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Monday, August 02, 2004 |
Recently, Lucas and Company revealed that the title of Star Wars Episode 3 will be Revenge of the Sith. 1) YAWN! 2) Either it was copped directly from "Revenge of the Nerds" or it just sounds too much like that title. Either way, not good.
Also recently, AFI penned Darth Vador as the greatest villain in film history. Well you sure wouldn't know that from the latest two episodes of Star Wars. There simply is no logical psychological transformation taking place from the Annie of the first episode to the one we see fall in love and throw tantrums in the second episode. What I'm trying to say is that Darth Vador was a dynamic character; Anakin Skywalker is a paper cutout.
In light of the Revenge of the Sith, I have come up with some of my own titles (stealing titles of some of the greatest films). Enjoy!
Apocalypse A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far Far Away
Annie Get Your Light Saber
Annie Flies Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Annie Goes Goth
Annie Without A Cause
Annie Becomes a Dead-beat Dad
Annie Strikes Back
Annie Gets Really Mad
The Sith Connection
End of An Empire
Death of a Jedi
Return of Another Mediocre Film But At Least This is the Last One
Crouching Jedi, Hidden Sith
Gone With the Force
Anakin Skywalker and the Master's Light Saber
Princess Amidali and the Seven Jedi
Star Wars Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Focus on the Special Effects
8:30:54 PM  | |
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I agree with Sydney's take on Kerry's speech. From Salon's article Reclaiming "Democracy Itself":
...Kerry had to present himself as the most capable of mastering these crises. And he had to prove his credibility simply through his words. He had to create the event that would determine his future and in effect the nation's completely alone. "Never has there been a moment more urgent for Americans to step up and define ourselves," Kerry said in his speech.
And Kerry did more than that for himself, his candidacy, the Democrats and the campaign. Facing the action, as when he turned his Swift boat in the Mekong to attack the enemy, he seemed suddenly to course with adrenaline. His meandering sentences of the past were replaced by a crisp fluency. With withering disdain that never stooped to insult, he set himself against Bush and his works. The Democrats gasped and were held breathless at his daring in attacking the religious right and its intolerance, in directly addressing Bush by name and demanding that he cease desecrating the Constitution (well understood as nailing Bush for his support for an amendment against gay marriage), in defending science against Bush's cynical suppression, in holding Bush to account for his arrogant and incompetent conduct of the Iraq war, and in his forceful advocacy of economic equity and national health insurance as a right. Each phrase, delivered with self-confident force, succeeded in diminishing Bush and lending Kerry stature....Time and again, Kerry represented himself as the future president.
7:01:50 PM | |
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Eat your heart out Lucas!
Shrek 2 took in $1.3 million dollars over the weekend to gross an overall box office total of $432.4 million dollars, passing "Star Wars: Episode I -- The Phantom Menace" to become No. 4 on the all-time domestic chart.
6:51:13 PM | |
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After capitalizing off of Reagan's passing, the GOP can't get it right with the Reagans. Within the past week, for instance, Nancy Reagan politely refused an invitation to attend the GOP convention later this month. The Democrats, on the other hand, have picked up Nancy's cause for stem cell research, which they should do. But, to top of the discontent surely has to be Ron Reagan's vocally negative comments regarding the current administration. The latest blow has just been published in the September issue of Esquire--the article "The Case Against George W. Bush." In a nutshell, Ron Reagan says this Administration is one big lie. Consider these two paragraphs:
Politicians will stretch the truth. They'll exaggerate their accomplishments, paper over their gaffes. Spin has long been the lingua franca of the political realm. But George W. Bush and his administration have taken 'normal' mendacity to a startling new level far beyond lies of convenience. On top of the usual massaging of public perception, they traffic in big lies, indulge in any number of symptomatic small lies, and, ultimately, have come to embody dishonesty itself. They are a lie. And people, finally, have started catching on.
And consider this incredible opening:
It may have been the guy in the hood teetering on the stool, electrodes clamped to his genitals. Or smirking Lynndie England and her leash. Maybe it was the smarmy memos tapped out by soft-fingered lawyers itching to justify such barbarism. The grudging, lunatic retreat of the neocons from their long-standing assertion that Saddam was in cahoots with Osama didn't hurt. Even the Enron audiotapes and their celebration of craven sociopathy likely played a part. As a result of all these displays and countless smaller ones, you could feel, a couple of months back, as summer spread across the country, the ground shifting beneath your feet. Not unlike that scene in The Day After Tomorrow, then in theaters, in which the giant ice shelf splits asunder, this was more a paradigm shift than anything strictly tectonic. No cataclysmic ice age, admittedly, yet something was in the air, and people were inhaling deeply. I began to get calls from friends whose parents had always voted Republican, "but not this time." There was the staid Zbigniew Brzezinski on the staid NewsHour with Jim Lehrer sneering at the "Orwellian language" flowing out of the Pentagon. Word spread through the usual channels that old hands from the days of Bush the Elder were quietly (but not too quietly) appalled by his son's misadventure in Iraq. Suddenly, everywhere you went, a surprising number of folks seemed to have had just about enough of what the Bush administration was dishing out. A fresh age appeared on the horizon, accompanied by the sound of scales falling from people's eyes. It felt something like a demonstration of that highest of American prerogatives and the most deeply cherished American freedom: dissent.
Dissent, indeed!
6:42:00 PM | |
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