My Final Star Wars Post (for now)

Latest entertainment news: The director of the Rush Hour films has decided to replace Chris Tucker with someone slightly less annoying for the upcoming Rush Hour 3, due to start shooting this summer. For the new film, the role of Detective James Carter will be played by Jar Jar Binks.

Ok, in reality, it's a toss up which of those two is more annoying, but at least Jar Jar has the advantage of being simply a computer program. Man, until I forced myself to watch The Phantom Menace the other night I had forgotten just how truly, totally, nerve-gratingly annoying Jar Jar was. His mere presence in that film would have overshadowed all the film's good points, if there had been any. (Don't even get me started on that midichlorian nonsense)

I did, however, follow up Menace by watching the first first film, A New Hope, and was reminded of why people were eagerly waiting a decade and a half for crap like Menace in the first place. At the end, I was on the edge of my seat as Luke raced against time to destroy the Death Star before it moved into position to destroy the Rebel base, even though I, and every sentient being on the planet regardless of whether they've seen the movie or not, knew the outcome. That's good film making.

As I said earlier, the best Star Wars movie of the post-Return of the Jedi era is the Clone Wars cartoons directed by Genndy Tartakovsky for Cartoon Network. After I finished watching them, I wanted to see more. Furthermore, there is a gap in the chronology of the story of something like twenty years between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope and a lot happens during that time. There's the beginnings of the Rebel Alliance to chronicle, as well as the early adventures of Han Solo, including how he aquired the Millenium Falcon from Lando Calrissian, how he got into trouble with Jabba the Hut and how he hooked up with Chewbacca. (Y'know, for someone who professes not to dig Star Wars all that much, I sure know an awful damned lot about it.) Lucasfilm should let Tartakovsky and his animators loose on the story of those lost years, and without a new film to promote they could do them as movies in and of themselves instead of serialized teasers for the upcoming film, as Clone Wars was.