{"id":200,"date":"2005-03-16T02:10:54","date_gmt":"2005-03-16T02:10:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=200"},"modified":"2005-03-16T02:10:54","modified_gmt":"2005-03-16T02:10:54","slug":"lileks_comments_on_the_episode","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2005\/03\/16\/lileks_comments_on_the_episode\/","title":{"rendered":"Lileks Comments on the Episode III Trailer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>[<b>UPDATE: I wrote this entry in the wee hours last night and, upon reflection in the clear light of morning, decided it wasn&#8217;t quite right. What can I say? Sometimes it really is best to let something cool a bit before you publish it. I have therefore streamlined the whole thing to intensify the one point I think I was really trying to make. Sorry for the confusion&#8230;<\/b> ]<\/p>\n<p>Funny thing about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lileks.com\/bleats\/index.html\">James Lileks<\/a>. I can wonder for months why I continue to read his self-important, reactionary and often paranoid post-9\/11 drivel, and then one day he&#8217;ll just spew out something that makes all the grumpy-old-man-ishness worthwhile. Case in point: his comments today about the upcoming <i>Revenge of the Sith<\/i>&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The new SW movie trailer looks incredible &#8212; if they&#8217;d showed this to fans in 1979, I think most of them would have spontaneously dissolved. I have no doubt the dialogue will be horrible&#8230; I don&#8217;t care. If it looks like the trailer, I know I will sit in a movie theater on a Friday afternoon and quite possibly feel 18 again. This is no great accomplishment; art, you could say, should raise you up, not lull you back to the sloshing amniotic sea of the womb. But it&#8217;s a movie with rockets and robots and ray guns, and I&#8217;m a guy who grew up loving rockets and robots and ray guns. Hence I like to see the same once in a while, done well, without Bruce Dern moping around in a Jesus robe weeping about pine trees.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>James just managed to eloquently sum up, in a sentence and a half, what I&#8217;ve so often spent hours trying to explain to my disillusioned friends who mock me for my continued loyalty to the Great Flanneled One: &#8220;it&#8217;s a movie with rockets and robots and ray guns, and I&#8217;m a guy who grew up loving rockets and robots and ray guns. Hence I like to see the same once in a while&#8230;&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Amen, man. I often think Lileks is totally up in the night with his opinions, but on that point, we are in absolute agreement. I&#8217;m looking forward to May because I&#8217;m hoping to feel, if only for a short time, like a wide-eyed boy of seven instead of a tired and wounded old man of 35&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>[Ed. note: the crack about Bruce Dern in a Jesus robe refers to the 1972 film <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0067756\/\"><i>Silent Running<\/i><\/a>, just in case you&#8217;re not up on your classics of dystopic science fiction. Lileks has a big problem with the cynicism common to all films of this era, science fictional and otherwise. Personally, I quite like the dark movies of the early &#8217;70s. But then I don&#8217;t politicize every damn thing the way he does.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[UPDATE: I wrote this entry in the wee hours last night and, upon reflection in the clear light of morning, decided it wasn&#8217;t quite right. What can I say? Sometimes it really is best to let something cool a bit before you publish it. I have therefore streamlined the whole thing to intensify the one [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-star-wars"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}