New ‘SR,’ new Film.com feature
Well, lookee here! It’s a new “Snide Remarks” column, bearing the title “Leaving the House, and Why I Don’t Want To.” Perhaps you will enjoy reading it. There’s only one way to find out.
In other news, we’re starting a new occasional feature at Film.com called “Eric’s Ten-Year Itch,” in which I re-watch a movie that I reviewed exactly 10 years earlier and discuss how my views — and how the movie world, and society in general — have changed since then. First up is a re-examination of “Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace,” which was released 10 years ago tomorrow, if you can believe that.
For now, “Eric’s Ten-Year Itch” will appear in place of “Eric’s Time Capsule” on occasional Mondays, with the aim of eventually replacing the Time Capsule altogether. I hope you find it interesting, or at least not irritating.
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This week’s “Snide Remarks,” including the audio version, is here.
The audio version (i.e., the podcast) is also here.
Subscribe to the podcast’s feed with this URL.
May 18th, 2009 at 11:15 am
I liked Eric’s Time Capsule. It always cracked me up.
May 18th, 2009 at 11:20 am
I never got the impression the Time Capsule was supposed to be funny, just interesting. Are you thinking of Eric’s Bad Movies?
May 18th, 2009 at 11:32 am
Since Phantom Menace was released 10 years ago, is Jake Lloyd old enough to be put to death for his performance? Or has the statute of limitations on that lapsed?
May 18th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
I like the new feature. It’ll be interesting to see which movies came out that were huge hits at the time and have either faded away into nothingness or have continued to have the punch they did when they came out.
May 18th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Ah, I think Eric has opened a proper can of worms with this one.
I waited in line for EP1, but it was only like 6 hours or something. (My girlfriend, who is now my wife waited in like longer than that to get the tickets. I guess she won me over with that one
) I will fully admit that I got my expectations up too high. It was entertaining, but mostly it wasn’t fulfilling like expected.
I really think it’s major downfall wasn’t Binks or Anikin’s acting. Across the board, all the main characters were boring and uninteresting. I realize that Jedi are supposed to be a little stiff, so I can excuse Obi-wan and Qui-Gon. The two characters they could have brought in a little spice with were totally lame. Amidala was almost jedi-like in her boringness. Jar-Jar, who could have been a more Han-solo like character, was annoying and almost completely incomprehensible the first couple of times you watch him.
Because these characters were fairly bland, the dialogue between them was not all that interesting. Go back and watch the original trilogy and watch the dialogue between Han, Luke and Leia. It was lively and fast paced. The dialogue in Ep.1 was slow and uninteresting. It isn’t until the third movie where Annikin becomes dark and whiny that we get any kind of dialogue worth listening to.
In my opinion, Lucas was looking more at trying to show us a story rather than making a good movie. That is where he fails…
May 18th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
I liked the Time Capsule, too. I really liked the “on this date” bits, when you mentioned which song was #1 on the Billboard chart (the cheesy video link made it even better), popular tv shows, etc. When E10YI replaces ETC, any chance you could incorporate that?
May 18th, 2009 at 7:00 pm
This was an interesting film for me, in that I was almost completely shielded from the hype and thus probably had a very different 1st viewing of the film than most people.
I was serving an LDS mission when the film was released in the US (it came out about 2 months before I returned home). Thus, I didn’t see any trailers or hear any news about it until the week it came out, when my WHOLE FAMILY wrote me letters telling me they’d seen it (apparently, they’d succumbed to the hype as well). In fact, I started seeing posters for the Phantom Menace in my (overseas) mission city, and I didn’t even know what they were about (I thought Darth Maul was the lead singer for a metal band in fact!
).
At last, the day I was released from my mission, I finally checked the thing out (still in theaters). I was nonplussed. I found the CG to be good but overwhelming, the story a little hard to follow, and a few cool action scenes & a couple of cool characters. In short, I’d completely agree with Eric’s present-day “B” rating (maybe a B-minus for Jar Jar & that Lloyd kid). It’s really interesting what your reaction to a film is when you know nothing going in (something that, in the Internet age, is increasingly hard to do).
May 18th, 2009 at 9:26 pm
I liked the time capsule column, but I like this ten-year itch column better. So the change gets my seal of approval (because I’m sure you were all eagerly waiting for it).
May 19th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
My thoughts echo Ken’s: like the Time Capsule, but like this one even better.