Category: Movies

This film is a B-movie, direct-to-video piece from 1988 fit into those post-apocalyptic desert wasteland films from the era. It stars David Carradine in between his Kung Fu television shows as a clone warrior looking to rescue his wife from a Warlord who has arisen after the nuclear war. I’m not really sure why the film’s title is plural, as there’s only one warlord, really. The story is pretty simplistic and the whole thing smacks of being low budget, but that’s kind of what you get with the genre.

So I can’t help but compare this to Hell Comes To Frogtown, one of the standouts in the field and a film I felt affection for since seeing it on USA Network’s Up All Night in the late 1980s.

Overall, its effects budget, story, and whole bit are less than the gold standard that is Hell Comes To Frogtown.

But if you’re into the genre, it’s a fun little hour and a half.

My beautiful wife is traveling for business this week, which means it’s film festival time at Nogglestead. In the olden days, I’d watch two or three a night, but now I have children who like to get up at 5:30 in the morning, so it’s only one a night. Last night, I watched the James Cameron film The Abyss from 1989 (twenty-three years old? How old am I then?).

I hadn’t seen it before, but I found it to be a perfectly serviceable little action/science fictioner. It’s a real bummer that the “bad guy” in this is really just a Navy SEAL suffering from temporary insanity induced by the pressure change being under the sea. As such, I really felt kinda bad for him throughout the film and hoped he’d be redeemed somehow.

But that’s neither here nor there. As I’m watching the film, I’m struck by some of the meta considerations about the actors and whatnot in the film.

Consider:

• Mary Jane Mastratonio has appeared in two films involving hurricanes: this one and The Perfect Storm where she plays the role of Linda Greenlaw (whose book The Lobster Chronicles I read three years ago.
   
• Ed Harris has played more men named Virgil than any other actor in Hollywood, probably. His character in The Abyss is named Virgil, and he played Virgil Cole in the 2008 western Appaloosa, which I watched in January.
   
• In a tense moment in the film, Mastratonio’s character says to Harris’s character, “It’s not an option.” Failure, that is. A couple years later, Ed Harris would say “Failure is not an option” in another film, and it would become overly quoted. Was it homage to this film? Perhaps.
   

At any rate, it was a good enough picture, but I suppose it could be said that it did not draw me into the world enough so that I would forget the actors in it and that it was a movie with its place in history.

Allow me to prognosticate: Premium Rush is going to bomb.

It’s like The Transporter, but it’s about awesome bicycle riding. And you know who likes awesome bike riding? Hipsters. And do you know what kind of movies hipsters like? Foreign language films screened in shabby little single screen cinemas.

This film has too much English in it and, judging by the fact that they’re advertising it during preseason football on ESPN, too much advertising budget and too wide of a release to garner the support of the sort of people who wear their Spanx® on the outside and crush their testicles against hard plastic for hours at a stretch.

(Isn’t that a lot of smack talk from someone who has seen enough of the film Breaking Away to be able to call it to mind instantly? Shaddup.)

What, no attempt at Die Hard on a Bike? C’mon, a tandem bike where the back seat has a terrorist in it and the front seat has Don MacLivane in it? Hey, how about you throw a little Speed in it and they can’t go less than 22 mph or a bomb will blow? And maybe a little Collateral in it where they have to stop every once in a while and kill someone, except that would ruin the Speed bit of it? C’mon, the screenplay writes itself.

UPDATE Thanks for the link, hipcarryster.

Entertainment Weekly presents a list (come on, it’s really a quiz!) called 50 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen (warning: gallery form).

I got a perfect score. That is, I haven’t wasted my time on any of them.

I am no modern cinemataste. I prefer my best movies no one else has seen to be seventy years old and in black and white.

I have to admit, though, that as I got further and further into the gallery, I was a little afraid that it might include something like Adaptation or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but whoever compiled the list is a real aficionado (that is, he or she likes to flaunt his or her familiarity with the obscure) and really seems to favor British films and documentaries.

Now, let’s discuss my imperfections: I have not seen every Adam Sandler movie, although I have seen Click and Going Overboard, so I’ve knocked off some of the harder titles.

Last night, I watched Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s 1920 silent film about a dystopian society. I’ve not soaked in the moisturizing dish liquid of Cinema, but I have watched a couple of silent films in my time, which puts me ahead of most people. These films include:

• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. When I was young, I dated a girl who took a film appreciation class, which meant that we got to watch important films. This particular item was a high example of German surrealism or expressionism or something like that. Marinated cinematistes (I just made that word up. Like it?) could better explain its importance. I remember quite a bit from the film, though, which means it made more of an impression on me than most films with Jason Statham and/or Matt Damon in them. And, friends, we watched this film before Netflix existed, which probably meant we had to go to the old Bijou movie rental place up in University City or reserve it through Blockbuster or something.
   
• Juno and the Paycock (where paycock is British for peacock–couldn’t they just have put an extraneous U in it and left it at that?). An old Alfred Hitchcock film, but without crime in it. I bought a boxed set of Hitchcock films about ten years ago and started watching them. You know what boxed set means, don’t you? It means old films we couldn’t sell standing alone.
   
• The Lodger, a film sort of loosely based on Jack the Ripper, wherein there’s a serial killer terrorizing London (in 1927). A strange lodger moves into a boarding house and might be the killer. This film is most notable because it starred June Tripp.
   
• The Ring, a boxing picture, also in the Alfred Hitchcock boxed set. Notable because it gave me a nickname I used to use on my second child. You know, I think I watched these last two films when he was a newborn because I could watch them with the television on mute. Huh, I just remembered that as I was typing.
   
• Metropolis. You don’t have to be a cinematiste to recognize that this film was seminal in framing science fiction films for decades after it. Or at least see that certain tropes you see in modern films existed eighty years ago. The text frames refer to robots, a term that was only seven years old at that time, but it must have gained enough currency to be in the popular mind by then. As I watched, it occurred to me that this was filmed at the time when H.P. Lovecraft was writing, and I can see shared elements–descending staircases, catacombs, and so on. An interesting enough film.

So that’s three British silent films and two German ones. I don’t know if I’ve seen an American one. I suppose I should sit down and watch some Charlie Chaplin or something to round out my silent film bona fides, but I’m a modern man, and I really need to be in the right mood for a silent film. I don’t get that many film-length stretches of time, and when I do, I’m inclined to watch something I’ve seen a million times before and love or a comedy or action flick I own and have yet to watch before I’m inclined to broaden my mind.

But if I happen upon one at a garage sale, I’ll pick it up and have it on hand in case the mood strikes me again sometime in 2015.

I have only seen 10 of the 11 films on the Guyism.com 11 movies every guy needs to see.

I am missing two. The Wild Bunch and The Bridge on the River Kwai, which is very, very strange considering that I listen to the River Kwai march several times a week (that’s a story for another day).

I think I have it DVRed, though, so I should fix that up sometime soon and will become 100% masculine according to some twee Internet posting, which frankly is the highest standard I can reach some days.

(Link seen on Ace of Spades HQ.)

Somebody on the Internet posted a list of 8 Movies Every Geek Should Watch (And Love).

I’ve done a number of books-you’ve-read checklists and haven’t fared so well, so I thought I’d stack the deck and make this into a checklist since I’ve done well on it.

The list below includes the list at the post. Bold means I’ve seen the film, italics means I own the film and will get to it.

1. Office Space
2. Cube (I didn’t like it. Geek demerits for me.)
3. WarGames
4. Blade Runner
5. THX 1138
6. Dark City
7. Moon
8. They Live

So, how do you do?

And as a geek point of order, the poster of this list makes cranky noises about the changes Lucas made to THX 1138, but he doesn’t have anything to say about which version of Blade Runner is definitive. This, my dear friends, is a serious lapse in geekery and might reflect someone who can bash Lucas because it’s currently coolly demigeek to do so.

On Facebook the other day, I saw a link to a piece entitled How ‘The Fifth Element’ Predicted Lady Gaga And Everything Else About Modern Life—Back in ’97.

I postulate that anyone writing for money on an Internet site is 25 years old or younger. Why? Let’s use this piece as an example.

The article says that The Fifth Element, a fine film that I’ve seen many times, predicts:

• Yes, a fashion model can carry an entire movie.
  But fashion models have been in films for decades. Ever heard of Racquel Welch? She modeled before she carried films. Jane Fonda? I know, if you’re like me, you think Nat King Cole carried Cat Ballou, but her name was over the title.

  If you go out on the Internet and conduct a search for models who became actresses, those lists written and poached by 25-year-olds do only include fashion models who became actresses in the late 1990s.
   

• We love Divas
  

  Is Diva Plavalaguna from the movie any less weird than Lady Gaga from Earth? Or Nicki Minaj, for that matter?

  What on earth? People who appreciate divas did not appreciate divas before 1997? Good lord amercy, what about Diana Ross? Does he mean only lady singers who look weird? Maybe this writer’s granddad can explain Wendy O. Williams or, frankly, any pop singer from the 1980s to him. Sarah Brightman. Cher. Madonna. Come on, this is where divas started?
   

• And cruise ships.

  Behold this howler:

  The cruise ship industry was still in its infancy in 1997.

  Uh, what? 1997 is 20 years after The Love Boat debuted on television. Royal Caribbean was founded in 1967. Carnival Cruise Lines was founded in 1972. That’s a damn long infancy.
   

• Terrorists!

  Another howler:

  In 1997, terrorism was something that happened in far away place, to other people.

  Keep in mind, 1997 is four years after the first World Trade Center bombing and two years after the bombing in Oklahoma City. It’s some number of years after the bombings in the late 1960s and 1970s. A couple decades past airplane hijackings in the United States.

  The author goes onto say:

  Since 2001, however, it’s been on the cultural frontburner almost continuously.

  Movies before The Fifth Element didn’t feature terrorists (or fake terrorists)? Uh, Die Hard, Delta Force, Invasion USA, True Lies, and so on and so forth.

  In the news, one never heard about the 1972 Munich Olympics, the Iranian Hostage Crisis, constant kidnappings throughout the Middle East, or the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro (of course the author didn’t hear about this, since it took place on a cruise ship before the industry was in its infancy).

  No, indeed, The Fifth Element was the thing that brought terrorists to our attention.
   

• The real estate crisis.

  Silly human, the real estate crisis only involves New York City.

  In future New York, we see that apartments for ordinary people are reduced to tiny cubicles. Not too different from the current New York!

  In 1997, all New York apartments looked like the sets of 1940s films. Every studio was a three-bedroom penthouse. But in 2000, Rudy Guiliani sold 75% of Manhattan to New Jersey to buy its silence in covering his affair with Judith Nathan, which resulted in the small sizes for domiciles that continues to this day. Or something.
   

• Reality TV
  

  People forget that reality TV as we know it now didn’t exist in 1997.

  Cops debuted in 1989. The Real World debuted in 1992. I mean, really. A quick search of Wikipedia gives you a history of reality television. As to shameless self-promoting television hosts, come on. We can go back to Morton Downey, Jr. Or Geraldo, who got his nose broken on his television show in 1988.

  I mean, the Howard Stern show was syndicated eleven years before the film, and it features a hucksterish outrageous personality transmitting his thoughts via radio waves to your receiver.

  Who could have seen this coming? Only the divine oracle that is The Fifth Element.
   

The other things in the list are about Bruce Willis’s lingering popularity (well, he’s still working, but I wouldn’t say he’s still “huge”) and the lingering popularity of the Leelo costume for Hallowe’en (coincidentally, it covers little of the feminine physique).

Like so many things, the piece has a certain cultural myopia that can’t see anything before the middle 1990s and comes off, at least to this old man, as annoying because of it.

But it does reflect an adolescent viewpoint that says, “All history began with my birth or self-awareness” that cripples our contemporary society and discourse.

NOW GET OFF MY LAWN!

UPDATE: Thanks for the link, Mr. H. I’m not sure if he means I’m not self-aware or not. Which might prove that I am not.

UPDATE: Thanks, also, for the link, Ms. K.

This DVD is billed as a double feature: A Carol Alt film and a Rutger Hauer film. Closer inspection, that is watching the films, shows that this is actually a Carol Alt double feature since she is the female costar of Beyond Justice as well. Both are Italian pictures.

Bye Bye Baby is billed as a comedy. At least, that’s what I get because the DVD box says it has more than one uproarious scene. I didn’t see any of that. It’s the story of an Italian businessman with an attractive woman doctor wife (Alt) who throws him out. After the divorce, which she doesn’t really want, he goes onto a relationship with a professional pool player (Brigitte Nielsen), and she gets involved with a doctor at the hospital where she works. Eventually, she and he rediscover their passion for each other and they (uproariously!) try to get their current mates to fall for each other as the former spouses get back together (while still seeing their new relations). Then, he gets hit by a car. But doesn’t die. So there’s hope they’ll get back together. The end. Not a lot of laughs, but a lot of Carol Alt ca. 1988. Which might be worth a watching just for that.

Beyond Justice is an eighties action film a couple years past the 1980s. The son of an American businesswoman is kidnapped by Arabs, and her ex-husband knows more about it than he lets on. Seems he’s the son of a northern African emir, and when the boy turns 13, he’s supposed to be returned to his tribe to begin his real education with the tribe. Rutger Hauer is Rutger Hauer, and he agrees to help find the boy. Along the way, guns are shot, respect is gained for former adversaries as they band together in the face of new threats, and Omar Sharif. The film has more depth than one would expect given its lineage, but not bad at all.

The offshoot is that I’ve achieved a certain balance in my life that not many people have: I have watched as many Carol Alt films as Kathy Ireland films (those being Necessary Roughness and National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon I).

And as an off-shoot, I also have the urge to look into the spaghetti Rambo films that I might have missed until now. And, maybe, the Carol Alt films. It looks as though she’s done a lot of work in Italy.

Books mentioned in this review:

I could not make it through this film in a single viewing.

I started watching it three or so years ago, back when I lived in Old Trees, and I got probably 2/3 of the way through before I thought of something better to do, or before my wife returned from wherever she was and I spent the time with her instead.

So the second viewing, the film had a certain familiarity with it. It was like a movie I’d seen before.

The plot: James Bond, with Timothy Dalton at the helm, helps a high-level Russian defect only to see the Russian snatched back after explaining the plot of another Russian honcho to start killing British and American spies. Bond knows the plotting Russian and thinks him incapable of the betrayal, so Bond goes roguish with a Russian cello player to find out what the Russians are up to.

Dalton’s low on my list of Bonds, so he doesn’t get that much of my innate affection that I feel for the franchise. I made it through the second viewing, but I won’t watch it over and over again.

Strange, though, how squicky these films make one feel 25 years later. Remember when those plucky Afghan freedom fighters were the good guys? James Bond helped them. Rambo helped them. Only a quarter century later and those plucky Afghan freedom fighters are blowing up Americans, and it’s hard to sympathize with them.

Books mentioned in this review:

Full disclosure: This is a small independent film from a production company in St. Louis. I’ve worked with some members of the team on an Internet video that depicted me in bed with another man (I was young and needed the money). So take it for what it’s worth. I bought the film and did not receive it as a free gift. </fulldisclosure>

The film depicts some raw recruits trained in anti-armor as they’re thrown into combat and a mine squad at the tail end of World War II. There’s a young idealistic sort of n00b, a grizzled, disdainful sergeant, a world-weary lieutenant, and some other guys, and they get various infantry assignments as the army presses onto the Rhine.

Technically speaking, it’s a very adept film. They used a lot of vintage vehicles from World War II that they gathered from collectors in the St. Louis area, including a half-track that I saw driving around Old Trees once in a while. They rely on shaky cam a couple times for verite, which I could have done without. But you don’t think you’re watching some kids playing soldier in Illinois.

The story, though, is a little thin. The incidents and scenes run a bit long, the n00b changes into a veteran in a matter of moments, and even as the n00b is changing, the sergeant remains disdainful until the end.

So it’s a good looking piece of work that could have benefitted from a better story.

DVDs mentioned in this review:

This film is based on the book by Robert B. Parker which I read in 2005. Since I was to read the fourth book in the series, I ordered the DVD so I could watch it after I finished the last book.

And you know what? The film is better than the book.

The latter 2/3 of Parker’s books were heavily influenced by his years in Hollywood in the 1980s, so they translate very well to the screen. But Parker didn’t write the screenplay–Ed Harris, who plays Cole, did along with a co-writer. As such, he takes the ideal Parkerian hero, the fast draw dead shot who loves a fallen woman character and diminishes him compared to Hitch, the sidekick and narrator. Harris emphasizes that Cole is not book-learned like Hitch when he (Cole) struggles with words. The screenplay also contrasts Cole with Bragg, the bad guy, as being undereducated. He’s not so much an ideal man as a fast man who is simple.

Maybe that’s the way that Parker intended it. Maybe too much interior thinking on Hitch’s park shaped the narrative wrong for it to carry off. Maybe I too much read Parker’s biography into all of his books. But it’s a good enough Western film, and I enjoyed it more than I enjoyed the recent Hitch and Cole books.

DVDs mentioned in this review:

I re-read the novelization of the film last month, but I hadn’t seen the actual film. So as part of the “One-for-you, one-for-me” gift buying protocol, I bought and watched the DVD.

I won’t rehash the plot here, since I did that in the book report. However, I will make a couple bullet points about how the film has aged vis-à-vis the novelization. Well, no, I won’t use bullet points because I know what bullet points do to the polarized glass of a mining base.

The film is far more dated than the book is. The visual elements of the film strike one more than they would in the book. For example, when the book might have mentioned that the character lit a cigarette in the workplace, the film has a warehouse scene blue with smoke as every employee has a cigarette dangling out of his mouth. The book is dated enough with its video messages instead of text, but the film plays them on CRTs with green text. The look and feel of the film definitely evoke the time period of the film-making as much as that of the future.

The film also diminishes some of the minor characters in that their screen time is really truncated compared to their page time. That’ll come with any film, of course, since it has two hours and roughly one hundred or so pages of dialog and scene material versus page of text. It doesn’t make it better or worse; books (including books based on film) and film are two different media.

So, will I watch this again before 20 years have elapsed? Maybe. Movies are more replayable than most books because of the time committment involved. I buy movies more slowly than books, but I still buy them faster than I watch them, it seems. So it might just take my accidental repurchase of the film to trigger another viewing. But that’s not likely.

At any rate, a serviceable period piece of science fiction.

Books mentioned in this review:

Nothing says 1985 like a couple Uzis fired effectively from the hip. Except maybe some Chinese throwing stars killing people instantly. This film has plenty of the former, none of the latter.

As I have mentioned, this is one of my favorite Christmas movies. This also qualifies as one of those films that I watched over and over on Showtime in the middle 1980s, so it’s got a place of affection in my heart. How does it hold up?

Well, the bad guys are the Russians, and 25 years later, it’s not the Russians who provide a realistic cinematic foil for heroes. It’s the Nazis and the North Koreans, somehow. The protagonist is an American, called “cowboy” by the attractive-in-an-80s-way photojournalist who joins up with him. In short, it’s a film that was mainstream in the 1980s, but its themes seem dated by modern Hollywood mores. Which might account for continuing domestic box office decline.

So, as I said, I watched it over and over in the olden days, but I didn’t remember much but for some of the scenes. The rewatching filled in many of the blanks for me, the biggest of which was why the doings of one man in Florida could impact a nationwide covert infiltration. The film does account for it with a sort of honeypot strategy in the climax. So the film held up in the plot better than I remembered.

Also, it should be noted, this is a Chuck Norris movie. If you don’t already own it, you must click one of the convenient links in this post and purchase it.

Books mentioned in this review:

As we entered the Christmas season, the “one-for-someone-else, one-for-me” buying protocol took effect. I was startled at how much streaming media and Blu-Ray have driven down the price of new mere DVDs. Under ten dollars for most, and like five bucks for many. Suddenly, I had Amazon-Primed myself a collection of remembered films to watch. And I did this last week, one at a time.

	Monday. The Last Starfighter Hey, you already can guess what I think about this.
	Tuesday. Krull I had never seen this film before, but it was a recommended purchase for The Last Starfighter, and I’d seen the pinball game at the National in Fenton, Missouri, in the era in question, and who could forget the Glaive? It was the Chinese star (a staple of 80s films) smart bomb. Well, it’s got a science fiction vibe, as the invaders have bladed weapons that shoot lasers out of the butts and whenever the good guys strike with their bladed weapons, red electricity tingles. But. I thought the film might be trying to capture some of the surreality of Legend, but Krull precedes it. I dunno. There’s a poorly seen Beast ruling the aliens who come down to defile the planet Krull and a damsel captured by it who wanders its surreal castle. Strange that Legend got this right, but this film did not. At any rate, the film has a lot of similar tropes from 80s films that just sort of miss. It also features an early appearance by Liam Neeson and a scene where the protagonists who have to capture some firemounts, horses that can travel 1000 leagues in a day, and they do so by driving them into a canyon–much like in the Western book I’m currently reading. So I appreciated that. If I had watched this film over and over in the 1980s on Showtime, I would have a greater affection for it, I think; however, even in this late date in the next century, I’m happy to know I have watched it. But it won’t be in regular, semi-decadical rotation.
	Wednesday. Conan the Barbarian On a recent time-killing trip to Barnes and Noble, I saw a volume of the Complete Chronicles of Conan by Robert E. Howard, so I took a look at the films on Amazon, and I saw they proffered as a recommendation Red Sonja, so I told my wife she was lucky I didn’t order the films. She said something along the lines of that it would be okay, I hope, because I did. Which explains the latter bit of my week. I’d never seen Conan the Barbarian except for bits, and I’ve quoted parts of it, so I watched it (finally) to restore my credibility. And, wow. Where Krull had a story, it lacked the framework of epic. Conan the Barbarian has that, from the frame story to the score to the scenes of riding horses. Oh, yeah, it has James Earl Jones as the bad guy, and a lot of bastard swords being swung. I understand the remake is just gore poured into a template. I have to wonder if, as our culture becomes less literate in the sense of books and only whatever in the terms of films (a la Quentin Tarantino) we lose a depth that makes the splatter relevant.
	Thursday. Conan the Destroyer This film picks another Conan adventure, wherein he goes out to… Erm…. Excuse me, I’ve written this after the whole week, so it’s a bit swirled. Conan is promised by a queen that she’ll resurrect his love, Valeria, if he accompanies a virgin on a quest to get a mystical horn. Conan agrees and gathers his band together, and they retrieve the horn which the queen then uses to reanimate an evil god. It’s a pretty good piece of epic filmmaking.
	Friday. Red Sonja This film features Brigitte Nielsen as Red Sonja, a woman whose family are killed by an evil warrior queen. A priestess sister tasks Sonja with finding and destroying a talisman that might be powerful enough to destroy the world. The film was produced by Dino De Laurentiis, the guy behind the Conan films, so it stars a number of the same people (Schwarzeneggar and Sandahl Bergman) and hits a lot of the same themes. Still, I liked it a lot, although it gets a lot of negative reviews on the Internet. Perhaps it’s because this was one of the films I watched over and over on Showtime. The film also features Ernie Reyes, Jr., the karate kid from the Gil Gerard television program Sidekicks. It seems like I’ve seen a number of things with him in it, but maybe I just saw commercials for Sidekicks and this film over and over to make him seem more ubiquitous in the 1980s than he really was. Also, he’s older than I am. That didn’t seem the way back in the day, but Ralph Macchio is 50, so I guess the time warp of older actors playing younger characters explains it.

So that’s how I spent my week: immersed in old timey films, and enjoying them for the most part. I’ve promised my wife this won’t become a regular occurrence, though: she loses me enough to football on Sundays.

I’m going to shock and offend a full 60% of the Internet, but I’ll say it loudly: The Last Starfighter is better than Star Wars.

 

In the interest of full disclosure, The Last Starfighter might have some additional resonance for me, since I was a precocious teenager living in a trailer park with a little brother with an extensive Playboy collection when I first saw it on videocassette. So now you know where I’m coming from.

Both stories follow a similar arc: a boy is called from a backwater to go into space, show off his skill at martial arts, and then save the worlds from an evil menace. However, the main character in The Last Starfighter comes from the common man and works with a highly democratic society on Rylos, whereas in Star Wars, the main characters (Luke and Leia) come from high birth and one even bears the title “Princess.”

Let’s just stack up the characters:

The Hero	Alex Rogan is a kid from the trailer park who loves his mother, dreams of going to far away places (the university, mainly). Rogan has useful skills as a handyman and electrician–too much so as he has to forego partying with his friends because someone needs a 30-year-old fuse box patched.	Luke Skywalker is special from birth because he’s the product of a lineage with lots of mito-pseudoscience-deusexmachinians in his blood. Sure, he’s a decent droid cleaner, but he’s a whiny little snit who would rather run off with his friends than tend to his duties.
The Love Interest	Mags, played by Mary Catherine Stewart. Her affection for Alex is constant, and she’s ready to leave the trailer park for the stars with him at the end. Also, she’s cuter than Carrie Fisher and has aged better.	Princess Leia, portrayed by Carrie Fisher, is a high maintenance princess who is an action hero, but vacillates among the available men.
The Mentor	Centauri, a universe-wise wily operator who invents a game, merchandises it, gets it into the stores before Christmas, and is unafraid to recruit Starfighters from planets not officially in the Star League. He’s doing it for the greater good, but it never hurts to be rich, my boy. Capitalism working for the betterment of all.	Obi Wan Kenobi, a Jedi whose last project turned out pretty poorly after his Padawan slaughtered and scattered the Jedi, including the younglings. Instead of working for his own profit, he serves some hokey, nebulous religious order and spouts off recursive and reflective “wisdom” like the Sphynx from Mystery Men (the latter is supposed to spoof Obi Wan, but come on, in retrospect it’s pretty straight up homage, ainna?)
The Alien Sidekick	Grigg, the lizard. He’s a good navigator, he can bypass electrical circuits to use power from the life support systems to start the engines in the nick of time, and he’s got a sense of humor. Oh, yeah, and everyone can understand him.	Chewbacca. He’s a good navigator, he can make ship repairs, but only Han Solo can understand him. He’s big and can handle a bowcaster, so those are positives. But he was in The Star Wars Christmas Special.

Now, then, what do we have? A democratic society with capitalist principles leading to personal growth, public gain, and whatnot versus a theocracy or at the very least some sort of aristocracy posited as the highest goal–although the Empire is somehow worse than a system relying on the Jedi to maintain order.

Also, in the 25th anniversary edition, they cleaned up and crisped up some special effects in The Last Starfighter, but left the movie intact. I don’t think Star Wars has gone a whole decade without George Lucas doing something to it to tamper with it, to throw in a Wall of Sight aesthetic into it, and to extract money from the dwindling number of die hard fans.