THE FILM AND WATER PODCAST
Episode 19: STAR WARS
The countdown to THE FORCE AWAKENS begins when host Rob Kelly welcomes Michael Bailey (VIEWS FROM THE LONGBOX, lots of others!) to discuss the one, the only, STAR WARS! May the Force Be With You!
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Thanks for listening! That's A Wrap!
Rob,
ReplyDeleteGreat to hear you and Grand Moff Bailey talk some Star Wars. I like Michael's pitch-perfect analogy on the Luke/Han debate. Although I liked Han, I never considered myself cool enough to be him. He is the Fonz to Luke's Richie Cunningham. And yes, I just compared Star Wars to Happy Days.
Great show, looking forward to more!
Chris
I'm one of the guys who only likes it fine and doesn't love it. I will credit it with the following:
ReplyDelete-It is a technical triumph of effects, design, editing and score.
-It is immersive, never explaining itself and just SET in that universe. It's your job to catch up.
-It has created a sense of community in its fans, which is on par with very few other franchises.
My mere LIKE of it is probably due to everyone else's often overblown enthusiasm for it. I'm a Doctor Who fan and a Trek fan, and there's SO MUCH of each, that I can, with no trouble talk about their faults, and concede a lot of their output was frankly terrible. With Star Wars, there's a lot LESS (in visual canon), so each chapter must per force (ha!) be celebrated, and so you had many fans either denying the prequels' terribleness or trying to cover for it with excuses. That was just a turn off for me.
But here's the thing, I like the original trilogy well enough. Star Wars is groundbreaking, especially in context. Empire is a great film. I even like Jedi more than most armchair fans. It just feels like George Lucas has spent all his time since 1983 DESTROYING those films.
His incessant tweaking, making changes that either don't matter (and are thus mystifying), are stupid (comedy robots outside Mos Eisley's or showing he doesn't understand what made the characters great by changing Han Solo's introduction), or worst of the worst actually hurt those very mysteries that captured out imaginations and of which you guys speak so well by overexplaining them in inferior fashion in Special Edition scenes or prequels. Between those and Lucas' hilarious interviews on the prequel DVDs in which he admits to being completely clueless about everything, it's got me thinking of Star Wars as the work of incredible technicians IN SPITE of Lucas, or a crazy fluke. And since one branch of Star Wars fandom is about the Cult of Lucas, that's another impediment to thinking it's the greatest thing since dehydrated mashed potatoes.
I loved hearing your love for the film shine through. I don't think it's unwarranted even if I don't personally vibrate at that intensity. In its unadulterated form, it was indeed great fun, and I'm expecting Force Awakens to be fun too.
Now on to the movie I really do like a lot - and not coincidentally, the least frigged with by Lucas - and the first one I saw, The Empire Strikes Back!