A depressing number of commentators recently got sentimental and downright gooey talking about Star Wars<\/b><\/i>, which was released 40 years ago this week.<\/p>\n
By 1977, I had read a lot of science fiction. Gene Wolfe and R.A. Lafferty, Philip K. Dick, Joanna Russ and Cordwainer Smith were favorites, and I collected all the various best-of-the-year anthologies (and for a while, there were a lot). I regularly visited all the bookstores in town, new and used, looking for interesting new writers and well-written, adventurous stories.<\/p>\n
One of my co-workers praised the movie, so one afternoon I rode my bicycle out to the theatre and sat through 17 minutes of commercials in the chilly dark<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> waiting to see this magnificent new breakthrough in science fiction. Finally, the movie started.<\/p>\n And it stunk. If you are Star Wars<\/i> fan, I’m sorry, but I found it stupid. The script was comic-book level. The actors might have been talented, but their lines were drivel. The music deserved a better showcase, and why did Alec Guinness bother with this mess? (Money, I suppose.)<\/p>\n I did sit through The Empire Strikes Back<\/b><\/i>, and found it a little better \u2014 having Leigh Brackett on the script probably helped. It was still lousy, though, and I didn’t bother watching any more Lucasian nonsense.<\/p>\n I would hesitate to call Star Wars<\/b><\/i> “life-changing,” but along with a few other disasters like Blade Runner<\/b><\/i> \u2014 I left the theater furious at what had been done to Dick’s novel \u2014 it was one of the reasons I lost all interest in movies.<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n By the way, if you want to see Alec Guinness in roles that suit him, start here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A depressing number of commentators recently got sentimental and downright gooey talking about Star Wars, which was released 40 years ago this week. By 1977, I had read a lot of science fiction. Gene Wolfe and R.A. Lafferty, Philip K. Dick, Joanna Russ and Cordwainer Smith were favorites, and I collected all the various best-of-the-year … Continue reading “The empire strikes out”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-and-anti-culture"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4xam3-8DM","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33218"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33218\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33232,"href":"http:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33218\/revisions\/33232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}