Word: kenobi
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Guinness would search the globe for new accents and characters: Japanese (A Majority of One), Bedouin (Lawrence of Arabia), Russian (Doctor Zhivago), Indian (A Passage to India). His transparency made it easy for him to incarnate specters; he was Marley's Ghost in Scrooge and Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars--the role that heaped on him the annoyance of multigenerational fame. But "the force" was not with Guinness; delicacy and subversive wit were...
...fellow carrying around a sign that read "Nominate Jimmy Carter to Unite the Reform Party." And there was Jim Bourassa, founding chairman of the Arizona Reform party, who wears on his jacket not a political button but a large photograph of recently-deceased actor Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi. Bourassa says the photo gives him otherworldly powers to wrest political might away from Buchanan. "We're using the Force to save the party," he says with a straight face. "I am Arizona's Luke Skywalker." Well, if John McCain's not using that shtick anymore...
...There's a third category - the gifts to lesser, later movies. The blind butler Jamessir Bensonmum in "Murder by Death." The mummified chief clerk in "Kafka." Obi-Wan Kenobi in "Star Wars," eyes glittering with wisdom, salvaging that tortured Lucas dialogue. Would there be a "Phantom Menace" without Guinness's saving injection of class in the first installment...
There's something timeless about Qui-Gon Jinn and Han Solo, about Princess Leia and Obi-Wan Kenobi. The struggle for peace with justice and honor is not a new fight and it is Lucas' artistic expression of these things that brings so many together for, yes, a movie. It really is true that the anticipation and opening of this film, drawing on our society's love for popular culture and, more importantly, often wordless search for truth, has brought people together like few other things can. Only once in my life have I sat in a theater...
...seen it now. Did you wonder at the idea of a virgin birth, of someone being "The Chosen One"? Did the idea of midichlorians make you think? Did you wonder at the hand of the Force in bringing Obi-Wan Kenobi and Qui-Gon Jinn to Tatooine and "bumping into" Anakin Skywalker? Were you curious about the fall and redemption of Darth Vader...