Easy targets

[Bonobo]

Jar Jar Binks is commonly blamed for the horrible new Star Wars movies, but I think they have a lot more wrong with them than that.

What do you guys think? Am I just jaded because I am older? Or are the new Star Wars movies really a dream-sucking device that destroyed the childhoods of millions?

[Warren DeMontague]

1. George Lucas forced us all to realize that pretty much everything after Empire sucked.

Which is too bad, because up to a certain point I thought I kind of liked Return of the Jedi. Certainly, for 1983, that last space battle was pretty awesome.

I wanted badly to like those movies. I tried. I did. I lied to myself, waited in the damn line, all of it.

Jar Jar Binks was symbolic of everything that was wrong with #1, but honestly the real problem for all 3 was Anakin. He just wasn't a compelling character, and the whole point of the damn series is supposed to be his fall and redemption.

[Bonobo]

2. You ever heard this?

[Warren DeMontague]

3. Patton Oswalt is awesome.

The thing at the end about Jon Voight... too funny.

...

There was a documentary I watched a while back, like, "George Lucas on trial" or something, basically it was a bunch of Star Wars fans discussing the whole thing, it was interesting to watch, raised some good questions about art and whether art belongs to the artist, or the fans, or some combination thereof, and when and where it changes ownership, if at all.... the conclusion they sort of arrived at was, for the most part, Star Wars is Lucas's thing so it was his right to fuck it up, and yes.... fuck it up he did.

Sort of funny when the whole thing went to Disney and JJ Abrams, and people were saying stuff like "travesty! He's going to screw it up!"; my take, at that point was, really no one can screw it up more than Lucas himself already has (please, please, don't make me eat those words) so why the fuck not?

I dunno. I mean it seems a silly sort of topic to wax philosophical on, but it got me thinking- perhaps there's some mindleak going on from our friends in Colorado ...really, about the peculiarities of Generation X which I know you and I at least both are, as are a lot of people who grew up with the original Star Wars... and it really speaks to our generation's almost peculiar - to us - obsession with integrity and authenticity. I mean, that was what so much of the whole "Grunge" thing was, the anti-corporate music being sold, of course eventually by corporations... and before that the college radio scene... we all had the experience of liking the indie band or several of them, that "sold out". I almost think Millennials and certainly post-Millennials don't even approach stuff that way; the notion of "selling out/not selling out"- you might as well be speaking Swahili.

Maybe for us it had to do with coming of age under Reagan, being force fed a lot of plastic 80s bullshit and rejecting it. But Star Wars originally was one of those things that carried with it a hint of something deeper, ostensibly (also, like certain bands I could name)-- and yet even from the beginning Lucas was also marketing Cargo Tankers full of mass-produced merchandise to go with it. It was like an odd intersection of Joseph Campbell and Campbell's soup.