Darth Maul lightsaber demo

Ray Park demonstrates  Darth Maul's lightsaber technique to a con crowd that weirdly includes a Darth Maul cosplayer. He looks like he's keeping quiet and hoping to learn something. At the end, he nods, sagely.

Star Wars Ring Theory (Mike Klimo)

LYLE HOPWOOD·SUNDAY, APRIL 10, 2016

Well, this is a hell of a theory. I used to hear all the Star Wars theories because I was on all the Star Wars theorizers' groups - but they are on Yahoo, and nobody goes there any more. (And not because it's too crowded.) So I came to Star Wars Ring Theory a little late. 

You have to read it to really get the full impact of it, and it's 8 chapters long. I had to put it aside until I had an hour to read it, and even so I was getting punchy by the end and will have to read it again. But in a nutshell, he says that the prequels match the original series almost scene by scene, but not in a straightforward order. They form a ring, with the middle two inverted against each other. (It's called a chiasmus, which I'm familiar with from genetics - and it's fascinatingly so!) All those points where you think, hang on, hasn't someone else had a hand chopped off? Or, wait, is that the third time somebody's had a bad feeling about this? Or, didn't the last one open on a shot of a giant space vehicle approaching a planet from above, not below? And so on, and so on... They all fit together in a complex pattern, which he explains and illustrates with screen shots that make you wonder why you didn't think of this yourself. 

One of my theories (what is mine) is every sufficiently large text is like the Bible, by which I mean that if you have a big enough corpus - Lord of the Rings, or Shakespeare, or Harry Potter - there is enough STUFF in there to make any random theory sound good because you can always find something that matches your thesis. I mean, I’ve read Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. I’ve read The White Goddess. I’ve read the Golden Bough. I started reading this in the same light, but he managed to convince me that there’s a single path through all of the films that makes sense as a ring/crossing over structure. 

One sticking point for me was the discussion of good versus evil in the Star Wars universe as I'd gotten used to thinking of evil as a privation of good, a la St. Augustine, rather than a thing in itself. This theory seems to involve evil as a separate and equal force in the...er, Force. But if so, why does bringing balance to the Force involve the death of ALL the Sith but only SOME of the Jedi? That was always my sticking point with it, but he brings out several quotes from Lucas that not only support this view but actually state it in so many words. Yeah, I have to read it again.
What do you think?

http://www.starwarsringtheory.com/

Han Solo, shooting first, in the original Star Wars cut

Just for youngsters, i.e. anyone under thirty-five, here is a clip from Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, showing that Han shot first, and indeed was the only one to shoot, because he hit Greedo, obviously, and there was no return fire. (Thanks to uploader Daniel M Kobayashi.)



Whenever this one comes up, there's always a few people who don't care who shot first. They don't care that Greedo (in the Special Editions) missed at point blank range, and they don't care that Han waited for him to shoot first, a non-survival trait that really seems out of character for him as we first meet him.

As far as I'm concerned, Han not only did, but must have, shot first because he thinks only of himself - which he continues to do for some time.  That's why he's an interesting character. When he starts thinking of others, and even helping other people for free, that's when you know the character has grown.

Loneliness of the long distance thinker: My thoughts on the Isla Vista spree killer (and Star Wars)

Trigger warning: I'm going to talk about the latest spree killer.  I'm also going to talk about Star Wars.  Although I didn't intend it to be, some may find this disrespectful to the victims. Some may find it triggering. If you think you might be among them, skip this.

Unlike all the previous ones, the latest spree murder by an ill-socialized little ratbag has fascinated me.

I watched his video and it's quite a piece of work. He sits in his black BMW, carefully positioned in the sun at Golden Hour, so liquid orange light flows across his face. Behind him stately palm trees form a backdrop  In a rehearsed tone, he reels off how much he hates women, and hates the men that have women's love. He punctuates it with a Z-grade Batman cartoon villain muahaha laugh and at times actually strokes his chin. There's something knowing and polished yet thoroughly amateur and lame about it that makes it hilarious, despite the subject matter and the later consequences of his hatred.

But the thing that stands out for me is: He quotes Anakin Skywalker. He says, "You're animals and I'll slaughter you like animals."

The evil murdering villain that comes to his mind when talking about revenge against all the multitude of wrongs he thinks he has suffered is the young, whiny, pre-mask Darth Vader.

Here's the video [3:50].

The killer was a big Star Wars fan – he talks about all three of the prequels in his 'manifesto'.  He loved them. There's something irredeemably banal about this son of a Hollywood assistant director basing his stupefyingly humdrum revenge fantasies on Anakin Skywalker.  Anakin is also a mass murderer of youths, of course. He killed the Younglings, the little Jedi-in-training at the temple.  I was never sure why, except that the plot demanded that all Jedi were to be wiped out before Episode IV: A New Hope. The adults could be taken care of in plausible battles, but how to get rid of the Padawans? Ah, we'll have Anakin kill them five seconds after he's turned to the Dark Side.  As far as we can tell from the film, Darth Sideous didn't order him to do it, he just went nuts and mowed down the kids.

There was a precedent to the murder of the Younglings – and that's where the phrase, "They're like animals and I'll slaughter them like animals" comes up. After learning that the Tusken Raiders have yet again attacked the moisture farmers, killing and maiming them and taking his mother captive, Anakin goes berserk and kills a whole village full of them.

I didn't care that much about the Tusken Raiders. I think we were supposed to take their local name – Sand People – and assume they had sentients' rights, but they were torturing his mother to death at the time, so you know, that's an excuse. [1] Slaughtering the Younglings, though – where did that anger come from?  It's remarkable that we have a better answer to that question from a horrible little dweeb in a BMW than we got from a world-famous and extremely rich film producer.

The killer's 'manifesto' is a similar mix of high aims and ludicrous execution. If you're not easily triggered by the mountains of loserdom, racism and violent misogyny, it is also comical. Here's an excerpt:

"The girl was a pretty blonde! They looked like they  were in the throes of passionate sexual attraction to each other, rubbing their bodies together and tongue kissing in front of everyone. I was absolutely livid with envious hatred. When they left the store I followed them to their car and splashed my coffee all over them. The boy yelled at me and I quickly ran away in fear. I was panicking as I got into my car and drove off, shaking with rage-fueled excitement. I drove all the way to the Vons at the Fairview Plaza and spent three hours in my car trying to contain my tumultuous emotions. I had never struck back at my enemies before, and I felt a small sense of spiteful gratification for doing so. I hated them so much."

It's not possible to write anything more spirited about an interaction and a landscape so vastly mundane. It's the very definition of bathos. He was livid with envious hatred! Oooh! So he splashed them with coffee and drove all the way to the Vons at Fairview Plaza. Ohhhh. (He went on to splash his drink over quite a lot of people who offended him this way. It's a terrible shame that he made progress on making his assaults match the depth of his feelings.)

At times, his lonely nerd ambience is so profound it sounds almost faked, as if the CIA wrote the entire manifesto to deflect attention from the chip they put in his head that activated his false flag murder spree.[2] He adores Star Wars. He liked the Lord of the Rings movies. He plays all the latest videogames.  He plays World of Warcraft online. He loves A Song of Ice and Fire. A Game of Thrones is great. He mostly lives with his mother.

It's 137 pages of absurdity. He's domiciled in the easy living part of Southern California and obsessively details SoCal things that are familiar to me, and quite banal, with an artless earnestness. It's terribly hard to make things like Encino and Calabasas in any way evil, or despotic, or even romantic, or indeed anything but a collection of upscale and downscale malls and associated mallrats.

Then there's his methodology.

He wants to be rich, so he buys a lottery ticket. That doesn't work, so he buys another one.  He eventually uses the power of his mind to win the lottery, buying a book on making things happen by thinking hard, building himself up for the big win that's sure to come. He doesn't win. So he buys another and wills really hard at it and is devastated at not winning.  This continues. He's told that writing an epic, a bestseller, would make him rich, which he researches on the webs and learns it may take some time before he gets rich from his bestseller, so he gives up.  

His strategy for attracting girls is to sit by himself and send out loneliness vibes at passing women, which unfortunately for him, isn't successful.  Time after time, he goes out somewhere and thinks hard at the young women, and they fail to respond.  He's infuriated.

At times, his deadpan self-regard is so similar to that of Adrian Mole, aged 13 3/4, except he's twenty at the following point, that you can't help but laugh:

"Even though she [his mother] was no longer seeing Jack, she dated other men of high class. She had a special way of charming them. I continued to pester her to get married so that I can be part of an upper class family and enjoy all the benefits that would come with that, but she always refused, claiming that she never wants to get married due to her unpleasant experiences with my father. I told her that she should suffer through any negative aspects of marriage just for my sake, because it would completely save my life, but she still refused."

Did she, pet?

Some of the delivery is pure Adrian Mole comedy, too.

"Her status as a reality T.V. star, coupled with my father’s important association with Gary Ross, enabled us all to attain VIP tickets to the red carpet premiere, including  admittance to walk on the red carpet itself, which was actually a black carpet, in a literal sense."

Huh. A black red carpet. Tell me more.

And then, after details of hundreds of relatively commonplace events, many of which get him angry and cause him to throw his drink, he reveals the sudden splatterpunk ending. He details how he will kill his roommates so he can have privacy in his torture chamber, then he will go out hunting at a sorority for women to kill. We get a passage that once again sets out his weird, long-distance Theory of Mind.

"I will then make my way to Del Playa, splattering as many of my enemies as I can with the SUV, and shooting anyone I don’t splatter. I can only imagine how sweet it will be to ram the SUV into all of those groups of popular young people who I’ve always witnessed walking right in the middle of the road as if they are better than everyone else. When they are writhing in pain, their bodies broken and dying after I splatter them, they will fully realize their crimes."

They will fully realize their crimes? How? He has never communicated to them what their "crimes" were.  If a nutcase in an SUV ran me over, assuming I did have time for a last thought,  it would most likely be, "Ow, this fucking hurts. Why didn't you watch where you were going?"

I can guarantee you it wouldn't be, "Oh that was that guy I failed to ask out five years ago when I saw him sitting alone at the mall. I am such a criminal degenerate that I deserve this." That would be impossible, a violation of causality. I would have to see the video he posted about it before I died, which wouldn't be possible.

He's completely missed a step in his understanding of people.  Which is that, unlike Anakin Skywalker and the other Jedi, people are not telepathically able to feel a great disturbance in the Force.

On the other hand, although he doesn't know it, he could have realized his ambition to write a bestseller. It's all here, and apart from a few copyediting suggestions and some editorial changes to make the action-at-a-distance Jedi Mind Tricks more realistic, I think it would have gone over well. It has a lot of similarities to Carrie, for example. He even recorded a video promo – good marketing skills. Shame he epublished it for free. Could have made him rich.

[1] I'm not going to go into this in more detail here because reasons, but I can elsewhere.

[2]I made this bit up. This is real though.


05/29 Edited to add:  Some of the dialogue he uses in the video also comes from World of Warcraft - a character called Garosh Hellscream's mountains of skulls and rivers of blood. The people picking up on this are WND and Breitbart, not my usual cup of tea.

***

End note:

I didn't get into it above, but I've found it infuriating that he wrote 137 pages and left ten minutes of video on how much he hated women and wanted to kill them and yet the majority of responses to it I have seen, and I've seen a lot, are "It's not misogyny!" Just SMH. If wanting to kill women isn't misogyny, what does the word mean?

"There is no creature more evil and depraved than the human female. Women are like a plague. They don’t deserve to have any rights. Their wickedness must be contained in order prevent future generations from falling to degeneracy. Women are vicious, evil, barbaric animals, and they need to be treated as such."

What species?

I was having a text conversation with someone who asked whether something I'd typoed was Gungan or Yodaish, and he said, "Who is what species?"

So I asked Google. I typed as far as "what species" and it auto-completed "What species is Yoda?"





So the majority of people asking Google "what species" are asking about Yoda? Whoah.

For those of you in suspense, it said that Yoda's species is unknown. But that's not really the point of this post, which is: Really, Google?

Nerdgasm: Doctor Who on Star Wars

Or Barty Crouch on Star Wars! whichever you prefer.

David Tennant is a Star Wars fan! He will play a character on Cartoon Network's Clone Wars. 

The Doctor Who fave will play an ancient droid called Huyang, a servant in the Jedi Order.



Love that large-eyed, vulnerable look he has. Tennant, not Huyang. Though Huyang's pretty hot for a decrepit metal schoolteacher.

IGN.com has the story, and even better, an exclusive clip from the cartoon.

More Star Wars Oldies - original screen tests

Slate magazine finds and discusses the original screen tests for Luke Skywalker and Han Solo.

It's hard to imagine a time when there was any question of who is Luke Skywalker and who is Han Solo. Although I didn't see Star Wars as a little kid, I did see it when it first came out and that is over thirty years ago now. The only person who could ever have embodied the boyish, whiny Luke as he grew up to be a somber Jedi was Mark Hamill, and of course the only person who could mumble Han's convoluted lines and look roguishly handsome at the same time was Harrison Ford.

But there was a time when even George Lucas didn't know that, and so there were screen tests. Hamill is himself in his and already sounds every inch the part. Listening to Kurt Russell's take on Han Solo is amazing, though - he would have been great, too, but it wouldn't have been Star Wars.  His Kurt Plissken, like Mel Gibson's Mad Max, is one of the characters I most admire in fantasy movies.


Mark Hamill's screen test


William Katt's screen test with Kurt Russell


Kurt Russell's screen test

Star Wars mysteries - would Luke Skywalker survive the night on Hoth in a dead Tauntaun?

i09 in Science Proves Luke Skywalker Should Have Died In The Tauntaun's Belly provides a "scientific" rationale for why Luke Skywalker could not have survived on Hoth, despite (or rather because of) being stuffed inside a recently dead Taun Taun.

It's one of the Old Skool internet arguments and takes me back to those (probably not) long lost (at all) days when people, or at least teenage boys, would spend hours arguing whether Jean Luc Picard could take James T Kirk in a fight, or which would win, the Enterprise or a Star Destroyer.

i09 conclude that Luke, covered in freezing blood and infectious guts from the Tauntaun, would begin to cool down in 17 minutes, suffer severe hypothermia (as in limb loss) in 47 minutes and die within an hour.  (For some reason they believe that it will take Han some time to inflate the emergency shelter and this time frame is pushing it.)

They've forgotten three things:

1. Tauntauns may not be able to survive a night on Hoth (this is specifically mentioned in the dialogue) but they do live on Hoth, which means they have some fur or blubber that slows down heat loss even when dead;
2. Lightsaber cuts cause an initial spray of blood, or a few drops of blood, but the heat cauterizes the cut very well - so the inside of the animal would not fill with cooling blood;
3. Luke isn't actually dead, so he does not cool down according to Newton's laws - he can keep up his own body temperature as long as he is partly insulated.

I guess i09 weren't spoiling for a fight with middle-aged female teenage fanboys - they say it's 'lighthearted' - so I lightheartedly reply, "Ha Ha! I win!"

Happy Star Wars Day!

May the 4th be with you.

 

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Eating that, I am not

I'm a sucker for anything Star Wars-related, and viola! (as they say on the internet) here comes another collectible to pique my interest.



The French burger chain Quick has designed a nifty line in Star Wars burgers. You can get the green Jedi Burger, the red Dark Burger, or if you dare, the black Dark Vador Burger.  I assume the red burger is Darth Maul - my favorite - but they seem to have chickened out on finding a word for Maul in French.  It means 'muzzle' (animal's mouth)  in German so I guess it's not a great candidate for international burger names. Various websites are happy to inform me that Dark Vador is Darth Vader - the French language apparently not being well-equipped with either a "th" sound, or a schwa on on the end of words - but no one seems to want to tell me exactly how they make a black bun for a burger.



I could probably come up with something relatively wholesome for that if I tried, however, but what has me really stumped is the stuff that looks like a ring of teeth on top of the Jedi Burger.  What is it? At first I thought it might be poutine, but that's the other Francophones, isn't it? Not the original old skool ones. It's evidently emblematic of the light side of the Force but as off-white melted cheese (if that's what it is) it just seems to emphasize the beigeiness, waffledom and slightly crusty look of the Jedi. The dark siders have always had more style.

Apparently the burgers are the equivalent of $6.29, which is cheap at half the price and I'd have one of each, except the air fare would be another $1,000 and that puts me slightly over my weekly burger budget.

Darth Maul returns...

My favorite Sith is back - in Clone Wars, starting in spring.



Teaser trailer from Lucasfilm here.

Happy Star Wars Day!

May the fourth be with you.

Last Supper

I love me some Last Supper re-enactments, and via Kali Durga of Das Ding an Sich, here's a Star Wars one:

It's from Robin Cook.

Forever Geek

I missed one sound. But I can tell astromechs from medi-droids and Tteel Kkak from Poggle the Lesser by five second sound clip alone. I'm proud of myself.

The quiz is on boing boing, here.

May the funny be with you

Star Wars/Disney ad Campaign - with some funny takes on air travel. Queen Amidala is cool. Wonder if that 'elected-queen-thingy' position of hers pays for extra baggage?



Many more funnies at Standardatl (link has decayed and been removed 07/17).

Happy Star Wars Day!

May the Fourth be with you!

Starship Troopers on the ground

Dave ex Machina has a blog post about Star Wars Stormtroopers who...wait - don't go, this is interesting...really exist. The 501st is a legion of Stormtroopers (and other Star Wars villains) who dress up in fantastically accurate costumes and raise money for charity while being all Space Nazi on parades and at conventions.

He riffs on the strange irony inherent in seeing people dressed as mindless, genocidal infantry being hugged by little kids and having their photos taken with gran.

Suppose tomorrow the Bush administration announces plans to deploy thousands of Homeland Security Troops to American cities, to walk the streets armed in the search for un-American, possibly terrorist activities [...]
Obviously there would be some outrage, yeah? I mean, not as much as there should be, but a lot of folks wouldn’t care for this at all.

Now imagine that these troops are outfitted exactly like Stormtroopers from Star Wars.

What percentage of geeks would declare that this was awesome?

What percentage of non geeks?

Then he takes it from there.

The whole thing, as is required on teh intarwebs, eventually dissolves into a massive argument on the comments list. This time it's between people who think it's odd that people dress up as fascists for fun, 501sters who don't think it's odd at all, and people egging both sides on with judicious pokes. It's one of the few arguments I've read where Godwin's Law doesn't apply. Unfortunately nobody gets hot under the collar about the plural of octopus either. I usually enjoy that when it happens.

There are some cool pictures of Stormtroopers, including one of Stormtroopers playing Twister.

Thanks to Blitzen for the heads up!

Honing Our Sithly Hate of The Creator.

The last couple of posts have been about the internet's exciting way of keeping despair alive by ensuring that no won argument ever stays won, and no unwinnable argument ever goes away, because it provides fresh clueless to join the fray as fast as older hands disappear.

A very specialized form of internet argument is the endless kvetching about a Fandom issue. As a Star Wars fan, I have participated in many of these myself. Why, I daresay at once point I might myself have been clueless and posted crap about Star Wars. I'm sure it's dropped off the end of the internet now though. These posts have a finite lifespan, right? Right?

Most of my Star Wars obsessions centered around Darth Vader (Sithly good guy, before the revisionist prequels made him out to be a good guy, after which I was less interested), and Queen Amidala. See, most people could not see why such a strong character should eventually just, like, die of lack of will to live, while giving birth to twins who might have presented, y'know, some slight reason to live on a bit longer. (The dialogue makes it explicit that there's nothing physically wrong with her.) Whereas I found it perfectly reasonable that she should die at the same instant as her husband Anakin. The fact that he immediately took another breath as the newly-created Lord Vader didn't disprove that to me - in fact it added fuel to my belief. Clearly they died together, as is entirely appropriate in a sacred marriage of that kind.

Possibly Lord Vader did kill her, as his master Palpatine said. Perhaps he sucked the last drops of her will to live for his own needs.

It wasn't a popular viewpoint. The popular viewpoint was that she was a wimp. We had an argument about it. Most people thought Lucas sucked by making a strong female character into a wimp, and were very vocal about it.

An article in Jive Magazine was pointed out to me today, which reminded me how much everybody hated Star Wars, particularly Star Wars fans, who hate it more than any non-fan possibly could.

It begins:

Star Wars fans hate Star Wars.
The primary fulcrum for the Star Wars fan’s hate (including my own) is George Lucas, creator of Star Wars. Unlike Trekkies/Trekkers who adore Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, Star Wars fans hate the father of their obsession. We hate the fact that George Lucas got it wrong from the beginning, creating incest between Luke and Leia. We hate the fact that he wrenched Return of the Jedi off of Kashyyyk and set it on Endor with those tiny, furry Hobbit bitches he called “Ewoks”, which is a syllabic anagram of Wookiee if you’re obsessed enough. We despise the entire existence of literally half of the Star Wars movies, blaming George Lucas’ greed and flawed ‘vision’ for everything.
We believe George Lucas’ ideal death time was 2:07am, 14 November, 1990.

And it goes on from there, to detail exactly why we hate it so much. It inexplicably leaves out the bit about Queen Amidala being a wimp at the end, or indeed anything about how much female Star Wars fans hate George Lucas for not having any strong women characters in the movies (except Princess Leia, Queen Amidala, half the Jedi, Aunt Beru, Shmi Skywalker and Mon Mothma who don't count for reasons I've forgotten but are very important). Otherwise, it's a fun introduction to the topic of Star Wars hate by Star Wars fans.

Moron Star Wars 30th Birthday Party.

Uh, make that "more on". No, wait, I was right the first time!

Time sends a reporter with a fresh outlook on Star Wars:

But it's not actually the waiting in line part that the fans love, says Steve Sansweet, director of fan relations for Lucasfilm. "They love to be together, to find comradery and friendship." And, let's face it, to compare their replica lightsabers.

Ha ha! She thinks Star Wars fans are all nerdy! It makes such a change from the media's 30 years of unthinking admiration for the fans.

She also says:

Those in touch with their dark sides rushed exhibits of tortured druids on a rack, Luke Skywalker's severed head and the Princess Leia slave costume, a fetching metal bikini that says, "Eat your heart out, Jabba the Hutt."

Clearly, the Kool Aid is stronger at Celebration IV than I had been led to believe. Severed head? Tortured druids?

Happy Birthday, Star Wars!

Star Wars 'A New Hope' is 30 years old today.
Celebration IV is in full swing this weekend.


A fine vintage picture.

I didn't get to see Star Wars until months later - I was in England at the time. I don't think it opened until the late fall in London, but I could be wrong. I'd love to share stories about the First Time but alas I can't remember anything except going to the Pinarbasi Kebab Nosh Bar Take Away Delicatessen on the Mile End Road for a Donner Kebab with Ot Soss afterwards.