Yeah, that's the missing piece - the prequels certainly seem to suggest that everybody knows about Jedi, they've got their own office building downtown in the capital of the Galaxy.

If the prequels had only suggested the Jedi were a secret to the general public, the basic plot could have stayed exactly the same.     QuiGon and ObiWan could have done everything they do, just not openly as Jedi...     

"Hey, there are two guys in the lobby, they're kinda creepy and calm and they're freaking me out."
"Crap, maybe they're Jedi."
"Oh come on, Jedi aren't even real.  Are they?"

If it had been established that the Jedi did their thing in secret, and then were just as secretly exterminated, it would have been perfectly understandable that twenty years later folks like Han and Motti would believe Jedi weren't that big a deal and maybe never existed at all.

I'm not assuming anything - I'm going off the information that was actually presented to me in the first film.    Such as a lengthy sequence of how much effort it took just to get Neo out of bed for the first time, and dialog such as:

"Why do my eyes hurt?"
"You've never used them."

and then watching real-world Neo lean tiredly against walls for most of the rest of the film, etc.

So I'm not assuming it, it was actually part of the movie they made.

While that's not the case - see above - the Wachowskis do get to make whatever movie they want.  And I'm allowed to like it, or not.     I thought their sequels were flawed and just explained why.   But neither the Wachowskis nor I will be losing sleep over it.

I wasn't suggesting that Super Neo/Weak Neo should have been the only plot of the  sequels, I was suggesting that as a B plot it would have been more interesting dramatically than the Super Neo/Super Neo B plot they went with.   

And again, it's only my opinion, and the sun will still come up tomorrow.

Exactly - it's just another way of saying "Once Upon A Time..." in hopes of setting the audience up properly to receive a fairy tale, and thus not question the magical bits when they happen.  Because in a fairy tale we accept that magic is everywhere, it's a given.

That's all Star Wars really is - a fairy tale about a hero who rescues a princess from an evil sorceror and saves the kingdom, just with a Buck Rogers gloss laid on top of it.   

The real genius of Lucas was in coming up with the idea of doing a movie like that, smack dab in the middle of the cynical post-Nam American '70's.  The idea of a good ol' fashioned fantasy movie of heroes and villains was so old, it was new again.     

It was a crazy idea, but it worked out and then he lived happily ever after. 

The end.  Now go to bed.

Well, whaddaya know.  I was aware of the difference between a trouper and a trooper, but I just always thought that expression was military in origin, and not from the theatah.   Live and learn.

I also realize in retrospect that the video switcher that fires the Death Star's weapon was probably a Grass Valley switcher and not a Chyron.   The Times regrets the error.

It's true - film school will completely ruin your ability to simply watch and enjoy a movie.  And working in the movie industry, doubly so.   

But it does enable you to appreciate them in other ways.   Just as auto mechanics need to know how cars are put together, and that might take away some of the romance of it.  But they probably appreciate automobiles on a different level than those of us who look at a car and just think "ooh, shiny!"

And every once in a while a movie will come along and be so goshdarned good that I'll forget to analyze it and actually just enjoy it like a normal person.   Those movies are rare, but it's great when it happens.

Something I should have mentioned in the anniversary "what did we learn?" discussion - it didn't occurr to me at the time - was that we started with the assumption that fewer people would be interested in a commentary if it was a movie they probably didn't own and therefore couldn't watch while listening.  So for the most part we've stayed with recent blockbusters as our source material.

Now that we know that watching (or even previously SEEING) the video in question doesn't seem to be as much of an issue, we may indeed start doing older and/or more obscure films.   We all can name films that we wish more people would see... or classics that we just can't understand why they're supposedly so great, etc.   I'm hoping we'll do more of that sort of thing in our *ahem* second year.

To which I say - yes,  that would in fact solve the "problem".     Would it not?  But I gather you think that it's bad to force people to change in the interest of greater harmony.   

In fact, so do I.  But that doesn't change the fact that eliminating gay people would eliminate the problem of gay discrimination.   

And (for the fifth?  sixth? time) I am not advocating this policy.  I am merely stating that it would work.  Facts are facts, no matter how frowny they make your tummy feel.

I get it. Rather than change the gay people, you want to change the people who don't like the gay people.   You do realize that people can - and do - object to homosexuality on cultural grounds?    But you have seem to have no problem advocating a change to that culture...

And that's the problem - Everyone knows life would be better if those "other" people would just change their ways.  Worse still, everybody's right. 

You've just illustrated why multiculturalism is difficult to achieve, though I don't think you did it on purpose.

Actually, we kinda do - or at least real-world experience has shown that a HAL-like computer is impractical, for many reasons.

There was a fascinating documentary years ago about a fella who had one of the most sophisticated computers available at the time and literally was trying to teach it to relate to humans as if it was human itself.   

The problem he was encountering that eventually sank the project was that there is just too much info that a human absorbs in order to function, and the most important stuff isn't data, it comes from the daily experience of being a human in the first place.   

So to get the computer to really understand the meaning of "my toe hurts", it had to understand what a toe is, and what hurting is, and why my toe isn't your toe, and the list goes on almost forever, just to get that one simple idea across.

More recently there were some experiments of putting a computer brain in a simulacrum of a body so that it COULD learn to move around and experience the world in a human sort of way, but these sorts of things are still very theoretical.

Which is why from a PRACTICAL standpoint we long ago abandoned the idea of one mega computer in favor of networked small computers that handle specific tasks.   So you might someday have A ship's computer that speaks to you in English and seems kind of human, but he probably wouldn't also be running your life support system.   That's just a bad design, as the Discovery crew learned too late. 

But as far as the neural net concept, yep, that's the scary thing about them.  They can learn to do what you want them to do, but you can never know what they're "thinking" as they do it.   Just as your mailman might seem friendly, but in his head he's actually planning where he's going to hide your body, because he's actually completely insane and only mimicing human behavior.   

Freaky stuff to contemplate... will there be a day when we let neural-net computers handle something critical, when we can't fully know why they're doing it, or what might make them  totally lose their sh*t?

except that apparently whatever "Arcturians" are, you can't tell the males from the females, and it doesn't matter.   

Even assuming that the characters are teasing each other, it's always seemed to me there's more to that story than just relaxed Arcturian morals.   It's as if they're talking about sheep or something.

In fact there's an old joke that goes sorta like that.  (The punchline is "yeah, but you picked the UGLIEST one!"  You can probably work out the rest of the joke yourself. :-)

I believe it is in this week's very episode (Gremlins) that I go into the interesting theory that mainstream Hollywood's primary output nowadays would have been called exploitation films thirty years ago.   ( if it's not Gremlins where I go into that, it's in the upcoming Ghostbusters II).   

When I was a kid, if you wanted to see aliens and monsters and car chases and things exploding, you had to go to the drive-in and watch a movie made by a studio you never heard of.    If you wanted to see emotional stories about characters, you went to a real movie theater and watched a movie made by a major studio.

Now, it's largely the opposite - the "majors" make movies from comic books and toys and old sci-fi tv shows, and the independent studios make character dramas.  Odd but true.

Well, garsh.  Just doing our job, y'know.    Glad you liked Return - Dan O'Bannon (who also wrote ALIEN, among other things) wrote and directed that one.  When O'Bannon died last week, Simon Pegg gave homage to O'Bannon on Twitter for making Return OTLD, since it was more or less the godfather of Shaun of the Dead.

Speaking of which - Shaun of the Dead, we should do that one.    We haven't gotten into zombies yet, and if Shaun doesn't belong on the Perfect Movie shelf, then nothing does.

My retroactive correction for this movie is:

I referred to a certain actor as Ric Overton, his name is actually Rick Ducommun.   

Ric Overton is another fine character actor, but he ain't in this movie.    I got my Micks rixed up.

Also, I mispronounced the screenwriter's name as "De-SOWza".  For the record, it's "De-SOOza".  Please make a note of it.