Uni

Yeah, you know those Ewoks....always gettin' drunk and causin' trouble at all those New York film premiers. I'd love to see something like this happen (the meeting, I mean, not a Ewok riot in Times Square). I do think a JW concert would make a better forum, but I'd be open to anything. On a similar note....sadly, I won't be able to attend the concert in Cleveland this July. At one point some of us were thinking about a gathering there. Not that it can't still take place, but I'll be absent, I'm afraid. Anyway, we ought to keep thinking on this, at least on some regional level. It would be nice to meet some of you in person.... - Uni

"Kept the peace for a thousand generations we have....and the thanks we get this is." - Yoda, from an undisclosed early draft of Attack of the Clones - Uni

Interesting....Horner scores you love, followed by the ones you don't care for because of his tendency to return to familiar thematic grounds. Interesting, because one of scores on your "favorites" list is The Rocketeer....which is like a "best hits" list from his scores of the 80's. There are direct quotes from Willow, Cocoon, Field of Dreams, and his Star Trek scores, just to name a few. Not that I consider this a bad thing, necessarily; in fact, The Rocketeer happens to be one of my favorites as well. Just a curiosity.... I haven't yet heard A Beautiful Mind yet, but I'm astonished to hear that he used the Gayne Ballet bit yet again! That's one of the few thieveries of his I've never been able to reconcile with. It's not so bad that he used it in Aliens, mind you....but that he repeated it again in Patriot Games, and then again in Clear and Present Danger....well, that was just inviting criticism. I guess he figured it was time to dust off an ol' standby once again.... Incidentally....Willow is definitely worth the time, one of the best fantasy scores of the decade. Not as good as Krull, but certainly a great one.... - Uni

I picked this one, although there were plenty of other references to the dialogue in this thread to chose from. In answer: there can't be any denying there are whole truckloads of awful dialogue in all five films. Most of this stuff is right out of the Flash Gordon school of dramatic writing (Lucas may have made vast improvements on the sparklers stuck to the backs of the phony ships, but he forgot to update the phony dialogue stuck in the actors' mouths). The worst of it in this last installment tends to congregate around the love story (and that a forgiving label at best). "I've died a little every day since you came back into my life"? "I truly, deeply, madly, PAINFULLY...."? Oh, puh-lease. The only lines to outdo the mooning of Ani and Ami are the astonishingly anochronistic groaners we get from C3PO (Lucas ought to be fined by the Screenwriter's Guild for resurrecting puns that were already petrified back in the 60's). But that's all par for the course in a Star Wars film, really. Lucas has never been much of a writer (and if you think the film versions are bad, you should see the rough drafts of the original films....holy cow), but that's never really been a problem, has it? All that laughable bantering brings a sort of cheerful, mythological spirit to the whole enterprise. It recalls the heroic days of true melodrama when every other sentence was voomped up with an exclamation point (and a sword raised in the air)....the days when a man's love for a woman was measured by the quiver in his lips....the days when everyone "musted" everything ("We must stop them!"). We know how much Lucas was influenced by those old Saturday-afternoon cliffhangers; influenced so much, in fact, that he has apparently transferred them part-and-parcel into the modern era of cinema. While we ought to be thankful that he's had people around to help add spice, humor, and real drama to his awkward attempts at scripting, at the same time the spirit of these films we adore so much would be regretably diminished if the characters didn't wear their gushing hope on their sleeves, and if Darth Vader didn't verbally twist his mechanical mustache every now and again. So I can certainly forgive the films' penchant for silly lines, even as I twist a grin into my hand at them. In answer to the thread's original question: I gave it an 8, simply because it was fun (something the last film wasn't). It loses points for a painfully contrived "love story" (Lucas can be pardoned for overdramatizing war, but romance is a tricky business) and, again, for Threepio's intolerable, punny jaunt into the well-forgotten past. But the movie remembered something that the original films had down to a "T": that if the story can't carry the day (and, in these cases, let's be honest - it usually can't), then for heaven's sake, don't take it too seriously; throw it at us a mile-a-minute, and make us laugh along the way. It's amazing how much milage you can get out of speed, humor, and cutting-edge special effects. - Uni