Mr. Plinkett’s final installment of reviews of the latest Star Wars films (which I mentioned earlier) is complete and was posted last week. It’s more goodness from my favorite scifi movie reviewer/serial killer and it’s worth a look. Also, Plinkett gets name-checked by another of my favorite film critics, Roger Ebert.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:
Red Letter Media‘s film reviewer Plinkett is an obscene and slovenly, garble-mouthed shut-in. He is almost certainly schizophrenic, he is definitely a predator of women and its likely he is a serial killer. Chief among his deprivations are his tendency to kidnap and terrorize women, his nihilist attitude and his reverent obsession with Totino’s Pizza Rolls.
In spite of these enormous failings he delivers some of the most shrewd, compelling analyses of science fiction films in particular and narrative format in general. His earlier critiques focus on the Star Trek: The Next Generation films, but his reviews of the first two Star Wars films is where he transcends the role of typical reviewer and becomes an actual artiste of the form.
What follows is an utterly devastating sequence of take-downs, point-by-point, of The Phantom Menace and The Clone Wars punctuated with Plinkett’s own Silence of the Lambs-like back-story. There are some call-backs to earlier reviews of his Trek films, but they dovetail so nicely that little explanation is required. It’s plainly obvious Plinkett loves Star Wars and Star Trek, and his appreciation for them provides the fuel for his disdain of what has become of both franchises and what could have been.
Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace (7 parts)
Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones (9 parts)
Daily Kos, the scourge of the rightwing, is posting a series of essays on the front page today about the supposedly unbeatable presidential candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton … and how she got beat.
You may feel that you’ve been exposed to all the analysis you could possibly need on the subject by the television pundits who, by and large, don’t want to talk about much else. Well, quantity doesn’t have much to do with quality, and just based on the first of these essays (by the estimable Hunter), there’s some serious quality in store today.
The Clinton campaign was premised from the start on the notion that Clinton would win, and nobody else could. When Clinton started to not win, the same premise was repeated, but with hostility — Clinton would win, damn it, because the rest of you are unelectable. We heard that Clinton was vetted, but no matter how much the other campaigns were vetted, it was not enough. We heard that Clinton was liked by this demographic or that one, and it was asserted that those demographics were the important ones, and the ones won by others were less important. We heard that caucuses were not a sufficient measure of electability, despite their actually doing electing. We heard that entire states were also-rans.
It was not a narrative, but a meta-narrative. She was electable because she was electable, and anything that disproved that theory was dismissed as an exception. It was the campaign equivalent of Intelligent Design.
It was, in short, a terrible, mind-bendingly awful strategy. That is not to say that there was not substance discussed, in the debates — but the campaign was not about that substance. That is not to say that there were not good points to be made in “electability” — but her spokesmen made them shabbily. In the end, it was not an argument that could convince.
Obviously, if you’re sick to death of this campaign, you shouldn’t torture yourself. However, I think this chunk of history has provided some profoundly “teachable” moments to those of us who keep up with the process like it was the path to the Superbowl.