gets none of this right. Instead, the film establishes itself as a forgettable trifle right from the opening credits when, instead of a hero's march, the soundtrack gives us Dr. John's "Right Place, Wrong Time," a funky, early-70s, whacka-chicka song that suggests the film to follow is the cinematic equivalent of a beach party. In fact, the music is probably the best metaphor for what's wrong with this movie -- there's nothing about it that distinguishes a Dirk Pitt movie from any other adventure film. The major sequences are scored by the same uninspired classic-rock selections that we've heard in a thousand other movies. "Magic Carpet Ride," for example, throbs over the scene in which Dirk and Al transform a wrecked airplane into wind-driven "land yacht," a painfully obvious choice, and I'd be perfectly happy to never hear "Sweet Home Alabama" in another film ever again. When we do get some instrumental scoring, it's loaded down with brassy hits that are reminiscent of James Bond music. There should've been a distinct theme for Dirk, at least. (To be fair, there isn't a lot of memorable movie music being composed these days, much to my dismay.)

The major action set-pieces I remember from the novel are here, but they feel curiously small, and when Dirk finally discovers his lost ship, he doesn't seem all that wowed by it. (Neither is the audience, for that matter.) The family-friendly PG rating ensures that the plague never seems all that horrible, and I never bought that it was a genuine threat to the whole world, as the characters kept telling us it was. Instead of larger-than-life heroes who have a string of amazing discoveries under their belts, Dirk and Al feel like beer-drinking buddies who sometimes go out on the weekends with a metal detector. It's as if the cast and crew were underplaying everything or something. There just isn't any charisma on display here, not in the performances, not in the stunts, not in the music, not in the plot. Everything proceeds from point A to point B to point C right on schedule, but there's no inertia to carry us along, none of the breathless urgency of the novels.

The problem isn't that this movie totally sucks, because it doesn't. The problem for me is that it isn't a Dirk Pitt adventure. Not to someone who really knows Dirk Pitt.

Hey, I said I tried to judge the movie on its own merits; I didn't say I succeeded.

The Clock is Running

Only 19 days until Episode III.

I suppose it goes without saying that I'll be doing some nostalgic musing on the whole Star Wars phenomenon over the next two and a half weeks. For the sake of my three loyal readers, I'll do my best not to become tediously one-track-minded.

I may not succeed, but I will try.

And please don't throw the "do or do not, there is no try" thing at me. That's my schtick...