Word: jarringly
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...everybody?) and seeing scraps of the film, we get intimations of something fresh, handsome, grand. Naboo's golden underwater city glows like an Art Nouveau chandelier, while the Jedi knights' home base, Coruscant, could come from a spiffier Blade Runner. The new sidekick, a computer-birthed frog boy named Jar Jar Binks, is a vexing, endearing mix of Kipling's Gunga Din and Tolkien's Gollum, and speaks in a pidgin English ("Yousa Jedi not all yousa cracked up to be!") that will be every kid's secret language this summer. Even on paper, the film's set pieces...
...modern, from the doddering aristocracy of the Galactic Republic to the brutal opportunism of the Trade Federation, which has blocked all shipping routes to the planet Naboo. Qui-Gon and his Jedi apprentice Obi-Wan are dispatched to settle the dispute. Reaching Naboo, they are befriended--hounded, really--by Jar Jar, a disaster-prone outcast of the Gungan race. He leads them to Amidala the Naboo Queen, whom they intend to take to the Republic's assembly in Coruscant. Engine trouble forces them to detour to Tatooine, where Qui-Gon bargains for spare spacecraft parts with Watto, a potbellied, hummingbird...
...actors," Lucas is proudest of the digital Jar Jar: "We have the first photo-realistic character that acts." Jar Jar, for whom actor-dancer Ahmed Best was both the voice and a rubberized stand-in, took years to develop. "He was Tex Avery cartoonish in style," says Chiang, "with large eyes and a big mouth." He was given short ears, but Lucas insisted on long ones. The comically androgynous shape came later...
...Camille's theatricals, the Anne Rapp script dawdles through predictable Southern Gothic plot twists that a real writer like Beth Henley would use to showcase memorably bent characters. Rapp's idea of character comedy is to have the movie's villain literally caught with her hand in the cookie jar. This little essay on greed and blurred bloodlines is another footnote to an Altman career that is fast becoming all footnotes...
Upset that a Clarkson player attempted to jar loose a covered puck well after the referee had blown his whistle, Prestifilippo uncharacteristically sprung up and clocked the offender...