Tuesday, May 04, 2010

Happy Star Wars (tm) Day 2010.

Happy Star Wars (tm) Day everyone. May the Fourth be with you.

How was your Star Wars year? Much been happening? Personal Star Wars highlight of the year for me came from 30 Rock, to which I was recently introduced. The main character, Liz Lemon, is, among other things, a Star Wars dork, but to my surprise her love is portrayed sympathetically. We laugh with the character, rather than at her. Instead of the usual jokes about sociopathic man-child Star Wars fans with poor personal hygiene living in their parents’ basement, we get something fresh and inventive. The “Uncanny valley” exchange between Tracy and Frank from the season 2 episode, ’Succession’, was a particular standout.

Personal lowlight of the year was watching a 70-minute video review of The Phantom Menace by one Mr. Harry Plinkett from RedLetterMedia. Lowlight not because it was bad – it was brilliant – but because it drove home with the force of a pick-axe how truly terrible The Phantom Menace is and how different things could have been if someone other than George had been in charge. To compound the misery, Plinkett has just released a follow-up review of Attack of the Clones. Sigh.

But let’s not finish on a low. Let’s peek ahead to a possible highlight of the upcoming year: Star Wars Uncut. Someone has chopped A New Hope into 15-second clips, bunged it on the web and enabled anyone – anyone – to upload their own 15-second remakes! Brilliant. Video, illustration, stop-motion, whatever… it’s a tapestry of almost unlimited variety and colour. I've already lost a day browsing through the many clips. It is a mixed bag, but there's plenty of goodness there. Once complete, the best clips will be spliced together to create the ultimate fan homage to the film we know and love.

Hopefully Han will shoot first.

UPDATE
And in honour of The Empire Strikes Back's 30th anniversary, do please enjoy this review by Dan Moren of the best Star Wars film of all. :) Perfect.