House founder Matt Seitz likened this 70 minute video essay epic to Nabokov's Pale Fire. That about says it. Here's all 7 parts for your viewing, um, pleasure, I suppose. More from the RedLetterMedia production house here.
Part I:
Part II:
Part III:
Part IV:
Part V:
Part VI:
Part VII:
"Links for the Day": Each day (more or less) the House editors post a link/links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.
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10 comments:
Despite the fact that I normally find fanboy nitpicking irritating, this is brilliant. It's like a MZS video essay from Bizarro World.
The other reviews are fun, too, if not quite as ambitious. The breakdown of Star Trek Generations's myriad show v. movie continuity issues is hysterical.
Eppur si muove. The Phantom Menace is a great film.
JF... My inner geek is embarrased to admit a lot of the problems cited in the ST: Generations review had occurred to me when I first saw it. The bit about the artifact from STNG is hilarious.
This is so great!
This is just another snarky attack on what has become an easy target. It's sad really, and I've heard it all before.
This video essay tries unsuccessfully to intelligently dissect the film's failures and ends up just smashing at it with a jackhammer.
IMO The Phantom Menace is a very good film.
Stephen: "This video essay tries unsuccessfully to intelligently dissect the film's failures and ends up just smashing at it with a jackhammer."
I don't think that's the purpose at all. It may seem that way in the first or second installments but a different agenda discloses itself soon enough. This guy is creating a character, that of the narrator. And as he talks, he gets further away from Star Wars and goes deeper into fandom and pop culture and reveals increasingly strange and disturbing details about himself.
It's a biographical or autobiographical portrait told in the form of an Internet fan rant. I don't know if that was the sole intent but that's what I got out of it. And I have to assume it was intentional because the video essay format is complex and time consuming, with a lot of moving parts, and you can't just toss one of them off. Whoever did this spent a long time making it, weeks at least, and had plenty of opportunity to think about his choices.
I'm not saying it's a work of art on par with Nabokov's novel, only that it's got a bit of the book's spirit, hiding one narrative inside of another.
Matt, this video is doing both: It sends up fanboy rant videos and carefully dismantles The Phantom Menace. This guy is adopting a character, sure, but the passion and clarity he puts into analyzing the movie is realer than real. In ten years I haven't read anything that so precisely identifies the story problems of not only neo-Lucas but of so many 00's filmmakers "liberated" by digital technology. ("King Kong" Jackson and Smurf Cameron come to mind.)
As my nephew emailed me after watching it, "It makes 2 much sense."
I could see how the 'review' comes off at first blush as satirical fan-boy rant, but if you hang in there til you get to the 5th, 6th, and 7th vids, you see that this guy is definitely in love w/ Star Wars as pop-art and was crushed that Lucas created such a poor movie in PM. Even the last 2 minutes of the last vid is incisive and perfectly cuts at the clay feet of Lucas and his fans.
I have to check out his ST:G review.
Not as funny as Damon Packard
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