Who's responsible for big-budget Hollywood dreck?
This critic blames you (and this magazine)
and calls for drastic action.

By Mike D'Angelo Esquire Magazine
May 1, 2005

So this ordinary, middle-class American male walks into a bar. "Gimme a beer, whatever you have on tap," he says, slapping down a fiver. The bartender, smiling, reaches below the bar, audibly unzips his fly, and a moment later produces a tall glass that looks suspiciously as if it might be full of warm urine. But our guy is a trusting soul, and he gulps it down anyway. Big mistake. He retches, curses, and then storms out, furious.

Three years later, the same guy walks into the same bar and asks the same bartender for a beer. No problemo , says the barkeep. Zzzzip . Handed what again looks like something better suited to a specimen jar, the guy barely even hesitates. Down the hatch it goes, and then halfway back up the hatch again. Tears of rage are shed; a lawsuit is threatened. Exit the dude, livid.

Three years later, the same guy walks into the same bar and asks the same bartender for a beer.

You're waiting for the punch line. It's not a joke, I'm afraid. It's a parable. The guy is you, the bar is the neighborhood multiplex, and the third steaming glass of piss you're about to be served with a smile is called Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith.

For God's sake, don't drink it.

FOR LACK OF A BETTER TERM, let's call what I'm advocating here a provisional boycott. It has to be provisional because I haven't actually seen the film yet. I'm assuming it's going to reek, just as I assume, based on precedent and logic, that my cats' litter box isn't going to be filled with emeralds and rubies tomorrow morning. But I could be wrong. Maybe this time the painstaking care evident in the film's CGI cityscapes will also manifest itself in the story and the dialogue, so that we don't feel as if we're watching a history seminar being conducted at a Renaissance fair. Perhaps Jar Jar will be decapitated in the opening scene. There is a chance that George Lucas has rediscovered the sense of rollicking, devil-may-care adventure (exemplified by Han Solo) that made the original trilogy an enduring classic, and the absence of which turned The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones into pristine, monotonous slogs. If that happens—if reviews suggest that the new film is light-years more entertaining and memorable than episodes I and II—then disregard everything that follows.

But it isn't going to happen. Search your feelings; you know it to be true.

Here's the plan. It's exceedingly simple but also potentially revolutionary. If you saw and genuinely enjoyed the first two installments, by all means dash straight out and see Episode III , taking special care that your imperial-stormtrooper helmet hides the lobotomy scars. If, on the other hand, you found one or both of the previous two films lacking in some way yet feel obligated by a sense of pop-cultural duty and/or lingering nostalgia to tune in for the grand finale: don't. At least not for the first week. See an intriguing foreign film instead, or catch up on the first two seasons of The Wire (the best TV series nobody's watching), or gather like-minded friends and play a drinking game in which you watch Attack of the Clones and do a shot every time Hayden Christensen pouts. Do whatever it takes; just avoid the theater for seven days. And tell every single person you know to do likewise.

In my dream, this article isn't dismissed as a bitchy provocation. People take it seriously, word of the provisional boycott spreads across the Internet faster than that "Re: Wicked screensaver" worm, Revenge of the Sith attracts only the hardcore fan boys and opens to $22 mil, and that popping sound echoing off the Hollywood Hills is revealed to be the heads of various studio executives imploding as the one and only certainty they cling to dissipates like dry ice in front of a wind machine. Hey, a man can dream.

Granted, this will require your disregarding a small avalanche of breathless hype. As a matter of fact, one of the movie's stars will grace the cover of this very magazine next month. Why? Because Episode III is guaranteed to make a gazillion dollars and sell magazines. The media is part of the problem. If anything's ever going to change, you need to tell those responsible, in no uncertain terms, that you're not interested. And that entails one thing and one thing only: killing the opening-weekend gross.

IT'S NOT GONNA BE THAT TAXING, REALLY. We all know more or less where the movie's going. Luke and Leia's conception will surely be implied in a lush, romantic sex scene, complete with tasteful fade to black. Obi-Wan will do something to really piss Anakin off. I'm gonna go out on a limb and predict a decision favoring the good of the republic over the life of somebody near and dear to the young Padawan. There will be an accident involving a toxic substance of some kind, from which Anakin will emerge suddenly sounding uncannily like the voice of CNN. And so forth. You can wait an extra week.

I hate to get all grandiose and moralistic, but the fact is that every time you go see some movie that you know in your heart of hearts is going to suck, merely because it's that weekend's megahyped commodity starring actors you've heard of, you make it impossible for smart people in positions of power not to green-light total dreck—dreck that you will wind up suffering through two to three years down the road. In short, the movies you're getting are the movies you deserve. And the only way to persuade studios to make better films is to stop seeing the ones they consider to be automatic slam dunks.

Ironically, George Lucas is one of the last filmmakers I'd ever accuse of trafficking in jaded cynicism. For all their empty spectacle and painful stodginess, the Star Wars pictures represent his vision; he's working as independently as D.W. Griffith did in the medium's infancy, albeit with virtually unlimited resources and the secure knowledge that there's a public clamoring for his work. All the same, Revenge of the Sith is the ideal subject for this experiment, because it's as close to a sure thing as exists in the film industry. If you forced studio execs to wager their infant children's lives on the opening weekend gross, they'd scarcely even break a sweat, so long as the over didn't exceed $75 million. They know perfectly well that most people were disappointed by the previous two films, and they also know perfectly well that we're all gonna show up for Episode III anyway. Imagine the consternation when we don't. Pass it on.