Bereft as I am of debate for the next few months, I simply could not keep myself away from O’C’s screening of Willow at the new Cruz Cantina.
Oy.
Saturday was one beautiful day. Everybody’s been so put off by bad weather lately that any excuse for a nice day would suffice, but Saturday genuinely was nice, which made it all the better. I started up at the Met, checking out some small exhibits and roaming into nooks and crannies that I don’t normally visit, discovering all sorts of works I had never seen, or else completely forgotten. Then I strolled my way down to O’C’s downtown, stopping hither and yon, weaving through the tourists, generally just enjoying the elements, much like everyone else.
I can’t compare the new Cruz Cantina to the old one, having never visited the previous digs, but the new one is quite respectable, if you’re not afraid of tripping over the odd AT-AT scale model. I brought some apparently non-kosher prosciutto down from Eataly, JV supplied a bottle of wine, O’C spread out various cheeses, and Kate supplied the drunken brownies, in honor of the afternoon’s screening. We established that, since he bought this particular Blu-ray disc a fortnight ago, O’C had already watched it three times. He also admitted that he had been in Prequel Denial (except for Jar-Jar Binks, who even O’C never liked), and that, as Tchaikovsky only wrote 3 symphonies, the 4th, the 5th and the 6th, Lucas only made 3 Star Wars films, episodes 4, 5 and 6, although O’C didn’t exactly use the Tchaikovsky reference, which would have been apt, considering how most of the soundtrack of the movie we were about to see was themes drawn from said Russian and twisted around just enough so that Lucas & Co. wouldn’t be sued for international property theft at The Hague.
Eventually the movie began. I vaguely remembered it from when it came out as being rather so-so, but I must have been generous at the time. The acting made you wonder why they couldn’t have just grabbed up some freshman Dec speakers, who would have sounded a hell of a lot better. The plot was often scene for scene borrowed from some other Lucas movie (he produced this; Ron Howard bears the blame for actual direction, or as I guess it should be called, re-direction). The dialog was classic Lucas, as in, Oh, I guess Tom Stoppard was busy yet again when the call came in. “The bones have spoken.” Yeah, right. The best thing of all is the unexplained change of allegiance by the daughter of the villainess, presumably herself a villainess-in-training. For that you have to watch the extras for some footage stolen from the Camelot cutting room floor. The extras (great googly-moogly, I can’t believe we actually watched extras, but O’C wouldn’t turn the damned thing off) also included the unforgettable Fish Boy sequence, which started great amounts of discussion on our parts of Chekhov, guns on the wall and the use of all of one’s acorns.
I guess I should be happy that Howard the Duck isn’t on Blu-ray yet.
Afterwards, those of us who didn’t have yet other social engagements to pursue, or those of us who weren’t scarred for life and had to run home screaming, had a nice meal at the old Cuban restaurant we all like, and a splendid time was had by all.
When does debate start up again?
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