Status Report (I'm not dead)

May 29, 2005 · Posted in General · Comment 

The Teeth

It's not that bad. The side which only had one tooth removed (which was also the tooth already sticking out) is not sore or swollen at all, and the other side is only slightly swollen. I would like to report (for the benefit of various people who made boggle-eyed faces at me earlier) that getting it done under local anaesthetic with sedation was not grim at all, and I am generally pleased that I avoided forking out a couple of thousand rand extra for the dubious pleasure of being unconscious.

I can eat normal food, and the swelling has gone down a lot since I moved both my strap-on ice packs to the only swollen half of my face.

My mom picked me up after the op, and we made six jars of pickled mushrooms.

The Work

It's much better than my old work. I like perl. We had a visitor from the parent company down from London, and on Thursday we all went to dinner at a kurdish restaurant (Mesopotamia in Long Street). There was a belly dancer. I ate too much garlic (the dish deceptively known as “naan bread with cheese and garlic” is actually “a huge garlic pancake with some naan bread and cheese to glue it together”). My surgeon could not have been pleased on Friday morning.

FreeBSD has been a bit of a pain to upgrade (to be fair, it had been installed from last year's release), but I now have it set up just the way I like it, and hopefully won't have to fiddle around much from now on.

The Literature

I am finally reading Galileo's Finger. It is cool. On a completely different note, I ordered both of the Devlin Waugh paperbacks through Kalahari.net, and have received and read them.

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Review: Revenge of the Sith (spoilers, but do you care?)

May 25, 2005 · Posted in Reviews · Comment 

Well, it's better than the first two prequels, which seems to be the internet consensus. The dialogue is once again mind-bogglingly awful, the acting is what you can reasonably expect given the quality of the dialogue, and Anakin and Padme still have about as much chemistry between them as two wet logs.

The best bit of the movie is the opening scene. It actually manages to be fun and interesting, and R2's brief adventure is hilarious. I even managed to suspend disbelief over the bizarre physics surrounding the failure of the ship's artificial gravity. Because it was cool! That bit was very much reminiscent of the original trilogy. Now if only the rest of the film had been like that.

It goes downhill from there. The remainder of the movie is a formulaic, by-the-numbers traversal of a checklist of dots which must be joined. There are no earth-shattering revelations or surprises. This is not simply because the story is bound to known historical facts. Known history can still be surprising and compelling. It is the opinions and reactions of people who are there when it happens which make it interesting, and which can surprise us, but we are shown no such insights in this movie.

Senator Amidala, who in the previous Episodes was an interesting character who made things happen, spends the entire movie being vaguely worried about Anakin, but doing absolutely nothing about it (or doing anything else, ever, really), and refusing to accept the blindingly obvious. Honestly, just because a woman is pregnant doesn't mean she's just going to lie around vegetating while the Republic and her secret husband go down the crapper. She briefly gets some of her old spark back near the end, but the dialogue worsens exponentially at around that point, so it's not much of a consolation.

I have nothing against the reason given for Anakin's fall in theory, but the execution of the Anakin/Amidala relationship was so tepidand unconvincing that it held no emotional resonance for me whatsoever.

And the dialogue. Oh, my god. It's as if Lucas took a five-page summary of the plot written in very small words, rewrote it in direct speech, spliced in The Monster Book of Ghastly Cliches for padding, and called it a script.

“It's like I don't know you anymore”?!

But the prize for the most awful line in the history of Star Wars has to go to Anakin's profound and poignant response to Obi-Wan's admittedly not much better “Palpatine is evil!”. It's the great dramatic climax of the entire movie, Anakin is facing off with his former mentor after betraying his love and trust and destroying the entire Jedi order in a sudden homicidal rampage, and he says, by way of explanation… “From my point of view, the Jedi are evil!”

Brilliant, Mr Lucas. It's the culmination of the final episode of your vast epic saga, and that was the best you could come up with? Seriously.

Simon doesn't see why I have such a big problem with this. I think he has a higher tolerance for purple prose.

In spite of all this, I did enjoy the movie. It has spaceship battles, droids, lightsabre duels and wookies. You can't go wrong with wookies. And Palpatine kicks ass.

In other news, if the flashy action scenes and lack of substance leave you feeling somewhat disappointed, and you would like some emotional closure, I suggest having a look at the Darth Side, which actually manages to make the prequel characters interesting.

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