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NEWS AND VIEWS - SEPTEMBER 2020
WRITING NEWS Not a whole lot going on this month. I've been spending most of my writing-time working on The Brassfire Fleet, which I've got up to 48,000 words now; I've been making such good progress on it that I'm beginning to think I might actually be able to finish it by the end of year. Sneak and the Shadow of Darkplanet, which was released last month, has sold very poorly so far, even compared to the other Signalverse titles. I never expected the book to do all that well, though, and I've done nothing to promote it, so I'm not really all that surprised. * * * * * * * * BILL AND TED FACE THE MUSIC I'm a huge Bill and Ted fan. Excellent Adventure and Bogus Journey are some of my favorite movies -- Bogus Journey in particular is crazy, creative, and (in my opinion) criminally underrated. My friends and I are constantly quoting this movie at each other; it's become a part of our shared vocabulary. So when I heard they were making another sequel, Bill and Ted Face the Music, I was...well, a little worried, to be honest. I was as excited as anyone at the prospect of seeing Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves together again, but I felt like Bogus Journey ended on a nice note, and that there really wasn't any reason to make another Bill and Ted movie. I guess I was most worried about this new movie tarnishing the legacy of the first two movies, because this sort of thing has been happening a lot lately in Hollywood -- a lot of Star Wars fans weren't happy with the way the Disney movies treated Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, for example, and a lot of Terminator fans weren't happy about John Connor getting killed off in the first five minutes of the new Terminator movie. 
But I watched Face the Music a few days ago, and although I have mixed feelings about it, I certainly can't accuse it of tarnishing the legacy of the previous films. It's a fun, goofy kind of a movie, with a good heart, just like the other two Bill and Ted flicks. Bill and Ted are still likable airheads, and the script doesn't go out of its way to make them look bad or anything like that. It was far from perfect, though. In the first two movies, Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves were Bill and Ted -- they inhabited those characters completely. In this one, though, they seemed more like actors, trying to do impressions of Bill and Ted. There was just something off about it, and about them. Keanu Reeves seemed especially off; he just doesn't seem to have the ability to channel Ted anymore, and he was wearing this sort of constipated expression throughout the whole movie (I'm not the only one to have made this observation; the Red Letter Media guys thought he looked like he was on pain medication). The killer-robot-from-the-future subplot didn't do anything for me, either; it wasn't funny, and it seemed like a recycled idea from Bogus Journey besides. But I liked the subplot with their daughters, doing the time-traveling, and the ending was sweet, so overall, yeah, I'll give this one two thumbs up. * * * * * * * * SPEAKING OF STAR WARS... I sometimes watch YouTube videos of people watching the original Star Wars trilogy for the first time. The idea of someone making it all the way to adulthood without having seen these movies just seems kind of weird to me, I guess because the original movies were such a big part of my own childhood. Growing up, I just assumed everyone had seen Star Wars. Unfortunately the only version of the original Star Wars trilogy available to the public right now (legally, anyway), and the version most people are reacting to on YouTube, is the Blu-ray edition, which is full of Lucas's little changes. Now, I don't actually mind most of the changes. Cleaning up the prints, adding some CG special effects here and there, and even inserting a couple of new scenes (Han Solo's meeting with Jabba in the first movie, for instance)...this stuff doesn't really bother me all that much. I don't particularly like the beak in the sarlacc pit, or some of the goofy CG space-animals that Lucas felt compelled to add to the background of some scenes, but I can live with them. There's three changes I really, really hate, though. 3) Greedo shooting first. I get why Lucas did this. He didn't want Han Solo to seem like a cold-blooded killer, so he clumsily retconned the scene to make it seem like Solo killed Greedo in self-defense (after Greedo somehow misses him at point-blank range). It's pretty stupid, and it takes something away from the character, as well; Solo is supposed to be an uncaring badass at this point in the movie. As dumb as this change is, though, I don't actually think it's as egregious as some of the others. To wit... 2) Darth Vader's "No!" At the end of Return of the Jedi (spoiler alert) Darth Vader finally saves Luke, turning on the Emperor and throwing him into a pit. In the original version, we see Vader looking at Luke, and then at the Emperor, and then at Luke again, while the snarling Emperor tortures Luke with his lightning bolts. The camera zooms in on Vader's face (or his helmet, whatever). His inner struggle here is perfectly clear from the visual cues we get. When he finally decides to turn on the Emperor, it's an epic moment; the eerie music reaches a crescendo and then explodes into the "Force" theme, as Vader simply turns to the Emperor, picks him up, and begins carrying him off. Lucas changed the scene, dubbing new dialogue over it -- now, just before he attacks the Emperor, Vader shouts "No!" a couple of times, which is just completely idiotic. Was Lucas afraid that viewers weren't "getting" this scene -- that they weren't understanding Vader's inner turmoil? I don't know. But it's awful. It ruins the whole scene, which is a shame, because it's probably the most important and most pivotal scene of the entire original trilogy. 1) The ghost of Hayden Christensen. At the end of Return of the Jedi, at the Ewok celebration, Luke sees the "ghosts" of Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda, and then his father, Anakin Skywalker, appear. In the original version, Anakin Skywalker was played by Sebastian Shaw, the same guy who played the unmasked Vader earlier in the movie. This was changed in the Blu-ray edition -- now it's actor Hayden Christensen who appears, in place of Sebastian Shaw. Christensen, of course, played the young version of Anakin in the prequel movies. Presumably, Lucas made this change in order to create a link between the original trilogy and his prequel trilogy (and, I believe, to prevent disaffected fans like me from pretending that the inferior prequel movies don't exist). But it's really dumb. Why are we seeing a young version of Anakin, but not a young version of Obi-Wan? How is the audience even supposed to know who this character is? Most people watching the Star Wars series for the first time start with the original trilogy; YouTubers, reacting to this scene for the first time, often express some kind of confusion, wondering out loud who this character is supposed to be. We also lose the kindly, fatherly, "I'm proud of you" look which Sebastian Shaw gives to Luke. Hayden Christensen just stands there like a dope. I hate these changes, and I cringe every time I see these Star Wars newbies watching them for the first time. They don't know what they're missing! They really ought to be watching Harmy's Despecialized Edition. * * * * * * * * WHAT I'M READING I started reading Hugh Thomas's history of the Spanish Civil War last month, but I haven't been making much progress with it; it's extremely dense, and my total ignorance of Spanish history after about 1850 is something of a handicap (hard to put these events into their proper context). Shrug. I also started a book called Washington's Spies by one Alexander Rose, which has been pretty dang interesting so far, and read a few volumes of the March Comes In Like a Lion manga. This is a wonderful series, beautiful and sweet, but also sad, in its way. Highly recommended. * * * * * * * * BH 
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