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edenfallingPart the First: Furniture Shopping
Mom and I headed out to Ikea at about 10:30 this morning, and spent about an hour and a half looking at stuff -- we would have spent longer, but unlike my mother, I can be decisive when I need to, and I stopped her from looking at more things and saying "But what about..."
Of course, then we realized that we couldn't possibly fit everything into our minivan in one trip, and we also probably couldn't lift the loveseat with just two of us. So we packed up the chair, the table and chairs set, and the random cushiony type things, and drove home to enlist my dad.
And we went back, and we picked up the loveseat, which Dad and I managed, in our immense cleverness, to actually fit into the minivan with enough space left over for me to actually sit in a seat, instead of crouching in the gap between the front seats and being madly illegal.
Go us! And go me -- I have much new furniture for, I believe, under $600 total! ($200 for the sofa, $100 for the washable cover, $100 for the table and chairs set, $100 for the living room chair, $60 for its cushion/cover, and $8 for dinky little seat covers for the dining room chairs.)
I love Ikea. :-D
---------------------------------
Part the Second: Revenge of the Sith
I think I will cut this for spoilers, even though the movie's already been out for over a week. Aren't I nice?
So first of all, it was actually pretty good. A lot of action, good momentum, plot vaguely reminiscent of classical tragedy, etc. Samuel L. Jackson kicks ASS. (As usual.) Ewan MacGreggor ROCKS.
And it was pretty. Star Wars movies always have great visuals, if nothing else. Mustafar (the volcanic planet) for example? Was SO DAMN COOL. The rivers of lava were to DIE for.
But.
The dialogue.
OMFG, the DIALOGUE.
*wince*
Swear to god, I could have made this movie five times better if I had thirty minutes and a red pen. And dialogue isn't even my strong point as a writer! Palpatine, while actually given good lines through most of the movie, mysteriously fails to make any really convincing points about Anakin's complicity in the death of Mace Windu. There is very little real sense that these characters are involved in high levels of government or the military.
And Padme has been LOBOTOMIZED.
Look, this is a woman who was elected QUEEN OF HER ENTIRE BLEEPING PLANET when she was 14 years old. She saved them from a blockade and an invasion. She's a SENATOR. And despite her inexplicable taste in men, she is quite capable of taking care of herself.
She is NOT STUPID.
And yet through this entire movie, she mostly wanders aimlessly around her apartment, wearing steadily weirder dresses, and procedes to speak with her husband as if she's the love-child of a high school cheerleader and a self-absorbed, depressive, wannabe poet. Only once do we see her doing anything even vaguely resembling her actual JOB. You know, GOVERNMENT? Which usually involves attending a lot of Senate sessions and meetings with lobbyists, and doing paperwork, and things like that?
It's especially sad, since she sort of pulls herself together toward the end, to comment ironically on Palpatine's establishment of the Empire, and to call Anakin on his hypocrisy, but she still can't find the words to argue effectively and doesn't even manage to tell him that she DIDN'T bring Obi-Wan along willingly -- he just stowed away on her ship.
What a waste of a good character and actress.
And the ending, while full of cool tie-ins to the original trilogy, didn't work in and of itself. I was reminded of people who complained that The Return of the King seemed to have about six different endings, but it just... kept... going...
So did Revenge of the Sith. Really, it should have flipped some scenes so that the babies were born, and Obi-Wan, Yoda, and Bail Organa decided how to hide them... and only then cut to Darth Vader waking up after his reconstruction as a cyborg. And end the movie on his horrified realization that he essentially brought about Padme's death through his own efforts to prevent it.
That would have had full thematic resonance.
This was more... oh, a series of faltering stutters. And not even particularly well-done scenes, at that. Bail and his wife did not act like normal people going "Ooooh," over a baby. People change their expressions, move their arms, offer fingers for the baby to look at or grasp. They don't just sit there looking like they're posing for official photos.
And Owen and Beru? WTF was up with the receiving a new baby and going to watch the sunset? I'd either start pointing out the sunset to the baby, or go inside and start setting up a nursery.
Idiots.
...
I feel I should mention, for the sake of perspective, that I do not bother to nitpick movies that I don't already like to some degree. If I think they're hopeless, I just say so. I do not start pointing out ways in which they could have been made better. Because some movies just CAN'T be made better, no matter how much you try; there isn't anything there to work with.
Revenge of the Sith, though, was good. But it COULD have been great.
If only.
*sigh*
To summarize: good movie, some serious flaws, could easily have been fixed if George Lucas A) could write dialogue, B) treated Padme as a real person with a real job instead of a plot device, and C) had a slightly better understanding of human behavior.
Mom and I headed out to Ikea at about 10:30 this morning, and spent about an hour and a half looking at stuff -- we would have spent longer, but unlike my mother, I can be decisive when I need to, and I stopped her from looking at more things and saying "But what about..."
Of course, then we realized that we couldn't possibly fit everything into our minivan in one trip, and we also probably couldn't lift the loveseat with just two of us. So we packed up the chair, the table and chairs set, and the random cushiony type things, and drove home to enlist my dad.
And we went back, and we picked up the loveseat, which Dad and I managed, in our immense cleverness, to actually fit into the minivan with enough space left over for me to actually sit in a seat, instead of crouching in the gap between the front seats and being madly illegal.
Go us! And go me -- I have much new furniture for, I believe, under $600 total! ($200 for the sofa, $100 for the washable cover, $100 for the table and chairs set, $100 for the living room chair, $60 for its cushion/cover, and $8 for dinky little seat covers for the dining room chairs.)
I love Ikea. :-D
---------------------------------
Part the Second: Revenge of the Sith
I think I will cut this for spoilers, even though the movie's already been out for over a week. Aren't I nice?
So first of all, it was actually pretty good. A lot of action, good momentum, plot vaguely reminiscent of classical tragedy, etc. Samuel L. Jackson kicks ASS. (As usual.) Ewan MacGreggor ROCKS.
And it was pretty. Star Wars movies always have great visuals, if nothing else. Mustafar (the volcanic planet) for example? Was SO DAMN COOL. The rivers of lava were to DIE for.
But.
The dialogue.
OMFG, the DIALOGUE.
*wince*
Swear to god, I could have made this movie five times better if I had thirty minutes and a red pen. And dialogue isn't even my strong point as a writer! Palpatine, while actually given good lines through most of the movie, mysteriously fails to make any really convincing points about Anakin's complicity in the death of Mace Windu. There is very little real sense that these characters are involved in high levels of government or the military.
And Padme has been LOBOTOMIZED.
Look, this is a woman who was elected QUEEN OF HER ENTIRE BLEEPING PLANET when she was 14 years old. She saved them from a blockade and an invasion. She's a SENATOR. And despite her inexplicable taste in men, she is quite capable of taking care of herself.
She is NOT STUPID.
And yet through this entire movie, she mostly wanders aimlessly around her apartment, wearing steadily weirder dresses, and procedes to speak with her husband as if she's the love-child of a high school cheerleader and a self-absorbed, depressive, wannabe poet. Only once do we see her doing anything even vaguely resembling her actual JOB. You know, GOVERNMENT? Which usually involves attending a lot of Senate sessions and meetings with lobbyists, and doing paperwork, and things like that?
It's especially sad, since she sort of pulls herself together toward the end, to comment ironically on Palpatine's establishment of the Empire, and to call Anakin on his hypocrisy, but she still can't find the words to argue effectively and doesn't even manage to tell him that she DIDN'T bring Obi-Wan along willingly -- he just stowed away on her ship.
What a waste of a good character and actress.
And the ending, while full of cool tie-ins to the original trilogy, didn't work in and of itself. I was reminded of people who complained that The Return of the King seemed to have about six different endings, but it just... kept... going...
So did Revenge of the Sith. Really, it should have flipped some scenes so that the babies were born, and Obi-Wan, Yoda, and Bail Organa decided how to hide them... and only then cut to Darth Vader waking up after his reconstruction as a cyborg. And end the movie on his horrified realization that he essentially brought about Padme's death through his own efforts to prevent it.
That would have had full thematic resonance.
This was more... oh, a series of faltering stutters. And not even particularly well-done scenes, at that. Bail and his wife did not act like normal people going "Ooooh," over a baby. People change their expressions, move their arms, offer fingers for the baby to look at or grasp. They don't just sit there looking like they're posing for official photos.
And Owen and Beru? WTF was up with the receiving a new baby and going to watch the sunset? I'd either start pointing out the sunset to the baby, or go inside and start setting up a nursery.
Idiots.
...
I feel I should mention, for the sake of perspective, that I do not bother to nitpick movies that I don't already like to some degree. If I think they're hopeless, I just say so. I do not start pointing out ways in which they could have been made better. Because some movies just CAN'T be made better, no matter how much you try; there isn't anything there to work with.
Revenge of the Sith, though, was good. But it COULD have been great.
If only.
*sigh*
To summarize: good movie, some serious flaws, could easily have been fixed if George Lucas A) could write dialogue, B) treated Padme as a real person with a real job instead of a plot device, and C) had a slightly better understanding of human behavior.
