Stop Molesting My Movie Franchises, George Lucas #longestblogposttitleever

I’m not a film nut. I like some good movies (Good Will Hunting). I like some bad movies (Transformers). I’m all for the cool scifi stories (Star Trek), except when they get too political or hyped (Avatar) or their only purpose seems to be to destroy a great literary work (Starship Troopers). I love classic movies where the film is driven by the actor’s abilities to act (Casablanca) around a story worth hearing (Pride of the Yankees).

and how obscure the songs on your ipod are…

Yuuk recorded the latest Indiana Jones movie for me. Here the movie is just called Indy Jones. I was skeptical and leery. Harrison Ford is an old man. Shia LeBeouf isn’t really the one I’d be looking to hand the hat and whip over to, he doesn’t exactly ooze masculinity, but that’s his fault for typically taking parts that humorize his immaturity or femininity. Plus Lucas’s latest attempts to revitalize his legendary stories haven’t exactly been the blue pill, (Viagra’s blue right?).

Yeah… Point Break is gonna be our savior… great…

It was Yuuk’s first Indiana Jones flick as well. I told her she need to watch the original three, but she doesn’t always listen and here it burned both of us. Terrible movie, terrible story, terrible acting, terrible concept, terrible villians, terrible action sequences… I mentally checked out after Indy survives a nuclear bomb test in the opening scene by squeezing into a lead lined refrigerator and getting blasted a mile away. Pure crap, but now my theories that George Lucas used all the money he made back in the 70’s and 80’s on cocain and LSD are starting to look very plausible.

I’m waiting for Batman to beat up George Lucas…

A lot of people have never even seen the original movies. It’s like George woke up one day from his booze and smack laced vacation he started back in the 90’s and realized he wanted to start making movies again. So he took a cold shower, drank some coffee, downed a few Oxycontin pills and got to it.

Steve Holt!

The mistake with the Star Wars trilogy was he mistook flashy for good. Or he wanted to dupe everyone into believing that flashy is good. Flashy has it’s good points, but the new CGI he got to play with produced Jar Jar Binks and pod racing. And I understand that the new movies were supposed to be directed more at kids, but couldn’t he have waited until the next set? I mean these movies are about the fall of a just civilization, an evil dictator coming to power, the genocide of the Jedi’s, and Aniken getting diced up to pieces to become Darth Vader. Darth Fucking Vader. That dude scared the crap out of me when I was little. He’s such a good sort of evil. Not really kid stuff.

I sense a great disturbance in The Force…

I’m pretty heart broken over how it all turned out. I guess to a degree we all struggle to stay relevant as we become obsolete in an ever evolving world. Either we’re eccentric enough that we become living time capsules of sorts, or we just drift along in the great social river swept up along with the changing fashions (leg-warmers again?), music (am I the only one who doesn’t care they keep re-releasing remastered Beetles tracks?), and philosophies (progressivism is now bad? Hitler’s most dangerous qualities included his ability to empathize? [circa Glen Beck 2010]) It’s not bad that we go with the flow, it’s the natural way of things, and if you pay attention to history humanity as a whole sort of follows pretty set trends. I mean you can only call a horse by so many names before it’s just a fucking horse (but what color?).

I think it was a missed opportunity by Mr. Lucas. I don’t watch too many movies these days, but I’ll cross him off my list of directors. I waited around for his next movies like I still wait for J.D. Salinger’s next work (post humorously, now). But things that are good that try to change don’t really change in a good way it seems usually. At least not things like Star Wars and Dr. Jones.

My movie list:

• The Royal Tenenbaums

• Fight Club

• Star Wars IV

• Good Will Hunting

• Bottle Rocket

• Star Trek IV & VI

• Snatch

• Casablanca

• Pride of the Yankees

• Shane

• 500 Days of Summer

• The Maltese Falcon

• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

• Lucky Number Slevin

• Quantum of Solace

What’s yours?

May the force be with you.