San Joaquin, CA Ep.III

That movie was amazing in every way. The sencond time was just as good as the first. My favorite star wars film by far.

 

Absolutely!

 

while i surely agree that it was a great movie, i will always love the first the best (that's episode 4, NOT episode 1, so don't even go there)

 

The Empire Strikes Back
A New Hope
Revenge of the Sith
Return of the Jedi
Attack of the Clones
/
/
/
/
/
V
The Phantom Menace

I'd put it even farther down, but I'd rather not take up that much room on the screen. In reality, I'd also put some spaces between ROTS and AOTC, but hey...one has to have limits, right?

Also...depending upon mood, ROTS and ANH could flip-flop in my personal ranking. But...probably not. ROTS had some moments that were just incredible, but for overall movie-making/scripting/appeal...I think ANH beats it out. It was more steadily good, while ROTS had, to me, more peaks and valleys.

*shrug*

 

Revenge Of The Sith
Empire Strikes Back
Return of The Jedi
Attack of The Clones
A New Hope
The Phantom Menace

don't kill me, that's just my opinion. Attack of The Clones and A New Hope switches, based on my day.

 

Revenge of the Sith
Return of the Jedi
Attack of the Clones
Empire Strikes Back
A New Hope
Phantom Menace

Don't hate me because I'm not all big on episode IV... and especially because I like episode II better. It's not that I dislike A New Hope, I guess I'm just one of the apparently few people who really liked AOTC, and even PM ("Are you an angel?"). But I grew up on Return of the Jedi - it has always been my favorite... until now. Luke and Anakin are my favorite characters.

 

"Once again the Sith will RULE THE GALAXY!"

What's not to like?

DLS

 

What's not to like..how about the Emperor's "Angry Eyes" Ok those were just ...to quote Willy Wonka..."Ewww"

 

Nah. His eyes were cool. It's the fact that he needed to pull his cowl down to hide the fact his forehead had become a giant butt-crack...

 

Maybe if you had given your padawan a cool set of eyes he might not have gotten so upset.
Sid, however, gave him cool eyes, new legs, arms, great voice, etc. What did he get from the Jedi? "Be mindful." "Let go attachments." this coming from a little green guy that retires to a swamp. The boy needed guidence and answers. Sid was there with both.

Golda

P.S. We also gave him cookies.

 

//his forehead had become a giant butt-crack...//

ROFL...ok I've got tears running down my face from laughing so hard on that one... Good Job, Kai...Good Job!

 

*grin* Sadly, it really pulled me out of the moment, until he had his cowl on. The eyes=great. The voice=great. The acting=great.

The butt-crack prosthetic? Not so much. He went from cool and creepy evil to, "My god, somebody spackle that thing!" evil.

Somebody made a bad call on the makeup.

P.S. Should'a known cookies were involved in his corruption somewhere along the line...

 

I'm not crazy about the "I got stuck in a Don Post mask" look myself. But I guess they were trying to make him look closer to his age and the visage in Empire and Jedi. I could just never put it into words.

Also, cookies are a very important tool when wooing one to the Darkside. The Jedi only have food capsules, or bugs from what I can see. Oh and that morals and ethics thing. But we have cookies and a couple of other items I won't go into now.

Golda

 

Geez, where to begin --

First off, I did like it -- parts of it were kick-ass (see below), but I had a LOT of problems with it also.

Understand that I was indeed at the midnight show at the Arclight (the outdoor party for which KICKED BUTT by the way -- highlighted especially by the sign-carrying Christians who were trying to 'save' us from damnation by enjoying a movie in which evil won...no, I am NOT kidding, and they WERE serious...I will cherish their flyer as one of my finest collectible pieces...).

Anybody notice how even more unwieldy the writing was in this one, than usual? Sometimes it was hideous, sometimes (FEW times) brilliant? That's because Tom Stoppard (award-winning playwright, including "Rosencranz and Gildenstern are Dead") wrote the brilliant part of it. And you could tell.

Anyway, at the nadir of horrendous dialogue, nothing beat the theater-wide wave of laughter at the whole playing-house 'we can live with my parents and fix up the baby's room' poodoo. BLAGH! The guy behind me literally spit his drink (thankfully not on me) but it was pretty hilarious. Yeah, the vintage films weren't literary giants as far as dialogue either, but WE DESERVED BETTER.

The opera: Would that be the tapeworms-in-a-giant-bubble opera? I was REALLY disappointed in this. I am a box holder in San Francisco, and even for the film "Hannibal" they were able to create five minutes of REAL (and wonderfully cohesive) actual opera. I was hoping for even more elegant costumes and cool sets, particularly from someone who lives in Marin County. Sadly, no.

"Gee, that looks cool -- for about two seconds!"
I think what bugged me the most was the "Hey look at this, now it's gone!" aspect. Like the "Dr. Seuss Planet" as we were calling it, during the Order 66 scene. They touched on a lot of really neat costumes, effects, situations...for like a nanosecond. It was like, "Whoa, hey, what was that?" every five minutes. You could get whiplash just trying to focus on something you liked!

WAAAY not enough Wookiee action. I mean, geez, what was the point?! We KNOW they kick ass! Chewie and the gang should have had a lot more to do. And I guess Yoda will miss Chewie a lot -- unless my memory chip's eroded, they never encounter each other in the other films. That was a set-up that didn't need to happen.

WAAAY too much General Grievous -- whose entire purpose seemed to give Obi-Wan something to do so he was out of the way during the Night of the Long Knives, as it were. We don't need an "appetizer villain" in a film where chew-the-scenery good ones already abound! And HEY! Obi-Wan DOES, as I seem to recall, encounter Chewbacca later! Hmm, could THAT have been a set-up have made sense?!

I miss Han Solo. I really, really miss him -- in that somehow Obi-Wan and others have been sloppily morphed into him, delivering throwaway lines i.e. "always on the move" etc. that fall flat faster than a lead balloon. Harrison Ford would have delivered them with his trademark harrassed sotto-voce or saturnine smile and wink, and made them work. If you don't have Han Solo or James Bond in your movie, "punchline throwaways" just don't cut it.

I also miss Princess Leia...and even gun-totin' action-Padme' from the first two films... I'm not even going to go into the loathesome Bronte/Austen-esque "female death in childbirth" scene. Gag. Someone else has covered that already in an actual review, and far better than I could. Padme' was pretty much wasted and/or stereotypically hormonally brain-damaged throughout -- anyone notice that almost every time we cut to her, she was sitting on the couch? What, for the ENTIRE FILM?! If I go into my whole problem with Jedi Knights not being allowed to marry (are they PRIESTS? Knights Templar wannabes? AiieeEEEE my head's about to explode!)...so I'll just leave it at that...

And coming full circle -- Take Luke to his family? WHAT? It's not HIS FAMILY! More like "Here, take this baby to his dead grandmother's husband's OTHER kid by a previous marriage." No wonde

 

several extremely good points made. i agree, all of the anakin/padme scenes made me want to barf into my popcorn bucket, most *especially* the balcony scene. "i love you"-"i love you more" ...it reminded me of 2 teenage girls with brain damage (and yes, don't belabor me with the 'love is like that' argument- that dialogue was EXECRABLE) grievous felt like filler, no purpose but an excuse for a cool duel, and a very cool duel it was but it was filler. the wookiees? neato, but more filler, not enough time spent there to enrich the story. keep the action coming hard and fast, space battle and lots of lightsaber fights, and maybe we won't notice that everything in between is sorta lame and rushed...

that said, i enjoyed the hell out of it. lightsaber duels i wanted, lightsaber duels i got. how could i not love it? THIS is the story i have waited for, the fall that came before the redemption. and let's be real: whether i enjoyed them or not (and i did) lucas lowered the bar on the last 2 movies so far that this felt like oscar material.

and yes, i DO love star wars, all of the movies in one way or another. i just don't think they are perfect. seeing the imperfections in something does not stop me from loving it. sometimes quite the opposite.

 

In all honesty, I think EVERY star wars movie has their own little flaws in one way or the other, but in my opinion, Revenge Of The Sith was the least flawed one. The dialogue between Padme and Anakin was a little cheesy, but when has George Lucas written anything that was a defining achievment in film dialogue? The movies are meant to be fun, and they are. I enjoyed EVERY scene, whether it was the interaction between Padme and Anakin, with the Wookies, Grievous, or any other character.

The whole thing about the Christians protesting is both funny and sad. I am very much so a Christian, so it's kinda sad that someone who has the same beliefs I have would be so idiotic and judge people based on an awesome sci-fi film. I think there is absolutely nothing wrong with Star Wars, and am ashamed that people would do that. On the other hand, if I had been there, I would've laughed at them. -Jerry

 

well spoken.

 

Agreed, well said. When I was getting my BA, I was in a class on the Philosphy of Religions..and we had a woman who just came unglued because I had a SW shirt on one night. She (and her church) firmly believed that George Lucas was the Anti-Christ. Therefore, because I had worn the shirt, I was one of "satan's children" It made the last few weeks of class pretty miserable, and the fact that the professor, semi agreed with her didn't help. Oh well, such is the ways of life. Thank the Force that not everybody is that narrow-minded. But..the protesting is pretty funny!

 

Oh boy...here's a fun link, in relation to the topic.

http://www.raidersnewsupdate.com/starwarsnew.htm

As for problems with the film--I agree with most of those, although I ended up liking the film a great deal in spite of them. While I know that one of the marks of a not-so-great movie is when you have to WORK to make up rationales for "why things don't actually suck"...I am guilty of doing so for Padme. I was so disgusted by the "Oh, I shall swoon. I have lost my will to live" crud that I finally decided that Anakin's Force choke, while not inflicting PHYSICAL damage per se (since the robo-doc said that wasn't the case), still ripped a fair amount of life energy away from her. I guess I was taking a cue from Knights of the Old Republic and other video games, in which one of the darker Force powers involved pulling life energy from a target.

So, I just decided to pretend that she WASN'T dying of a broken heart, and she hadn't lost the will to live all on her own (which makes my teeth ache), but that her will to live was ripped from her by Anakin and his Dark Side tantrum.

That worked better for me. I can live with that.

 

I don't see why everyone has such a hard time with the Padme/Anakin thing. It's like, dude, if you'd been secretly married to someone as hot as Hayden Christensen, for almost four years, and couldn't ever talk to anyone about it, when he blew through town you'd be spewing some pretty cheesy dialogue too. Plus, as someone who's been pregnant before, I speak from experience when I say that you can get some pretty cracked-out notions when that warming bun is toying with your hormones 24/7.

But aside from that, I never saw Padme's death as simply, "Anakin broke her heart... because he went to the Dark-side to rule the galaxy and wouldn't settle for going with her to Naboo to decorate a nursery." I saw her death as MANDATORY, not only because there's no mention of her in Ep. IV-VI, (and because the Emperor would have found a way to have her AND the babies killed anyways), but because she was the FACE OF DEMOCRACY, and when "liberty" went the way of the buffalo, so she had too as well. COMPOUND that with losing her husband AND him having just gotten her all choked up("her will to live was ripped from her by Anakin and his Dark Side tantrum" =), PLUS don't even get me STARTED on the younglings, and I smell a perfectly reasonable death scene about to emerge.

As for the "Christian" thing, I, being a Christian as well, am being quite honest when I say I would get a good chuckle out of what sounds like quite an amusing little scenario at the theater, and even the lady who took issue with the SW shirt (man, she'd really hate me). When I meditate (haha) on it however, I think about the fact that there are millions of things the world over that would be a much better use of their passion, and time (i.e. the widows, the poor, the hungry, the suffering... you get the point). What I do find offensive, is that all these sects of the Protestant faith often get lumped in together as one far-reaching equivocal religion, and they simply aren't all the same. There's a good possibility that many of the people demonstrating were even of the belief that it's wrong, in and of itself, to be going to a theater in the first place. That's not to dismiss the elements of "the Force" that really ARE conflictory with my own religious beliefs, but until the day when I wake up in the morning and start praying to medichlorians (sp?) I think I'm ok indulging myself in some awesome movies upon occasion.

 

It's times like these I'm glad I'm a Unitarian-Universalist.

Sorry, just had to be flip. But we blend quite nicely with all sorts of things, including The Force.

 

Okay, so they didn't get to see each other very often and Anakin may have "ripped" some of her life force from her but what about the babies? She couldn't have thought, " Anakin is going somewhere that I can't follow, but I still have our children to care for and raise." She couldn't have decorated the nursey on her own?
And in Episode VI Luke asks Leia about her "real" mother and Leia answers him as if she had known her. Did Bail's first wife die and he remarried so Leia thought that was her "real" mother? Or perhaps for the story it is better for Padame to die and Anakin to feel the guilt and pain that the person that he had done all of this for; to keep from dying, he killed. That's enough to twist your brain cells a few times.
For me the best parts of the film were about Anakin, Obi Wan, and Palpatine. And Boga. I love Boga. I guess I missed Padame's strength. I never surfaced until the end and then it was too late.

Golda

 

You make some REALLY good points oh dark mother.

"She couldn't have thought, 'Anakin is going somewhere that I can't follow, but I still have our children to care for and raise.' She couldn't have decorated the nursey on her own?"

I have pondered this myself, and the conclusion that I use to make it all make sense to me, is that she knew Vader wouldn't just let her go like that. He would be hunting her and the babies, and the emperor would have been chasing them as well. Likely their first move would have been to take the babies from her. With her death, they just assumed the "child" was dead too... which was brilliant. I always thought the story would be that Vader never even knew Padme was pregnant.

"And in Episode VI Luke asks Leia about her "real" mother and Leia answers him as if she had known her. Did Bail's first wife die and he remarried so Leia thought that was her "real" mother? Or perhaps for the story it is better for Padame to die and Anakin to feel the guilt and pain that the person that he had done all of this for; to keep from dying, he killed. That's enough to twist your brain cells a few times."

SERIOUSLY! I know that I have talked with my husband about how it seems that Anakin's hatred for others and lust for power took a way back seat to his deepest hatred - that of himself, (because of what he believed he had done)- which is a brilliant motivation for what he occupied himself with for the next 20 years.

 

And brilliant, I might add, on the part of your son, for allowing Vader to believe that he had killed Padme and the child.

 

Some great conversation going on here. Through friends who worked on the film, I have a much better insight now as to why the Anakin/Padme' scenes were a bit stilted..and my hat's off to Natalie for working through difficult dialog and scenes. I'm unable to go into details...sworn to secrecy..but as much as I am uncomfortable with them, I understand why they are the way they are....

As for the rest...loved it..just loved it.. And yes, Mother P. I absolutely loved Boga too...(just wondering how to turn Merlin - My Percheron- into a Giant Iguana!).