Chefelf.com Night Life: dougte - Viewing Profile

Who would win: An army of Commander Codys, or an Army of the new and improved Oompa Loompas?

note: before you make your decision, you should know that the current Oompa Loompas, played by "Deep Roy" have a connection to the force. "Deep Roy" has an uncredited role in Return of the Jedi as "Droopy McCool"


Also, what does it say about George Lucas that he would name a character "Droopy McCool"?

episode III: backstroke of the west. Enjoy.


Scroll down, and some of the translations are priceless...

link to full review

For those complaining about chefelf's "wind" nitpick, I think this review does a better job fleshing it out. I don't think it's so much a lack of wind that causes the nitpick, but the "digital clean" feeling throughout all three movies....


...After all, the Lucasian universe is drained of all reference to bodily functions. Nobody ingests or excretes. Language remains unblue. Smoking and cursing are out of bounds, as is drunkenness, although personally I wouldn’t go near the place without a hip flask. Did Lucas learn nothing from “Alien” and “Blade Runner”—from the suggestion that other times and places might be no less rusted and septic than ours, and that the creation of a disinfected galaxy, where even the storm troopers wear bright-white outfits, looks not so much fantastical as dated? What Lucas has devised, over six movies, is a terrible puritan dream: a morality tale in which both sides are bent on moral cleansing, and where their differences can be assuaged only by a triumphant circus of violence. Judging from the whoops and crowings that greeted the opening credits, this is the only dream we are good for. We get the films we deserve...



...All of the interiors in Lucasworld are anthems to clean living, with molded furniture, the tranquillity of a morgue, and none of the clutter and quirkiness that signify the process known as existence. Illumination is provided not by daylight but by a dispiriting plastic sheen, as if Lucas were coating all private affairs—those tricky little threats to his near-fascistic rage for order—in a protective glaze. Only outside does he relax, and what he relaxes into is apocalypse. “Revenge of the Sith” is a zoo of rampant storyboards. Why show a pond when C.G.I. can deliver a lake that gleams to the far horizon? Why set a paltry house on fire when you can stage your final showdown on an entire planet that streams with ruddy, gulping lava? Whether the director is aware of John Martin, the Victorian painter who specialized in the cataclysmic, I cannot say, but he has certainly inherited that grand perversity, mobilized it in every frame of the film, and thus produced what I take to be unique: an art of flawless and irredeemable vulgarity. All movies bear a tint of it, in varying degrees, but it takes a vulgarian genius such as Lucas to create a landscape in which actions can carry vast importance but no discernible meaning, in which style is strangled at birth by design, and in which the intimate and the ironic, not the Sith, are the principal foes to be suppressed. It is a vision at once gargantuan and murderously limited, and the profits that await it are unfit for contemplation.



The review was too harsh for my liking, but at least with the section I've provided the author has a point.

I've been wondering: why do the Jedi generally set age limits on training? They want young children, but why? There really isn’t a good reason why older individuals who are strong in the force shouldn’t be allowed to train—unless the Jedi want complete obedience. Unless they don’t want questions asked. Unless they want complete inculcation on par with religious extremist terrorists!
Whenever Luke or Anakin ask questions they’re scolded and given some really vague new age verse that can be taken ten thousand ways. Personally, I LIKE that Anakin questioned the Jedi (I just wish he wasn’t such a whiney b**ch about it). If all Obi-Wan and Yoda could do was answer in a bunch of mumbo-jumbo contradictory double-talk, then perhaps Anakin made the right choice.





Note: For those wondering, I liked Revenge of the Sith 10,000 times better than the other two (I'm not just trying to incite violence) but it still wasn't like the originals.

I found this at a site calledMarginal Revolution

It' s about everything that is wrong with the jedi. Interesting....


The core point is that the Jedi are not to be trusted:

1. The Jedi and Jedi-in-training sell out like crazy. Even the evil Count Dooku was once a Jedi knight.

2. What do the Jedi Council want anyway? The Anakin critique of the Jedi Council rings somewhat true... Aren't they a kind of out-of-control Supreme Court, not even requiring Senate approval (with or without filibuster), and heavily armed at that? As I understand it, they vote each other into the office, have license to kill, and seek to control galactic affairs. Talk about unaccountable power used toward secret and mysterious ends.

3. Obi-Wan told Luke scores of lies, including the big whopper that his dad was dead.

4. The Jedi can't even keep us safe.

5. The bad guys have sex and do all the procreating. The Jedi are not supposed to marry, or presumably have children. Not ESS, if you ask me. Anakin gets Natalie Portman; Luke spends two episodes with a perverse and distant crush on his sister Leia, leading only to one chaste kiss.

6. The prophecy was that Anakin (Darth) will restore order and balance to the force. How true this turns out to be. But none of the Jedi can begin to understand what this means. Yes, you have to get rid of the bad guys. But you also have to get rid of the Jedi. The Jedi are, after all, the primary supply source and training ground for the bad guys. Anakin/Darth manages to get rid of both, so he really is the hero of the story. It is also interesting which group of "Jedi" Darth kills first...

7. At the happy ending of "Return of the Jedi", the Jedi no longer control the galaxy. The Jedi Council is not reestablished. Luke, the closest thing to a Jedi representative left, never becomes a formal Jedi. He shows no desire to train other Jedi, and probably expects to spend the rest of his life doing voices for children's cartoons.

8. The core message is that power corrupts, but also that good guys have power too. Our possible safety lies in our humanity, not in our desires to transcend it or wield strange forces to our advantage.



What did Padme say?: "So this is how liberty dies, to thunderous applause."

Addendum: By the way, did I mention that the Jedi are genetically superior supermen with "enhanced blood"? That the rebels' victory party in Episode IV borrows liberally from Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will"? And that the much-maligned ewoks make perfect sense as an antidote to Jedi fascism?