Anthony Lane and the Sith Backlash

Everyone's talking about Anthony Lane's review of Revenge of the Sith in this week's New Yorker. With its mix of death-defying vivisectional logic ("how Padmé got pregnant is anybody’s guess, although I’m prepared to wager that it involved Anakin nipping into a broom closet with a warm glass jar and a copy of Ewok Babes"), and low-blow stand-up comedy ("Sith. What kind of a word is that? ... It sounds to me like the noise that emerges when you block one nostril and blow through the other"), this is the battlecry we've been waiting for. That is, all of "us" who keep forgetting why today is different from all other days - all of us who, as Lane puts it, "still fail to understand why [we] should have been expected to waste twenty-five years of [our lives] following the progress of a beeping trash can and a gay, gold-plated Jeeves...Break me a fucking give."

And so, a few links should you choose to join the dissent:

• Are the rebels "an unimpressive crew of anarchic royals who wreck the galaxy so that Princess Leia can have her tiara back"? Beware, lefties - The Weekly Standard votes for the Empire.
• "It's not enough that the Star Wars movies are the work of an occasionally clever but mostly simple-minded auteur-wannabe; they've also been hijacked by zealots who insist on assigning weight and meaning to every idiotic frame, spoiling the fun even for average moviegoers who simply have a nostalgic fondness for the original trilogy." Stephanie Zacharek has had enough.
• "Post–Jar Jar, our expectations have sunk so low that now fans will celebrate a film just because it doesn't completely suck." Ed Halter on "the most expensive stoner film in history"
• The usually-pollyannaish Mick LaSalle can't get it up for the setpieces: "The action scenes are overlong and unexciting, and if anyone needs to take a bathroom break, go during a light saber duel. They'll still be fighting when you get back."
• Does Sith save the trilogy as a whole? Hardly, says David Edelstein. "And the first third or so of Revenge is almost as bad as The Phantom Menace."