Idiotprogrammer Blog

Category: sitcoms

  • Why Phantom Menace was not a complete failure By Robert Nagle

    Here’s a humorous 70 minute video review analyzing why Star Wars: The Phantom Menace didn’t work as film-making.  (Don’t worry; it’s broken down into 10 minute chunks).

    The review is sarcastic/silly/vulgar, but the critiques are valid: the film has no protagonist; the plot is too complicated, the Jedi’s powers are too unclear and arbitrary, there’s too much eye candy  and the ending is too disjointed. (Also, he pointed out a lot of logical inconsistencies).  I enjoyed the critique, but ultimately it did not dissuade me. Star Wars Phantom Menace wasn’t a disaster; although the plot was arcane and ridiculous, I had no problems following it and even enjoyed some  plot tricks (like Queen  Amidala’s switching places with her servant). The mistake the critic makes is that stories need to have one plot line (see Lost), that characters need to be individualized and that spectacle is intrinsically unsatisfying. The story is a good comic book adventure; I guess the film suffers from unrealistic expectations; I think Lucas aspires mainly to make an enjoyable and escapist  B movie.

    One problem is that it is a big budget film and needs to deliver the goods (visually speaking). If Lucas had aimed for something on a smaller budget but with more episodes, you wouldn’t face the pressure of having to make the good vs. evil struggle seem so portentous (and a Jar Jar misstep seem too fatal). But the Star Wars franchise aspires to be larger than life; Lucas Arts was paid precisely to make something that looked amazing on the big screen.

    Let me refute a common complaint that Lucas’s dialogue was wooden. Not on your life! The dialogue is functional and sometimes overly formal, but that is the film’s style. (In fact, Jar Jar serves as a good counterweight to the overly formal conversational style). When watching Revenge of the Sith, I was reminded at several times of moments from Greek tragedy; The dialogue of Greek tragedy was kind of wooden too by the way, but no one seemed to notice ….

    The two objections which linger with the overall Star Wars franchise is 1)there are too many characters onscreen at once, so there is little focus and 2)too much fighting! The film only knows how to create dramatic tension with fight scenes.

    But if you examine both complaints, there are answers. First, Star Wars provides enough back story for audience members to follow these characters pretty easily. Second, these three films are about fighting and the struggle between good and evil. It is like criticizing the movie Platoon for having too much blood in it.

    Actually my complaint with these swashbuckling films is that violence is not presented in a realistic enough manner. Nobody really dies; injuries always seem to be nothing more than flesh wounds and very rarely do we see people retreating or avoiding conflict.  The first step to prevailing is to stay alive, and repeated engagement doesn’t seem to be a successful long-term strategy.

    Lucas wants to immerse you in the middle of armed conflict. That’s fine. I wish that the stakes for his franchise didn’t have to be so high; a TV series is much better at presenting a series of incidents which reveal character. That’s one thing the show Lost does admirably. It builds upon individual conflicts until we reach some kind of climax at the end of season. One of my favorite Lost episodes is when Hurley discovers a Volkwagon minivan and tries to get it to work; there’s another episode about the survivors fighting over the Dharma rations. Totally unimportant in the grand scheme of things, but also fun. Unfortunately the Star Wars episodes are never allowed to have much fun (except perhaps the pod races).

    I can’t find the URL, but one person wrote to Roger Ebert to complain that the problem with Phantom Menace is that there is no Hans Solo character. In other words, if the film had a character who didn’t take himself seriously or seemed to enjoy the adventure for its own sake, the film would be more of a success. As I said, Jar Jar sort of fulfills that role. But that criticism is not altogether fair. In the Star Wars universe, characters have a dramatic seriousness and rarely have simple aspirations. If you enter the Star Wars universe, you just have to accept that. Compare this to Star Trek which has just as much back story and mythology and yet does not get bogged down in melodrama (but has too much time travel, a common cliche these days).

    One of my favorite sci fi series is Red Dwarf, a goofy satire on sci fi in general. Leave aside the show’s satirical aspects, I just loved the smallness of each show’s plot. Basically, the writers had to come up with conflicts which three ragtag characters could deal with. That constrained the plot possibilities (a good thing). The problem with Star Wars is that it is too big. Wouldn’t it be good  to limit the scope of the action to one character?

    A final point about character. The Star Wars critic makes a big deal out of the fact that characters in the Phantom Menace are not memorable. Fair enough. But even in sci fi TV series,  characters start out flat and then grow over time. In Red Dwarf,  Rimmer starts out as a coward (and basically remains one). But through the seasons  we learn more about why he became a coward and how  his cowardice manifests itself. Entire episodes are devoted to elaborating on a single personality quirk. Unfortunately,  Star Wars works on a larger canvas and feels compelled to  address larger social issues of justice and vengeance and evil…at the expense of exploring individual lives.

    The problem with Star Wars (and alas, with Greek drama) is  mythology. Mythology isn’t particularly entertaining; it doesn’t allow  much definition of individuals. This  magical/mythical/touchy-feely nonsense which infects  the Lost/Heroes/Buffy/Angel universes  (but NOT necessarily Star Trek) makes it easy to forget about characters and real life. Instead, we have to worry about the internal consistencies of the Force/vampires/Unobtainium/time travel and not really think about the significance of what we are watching.   Red Dwarf comes closer to doing that because it asks  existential questions: how will  humans respond to millenial and technological loneliness?  (The Answer: by watching old movies, bossing around robots  and cultivating  petty obsessions).

    I love the Star Wars franchise – if only for nostalgic reasons. But at some point I have to wonder if a livelier film couldn’t have been made for a fraction of Phantom Menace’s budget…and LucasArts wouldn’t have to obsess over creating  dramatic masterpieces and just make it easy to explore an alternate world with different rules and conflicts.

  • Sex-and-the-City tours

    A.A. Gill lampoons those who take the Sex-in-the-City tours of New York City:

    “You remember the episode where Carrie spills the cappuccino because she’s looking after the dog and has lost the manuscript with a description of oral sex with the Russian and then oh my God she bumps into Big who she hasn’t seen since that time with the martini olives and the hemorrhoids? Well, if you look to the right, that’s the café, and it’s like oh my God bad hair dog blow job cappuccino hell. You remember that of course.” Of course they remember that. It’s like asking Taliban summer-school students if they remember the bit where Muhammad smote the gay Jews. “And if you want brunch or something, I can recommend it.

    “Now here on the left is the restaurant where Samantha found out she was pregnant with cocker spaniels and then swallowed her contact lenses and the hot doctor at the next table offered to get them all out for her. You remember that?” They remember that. Corresponding clips from the series are played on the tiny, milky overhead screens. It’s an oddly disembodied sensation of traveling in a magic-realist bus, or coming around from an anesthetic. After an age, we stop. “Ladies, I’m very particular about time. If you’re not back in 17 minutes”—she checks her watch—“we will leave you behind.” And for a moment we all consider this. We could be left behind in the parallel land of Sex and the City, like an episode of Star Trek, to live forever in this mythical New York of endless brunch and always fornicating on top wearing a black bra. We’ve pulled up next to a sex shop. Apparently, we all remember that someone once bought a Rabbit vibrator here. We get off the bus and file into the shop, which is odd. Sex shops are generally solitary, furtive, and male. The Rabbits are piled high. That is the nature of rabbits. There’s a buzz of anticipation. They were expecting us with a discount, and a couple of women get out their credit cards. I suppose a vibrator might be an impulse buy, and buying yourself one in front of 50 strangers with whom you then have to share a bus journey might be considered the height of liberated insouciance. But buying a sex aid because some actress has faked an orgasm on TV with it is evidence that there’s more wrong with your social life than can be fixed by a dildo. We get back on the bus. I can’t tell if anyone’s chosen to stay behind and live on Mr. Big Island forever: “No, you all go on. My place is here.”

    …

    If I were a French philosopher, un philosophe français (and it’s certainly a request I’m putting on the form for reincarnation), I’d say that perhaps the Sex and the City bus tour is really how postmodern epic sagas are conceived: popular prose poetry, stories of wish fulfillment and inspiration, shaped by the repetition of gossip and the lives of heroes. It’s probably what Homer did. You could see this bus as an air-conditioned Odyssey workshop, and it’s only a cultural snobbery that makes us regard it as any more risible than guided tours around Brontë country or the classic ruins of North Africa, invigilated by some bitter, tight, redundant academic. But then, if I’m going to be a French philosopher, I’m going to have to inflate my cultural snobbery, and not by any stretch of the Zeitgeist, or Homeric blindness, is Carrie Bradshaw Helen of Troy. And Sex and the City ain’t a chic, ironic take on Wuthering Heights. These women on the bus are missing the point. The storyville they’re looking for doesn’t exist and never did, and trying to search for the literal in literature inevitably kills the object of affection, murders the fiction stone-dead.

    (Gill also wrote a funny piece about wealthy Indian artistocrats who collect cars).

    By the way, I’ve been fascinated by Sex and the City as a cultural icon (see my piece on the show’s demise). I recently picked up Candace Bushnell’s book and looking  for how it was adapted onscreen. It doesn’t seem like high literature, but the action stays on the surface and is highly readable. I have watched SITC a good number of times (and noted cases of vomiting—take heed!). Each time I watch the show, I am spellbound by the elegant camera work and the gay sensibilities (the two lead writers were openly gay). I think some of the plot setups are clever, but the Mr. Big character seems to be one of the dullest male characters on  American TV.

    (Wow, I thought my weblog categories were sufficient to cover any topic I dream of, but this post and the previous Higgs Boson post seems to cry for a new one).