Rating:
I hope you guys appreciate all I do for you. I could review an easy movie—Stripes, for example, or Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Watching those would be enjoyable. Heck, it would even be a downright good time. Instead, I am willing to put myself through the unimaginable terror of watching Attack of the Clones, the single most wretched movie ever made. I’m not sure I’ll have adequate words to describe the pain, the fear and the suffering that this movie causes, but I’ll try. It’s all for you.

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So I’m watching Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, and it’s at the beginning, on the ice planet Hoth–my very favorite part of the movie, and perhaps the whole series. Anyway, I noticed something unintentionally comical for the first time.

See, Luke’s lost and weak out in the ice plains, the wind swirling around him, nearly frozen. Suddenly, good ol’ Ben Kenobi (That’s Obi-Wan, to you and me) appears before him in hallucinatory spirit-form. Now, I understand this scene and appreciate its artfulness–the idea is, Luke is pretty out of it, his mind isn’t right at all, and what with his fragile state, the line between life and death may even be blurring a little bit, perhaps allowing him to communicate with dead people.

This set up was probably meant to be ambiguous–leaving the question open as to whether Luke was hallucinating or Obi-Wan had actually appeared to him–but it’s clear immediately, and confirmed through later contacts, that Obi-Wan is actually appearing to him. And what has Luke’s best friend and mentor crossed universes and temporal dimensions to tell his dying pupil?

“Luke, you must go to the Dagoba system–there you will learn from Yoda, the Jedi Master who instructed me”


What?! Luke’s lying there in the desolate tundra on the very brink of death, and Obi-Wan appears for like nine seconds to tell him this relatively trivial piece of forshadowing? I mean, it’s not like he appeared while Luke was sitting around playing monster chess, or flying his X-Wing somewhere, so he could just turn around and go to Dagoba right then. This is a desperate, forsaken Luke here, and we don’t even get a “Hang in there, buddy,” or a “Stay strong, Luke”??

I’m just saying, the utter frankness of this spiritual connection is hilarious to me.

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Rating:
For someone like me, what we’re about to discuss is the absolute ne plus ultra of holiday specials, despite being perhaps the single worst thing to have ever been broadcast on television. Most people into the same things as I am have heard of it and many have seen it, but I’m sure even more have not. Before the Internet made everything easily available to everyone, it was awfully hard to come by, and even now it is hard to come by in a form that isn’t so full of distortion that you have to squint your eyes really hard to tell what’s going on. Of course, what’s going on is the most truly awful celebration of the holidays ever, so maybe you don’t want to squint that hard. It’s one hour and thirty-five minutes of nonsense, ranging from the mind-blowing to the gut-wrenching. It’s a travesty so atrocious that even its creator wants all existing copies destroyed. And it all happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

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Rating:
The serious and objective part of my brain looks at AFI’s rating for Star Wars and thinks that, although the movie is undeniably great and groundbreaking and influential, the number 15 slot is probably way too high. Another part of my brain, though, thinks the hell with all that, because holy nut do I love Star Wars. That part of me is gonna win out today, and you can take that to the bank.

I’ve been a total, balls-to-the-wall Star Wars fan (of the original trilogy, that is) virtually my entire life. Any kind of sensible review, with legitimate analysis and appropriate discussion, is impossible. I can’t talk about the whole Joseph Campbell, mythological and archetypal aspects of it, or about the numerous movies, especially Akira Kurosawa films, to which it owes tremendous debts. I know about these things, having seen and heard and read gazillions of interviews and essays and commentaries about the movies. But any attempt to actually discuss them is futile; I get talking about Star Wars and pretty soon I’m just gushing about all my favorite parts of the movie. I have so much goodwill for the picture, and so many happy memories associated with it, that all I can do is present to you a list. A list of Things I Love About Star Wars.

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Love is a fairly amazing thing, but I suppose we all know that by now; it’s most unlikely that so much of our poetry, cinema and popular music would be devoted to the subject if it were something mundane. Among all of the myriad characteristics of this concept we call love, the most remarkable is its ability to grow anew in fields thought long ago to be sewn with salt. Indeed, the deepest, truest, most intense love affair of my life—which had, I thought, long ago been rendered nothing more than a pile of spent ashes—now blazes again with the intensity of the desert sun. And it all started up again because of a trip to the grocery store in 2005.

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When I was eleven-going-on-twelve, my dad and I went to see a movie.

This was before I made frequent trips to the movie theater with my junior high friends. For the first thirteen or so years of my life, going to see a movie was a major event; my family went once, perhaps twice, in a year. That spring and summer when I was eleven-going-on-twelve, however, was something different. My dad and I, leaving the womenfolk behind, went to the theater a whopping three times, if you can believe it. Three times in but a couple of months! Just going to the cinema that often was cause enough for excitement, but it was the extra special nature of these films that made this what was probably, at the time, the most important experience of my life.

The movies, of course, were the special editions of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.

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