TOP TEN ALTERATIONS IN THE SPECIAL EDITION “STAR WARS: RETURN OF THE JEDI” DVD

(I went back to 2004 just to rent a copy from my local video store. It’s a one-night rental, which means I only have five years and a day to watch it.)

10. The role of Lando Calrissian reprised with Tommy Lee Jones taking over for Billy Dee Williams.

9. New scene added with Boba Fett rapping, “Mah name is Bo-ba! I’m cooler than Yo-da!”

8. All speeder bikes now gas-electric hybrids.

7. Now Luke tells the Emperor, “I am a Jedi, like my father before me, fer shizzle!”

6. Fully-restored X-rated sex scene featuring Chewbacca and Ewok queen.

5. Mark Hamill’s auto accident scars now digitally-enhanced.

4. In bonus epilogue, Princess Leia writes best-selling tell-all biography about life as a famous daughter, which is adapted into hit movie starring Meryl Streep.

3. Han Solo and C3PO finally acknowledge their repressed sexual attraction.

2. Final fate of Sarumann the White revealed.

1. The evil emperor turns out to be Dick Cheney.

MONONOKE-DOKEY

What my mother used to tell me was right. It’s fun to talk about movies with people if you’ve travelled back in time from the year 2004, and have already seen everything.

That’s my new hobby: Hanging around the NYU Student Life building, chatting about movies with undergraduate Cinema Studies students. It’s a CS club, open to NYU undergraduates and alumni. I’m actually both—but of course, I don’t tell anyone that. I wonder if this club still exists.

Anyway, I get to chit-chat, and sound like a real expert, since I’m already familiar with every popular movie that came out in ’99. Just the other day, I went to see "Three Kings" on its opening night with a fellow student, and accurately predicted every upcoming scene. I claimed to have broken the "David O. Russell Code," and scoffed that he was "so desperate to be unconventional that he cannot help being wholly conventional." Then I said, "Kevin Spacey will take Oscar next year for ‘American Beauty.’ Unfortunately, he will choose as his follow-up vehicle the role of a scarred elementary school teacher in a mawkish Mimi Leder drama about doing good deeds."

My classmate looked at me incredulously. "Kevin Spacey in a role that conventional?" she said. "Riiiiiiiight. That’s as unbelievable as what you claim the next ‘Star Wars’ movie will be called. ‘Attack of the Clones?’ That’s dumb."

Actually, there was one heavily-hyped film that I didn’t see in theaters in 1999. I never saw it on home video or television, either. "Princess Mononoke," a Japanese cartoon feature. It got strong word-of-mouth from various critics, and helped fuel the popularity of ‘Japanimation,’ which is still going strong in 2004.

Here in 1999, the movie has recently opened. Since I already knew the outcome of most of yesterday’s football games, I decided to take a trek down to the local cineplex, and see "Princess Mononoke" on the big screen, where it supposedly deserves to be seen. So what did I think of it?
I liked it—no, loved it, until the end. Here’s my gripe:

You’ve got the Empress of Iron City, who wants to destroy all the spirits of the forest, so she can ravage the land. You’ve also got this monk, who wants the cut off the Spirit of the Forest’s head, and take it back to the Emperor of Japan, since it’s supposed to contain the secret of eternal life, or something.

And they succeed, for the most part. While the fate of the Spirit of the Forest is unclear, these two villains certainly manage to kill many wise, ancient, and powerful gods, such as Mononoke’s mother, Morrow, as well as the leader of the Boars. Now, I’m not claiming that the animal gods are cute, harmless forest creatures who don’t deserve at least part of their comeuppance. They’ve killed many humans who dared to chop down the trees of the sacred forests. The animal gods have blood on their hands (and fangs and claws), too.

And yet, the animal gods are the only characters to get their comeuppance. As for the Iron City empress and the scheming monk, the former loses an arm, but lives to wreak havoc another day (I’m not convinced that her final line, "We will rebuild Iron City. Only this time, it’ll be a better Iron City," promises no mischief.) Meanwhile, nothing—and I mean, nothing!—happens to the runty-headed, sandal-footed monk. What the f*ck?! He helped plot the death of the benevolent boar god! He murdered dozens of Iron City’s men as part of the strategem! And he goes out under the shade of an umbrella, without as much as a punch to the face?

On the plus side, the animation is very cool. Also, the side effect of Ashitaka’s curse on his simple bow and arrow (Cartoon men being decapitated! What did the ratings board think of this movie?!) was an awesome idea. I was wondering if Ashitaka was going to get some kind of superpower, and he certainly does.

Finally, the way he and Princess Mononoke first meet, as she’s sucking the blood out of her lupine mother’s wound, was very cute and kinda sexy. As my mother also used to tell me, if you fall in love with a girl as she’s sucking the blood out the side of a giant wolf, marry her immediately, because things will only get better.

IRONY

I was walking past The Bottom Line last Friday, and there's these guys standing in front of the billing, looking at the list of upcoming acts.

Guy #1: Hey, I hear the Ramones are gonna play here. We need to get tickets.

Guy #2: What's the rush? Those guys aren't going anywhere.

POETRY FROM THE PAST

My relatives in Brooklyn have kept the same schedule since the early 90’s, meaning they go to a Free Brunch program at the old folks’ center every Friday. Since they haven’t changed the lock on the front door for decades, either, the key I took back in time with me works fine.

I currently rent my own place on the other side of Brooklyn (Time travel requires me to stay hidden—especially from those who would recognize me). But ever since I arrived here from the year 2004, I’ve been tempted to stop by. Back in 1999, I spent my entire summer here, seeing the sights, eating dim sum, catching my first glimpse of NYU. I left some clothes in the guest room. They’re still there, and lord knows I could use them, since I couldn’t fit much luggage into the "Mr. Peabody."

While packing the aforesaid clothes into a garbage bag, I stumbled across an old journal which I had kept during the summer. It was an idea I had, since my plan had been to drive up from Miami by car, to jot down descriptions and impressions of places I passed, as well as my regular, random thoughts.

I don’t know what happened to the journal between 1999 and 2004. Either I lost it, or quite possibly one of the relatives threw it away. But I will be taking this newly-unearthed copy back with me to 2004. I can’t part with it; it’s so much fun waxing nostalgic about experiences that occured half-a-decade ago (Even if, according to the calendar on the wall, they also happened less than a month ago).

Also fun: Reading the ill-advised poetry I once attempted to compose. I don’t know what I was thinking, though apparently I thought I could write a sonnet.

POEMS FROM THE JOURNAL:

"Sonnet"

To love unwisely is to love the best
For wisdom grows with every longing sigh
Old Prudence envies every fool’s caress
Being fool himself, though not fool ‘nough to try.
Be lucky those whose hearts remain untouched?
Love unbetrayed makes blessed infant state
The milk for them tastes always sweet enough
‘Til Fate’s cruel course is heaped upon their plate.
Then twelve years misery brought down all at once
Miss Misery, heart as ice-blue as her eyes
"Is this adulthood?" asks the lovesick runt
"Or just some random unwelcome surprise?"
One day, such whining persons do repent
Realizing that misfortune sometimes comes
And love is like a traffic accident
If it don’t kill, it leaves you shocked and numb
Yet loving false is natural as to breathe
More false the love, the more true love relieves.
-1999

"Rhyming Verse (Written to a Blue-Eyed Japanese Girl with a Fixation on French-Fried Potatoes)"

Shall I compare thee to this plate of fries
Left underneath the heat lamp for an hour?
Their dull-brown skins glow nothing like your eyes
Which God had burnished blue like milk gone sour.
Or was heredity what fixed their tone,
The way that genes made spuds so smooth and round?
Unlike a whooping cough or kidney stones
The finer traits have roots fixed in the ground.
So dare I say that you’re potato’s kin?
How many spuds attended NYU?
Before you say my logic’s wearing thin
Hear out these final lines—you’ll find they’re true:
For you were soaked in books, like fries in oil
So you’ll be gowned as they are wrapped in foil.
-1999

INTERLUDE

So the other day, I mentioned to my classmate that I travelled back in time from the year 2004. She took a moment to digest this, then asked me whether or not time travel hurts.

"Oh yes indeedy!" I replied. "Ever push your head through a shirt collar that’s too small?" She nodded. "Well, in time travel, the collar is the size of a pinprick, the shirt is made out of titanium, and instead of pushing your own head, it’s being throttled at speeds of up to 300 miles-per-hour!"

"That sounds like it would hurt," was my classmate’s reply.

"You could say it’s quite a straaiiin," I said with a grin. But she didn’t understand how I was making light of being shoved through a pinprick-sized hole in a titanium shirt at 300 miles-per-hour. I haven’t spoken to her since.


ADVENTURES IN SPEECH THERAPY, CIRCA 1999

Classes are going okay, I suppose. It’s only the third week, and I finished my first paper for Dr. O’s Production of Speech course. The topic was the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, an old linguistics theory Dr. O expects will be the source of much debate next Tuesday.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis argues that any two speakers of different languages will have trouble understanding each other, not just because each language uses different words to indicate the same thing, but because people who speak different languages also THINK differently. For example, eskimoes have, like, several dozen words that mean snow. There’s a word for soft snow; a word for falling snow; a word for hard igloo wall snow. Since we English speakers have just one word for snow (that word being "snow"), the Eskimo language concept of frozen animal urine snow as being separate from on-the-ground snow would probably cause us confusion.

But the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which has been revisited and revised over the years, cites the lack of mutual intelligibility as temporary. Sapir-Whorf states that concepts of any language can be properly explained to non-speakers. The trick is to make the concept fit neatly into words and phrases of the confused party’s language. To borrow the example from the textbook, the myriad of Eskimo words for snow is no different from the multitude of English names for "flying objects that aren’t birds." After all, there are certain Native American languages where a single word encompasses "flying objects that aren’t birds." Hence, we are all capable of acquiring mastery of foreign languages!


BOOKS I’VE FINISHED READING, AND THOUGHTS PERTAINING TO THEM

Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray. Ending felt like a cop-out. Also, I’m unclear how so many readers came to the conclusion that Becky Sharp is a sociopath. She is certainly single-minded in her ambitions and a horrible parent. But some of the tricks she pulls (What she does to those nobles when Napoleon’s army is supposedly descending) are admittedly clever, and wouldn’t be entirely out of place coming from a Jane Austen heroine. Also, Thackeray never makes clear whether Becky cuckolds Rawdon, which would make a big difference. I will say, though, that towards the end, I really was rooting for Becky to get her comeuppance. That’ll probably upset the feminists…

Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy. Hated it when I started reading it, loved it by the end. The author is certainly kinder to Tess than he is to Jude, but that isn’t saying much. I definitely plan to see the 1979 Polanski film within the next few weeks.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, volume 1, Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill. I don’t think this first 6-issue miniseries is as clever as it thinks, nor as spectacular as people have told me. It also doesn’t hold a candle to Moore’s Watchmen, but what comic book series ever could?

I will say, however, that I can definitely see how a movie studio would be interested in LoEG. Swashbuckling adventure (Well, up until Nemo ruins it); Edward Hyde; the Invisible Man; such properties—I mean, characters, could appeal to audiences of all ages. Too bad the original material is written for grown-ups.

I haven’t seen "LXG—the Movie," but I witnessed its trailers. If the movie didn’t make a complete mockery of the source material, I would be stunned. For one thing, a lot of the sly humor in Kevin O’Neill’s artwork stems from foreground/background relationships. Certain panels you can stare at much longer than others, just because of the activity on two separate planes. When I think of similar spatial relationships in movies, and the directors who can pull it off, I think of Orson Welles, sometimes William Friedkin. Stephen Norrington, director of "Blade (1998)," does not spring readily to mind.