[UPDATE: I wrote this entry in the wee hours last night and, upon reflection in the clear light of morning, decided it wasn’t quite right. What can I say? Sometimes it really is best to let something cool a bit before you publish it. I have therefore streamlined the whole thing to intensify the one point I think I was really trying to make. Sorry for the confusion… ]
Funny thing about James Lileks. I can wonder for months why I continue to read his self-important, reactionary and often paranoid post-9/11 drivel, and then one day he’ll just spew out something that makes all the grumpy-old-man-ishness worthwhile. Case in point: his comments today about the upcoming Revenge of the Sith…
The new SW movie trailer looks incredible — if they’d showed this to fans in 1979, I think most of them would have spontaneously dissolved. I have no doubt the dialogue will be horrible… I don’t care. If it looks like the trailer, I know I will sit in a movie theater on a Friday afternoon and quite possibly feel 18 again. This is no great accomplishment; art, you could say, should raise you up, not lull you back to the sloshing amniotic sea of the womb. But it’s a movie with rockets and robots and ray guns, and I’m a guy who grew up loving rockets and robots and ray guns. Hence I like to see the same once in a while, done well, without Bruce Dern moping around in a Jesus robe weeping about pine trees.
James just managed to eloquently sum up, in a sentence and a half, what I’ve so often spent hours trying to explain to my disillusioned friends who mock me for my continued loyalty to the Great Flanneled One: “it’s a movie with rockets and robots and ray guns, and I’m a guy who grew up loving rockets and robots and ray guns. Hence I like to see the same once in a while…”
Amen, man. I often think Lileks is totally up in the night with his opinions, but on that point, we are in absolute agreement. I’m looking forward to May because I’m hoping to feel, if only for a short time, like a wide-eyed boy of seven instead of a tired and wounded old man of 35…
[Ed. note: the crack about Bruce Dern in a Jesus robe refers to the 1972 film Silent Running, just in case you’re not up on your classics of dystopic science fiction. Lileks has a big problem with the cynicism common to all films of this era, science fictional and otherwise. Personally, I quite like the dark movies of the early ’70s. But then I don’t politicize every damn thing the way he does.]
