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WHY, GEORGE LUCAS, WHY?
I'm not a spontaneous writer. Ideas fester in my head for weeks and weeks before I feel comfortable expressing them in words. I don't write capricious impromptu rants, or to put it differently, the amount of impulse writing I've done in my life is equivalent to what Calista Flockhart had for dinner last night: less than zero.
Imagine my surprise when after viewing the latest Star Wars massacre, I immediately grope for pen and paper to scribble down the angry thoughts churning in my head. I never write this way, but now I have to. Something must be said. We ought not, nay, we cannot stare cinematic terrorism in the very eye and do nothing. And even now, as I sit here typing in wanton fury, my words erupt as furiously as Mount St. Helens, except that they won't kill anything, except maybe George Lucas's integrity and self-respect, which are mostly dead anyway.
Episode III: Revenge of Sith? More like Episode III: Revenge of the George Lucas Hates America. Let's face facts, people. Industrial sabotage is big business, and even though Lucas isn't a professional card-carrying saboteur (he couldn't pass the physical), he still makes good money sinking the hopes and dreams of hard-working taxpayers like you and me.
Brief Synopsis
The movie has something to do with some Jedi Council, and some Senate, and some Padmé babies, and some Anakin guy — look, I don't know. I wasn't paying attention, and I zoned out for most of the film. Whatever the premise of the movie is, I'm sure it sucks. I could look it up on the interweb if I wanted, but I don't care, and besides, the interweb is nothing but porn anyway.
So what made this movie so terrible? For starters, Lucas took this ugly troll named Yoda and practically made him the centerpiece of the film! You can see this green monstrosity in every other scene, using bad English syntax and dancing around like the CG sock puppet he is. And did I mention how disgusting Yoda looks? I half-expected the theatre projectionist to stop the film and apologize to the audience for blowing his nose on the reel.
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It Gets Worse
But my biggest complaint has to do with what can only be considered a colossal failure on the part of George Lucas as a human being. Why any filmmaker would take a character so wonderfully complex and handsome as Jar Jar Binks and relegate him to a couple insignificant cameos is beyond me. Jar Jar Binks is like that kid in high school who wanted more than anything to play on the football team, but had thyroid problems and couldn't, but since he had so much school spirit the coach still gave him a uniform and let him sit on the bench during home games. He's the freakin' heart of the team, and Lucas looked him straight in the eye and said, "Go home Jar Jar. America may love you, but I hate America, and I hate you."
Think I'm overexaggerating? Think again. Jar Jar has two appearances with a combined screen time of less than ten seconds. Here they are in graphic, painstaking detail:
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After a poorly-executed title sequence (the budget for this film was $115 million dollars; why are the words skewed?) and thirty minutes of Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen dancing behind a blue screen, we catch our first glimpse of our Gungan hero — in a two-second shot of a crowd of politicians from behind. When I first saw this, I actually got excited. Oh, I thought, this is a teaser to get us excited about the Jar Jar lightsaber battle coming up later.
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Silly me. Fast-forward two hours. Again, we see our noble Naboo warrior, except he's still in a convoy of politicians, and he's escorting Padmé's dead corpse around town like it's prom night or something. Who writes this stuff?
George Lucas, you are a sick, sick man. I've never seen anything as thorougly disturbing and unpleasant as your film. It was as if my dentist gave me a root canal, but I thought he bought me a box of chocolates, only later to discover no, I did in fact receive a root canal.
Jar Jar Binks Kills Darth Vader
If you've seen the movie, you know that Jar Jar's little death parade is pretty much how it ends. Or is it? What you don't know is that Lucas left thirty minutes of additional footage on the cutting room floor. My brother downloaded it from the interweb (I asked him to do it for me because I hate porn). Here's how Episode III really ends:
Jar Jar Binks flies to Dagobah, puts Yoda in a German Suplex, and asks for his lightsaber. When Yoda says no, Jar Jar drowns him in the swamp and takes it anyway. Then Darth Vader comes out of nowhere, so Jar Jar cuts off his head and attaches it to a human skeleton that happens to be lying around. Then George Lucas starts yelling stuff off-camera, but nobody can understand what he says because he's eating a gigantic hamburger, and everyone's like, "That's disgusting, George! Why don't you finish what's in your mouth first?" Then Lucas drops a big gob of mayonnaise onto the key grip, and everyone's about to get upset, until they realize they have no clue who this guy is, so they're like, "What do you do here?" and the key grip is like, "I don't even know."
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NOTE TO ADOBE: This is the first time I've made drawings in Illustrator. I used this program in conjunction with Photoshop to make all the images for this article. Adobe, your products are incredibly powerful. I barely know how to use them and even I'm impressed at the quality of the work I've produced. Do we have a future together?
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