Guerre tout le temps

MAGA

Saga:
Original trilogy:
IV – A New Hope (1977) - Great flick - fun loving swashbuckler in the 1950's Pirate Movie tradition - a Fortunes of Captain Blood in outer space. Light hearted, vaguely political and very formulaic.
V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980) - Sigmund Freud and Joseph Campbell tossed in a blender that spits out Yoda, "I am your father" and a bionic hand.
VI – Return of the Jedi (1983) - fighting teddy bears (Ewoks) and a second Death Star blows up AGAIN!!!
Prequel trilogy:
I – The Phantom Menace (1999) - All star cast + Jar Jar Binks battle a army of droids - shooting a droid is like shooting your refrigerator. 9 year old wins podrace - ridiculous.
II – Attack of the Clones (2002) - Star crossed lovers, more droids and clones, I saw it, but honestly don't remember what happened.
III – Revenge of the Sith (2005) - The birth of Darth Vader, the death of Natalie Portman and too much C-SPAN  - I've slipped over to the dark side.
Sequel trilogy:
VII – The Force Awakens (2015) - Never saw it but I hear it's like A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back fused together with a girl and a black guy tossed in the mix. Oh yeah, and a bigger Death Star gets blown up.
VIII (2017) - my guess is they'll start building the Death Star again.
IX (2019) - The Death Star will get blown up.

Anthology films:
Rogue One (2016) - War all the time - I thought I was going to see a Star Wars movie and ended up sitting through Apocalypse Now in funny costumes.
Untitled Han Solo Anthology film (2018) Raiders of the Lost Clone
Untitled Anthology film (2020) A romantic comedy set on the planet of Alderaan.

My wife and I were driving to a New Year's party and a Leonard Cohen song came croaking across the radio waves and she declared, "Tom Waits just copied this guy (Cohen)" and then we started laughing about the Alt-Alt zeitgeist of Return of the Jedi America (1983) known only to creative type college students and urban hypsters (before hypsters were a thing) which resided in the Tom Waits - Charles Bukowski - Jim Jarmusch nexus. Fun times - no internet - spinning vinyl, corner bookstores and art-house movie theaters are all gone now but Stare Wars is bigger than ever and according to The Walt Disney Corp. the franchise will be here long after anyone who knows what I'm talking about is dead.

I was a big fat target for the first Star Wars movie (the really good one) and loved it - still love it - even though it isn't exactly my Sci-Fi taste I still appreciate it as a good humored swashbuckler with great twists, light sabers (very cool) and an exhilarating and very satisfying ending. There is an innocence to the picture that makes it look as hokey today as the 1950's Hollywood Pirate movies looked in the 1970's. I went to see the sequels which were okay and then slogged through the prequels which disappointed so I wrote off the whole Star Wars universe. Familiarity breeds contempt and once I knew the backstory, the lineage of Luke and Leia, the true nature of the Jedi and so much more I just lost interest. So I skipped last years installment because it looked like more of the same and I was planning to do the same for this years Rogue One, but everyone was going to see it and they were all saying, "It's great", "You'll love it", "It explains everything" and so...

Scarif-Aleppo

I walked in knowing, because I'd been told, that I was going to see the events leading to a critical moment in the first movie A New Hope (which is actually the 4th movie) so perhaps, thought I, the producers would try and capture some of the joie de vivre so abundant in the original. What I got was a Storm Troopers full metal jacket riddled with blaster neon until the Death Star mega-nuke strike kills everyone - in other words, I got war. A war movie that can't be made because the villains and heroes shall not be named so it gets superimposed on a fantasy which people can lap up without guilt or confusion. If you watched Rogue One and A New Hope back to back the mental whiplash you'd experience in the transition from 2016 to 1977 would freak you out. It might even spur you to Make America Great Again and find some way to end this endless war, you know, like building a Death Star or something.