Ironik

As I said earlier, you have to lead by example. Cut the salary of your employees and then give yourself a pay raise? That's idiotic. It creates a hostile relationship, so the next time you need to do something to save the company, the workers are just going to assume you're lying. Even the UAW and Teacher's union has seen the light in recent years, but only in areas where they've been treated fairly. This combative "us v. them" mentality is killing companies.

Read this story about the guy who founded Costco. The recently retired Sinegal only takes $350,000 in salary despite running a hugely successful multi-billion-dollar business. He bumped that up to $629,000 the year he retired. Costco has the best employee retention rate in the business and also gives out the best benefits. While still making money. (Suck on THAT Papa John and Applebees.)

And if you want to get political, Papa John and the Applebees guys are Republican, while Sinegal is a Democrat. Treats people fairly and makes truckloads of money. Who'd'a thunk it?

I think part of the problem is that her character is often more subtle, generally betraying her emotions in small ways. She has no trouble speaking up for herself, but her reaction to Andrea's questions about the two original pet walker seemed to indicate there was a lot more going on there (were they her brothers or something?), but it was fleeting. Her behavior is kind of reminiscent of those Japanese soldiers discovered years after WWII ended, living alone on islands. Fully self-reliant and more than a little feral.

It's not just the one-liners in the dialogue, it's the whole thing. Everything Yoda says is nonsense. He's a shave Fozzie Bear spouting gibberish. When I first saw the movie, I thought he told Luke his training would only be complete once he "faced failure." That was the only worthwhile thing he said. Come to find out he said "face Vader," it brings us back into the revenge melodrama.

Aside from Carrie Fisher -- who really is *terrible* in Star Wars (listen to how her accent changes depending on who she's with) -- I don't think there's really any bad acting going on. People ding Hamill for his portrayal, but he's playing an aw-shucks farmboy; of course he sounds goody half the time. He does quite a lot with very little. And Ford is just acting the hell out of that role, far more than he would do once he hit superstar status in his 40s and went into cruise control mode.


Star Wars is actually pretty good, FX-wise. ESB was a major step backward. If you ever get a chance to see the original versions from an old laserdisc or VHS tape, you can see just how well-made the stuff in Star Wars is compared to ESB.

Exactly. That's one of the things I kept reminding people when they bellyached about Phantom Menace: as bad as it is, if you're over 13 then you aren't the target audience. We grew up but Star Wars didn't. Lucas has always said, from the very earliest interviews, that Star Wars is aimed specifically at the 12-14 year-old.

I would argue, though, that you don't have to be quite so stupidly crappy when making movies for kids. Much of the Pixar catalog, for instance.

How much are you supposed to take? When you negotiate in good faith, give up money and benefits and get screwed over, why would you trust the guys making millions off of your hard work when they ask you to do it again?

No, the people to blame here are the guys at the top. Hostess didn't fail because the workers refused to end up like Wal-Mart employees, it failed because the executives legally looted millions of dollars by abusing a system created by their rich friends in DC.

You know what Michonne strikes me as? A cat. A big, solo hunter of a cat. She watches, she waits, she springs into action and will come around if she really wants something... but then walks away when she no longer needs you. It'll be interesting to see where they go with that.

In an unrelated front, I believe I'm having lunch with Danai next month. Be jealous.

She was just severely emotionally traumatized, in way Glen wasn't. Cut her some slack.

I would never have used the MA if they'd done that. Where's the fun of storytelling? You're just seeing it as another mission creator rather than a creative venue, which I believe is its primary purpose.

What should've happened about exploits like farms is that the Devs should've ignored them. Who cares what others did in their missions? None of that stuff was game-breaking. (Well, maybe market-breaking, but I could never fully employ or enjoy the market because people who treated the game like a second job always had billions of influence, no matter what the Devs did.) The continual habit of swatting a fly with a sledgehammer was ridiculous. Travel Suppression was the thing that most irritated me, but there were so many others.

Just allow players to tag a mission with "farm" or "story" or whatever and move on to providing something else cool.

Because purchasing another corporation is an impulse buy without months of planning and study.

Ironically, I'm not.

I was 12 when Star Wars came out and 15 when ESB was released. Those 3 years were critical developmental years for me in terms of understanding story craft and appreciating the art of film beyond "Boy, that was cool!" Before that, I basically just consumed science fiction, fantasy and adventure stories without thinking about them critically. But by 1980 I had been formally introduced to (and forced to read) things that were outside my comfort zone. Shakespeare, Steinbeck, Paton, Faulkner, Beckett... knowledge changes your worldview, especially at that age.

On the film front, there was no such thing as cable TV or videotapes yet, so I spent nearly every single weekend at the theatre. It only cost 35 cents to see a matinee, so I would just watch everything. If you look at this list of the top 100 movies from 1980, I saw nearly every one of those in the theatre of my own volition. 1978 and 1979 were the same way. I was there so much that the manager would let me watch a movie twice in a row without making me pay again.

I take your point about Indy, but he is the scion of adventure serials, after all. I'm all for epic, but I just think it was the wrong way to go in the case of Star Wars.

My basic issue with ESB is that the father twist flips everything on its head and revealed that Lucas never had a planned-out "trilogy of trilogies". (Which we later found was true, when long-time producer Katz -- who had been in on the earliest drafts of Star Wars -- told us that Lucas was just making stuff up as he went along.) If you ignore the stuff you've seen and only look at the world from Luke's point of view, the only truthful person he's met is Vader. Kenobi is a liar and he, along with everyone else in the Rebellion, uses Luke for his own ends, which is basically a revenge plot. But they never followed through on that, keeping the story shallow. Until Luke discovers that Vader is his dad, he's keen on killing him. But the *instant* he becomes Dad, suddenly he's worth saving. Bah.

It's just a badly-written movie, too. I don't know why Leigh Brackett is held in such high regard. Hatari is a terrible movie, primarily because the script is awful. Every other movie she has a credit on was heavily rewritten by a more talented screenwriter. Her books are really dull. Even Kasdan coming in at the last minute after she died couldn't do much to save it because the locomotive was already on its way down the track and Lucas was fixated on his big new twist. Kasdan once said that even he made C3PO redundant because he couldn't figure out a way to make him relevant to the core story and he only had a couple weeks to work on the story in the middle of pre-production. Compare the story beats and dialogue of ESB ("nerf-herder") to RotJ ("I dunno, fly casual") as well as the story arcs. What are the two most memorable moments from ESB? "I am your father" and "I know." And the second one was an improvisation by Ford. Jedi, on the other hand, had those moments constantly. "How we doin'?" "Same as usual." "That bad, huh?"

There's more than one way to go epic. Suppose Obi Wan's name was actually OB-1, aka Old Ben One. He fought in the Clone Wars and Owen calls him Old Ben. He's the first clone, and he's flawed. He tried to do what a Jedi master would, but his greatest mistake was training Vader, who betrayed Kenobi and killed Skywalker, the hero of the Republic. And therein were planted the seeds of the Empire. Make Luke a clone, too, so Kenobi sees him as a way to redeem himself with a second chance to train the student he lost. There are plenty of other ways to go, too, but that's one that immediately presents itself.

Plus, the special effects. Ugh. They were a real step backward. I don't think anyone really remembers the bizarre boxes around the spaceships because they haven't seen the originals in so long, but for some reason the mattes didn't match so there was this constantly-shifting square around each ship as it moved, which was absolutely horrendous-looking on the big screen.

I will hold your hair while you scrap.