Reviews

When I watched the Phantom menace, I was driven into a crazed state. I went mad. I started behaving like an animal. I was pacing the room, angry, irked to the point of psychosis. I started winding people up like a twelve year old kid, poking and punching them. I had a well of annoyance inside me. I had become emotionally ruined by the experience. Maybe it was the plot, maybe it was annikin, maybe it was Jar Jar Binks's voice and stuck-on wibble wobble gait. Maybe it was the thought that this film cost more to make than your average third world country's GDP. But I saw red. I've rarely been more fired up by a movie than by the Phantom menace. I had a similar experience with Revenge of the Sith.

Jaw dropping graphics. Beautiful, just beautiful. Operatic action sequences, epic backdrops, superb jetsons style vehicles. But it had moments of the lowest form of bathos. Truly below the belt schlock. Annikin's been seen killing 'younglings.' Younglings?! I thought that the Jedi were supposed to be vaguely hard. How could they use a word like that? It's like something out of Barney the dinosaur. YoungLINGS deserve to die! They're clearly letting the side down! It would be like going to war armed with a feather duster. Couldn't they have been called trainees, or maybe disciples? Or what about cutie-cuties? Or the ickle-wickle ones? And the moment when the chancellor is transformed into the ugly old emperor? I laughed myself sick. Samuel L Jackson is shamed! Shamed beyond belief! And to cap it off the newly transformed Darth Vader strides out of the machine like a cerebral palsy victim, only to shout 'Nooooooooo!' Again I laughed my twits off. My nipples were rolling about in the aisle like bits of over-sweetened un-popped corn. That was some truly spastic bombastic film making.

Read the script on paper (if they'll let you have it, it's classified as "hazardous material" under the Geneva Convention). And weep. It's probably only 20 pages in length if you strip it down to just basic action and dialogue.

"no, this is a happy moment" Just in case you didn't get it.

And Yoda's stilted Latin syntax? "This a lame film truly is."

So much art direction talent couldn't save it. This is poetry as in postcard. Get well soon, Mr Lucas. Remember, your father was a stationer. And his primary ambition was to become a drag racing driver. No corners=no twists. Geddit? And maybe he copied those hideous wipe transitions from American sports programmes. What's wrong with a straight cut?

On a positive note, I thought that John Williams's score was sublime in places. The guy is a master. All of the emotional momentum came from the music. Only to be rapidly and solidly shattered by some ultimately botched bad-news childish scriptwriting that doesn't even make the grade for a He-Man cartoon.

And Jar Jar binks shows up for the very end, but at least he doesn't gurgle in mournful sorrow. They spared us that oh-so-special sound effect. Thank the lord. I would have started throwing limited edition merchandise at the screen.

I know what the problem is. Lucas has no sense of humour. Watch THX-1152, and it's all made clear. He takes it all sooo sooo seriously that it becomes a total joke. Absolutely bombastic spastic.

Maybe that's what he was angling for, the sort of self-conscious humour of the early star-trek episodes? Maybe it's meant to be funny. But I don't think so. But I had to laugh anyway. No class at all. This is some seriously hick film making. Power rangers are Go! Or as Yoda would say : Power rangers Go Are.

Repo man is a blatant rites of passage film. Otto grows from being a nihilistic, selfish, dismissive punk, into a happy nuclear-powered joyrider. Along the way he meets many people who make mistakes constantly, and are looking for happiness or approval from external sources, often him. Everybody's looking for something, and they're almost certainly not getting it. The Chevy is one device that represents unfulfillable desire. Yet Otto finds it in the end. He fulfils his heart's desire. That's what this film is about for me. Learning to love life for all it's warts and vanities. I would compare it to Terry Gilliam's Brazil, or even at a stretch American Beauty. Never, ever Fight Club.

PS: The film was written by a guy who went to my school. Oohyeah baby. Other alumni include Dennis Pennis and Will Self.

Travis is certainly alienated. He has no power in his role as a cabbie. All he can do is interact as a subordinate with all of the characters he meets along the way. He listens to them, and is stunned by their mealy-mouthed excuses for why they don't use the power they have in life. This is particularly well illustrated by Scorsese's own role as the jilted husband, and Travis's reaction is that of well hidden disgust. This guy is going to travel in a cab to watch the window and not do anything? It's pathetic. Actually he's there to talk to the cabbie, to stand on the shoulders of a subordinate to bolster his injured ego. The politician near the end is another example of all talk and no action, ego gratification. Travis sees so much vanity and evil on his travels that he finally decides that he's going to do something about it. He's not psychotic, and he isn't insane. He's just reached the breaking point of passivity. He's been lumbered with the passivity of others, and has had passivity enforced upon him by his job. He commits mutiny in order to choose good. He breaks the law in order to become the law. He reflects upon his position (the mirror scene) and is willing to sacrifice himself for the welfare of others, something no other character in the film is prepared to do. The rescue scene at the end is virtually a fairy tale setting, the rescue of an imprisoned princess from the evil pretender to the throne (the pimp). I believe that Travis is indeed a hero, not a man descending into psychosis. He triumphs over the neurosis handed to him on a daily basis by his superiors (employers) and becomes a man capable of choice. It's all about free will, and the ability to choose good, even though the path to good may involve fighting evil with violence. This film is about the weakness and sickness of a falsehood : "pacifism is the moral high-ground". It is not. One must commit to one's beliefs. Another fantastic thing is that at the end he's broken the law, and committed murder, but the system is so passive that they uphold him as a hero in the newspaper. Yet Travis is still just a cabbie, and he doesn't take it seriously. He doesn't need the approval of others. He's realised that he doesn't need anything from anybody, and is no longer alone, he's self-sufficient.