dragonlady7

my client doesn't work, i can't post comments (except i can sometimes), nobody can comment on me, i keep getting logged out, and whenever i post a support request, i just get told to check status.livejournal.com, unhelpfully. no shit they're installing servers; no shit like a hundred people are being told their journals don't exist intermittently, but why? i don't understand. and how much longer? it's been five hours now.
so i can't use the client, and i'm not sure this will go through. i've managed to comment twice, but i've also been denied commenting a couple of times. and every goddamn time i come back here, it's logged me out, despite my choosing 'never'...
and... i'm sleepy.

poor DW is sick today. we went to rent a movie to watch, with popcorn, and be all cozy and warm and feeling-better, but then we didn't watch it. so, later.
he's fuzzy, tee-hee. his facial hair is coming in faster now than it used to. i mean like, two months ago.
i laughed at him, after pointing it out, and said that the same thing had happened to TLF when he was... nineteen. DW (23) mock-scowled at me. [hilariously, you can tell, now that he is more fuzzy than usual, that ALL of his genetics are conspiring against him ever having attractive facial hair. 1) the Chinese half= sparse growth. 2) the Native American fraction== still sparser growth. and then, cruellest of all, 3) the remainder, white=== blond hair. Yes, about an eighth of the hairs that are infiltrating his chin are blond (and thereby invisible, making him look even sparser and sketchier). Go figure. Fate and genetics must've figured he'd have to have something to make up for the fencing abilities.

we all went to see Episode II last night (me, DW, the girl from jersey, [how did panda so effortlessly come up with nicknames? this is hard] young Robbie and his dad, Fencing Wench, DR, ... and oh yes, CuddlDuds drove up from Cazenovia! Also to borrow fencing equipment.) and we found it highly enjoyable. TLF saw it separately and was indignant, today; he hated it, was outraged by it in fact.
I thought it was a great movie. Not Great, but great as in highly entertaining. No pointless reverence; but good casting, some likable character development-- i liked Haydn Christiansen as the petulant, whiny little shit that will turn to the Dark Side, and Natalie Portman finally got to be hot. (nice how the bad monster artfully tore off half her shirt.)
i liked yoda's muppet whoopass. tlf felt that it cheapened the mystic that yoda was meant to be; too much is explained, etc etc. I felt that it was true to the spirit of the original. i think all these people take the original too seriously.
yes, there's nothing quite as good in the dialogue as the famous "I dunno, fly casual" line, and there is no character to match the brilliant incidentality of Han Solo. But there also is nothing in the script to match up to the maddening woodenness of vocabulary-- think of how many times they said "fully operational" in Return of the Jedi. it was fucking maddening, i tell you.
as for characters, Obi-Wan is shaping up beautifully as embodied by the very talented and charismatic Ewan McGregor, who I like anyway-- he's developing into a character that could, reasonably, shade into the Alec Guinness (name?) character in the second, older trilogy. Friendly, a little stern, a tiny bit goofy, conservative, authoritative, humble. And while TLF complained bitterly that the "forbidden romance" between amidala and anakin was assumed and never shown ("i love you!" "who are you? Oh right, that little kid. Um, get off my leg." "I love you!" "ok, kiddo, this ain't gonna work." "I love you and I just slaughtered a bunch of people!" "hmm... hug him, or run screaming? Hmm.... I love you!!" "let's hump!" "okay!") I didn't have so much of a problem with it. Intelligent young women are often retarded when it comes to boys, and I was willing to just take it as read that she'd fall in love with the intense but petulant young teen model who threw himself at her repeatedly. OK. I can buy it. They didn't develop Han and Leia terribly intensively, though they were a bit more gradual. It's a flaw, but a minor one that I can bridge.
Portman is beautiful and I think her differences from Carrie Fischer are emblematic of the differences between the two trilogies; Fischer was never cute, but a very offbeat kind of beautiful-- full lips, large nose, round chin, big brown eyes-- far from the tall leggy busty blonde blue-eyed heroine of stereotype. Portman is also unconventional and off-stereotype, but she is more classically beautiful-- heart-shaped face, sharp features, dark somber eyes. So, both short brunettes, but where Fischer is a warm folksy-husky-spunky kind of pretty, Portman is a slick and somewhat cold, efficient beauty. The original trilogy was folksy-husky spunky in tone. This newer trilogy is slick and cold. And, for many, lacks the magic of the first.
If I were given a choice of banging either Natalie Portman or Carrie Fischer, I'd probably sleep with Portman. But. I'd rather make friends with Fischer.

and that's all I have to say about that, for the moment. Though one final comment: yes, Count Dooku's light sabre has a different grip than the straight grips of the usual ones. It is not, as DR claimed, a Spanish offset; it's rather closer to a bent French. He was undeniably represented as a better swordsman than Obi-Wan or Anakin, and it was somewhat of a draw with Yoda.
Are we then meant to assume that the more progressively modern the lightsabre grip, the better the swordsman?

I can only assume that by Episode III, Anakin will be sporting a Visconti pistol-grip. How else can he vanquish Samuel L. Jackson, as I think he's supposed to?

i hope this posts. wow, it got long.