Word: alec
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...five-month plan that his closest and most controversial adviser, Joe Gaylord, prepared for him in January. Since then Gingrich has courted moderates, Democrats and even the White House. At the State of the Union Address, he made nice to Jesse Jackson. Last month he met with actor Alec Baldwin and seemed to support continued funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, despite the fact that House Republicans resolved in 1995 that the NEA would be put to sleep after this year. And two weeks ago came his apostate announcement that tax cuts could wait until the budget...
Imagine my shock, then, when he called me up two weeks ago in a complete panic and told me to brace myself for extraordinary news: Sir Alec Guinness, the distinguished British actor who played Obi-Wan Kenobi, was not dead. Very maturely, I replied, "You wanna bet?" But he was convinced and began to recite the evidence. He had just come home from a family vacation and had seen a copy of a book written by Guinness in 1996. What's more, he read an article in Time magazine which seemed to make it very clear that...
Somehow, and I know not how, I was given the impression that Alec Guinness had died years ago. I transmitted this misinformation to my trusting comrades, who in turn transmitted it to their comrades. In short, I am responsible for an entire community of people who are convinced that Alec Guinness, who is presently alive and well and living in a London suburb, actually bit it back in the late '80s. Obi-Wan Kenobi's dialogue with Luke in that memorable scene from Star Wars, as a result, had its unlikely effect on me: "Oh, he's not dead...
...next bit of news was significantly less welcome. Apparently, Sir Alec is not an entirely contented participant in the Star Wars, which was originally just a nutty sci-fi picture he agreed to work on because of his admiration for George Lucas, eclipsed the rest of his long and distinguished career. Indeed, in his 1985 autobiography Blessings in Disguise, written some eight years after the first part of the Trilogy, Guinness mentions Star Wars only once (that once is a snide comment about how much money it earned him). The conclusion seemed unavoidable: Obi-Wan was whining. My friend added...
...Fisher's bagel-like hairdo, in the whining and bickering of the lead characters, in the varying pronunciations of Obi-Wan Kenobi and the planet Alderaan. The invocation to "trust your feelings" seems a woozy echo of the '67 Summer of Love, not the '77 summer of Wars, but Alec Guinness carries himself with the majesty of a Jedi knight and an acting peer. The climactic dogfight, copied in a quillion arcade games, has thrust and logic; it's the clearest, most potent narrative section of the movie...