Star Wars/Lucas/Crapola: I won't win many friends for this one, but I really ceased to give a shit about the bloated Star Wars franchise quite a few years ago. The first three were a part of my childhood/adolescence, so obviously I went to see Phantom Menace -- well after it came out, though. I also read through a lot of disappointed fan mewling, and I realized this: Lucas's work has always been juvenile, wooden, preachy, unsophisticated drivel. That's cool when you're a kid. As an adult, I really don't care for it any more. Was Jar-Jar Binks annoying? Sure. So were the Ewoks, Chewbacca, and various other Lucas creations.

No, I'm not trying to say that everyone who wants to see this movie needs to grow up. But they do need to face the diagnosis of acute nostalgia, and quit hoping that Lucas was just slumping for a while. The movies have always been crap aimed to wow kids and sell toys, poseur exegesis of Lucas's pseudo-profound space-Zen, recycled Kurasawa-isms, and derivative mythopoetics notwithstanding. Know why Phantom Menace sucked? Cause you're grown up now. Don't believe me? Take a ten year old to see it. Think Clones was boring? So was most of the talky dreck in Empire.

Point is, it's never going to mean as much/be as cool as it all seemed that summer in 1977. Remember? You heard it from another kid, maybe a couple years older than you: there's this movie about a guy with a kooky glowing sword; he has a spaceship, fights bad guys. But it's gone. And, honestly, who cares? That's life. It goes by, don't it? Now shut the f*ck up about it. It's not all about you, so quit bitching about how Lucas "sold out" or some such, because you're spoiling things for the intended audience, which, to be blunt, is not 40-year-old guys with a wife and a mortgage.