o Kali class this week, and if you thought that meant I wouldn't talk about it... you were sadly deluded.  There was no class Tuesday, for the first time in months, (The Gura is busy with some other stuff this week.) and there's no class Thursday either. I might to a class by another instructor in the school Wednesday night, but it's a long drive and Malaya and I did a pretty good hour of Kali by ourselves last night, so I'm not totally jonesing for my fix.

What we were supposed to be busy with this week is National Dance Week in the Bay Area, a week where dozens of local dance studios and organizations put on free shows and offer free beginner's lessons. A group of five of us were going, but one couple has had to bail due to family issues that have them out of town and too busy, and the single woman friend is sick and isn't going to be able to go out more than maybe one night this week. The other problem is the dance classes themselves, and while we perhaps should have predicted it in advance, this is the San Francisco Bay Area, and as such the classes are really rather... unique. Check out last night's schedule, for instance. See a type of dance you've 1) ever heard of in your life, or 2) might actually do at some point in public, like at a party or a wedding, when you want to dance? Not so much.

Samples:

They're not all that offbeat, but none that had dances we might actually use were in good locations or at good times, or were set for beginners to learn. We're trying to find something good for Thursday, and are considering just going to some regular introductory class in the future, since they usually are priced pretty affordably.

In other RL news, there ain't much. Good Kali time with Malaya Tuesday night, and I've done a ton of novel work the last couple of days, and am almost completely over the lingering cold that afflicted Malaya for 3 weeks and has been on me for 2.5. Oh, and I made all the multiple ingredients required for my newly massive chicken, bean, rice, veggie burritos.

With such exciting happenings to discuss (or not), you can see why I'm cutting straight to the movie and idiot celebrity news.

¤ Maggie Gyllenhaal, an actress with an unspellable last name (her brother is that guy who looks like a poor man's Tobey Maguire), is starring in a new independent film about New York post 9/11. For some reason, much to the regret of her publicist, she chose to make some fairly intelligent comments about those terror attacks.

If I'd just seen those comments, I wouldn't have paid them any mind. I mean isn't that just the common sense reaction, at this point? Perhaps, but not everyone holds that view, or possesses any common sense, as the rest of the article makes clear.

Curious, I looked on the fansite (Which is a perfect fansite to an unknown celebrity; utterly rife with misspellings and hyperbole.) and they had a link to a more detailed article about the controversy on NY NewsDay.

Seriously, what would anyone argue with about that? She didn't say "NYers deserved to die," though I guess you could make that inference from her words if you really wanted to. Frankly, if you don't agree with her words than you are woefully-ignorant of US foreign policy through history, and how it's received in the rest of the world. It's not Maggie's fault that you don't know any better, and if you do it's not her fault that you are unable to face the hard truths and realities of life. Do the people protesting her think Bin Laden (Remember him? Bush doesn't.) threw a dart at a world map to pick the US or what?

The best thing about the NYNewsDay article is the vote. Here are the current results, as of Tuesday evening.

So the leading option is agreement, and the vast majority of people agree or don't care. Well that's that, then.

The odd thing is that most of the complaints, as the NYND article says, are coming from NY firefighters. I suppose if we're ranking the most innocent victims in the 9/11 thing they're going to be near the top of the list, since not only were they not in the WTC to begin with, they ran there to help other people who were. True, hundreds died there, most because of their selfless bravery and their incompetent commander who didn't pull them out of a lost cause in time. But why aren't they agreeing with the actress and directing their anger somewhere productive; such as towards those who set and continue to set US policies that lead to the hatred that made us the target in 9/11 in the first place?  I figured Bush-apologists and neo-con Arab-haters would be the ones objecting, but nope, we've got angry firefighters who are all bent on shooting the messenger.

Still, who am I to criticize others for talking and complaining rather than actually going out and doing something, when that's the entire purpose of this blog? If this blog can even be said to have a "purpose," other than providing occasionally entertaining free entertainment...

When it comes to Star Wars fans these days, we seem to be divided into two camps.  Those who hope for the best while preparing to sigh resignedly when yet another movie sucks ass, and those who are just sure Lucas will return to form any time now, and nevermind the fact that 90% of their happy Star Wars thoughts are rose-tinted memories of movies first seen and loved when they were like, 7.

On that subject, TBS had The Empire Strikes Back on the other night, as Malaya discovered while channel surfing. I hadn't seen any of that movie in maybe a decade, and while it didn't suck, it was just a lot of, "Ehhh." Mediocre special effects in the cloud city, utterly ridiculous laser fights and battle tactics, embarrassing sword form during the light saber duel where Darth claims Luke's hand, etc. It occurred to me as I watched that something I've really disliked about the prequels; the utterly stupid action sequences and battle tactics, aren't a flaw in the prequels. No, the action and battles were impossibly stupid and absurd all along, I just wasn't old enough to realize it back in the original trilogy days.

The fact that one squad of marines with automatic weapons and a few grenades could kill every single Jedi and/or Storm Trooper without suffering a single loss is obvious in the prequels, but the action scenes in the early movies weren't any smarter. They're not really meant to be; they're all patterned after the running shoot outs in old westerns, where bad guys inevitably get plugged on the edge of a building, a trick that enables them to gasp in pain, clap one hand to their chests, and fall dramatically out of the bottom of the frame. We didn't see that much of Empire, but during the running battle through the Cloud City I don't believe that anyone ever actually took cover. Lando, Leia, and Chewie would frequently pause to shoot back at the Storm Troopers, but neither they nor the disposable bands of bad guys ever actually dodged anything or ducked behind anything. They'd all run to a corner, stop beside it, and kneel down next to the wall while shooting back. The wall always took several incoming blasts, and several storm troopers were hit, but no one actually used the terrain to their advantage. Not even for cover.

While watching I tried not to think how much more effective a single machine gun or even an automatic pistol would have been. Anything that could fire more than once every few seconds. Don't their laser pistols have a rapid fire setting? How about a continuous stream that they could just hose across a doorway and hit everything inside with at once? Christ, laser pointers have that option. And let us not mention the topic of explosives, since even a single grenade could have completely turned the tide of battle on numerous occasions. Space ship combat is no less illogical, since they fire once every few seconds, have no missiles or anything heat seeking, appear to fly at one speed only, maneuver without any evidence of side thrusters, etc.

Really, when you analyze the technology, nothing in the Star Wars movies takes hand to hand weaponry beyond the early 1800s. They've got single shot guns, none of which are very accurate, no useful armor of any kind, and they use swords for close range combat. Their space ships are set in a later period, but only just. They're pretty much WWI fighter planes with their slow speed, manual targeting and firing, light instrumentation, lack of useful shields or armored exteriors and vulnerable glass cockpit design. This sounds like a criticism, but it's not really; Lucas isn't an imbecile, and he surely could have designed the weapons and space ships in a more futuristic fashion. He chose to make them retro, with lower technology than existed on earth at the time, since he knew people would relate better to close range combat and human targeting. It builds drama and tension, as we hope Luke can dodge the lasers and shoot the tie fighters. Who would root for the Rebellion if they simply got in range of the Death Star and shot out self-guided bombs that automatically targeted the exhaust port and flew at 1/4 the speed of light?

Speaking of the Death Star stuff though... Jesus George, did you give it any thought? We saw the end of Star Wars on TV the other day too, and once again I was left wondering why the Empire didn't just keep the Death Star at warp speed all the way past the planet, so they were immediately in firing range. Whose idea was it to stop 15 minutes away, on the other side of a planet?  Also, I can accept that a laser that blows up an entire planet at once is a special new invention, but the rebels don't have any nukes? Their ships fly on anti-matter, or something like that, so they're not Iraq; they've got to have some sort of WMD technology, and they've got to be able to load it onto ships and shoot it or crash it into the Death Star. They've got the schematics for the Death Star and they know where the super big laser is; if they can't blow up the entire station why not just take that out? Hell, they wouldn't even need WMDs for that; all of the tie-fighters shooting at the laser ports would do the trick and buy them days or weeks of time to escape or launch a second attack.

In the interests of time I'll refrain from wondering why every attack run on the unshielded exhaust port began something like 40,000 kilometers away from it, when they needed at most 5000km to settle into a targeting speed. I did wonder why no one thought to put any guns on the back of the x-wing fighters, and why their attack style was to fly down a narrow trench in small packs, serving as proverbial fish in a barrel for the enemy fighters. Would it have been so hard to send another x-wing fighter in every ten seconds, so each of them could guard the back of the one flying in front of it? Han Solo hit upon that strategy purely by chance, and saved the day with it. Makes his ridiculous promotion to General seem a bit more logical, in retrospect, at least when you consider the Napoleons he was competing against. 

On another Star Wars topic, while we were watching them and trying to remember why we ever thought this stuff was so good, Malaya asked how I thought the SW movies would do today, if they were just being released for the first time. She meant the original trilogy, and we assumed there would be updated special effects and such, but that they'd have essentially the same characters, story lines, etc.

It's hard to answer that, since every Sci-Fi and action movie today is completely inspired by Star Wars, and that, plus achieving puberty, is why the old ones don't do much for us anymore. We're jaded and we've seen everything from SW imitated, copied, and surpassed dozens of times since the original films were released in 1977, 1980, and 1983, so it's impossible to evaluate them as they were originally.

So this is very hypothetical, but I think if they came along for the first time today they would be hits, but would not approach the mythic status they now enjoy. Most of their popularity back in the 80s was due to them being the first movies to do what they did; to combine soap opera story lines with cool special effects and set them in a Sci-Fi world. Until Star Wars, Sci-Fi was mostly boring and intellectual stuff like 2001: A Space Odyssey, and action movies seemed quaint or cheesy at the time. Coming into that background, Star Wars seemed impossibly-futuristic, but was still exciting and flesh and blood and swashbuckling enough to engage the viewer.  In 1977 it was a revelation. Today it would be just another Sci-Fi action movie, and while it would be better than mediocre junk like The Chronicles of Riddick, or Alien 4, or AVP, and would certainly kick the crap out of Episode 1 and 2, it wouldn't be a sensation anything like the original trilogy was.

Star Wars wasn't great, but Lucas took enough elements of all the classic myths and wove them into a shiny new package, and kids ate it up. Lucas was clearly running out of steam by movie 3, with the absurd happily-ever-after ending, and he clearly didn't get his steak back after two decades, as the prequels make evident, but for a while there, he really had something going. And the fact that he was hitting a largely-virginal market with no real competition in the genre he created certainly didn't hurt either.

¤ Sometimes the jokes just write themselves:

Not that this sort of movie has enough of a plot for there to be a spoiler, but come on, Paris. Anyway, when I first saw this trailer before another film the only noise in the theater was when Paris' face appeared on screen and her name appeared in the credits. And I can confidently predict that the biggest cheer in the movie will be when her character gets waxed.

In related news, if you ever really need to boost your spirits, just imagine the celebrity bimbo flavor of the month, Paris in this case, listening to her friends and agents as they reassure her that she really is talented and smart, and that it's not all just hype, and that her career is sure to be a long and critically-acclaimed one. And the star eating it up and sort of glowing as they receive their validation and continue to confuse fame with success.