The folks at Ain’t It Cool News were forced to remove their negative reivew of The Clone Wars by Lucasfilm, but Valleywag has reprinted it. Hop over and read it while you can.
It’s the most viciously negative review I’ve ever read, and confirms my beliefs about Lucas and Star Wars. The guy doesn’t know how to make good movies.
He exhausted all of his talent on A New Hope. Empire and Jedi weren’t directed by Lucas, and were decent. The three most recent films — plus the Lucas-enhanced versions of the originals — were big budget showcases for his non-talent.
According to Ain’t It Cool, Lucas adopted the animation style of Genndy’s Clone Wars mini series and nothing else. The soul and edge that made the mini series work have been replaced with mindless battles (and lots of them), stupid jokes that would annoy a 5-year-old and characters “…worse than Jar-Jar” (hint: Jabba’s son is named “Stinky.” Do the math).
Star Wars is dead. I mean dead. The shameless marketing and mindless films are the bastardization of the entire franchise. Screw it.
“The world is filled with people who didn’t know jack not too long ago about whatever it is that they’re doing and are now highly regarded in their fields. [...] If there’s something you don’t currently know how to do, please decide not to be a dummy or an idiot. You’re as smart as you always were, you’re just looking to learn something new.”
Absolutely correct. Ignorance — lacking information — is not synonymous with stupidity, or lacking intelligence. Too often people equate the two. Ignorance is easily remedied with a little education.
I see this all the time at work. “Oh, I’m stupid with computers,” people say. “I’m just dumb.” Wrong. You just don’t know how it works, and that’s perfectly fine.
I have no idea how my car works, but that doesn’t make me stupid. It kills me to hear people talk about themselves this way. Like Richard said, “You’re as smart as you always were, you’re just looking to learn something new.”
As a child, I was riveted to coverage of the Olympic games. I loved the competition and the sense of global unity. “Maybe we really are all one family on this planet,” I’d think.
Today, I know that’s bullshit, and that’s why I don’t watch the games. They’re an Olympic-sized letdown.
At the risk of sounding like Agent Mulder, I’ll say that I want to believe in the global community, the goodness of humanity. I want a harmonious, global family. But I know that it will never, ever happen. People are basically bad.
The good folks at CERN will shoot the first particle beams through their Large Hadron Collider (LHC) tomorrow. Exactly how large is this thing? Well, it’s 27 km in circumference and was designed to accommodate for the curvature of the earth.
Researchers confirm that it will only produce “tiny” black holes that disappear quickly once it’s full operational, but I’m not convinced of its safety. I’m pretty sure that thing could blow up Alderaan with a single shot.
For some CERN fun, read Dan Brown’s novel Angels & Demons, currently being made into a film by Ron Howard for an early 2009 release. Or, just check out this LHC rap made by the scientists themselves. You read that right.
Piper Jaffray goes out on a limb and predicts that Apple will do something they’ve done every year for the past three years: Release new iPods in September.
