Sarah and I went out on the town yesterday afternoon following a lazy morning where we looked at our navels, hers is almost an outee at this point, and eating outside in the backyard at Devlin’s. They had some trouble with the second order of Mojitos because they didn’t have enough mint to make the drink so they had sent someone out to the market to get more mint. They also didn’t have the ingredients for a virgin pina colada at first but upon learning of Sarah’s state they managed to whip a good one together.
In the afternoon we happened to have a gift that we needed to bring to Crate and Barrel from the wedding because we had a duplicate gift. We also had to purchase three wedding gifts for the multitude of weddings that we are going to or have already been to recently. It so happens that all three soon to be blissful couples all were registered at Crate and Barrel. After going through some shenanigans at the counter because we only had half the gift we were looking to exchange we determined that the other half was attempted to be delivered but because of our extreme paranoia of front entranceway thieves we hadn’t signed for it and they had gotten it back in the shipping department. We then proceeded to purchase three partial sets of three different china patterns. The Asian couple, Jason and Kathy, had chosen a nice Asian looking pattern. The two Caucasian couples had both chosen Caucasian patterns.
Upon leaving the store with two ready wrapped gifts and one to be shipped we were off on a quest to see Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith. At first we tried the Chestnut Hill mall but then we moved onwards to Fenway and despite there being a game that we had expected was at 2PM but was really at 7PM we were able to make our way into the theatre in time to see the previews for the Narnia chronicles. They look like they’ll be awesome.
While I am not sure if the Star Wars movie was going to give children who watch it nightmares, I did have a nightmare last night. Children would most likely have nightmares because of the scene when Aniken kills all the younglings. That’s a gruesome thought for a youngling looking to buy some action figures, even ones that can be melted on a summer grill to change from Aniken to a pre-bionic surgery Darth Vader. My nightmare may also have been influenced because I watched the movie Team America World Police the night before. The highlight and potential problem for small children in Team America was the scene where the marionettes are involved in a graphic sex scene including over seven positions. The dream also could have been influenced by the scene in Team America where two marionettes were eaten by black house cats called cougars due to the scale. The final problem may have been the many radio reports of the theft of thousands of credit cards.
The nightmare was as follows. I was walking in the neighborhood at night after camping with Falkoff. It was a nice night but very dark. Unfortunately it was so dark that I couldn’t see in any direction. I was essentially completely blind but I could tell I was in front of a house and standing on a sidewalk. Because I was frustrated by this I decided to lie down on the sidewalk. A few minutes later a police officer was standing over me and wondering why I was lying on the ground. He took me for a drunk vagrant even though I explained that I had laid down because I was unable to see in any direction and couldn’t find my way home. He walked me into the back of a house with a kitchen full of surly looking characters that I assumed were all criminals. He then showed me by unclamping the device holding my hands together that if I did unclamp it that alarms would go off. My first thought on entering this world was that it would be an interesting time for me to learn about this underclass of people who had been arrested. The police officer then left and the surly people started asking me a few questions. I admitted that I wasn’t there for any dangerous offense but instead for having slept on public property. I could tell that they were all there for doing deeds like stealing, raping, and murdering. Then one of them grabbed me and took off my pants. I was then pulled into another room and into a van with a window in it so we could see back into the original room. A group of us had all been pulled into this large van. Watching through the van I could see that the criminals were opening my pants and looking at my wallet. Inside my wallet normally wouldn’t be much exciting. Some old receipts, less than $200 in cash, two credit cards, and a lot of useless identification. I then realized that Sarah had given me all of the wedding checks and my wallet was full of tons of money that if they took the checks it would be impossible to piece the money back together and these thieves could probably figure out how to get the money from some of the checks that looked like travelers checks. I was in total shock, indignant, frustrated, and pantless.
So I awoke in the middle of the night with a shot of adrenaline running through me.
My thoughts on the Star Wars movie are as follows:
I didn’t buy the conversion of Aniken to Darth Vader. It was too simply played and I should have had more empathy for the decision. I had hoped that he would have done it in a moment of passion about Padome but instead it was in a moment of passion about the Darth Sidius/Senator and I just couldn’t see how he would suddenly throw his life to the dark side. There were plenty of areas to work with that could have made this possible since the movie pitted democracy against a dictatorship heavily and did a terrible job of providing the reality of why dictators choose to become dictators. The bottom line is that people become dictators to protect their kind (similar race, religion, etc.) because they find that democracy when corrupt has a tendency to discriminate terribly against minority. Democracy also tends to fail in the wake of a challenge from someone who acts decisively through force when the protectors need to respond. So in the case of the Sudan there can be genocide for months or years but the United Nations when split on keeping peace can leave people to fight against each other. Imagine the pain of being on the side of having your family raped and killed because nobody could make a decision. Aniken had these sorts of areas, a mother raped and murdered, a wife threatened but the causes were not elaborated in the movies and didn’t boil down to a believable character who could choose to forgo democracy for dictatorship of himself. I liked what was trying to be done but it just wasn’t clear and didn’t fit together. So I think the movie failed on the key area I was looking for, a clear answer regarding why Aniken became Darth Vader. Another annoying thing was there was a lot of set-up for other movies without giving a real role in the current movie to the set-up. Look Wookies, but what do Wookies do in this movie other than hang around with Yoda? The Ewoks had a major role in destroying the death star and they were the earlier version of Jar-Jar, cute but annoying characters. But the last Star Wars movie had it’s merits in that Jar-Jar never spoke and they didn’t have too much of the worlds worst love dialog between Aniken and Padome. The special effects were top notch. It was enough to give me nightmares.
