Catchin’ up on mah Pop Kul-cha
“Hey, you know in Attack of the Clones when-” “I haven’t seen it.” “What?” “I haven’t seen it.” “Oh. Why not?” “I dunno, I just haven’t. Why, is it really that important?”
…
“Hey, you know in Minority Report when-” “I haven’t seen it.” “Huh?” “I haven’t seen it.” “What’s wrong with you?” “Nothing’s wrong with me! I just haven’t seen it.”
Thusly embodied with brusque brevity (I’ve been reading too much Joyce lately, sue me) is at least 5 conversations I’ve had in the past 12 months. Well, now I’m finally up to speed! More or less. And at no monetary cost to myself, as I borrowed them from the library to use in my new DVD player (but which I mean my new notebook). The verdict. Well, apart from the Tom Cruise factor and the endless product placements, I thought Minority Report was pretty good. But what the fuck is it with Spielberg and happy endings? He totally fucked up AI with 15 minutes of feel-good, lovey-dovey crap after I would’ve rolled the credits, and does the same thing here, albeit with admittedly less forehead-slapping gratuity. Even still, he cock-teased us with the hope of the evil government agency winning the day and moving society another step towards Big Brother totalitarianism, leaving the audience to confront the complex issues of crime, governmental encroachment on civil liberties and humanity’s increasing dependence on technology, and then he flushes it down the toilet. “The good guys won, the bad guys died, America, by which I mean the world, was safe once again, and they all lived happily ever after and had another kid.” NO NO NO!! Still, it’s a far cry from maudlin E.T. mode, and a possible taste of things to come, and that can’t be a bad thing.
As for Attack of the Clones? Meh, whatever. It was exponentially better than The Phantom Menace, but that’s not saying much (if you want an indication as to how bad I thought that movie was, I submitted a review for the DVD on Amazon which I thought was quite fair and balanced. It didn’t make it past the censors. So I redrafted a substantially kinder one and submitted it. Didn’t make it past the censors), but it still can’t touch the Real Star Wars series. At least Lucas had the good sense to dress Portman in a skin-tight white costume for most of the movie, and there were a couple of decent scenes, but I was too busy playing “Spot the deliberate cash-in” and snickering at the Fett family’s Kiwi accents to be too impressed by it. Note to Lucas: you can’t write or direct. Just produce the third movie, and let someone else do the creative stuff. Ah, I’m just wasting my time.
