Word: kenobi
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Kenobi: "Oh, he's not dead...
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...
...became an almost "academic" exercise in refashioning ancient myths for modern audiences (at the time--no surprise--he was reading a lot of Joseph Campbell). In this vein, Lucas' most memorable invention was his notion of the Force--"an energy field created by all living things," as Obi-Wan Kenobi puts it. "It's a distillation of a lot of mythological religious teachings," Lucas says. "Not that I'm promoting a particular idea or anything. I believe in God, and I guess that's reflected in the movie, but that's about as far as it goes." A Judeo-Christian...
...retro-kitsch; even the opening logo has acquired the classic blockiness of a '56 DeSoto. One can find endearment in the lame badinage of C-3PO, in Carrie 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...
...acting in "Star Wars" will never make the movie stick in anybody's memory. Aside from the usual polish with which Guinness coats his role of the elder Kenobi, both the performances of the cast and the cast itself add up to a forgettable sum. Many of the actors' names appear in a film's credits for the first time or one of the first times as the "Star Wars" cast is ticked off: Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill. Admittedly, the quality of many of the characters imposes severe restrictions on the range of the dramatic possibilities available...