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Sunday Burst of Weirdness

This will be kind of a link-dump of some stuff I’ve found this week, combined with some stuff I’ve had sitting in my “Blog Fodder” bookmarks folder for a long time. In the case of the latter stuff, I may well have linked some of this stuff in the past and not remember it. Also, I can no longer credit where I’ve found a lot of this.

:: Fellow gripers about For Better or For Worse will enjoy April Patterson’s real blog.

:: Thirty-nine questions for Charlie Daniels upon hearing “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”. I’ve probably linked this before, come to think of it, but here it is again. I’ve never liked that song; frankly, both the Devil and Johnny are crappy fiddlers. If Natalie MacMaster or Joshua Bell walked in there, they’d both wipe the floor with both of those idiots.

:: A magical pet adventure, that isn’t safe for work. Hmmmmm.

A few links from Stephen Frug:

:: The twelve devices of Peanuts. I’ve previously commented on that second Schroeder strip in this space myself.

:: A do-it-yourself open letter.

:: Star Trek fans remember that before Kate Mulgrew was cast as Captain Janeway on Voyager, the role briefly belonged to Genevieve Bujold. Some of Bujold’s clips have surfaced, and man, she was not cut out for that role.

:: Not really weird, but quite cool actually: Twenty-five photographs taken at exactly the right time. I suspect that a bunch of these are of the “take lots of repeated shots and pick the best one later” variety, but who cares — the photos are all very interesting, and across many different subject matters to boot.

:: Finally, because I love me some Pac-Man, here are two odd variants: Steampunk Pac-man and Text-adventure Pac-man.

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There ain’t no “vista”, there ain’t no “view”, and there certainly ain’t no vista of no view.!

Shamus tracks the evolution of Windows, from 3.1 to Vista. He seems to be staunchly against Vista, and he has definite reasons for being so. My new laptop runs Vista, actually, while our current desktop machine runs XP. Personally I’m happy with both, although I don’t do anything really that gives me reason to be concerned about the memory usage of Vista, so basically, for me my appreciation of Vista boils down to that it looks cool and shiny, and I like cool and shiny. I will note that the infamous “security warnings” in Vista don’t bother me all that much; they don’t pop up nearly as often as I’d been led to believe, and it seems to me that they pop up once and then don’t occur again once a particular program has been cleared.

As an aural companion to Shamus’s post, here are all of the Windows start-up sounds to date:

And then there’s this, which is another reason why nobody but me is allowed to touch my laptop!

My point? None, really. I just like XP and Vista.

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Joss! Joss! He’s our man!!!

Joss Whedon has a new show coming to FOX. It’s called Dollhouse. What’s it about?

Echo (Eliza Dushku) [is] a young woman who is literally everybody’s fantasy. She is one of a group of men and women who can be imprinted with personality packages, including memories, skills, language—even muscle memory—for different assignments. The assignments can be romantic, adventurous, outlandish, uplifting, sexual and/or very illegal. When not imprinted with a personality package, Echo and the others are basically mind-wiped, living like children in a futuristic dorm/lab dubbed the Dollhouse, with no memory of their assignments—or of much else. The show revolves around the childlike Echo’s burgeoning self-awareness, and her desire to know who she was before, a desire that begins to seep into her various imprinted personalities and puts her in danger both in the field and in the closely monitored confines of the Dollhouse.

There are some interviews at the site linked above. The show sounds promising — it’s the creative team behind Firefly, after all — but it’s worth remembering that this is FOX we’re talking about here. If things go according to past practice, FOX will air the fourth episode filmed first, put the show on at 7:00 on Sundays so it’s constantly pre-empted by football, insist on multiple pilots being filmed, and run ads for the show only on Friday nights during the last commercial break during the 9:00-10:00 timeslot.

In the immortal words of Jon Lovitz: “FOX — they should spell it with a ‘U’.”

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Can the Colts have haloes attached to their helmets?

In comments to this post, Jess Nevins, who is a fan of the New England Stupid Patriots, takes exception to the fact that I used the word “evil” in reference to his team. Here is his comment, in full:

Yes, by all means, go Colts–let’s root for the team whose coach is out there giving speeches against gay marriage and shilling for a poisonously homophobic organization. (Just do a search for “Tony Dungy” “gay marriage”).

All Bill Belichick did was cheat at a game. (And run up the score). Tony Dungy is actively making life harder for millions of gay men and women. (Not to mention claiming that the homophobic organization is doing God’s work, which by extension means that those who oppose that organization are doing the Devil’s work).

I can understand hating the Patriots and rooting against them–but when you bandy around words like “evil,” let’s remember who the really bad people are.

[second comment]

Also–do some searching into Belichick’s work with Jim Brown’s Amer-I-Can Program, or his work with the Lazarus House Ministries.

Everyone’s entitled to hate a team and individuals on that team. But, finally, *enough* with the “evil.” Belichick may be boorish, asocial ,a philanderer, and a bad sport (although he’s always been more gracious in defeat than Peyton Manning has been–Belichick never blames anyone else for his losses, which Manning can’t say), but the man does good work outside of the realm of football, while Dungy is an activist for homophobia outside of football (and undoubtedly inside–if one of the Colts were gay, there’s no way they could come out in that locker room environment). “Evil” is for God (if there is any such creature) to decide. But I know which one is the better person.

Well…lately I’ve noticed that more than a few commentators, as well as outright New England and/or Boston sports fans, seem utterly shocked that someone out there isn’t swooning over the dreamy football feats of Brady-and-company. A few points in response:

:: This is, first and foremost, my blog, and I’ll choose the words I use, thank you very much. If I want to use the word “evil” to describe Bill Belichick and the Patriots, I’ll do just that.

:: That said, I will also assume that my readers are capable of differentiating “evil” used in the context of a sports team and “evil” used in other contexts. Now, I’m not sure if Jess is just a Patriots fan or if he’s a fan of all the Boston-area sports teams, but I’ve noticed that some people are upset about the “evil” label being applied to the Patriots, where I don’t recall ever seeing any such disapproval toward describing the New York Yankees as “the evil empire”.

Of course, everybody knows that the Yankees are neither “evil” nor an “empire”. Everybody recognizes that as a metaphor. That so many hyper-defensive Pats fans suddenly seem to be unable to recognize an over-the-top metaphor when it smacks them in the face when applied to their team strikes me as funny. Get a grip. More on sports metaphor in a moment, but….

:: Jess has been a sporadic reader of this blog for a long time, and he’s been reading my over-the-top venting about the Patriots for an equally long time. I was calling the Patriots “evil” before it was “cool” to do so (here’s my post from their Super Bowl win in 2004, if you don’t believe me), and Jess knows this. I’ve also led off each season of football blathering in this space with a frank admission that what I’m doing is pure blathering, and to that point I’ve even taken to decorating my football posts with pictures of Homer Simpson. So Jess knows that he shouldn’t take me seriously when I say that the Patriots are “evil”. I suspect then that he’s reacting to all the other commentators out there who have glommed onto the word — such as the sanctimonious claptrap recently penned by Gregg Easterbrook on the subject. I’ve seen other Patriots fans reacting thusly to the “evil” characterization, and I never saw Yankees fans react that way. Or Cowboys fans, back in the 1990s — in fact, they relished it. (Here’s a profanity-laced post on another blog that illuminates that very point.) Tell a Yankees fan that their team is evil? They’ll laugh at you. Same deal with a Cowboys fan. Tell a Pats fan that their team is evil? Break out the corkscrew, because here comes the whine.

:: Point-by-point comparisons of the off-the-field activities of the various personages involved are, for the purposes of this discussion, a waste of time. I’m not excusing Tony Dungy’s stance on gay marriage, because I stand totally opposed to it (Dungy’s stance, that is). But really — since we’re talking over-the-top language here, this is really all rather pointless, because except for extreme cases, sports fandom just doesn’t work that way. I’ll bet there are plenty of Indianapolis Colts fans who find Dungy’s anti-gay views objectionable, but forgive them because he’s their coach. That may be an ugly reality, but that’s the reality. Arguing about it here seems odd. If, in the future, some turn of events transpired that brought Tony Dungy to the Patriots sidelines, would Jess then dump his investment of fandom in that team? Would I? Well, maybe he would — we all have issues that are deal-breakers. I know that if the Bills are the team that gives Michael Vick his second chance in the NFL, I’m going to have a pretty hard time rooting for them.

:: This is perhaps a harder point to defend, but I can say with experience that one can hold some pretty dispiriting views on certain issues and still be a decent person. We once had a family friend who was a fine, fine friend indeed — and he was also a terrible bigot, to the point where he stopped going to his favorite bar when the bar hired a black bartender. I don’t like Dungy’s stance on gays; it leaves a pretty bad taste in my mouth. But picking sports teams isn’t like picking a political party, and we shouldn’t act like it is.

:: From what I’ve read about the NFL and its general approach toward masculinity, I find it hard to believe that an openly gay player would be any more welcome in the Patriots locker room than any other. This is a serious problem with the NFL in general, not just with Tony Dungy.

:: No, Jess, you don’t “know who the better person is”, unless you know both of these guys personally and can assess their lives and their vices and their virtues as part of a whole package. And neither do I. This is just silly. My general impression is that Belichick is a creep. Yes, this is certainly colored by my being a Bills fan — after all, I get to watch my team get clobbered by the guy twice a year, and he coached the Giants’ D in Super Bowl XXV. But yes, his public persona is, to me, that of a creep. (And I’m not a complete homer here; I didn’t like Gregg Williams when he was here, or Mike Mularkey, and Lawyer Milloy lost me with that stupid “You can’t feed your family on Super Bowl rings” nonsense.)

:: I’m going to need an explanation someday about why it is that Barry Bonds’s cheating is so horrible, so beyond the pale, that his Hall of Fame credentials are besmirched and that an entire era of baseball records needs to be asterisked at best and completely ignored at worst, while Bill Belichick’s cheating is just “Oh, that whacky Bill, just looking for an edge!”, and he pays his fine and the matter’s closed.

:: On a more general point, objecting to the use of the word “evil” in a sports context seems a tad naive. Sport is founded on the entire notion of competition, and competition with rooting interests pretty much implies that for the spectators, there are “good guys” and “bad guys”. And football amps this up to a very high degree. It’s inherent in the game’s very terminology: offense and defense. Aerial attack. Long bomb. Front lines. Shotgun formation. Blockers described as battering rams. Heavy hits. Quarterbacks as “generals”, in “command”. “Gridiron warriors”. “Monsters of the Midway”. “The Killer B’s.” “Steel curtain”. The Bills’ offense during the Super Bowl years, called the “K-gun”.

Football’s entire persona as a sport is steeped in terminology of conflict, war, and the like. Just watch any of those old NFL Films documentaries, with John Facenda’s voiceovers droning on about the “gladiators of the gridiron” tumbling over the “frozen tundra” of the field, and you’ll hear this kind of thing over and over. To take a sport like this, and then complain about the word “evil”? Come on, Pats fans.

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A Halloween Quiz Thing!

Hooray! A Halloween quiz-thing! This one comes courtesy SamuraiFrog and Messrs. Tosy and Cosh.

1. What is your favorite work of horror fiction?

As is my typical form, I can’t name a single one. In terms of novels, Steven King’s ‘Salem’s Lot was truly unnerving. I also admire Robert Cormier’s Fade, a young-adult novel about a not-so-nice kid who develops the power of invisibility. John Bellairs’s Gothic novels for young readers have more than a few unsettling moments; the scariest ones are The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring and The Curse of the Blue Figurine. (By the way, Hollywood, if you’re looking for a good author to mine for movies, Bellairs is just sitting there, waiting.)

I’ve read a lot of horror short fiction as well, and the one story that has stuck in my head for years is Graham Masterton’s “The Secret Shih-Tan”. It’s not supernatural, but it’s damned creepy.

2. Who is your favorite monster?

Monsters, eh? Well, let’s see — I’ll go with the Flukeman from that episode of The X-Files.

3. What horror movie gives you the most chills?

The Exorcist.

4. Freddy versus Jason?

Freddy. He’s an actual character, not an unstoppable doofus in a mask.

5. Ghosts or goblins?

Well, that depends, doesn’t it? You can do great things with either, although ghosts tend to be more creepy in an unsettling way than pure goblins. Goblins you know are made-up beasties, but ghosts have that human quality.

6. What is your scariest encounter with the paranormal?

I don’t believe I’ve ever had an encounter with the paranormal, so probably typical stuff like bumps in the night after I’ve watched a scary movie or teevee show.

7. Do you believe in ghosts?

No, but I’d like to live in a world where they were real.

8. Favorite Halloween costume?

My mother made me an awesome Captain Marvel costume when I was a kid. That thing ruled.

9. If you had an unlimited budget, what would your fantasy costume be for this Halloween?

I’d love to be one of the Riders of Rohan.

10. When was the last time you went trick or treating?

For myself? First grade, I think. After that I preferred to stay in and hand out the candy. We take The Daughter out each year, obviously.

11. What’s your favorite Halloween candy?

I’m the only one in the household who likes candy corn. I buy myself a bag every year and grin as The Wife and The Daughter whine about how gross the stuff is.

12. Tell us about a scary nightmare you had.

I genuinely don’t remember any scary nightmares, although I do recall going to my grandmother’s house in Pittsburgh on overnight stays and being terrified when this awful sound rose up from the basement. Turned out it was the automatic garage door opener; my uncle was a mailman and left for work really early each day.

13. What is your supernatural fear?

I don’t have any.

14. What is your creepy-crawlie fear?

I’m not a big fan of insects. Spiders don’t bother me, so long as they don’t try to board me as a passenger. Large bugs, though, trigger my often-overpowering Squish ’em! instinct.

15. Would you ever stay in a real haunted house overnight?

You mean, a house reputed to be haunted? Sure. I don’t believe in the supernatural, as far as houses go.

16. Are you a traditionalist (just a face) Jack O’Lantern carver, or do you get really creative with your pumpkins?

Oh, who the hell knows. Every year we buy a gorgeous, wonderful pumpkin that would make an outstanding Jack O’Lantern, and every year we forget to carve the damned thing until November 1. And sure enough, we did the same thing this year. Pity, because I love the toasted seeds.

17. How much do you decorate your home for Halloween?

We have an apartment, so not much at all. We should. I love that there are Halloween lights these days.

18. Do you think Halloween is too commercial these days?

No, but it bugs me that on Halloween you can’t buy Halloween candy anymore because stores have the Christmas stuff up already. Come on, folks.

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We’re the Fugowee!

Hmmmmm…Unidentified Earth 21 is still unidentified. Here’s a hint: I cut the notable feature of this location in half for the image used in the original post.

Also, Unidentified Earth 20 has been identified — actually this happened last week, and I was remiss in noting it. It is the ancient city of Petra, located in present-day Jordan. In the second hint, I noted that part of the Unidentified Earth location, but not the part I used for the puzzler, was used in a famous movie, but as a totally different location. The film is Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, wherein the most famous part of Petra — the buildings carved directly out of solid cliff face — are said to be the lost Temple in the Canyon of the Crescent Moon, wherein lies the final resting place of the Holy Grail.

The winner? Shawn, who now earns ten thousand Quatloos.

A new puzzle will run on Thursday.

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One Hundred Movies!!! (61 through 70)

Returning to our excursion through one hundred movies that I consider favorites (or, the Greatest Movies Ever If I Had My Way), we find ourselves counting down from 70 to 61. Or, at least I find myself counting them down thusly. You’re just reading this, not counting down anything. Yeesh.

Anyhow:

70. Independence Day (ID4)

I don’t care how implausible it is. I don’t care that an entire starfaring species, capable of interstellar travel and able to construct spaceships whose force shields can withstand direct hits by tactical nuclear weapons, are nevertheless undone by a computer virus uploaded via an Apple Powerbook. I don’t care that Will Smith somehow manages to learn of Area 51’s existence, a secret kept for fifty years, when he flies over it in his jet fighter while in a combat situation. I don’t care that Smith later ups and goes to his old military base which he’s told has been destroyed, for no other reason than that’s how he gets reunited with his girlfriend. I don’t care that the movie has people outrunning fireballs and surviving firestorms by ducking into maintenance closets. I don’t care that Bill Pullman plays the President of the United States and delivers a pseudo-Churchillian pep talk before getting into a fighter jet to attack the alien ship. I don’t care that the movie gets the orientation of the Empire State Building wrong. I don’t care that the script tells us that the Communications Director for the President of the United States has her cell phone number listed in the phone book “in case of emergencies”. I don’t care how much of this movie makes absolutely no sense. Why? Because the movie is so infectiously fun that it makes me not care about any of those things. So there.

Signature moment: When the alien ships open fire.

69. Terminator 2: Judgment Day

I keep trying to think of where this movie makes a mis-step, and I’m not thinking of one. I love its reversal of the original Terminator, with Arnold as the good Terminator. It’s too bad that the advertising and reviewers gave away the game prior to the film’s release, because the first act is constructed to keep us in the dark as to which of these Terminators is the good one and which is the bad one, right up to the moment when Arnold grabs John Connor and whips the boy around so he can shield Connor with his own back. Oh well.

Signature moment: Arnold, naked, walks into the biker bar.

68. Total Recall

Remember, these are in no particular order in the “lower” half; I tried to rank titles for the top twenty or so and then I just listed titles as they came to me. That’s why I have two of Arnold’s best SF action flicks back to back. I’ve decided that this movie is almost underrated. Its premise is loads of fun, keeping us guessing as to which Arnold is the real Arnold and with some cool SF gee-whizzery at work. I also like the Paul Verhoeven SF violence – nobody does blood-spattering gunfights like Verhoeven. Oh, and in my opinion, this film boasts the last truly great score by Jerry Goldsmith.

Signature moment: “Get your ahss to Mahs!” (By the way, there are times when my sinuses feel like they could really benefit from the use of the gadget Arnold uses to pull the bug out of his nose.)

67. Witness

Come to think of it, I should probably bump this up a bit, but here it is. I love this movie, and when I watch it now, it takes on a different note as I watch Harrison Ford back then and realize what a talented actor was lost when Ford decided, roughly in the early to mid 1990s, to stop challenging himself. John Book is John Book, with nothing at all of Indiana Jones or Han Solo visible in the character. The “fish out of water” story is as old as anything, but it seems so fresh here by virtue of the Amish setting and by virtue of the script that finds gentle comedy in those scenarios but still treats both cultures with respect. The chemistry between Ford and Kelly McGillis is terrific, and the crime thriller plot is well executed. The film also contains two of the most memorable scenes I can remember in a film: Book dancing with Rachel in the barn, and the barn raising. Seriously, the only blemish on the film that I can ever find is in the rather dull score by Maurice Jarre. The barn raising scene is scored well, but it’s done with all synths; a recent compilation album of Jarre themes has the cue arranged for full orchestra, and it is stunning. Too bad they didn’t go with that for the movie.

Signature moment: “You be careful out among them English.”

66. Ben Hur

Biblical epics are kind of like…Christmas fruitcake. They’re all heavy and leaden affairs that sit in your stomach like a rock after you consume them, but some of them taste good enough that you don’t mind that feeling that the thing just won’t end. Ben Hur is one of the best, vastly superior to The Ten Commandments in my view. Yes, it’s long and parts of it drag to a degree that would bring a stampeding herd of bison to its knees, but those parts are offset by a number of thrilling set pieces, the best of which is (obviously) the famous chariot race. I like this movie…but like Christmas fruitcake, I can pretty much only indulge it once a year. (Its score, by Miklos Rozsa, is one of the great classics of film music.)

Signature moment: The chariot race is justly famous, but I always like the sea battle a little more.

65. Far and Away

This movie is pure, pure cheese. It’s a romance novel writ large on the screen; if it were an actual romance novel, the title on its cover would be done in large, looping cursive script over an image of the leads on horseback or something similar. The movie is totally predictable; there is not a single plot development in it that can’t be seen a mile away. It’s the tale of a young Irishman and a young Irish woman who emigrate to the United States, thrust together even though they’re from different classes and they at first don’t even like one another. It’s Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman doing faux-Irish accents. It’s got bare-knuckle boxing, pistols at dawn, and the big Oklahoma land race at the end. It’s got a big John Williams score that features the Chieftains and Enya. And I love it so! This is partly pure sentiment; when The Wife and I were dating in college, we spent our summers apart, and we always went to see a movie on our last day together for three months. This was one of those movies, and our favorite.

Signature moment: The land race, obviously. Terrific music in that sequence.

64. Eating Raoul

This is a weird movie, all right. It features a married couple whose dream is to open a restaurant, but they just don’t have enough money, so they decide to raise money by posing as swingers, and then when people come over to “swing”, they kill them by beaning them with a frying pan and then steal their wallets. It’s a black comedy, obviously. Not the kind of subject matter I’d usually choose for myself; actually, if not for my sister, I’d have never chosen this movie for myself. But I do think it’s pretty funny. Although I do have the bad feeling that I’m someday going to pay a price for actually having watched this movie with my grandmother.

Signature moment: The couple’s surprise windfall at the swingers’ party.

63. The Hunt for Red October

I remember reading a review of this movie before I saw it. Released in 1990, a year after the Fall of Communism, the review wondered if a movie like this could possibly still be exciting in a post-Cold War world. The answer is an obvious Yes; I still find it riveting every time I watch it. What’s better than a good cat-and-mouse movie? A movie with about half-a-dozen cat-and-mouse games going on.

Signature moment: “We get the right sort of American, this will work. But if we get some buckaroo….”

62. Amadeus

If there is a movie out there that recreates a specific time and place better than Amadeus, I don’t know what it is. The creation of late 1700s Vienna is as complete a cinematic illusion as I can think of. The famous story of the rivalry between the freakishly gifted Mozart and the desperately ungifted Salieri is well known; I simply note that the film holds up as well now as it did in its original release. I reviewed this film for GMR here.

Signature moment: Mozart on his deathbed, dictating his Requiem to Salieri, and Salieri’s struggle to understand Mozart’s compositional genius.

61. The Adventures of Robin Hood

What a great, great movie this is – it should probably be farther up this list. Oops. Errol Flynn, Olivia DeHavilland, Claude Rains, Basil Rathbone, Nathan Hale; one of the all-time great scores by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. It’s such a classic that further comment here seems pointless, so I’ll just leave off there.

Signature moment: “What say you to that, Baron of Lockesley?” “May I obey all your commands with equal pleasure, Sire!”

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Fixing the Prequels – The Phantom Menace (part one)

Long-time readers will know that I am a member of that terribly small, but incredibly zealous, band of folk: those who admire and enjoy the Star Wars prequel trilogy. I enjoyed, and continue to enjoy, each one of them, and I refuse to view them as disastrous films done in by George Lucas’s money-grubbing hubris. The Daughter and I just watched The Phantom Menace this past weekend, and damned if I still can’t see what it is about that movie that everybody hates with such fury.

But while I do openly admit to loving these films – long posts about each film can be found linked in my sidebar – I do also admit that the films are flawed. Not fatally flawed, in my view, but there are things in each prequel film that could have been done better. So, in this series of posts, I’m going to set out exactly what I think should have been done differently. We’ll start, obviously, with The Phantom Menace, and then proceed on to Attack of the Clones and, finally, Revenge of the Sith.

First, a couple of points about this fairly Quixotic project. One, I’m not going to be bitching a lot about who should have been cast in this or that role (well, with one exception, but that’s less about the actual performance given and more about the character in question) or directed. This isn’t going to be a “Lucas is Teh Suck as a director!” kind of thing, OK? Two, I’m not going to vastly rewrite the prequel stories, because I think the stories and plotting of the prequels are quite solid and well done. What I’m more about here is fleshing out the stories themselves so they work better, not tossing them out entirely. I’m not doing fanfic here. Lastly, for the sake of brevity, I shall employ the following abbreviations:

TPM = The Phantom Menace
AOTC = Attack of the Clones
ROTS = Revenge of the Sith
ANH = A New Hope
TESB = The Empire Strikes Back
ROTJ = Return of the Jedi
PT = Prequel Trilogy
CT = Classic Trilogy

So, on to The Phantom Menace. Here’s how TPM would look if I’d made it.

Intro scenes.

I remember when the backlash started against this film, quite a few commentators complained about the text of the opening crawl, about trade routes and taxation and whatnot. “The film’s thirty seconds old, and I’m already bored!” went the refrain, and frankly, what a stupid refrain that was. The American Revolution, after all, had its routes in clashes and quarrels over taxation and trade routes and the like, and yet no one complains about American Revolution stories on an a priori basis. So the opening crawl stays.

Next, the sequence with the Republic ship landing on the Trade Federation cruiser. I actually like this opening too, and I wouldn’t change anything about it, save one small detail: the accents of the Trade Federation guys. Not because of all that idiotic stuff about them looking and sounding “Chinese” (for my money, they always sounded less Chinese and more like Count Dracula – I kept waiting for them to express their desire to “sok your blod”), but because they’re frankly hard to understand much of the time. The only time in TPM that Darth Sidious is actually referred to by name comes in one of these early scenes, and the accent makes the name almost unintelligible.

There’s also a bit in the original script where two worker droids in the landing bay note the arrival of the Republic ambassadors; one says something like “A Republic cruiser! Do you think that’s trouble?” And the other replies, “I’m not made to think.” I like that exchange and I wish it had been included in the movie.

So, the Republic ship has landed, and the two Jedi ambassadors have been escorted into a waiting room. Here’s where the first thing I’d correct about the prequels crops up: the relationship of Obi Wan Kenobi and Qui Gon Jinn. What’s wrong here is that the script, as filmed, doesn’t really draw the student-teacher relationship strongly enough. This is the young Obi Wan, the impulsive one who would make some bad decisions later on; this is the young Obi Wan on whom the older Obi Wan in the Classic Trilogy would look back somewhat ruefully. We don’t get enough of a view of Obi Wan as the student who doesn’t know everything.

This scene has Obi Wan noting that he feels something strange out there in the Force, something “elsewhere…elusive”. This should have been given to Qui Gon; his greater experience with the Force should make him the one feeling that something is amiss with this otherwise simple-looking matter of a trade dispute. It should have gone like this:

QUI GON: I have a bad feeling about this.

OBI WAN: I don’t sense anything.

QUI GON: This is supposed to be a simple trade dispute, and yet there’s something elsewhere…elusive. Learn to listen to the living Force, young Padawan, and it will tell you things that are not readily apparent.

OBI WAN: Master Yoda has said that I should focus my attention on where I am, and what I’m doing. The future is always in motion.

QUI GON: Yes, well…Master Yoda and I have had our disagreements.

OBI WAN: How do you think the Trade Viceroy will react to the Chancellor’s demands?

QUI GON: These Federation types are cowards. Blockading a planet with minimal defenses is one thing, but defying two Jedi ambassadors? The negotiations will be short.

Something like this would establish Qui Gon as the clearly superior Jedi in this scenario, as well as plant the notion of Qui Gon as something of a Jedi rogue. One of the underappreciated aspects of the entire Prequel trilogy, in my view, has always been the extent to which the Jedi are depicted: many commentators seem to miss the fact that the PT depicts not the Jedi in their prime, but the Jedi when they are in serious decline as an order, when their focuses have become too inward and when they have become too arrogant and decadent in their own power. Here we’d highlight the notion that all is not perfect in the Jedi world, by establishing the notion of a Jedi Master disagreeing with Yoda, who at the time TPM came out was the only true Jedi master (along with Obi Wan Kenobi) with whom we were familiar.

I also like the opportunity to have Obi Wan’s lines reflect a bit of dialogue spoken to Luke in The Empire Strikes Back. In truth, I think that the PT did a fair job of harkening back to the CT, but I’d make the parallels even stronger.

Next, we have the Trade Federation guys confer with Darth Sidious. This scene works pretty well, I think, except that again it’s undermined a bit by the thick accents of the Federation baddies. Also, there’s some dialogue from the original script that didn’t make it into the final scene. Additionally, I’d have the Federation guys show some fear and fealty to Sidious when his hologram appears, something like this:

A hologram of DARTH SIDIOUS appears before Viceroy Gunray and his lackies.

SIDIOUS: I instructed you to not contact me except in the event of emergency, Viceroy.

GUNRAY: Forgive me, Lord Sidious, but the Chancellor’s ambassadors have arrived, and they are Jedi knights.

SIDIOUS: The Chancellor involved the Jedi? That was unexpected.

DOFINE: [this is the other Federation guy] Your plan has failed, My Lord. We cannot go against the Jedi.

SIDIOUS: You fear two Jedi more than you fear me, Dofine? Viceroy, I don’t want this stunted slime in my sight again!

Dofine slinks away.

GUNRAY: Then what shall we do, My Lord?

SIDIOUS: Nothing has changed. A confrontation with the Jedi was inevitable, so we must act now. Begin landing your troops on Naboo.

GUNRAY: Invasion? So soon? Is that…legal?

SIDIOUS: I will make it legal.

GUNRAY: And the Jedi?

SIDIOUS: The Chancellor should never have involved them in this matter. Kill them immediately.

The hologram fades. Gunray turns to his subordinates.

GUNRAY: Begin jamming the communications from the planet, and prepare the armies for invasion.

DOFINE: Yes, Viceroy…but how will we kill the Jedi?

GUNRAY: Droids. Lots of droids.

Then cut back to the rest of this sequence as it unfolds in the film; I’ve always found this whole sequence pretty effective. The only change I’d make is that when the destroyer droids arrive, I’d draw attention to Obi Wan’s suddenly being overmatched: he would try to hold them off himself for a moment or two while Qui Gon continues to cut through the door. This would highlight the notion that he’s young and impulsive. Qui Gon would thus have to stop cutting through the door in order to bail out his young Padawan.

There’s also a line that I like in the original script; Obi Wan remarks, as they’re fighting battle droids, “Offhand I’d say that this mission is past the negotiation phase.”

Oh, and the business with the two Jedi suddenly displaying super speed in escaping the destroyer droids? I’d ditch that and have them escape in some other way – maybe by cutting open a coolant pipe or something to make a distraction. The super speed thing doesn’t really work; it’s a Jedi ability that is only seen this one time and never really comes into play again even though there are times when it seems just what the doctor ordered. The less of that, the better.

Finally, the two Jedi arrive in the landing bay, where they discover the droid armies boarding their ships for the invasion of Naboo. Here I’d highlight the Jedi’s surprise that the Trade Federation is actually invading.

OBI WAN: Battle droids?

QUI GON: It’s an invasion force. They’re invading Naboo.

OBI WAN: From a dispute over trade routes to invasion? I don’t understand.

QUI GON: Nor do I. They destroy our ship, try to kill us, and now an invasion…something else is at work here. We have to warn the Naboo and contact Chancellor Valorum. Stow aboard separate ships, and we’ll meet on the planet.

OBI WAN: Yes, Master. At least you were right about one thing: the negotiations were short!

And then we’re on to Naboo. Next up…the rehabilitation of Jar Jar Binks.

(Seriously.)

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