About Jar Jar Binks...

Over the summer, I happened to go to the opening night showing of a little movie you may have heard of called Avengers: Age of Ultron. The last of the 20 minutes of previews before the movie was for the forthcoming Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The audience absolutely lost their minds seeing that preview, especially cheering when a particularly geriatric Han Solo showed up in the last shot of the trailer. Make no mistake, I'll be sucker enough to go on opening day as I did for every movie in the prequel trilogy. But it struck me as a strange case of deja vu. After all, wasn't it just 17 years ago that people lined up for Meet Joe Black to see the trailer for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace and then walked out of the theater? Wasn't there a strong sense of kid-like excitement, adults playing with their action figures and dressing up in costume for the movie on opening day? And when it came out, what was the reaction?


Sheer, unbridled, near unreasonable anger, hatred, and fury--much of it directed at two people in particular: the very real George Lucas and the very CGI Jar Jar Binks.

I'll save the debate over Lucas and the merits or lack of same of Phantom Menace for another post. I plan on rewatching the six films, quite possibly in episode order again, in the run up to Episode 7. But for now, I want to specifically address the much maligned Jar Jar Binks character.


I come not to defend him per se, nor to praise him nor to bury him. But to provide a little insight into just what went wrong with him and why in the grand scheme of things, he's not as worthless as you may think.


First, let's understand something about movies in general. A movie made in 1999 is not actually made for an audience that was around in 1977. A movie made in 1999 is made for the all-important 18-35 crowd, with a special emphasis on the lower end of that scale. If you were a teenager in 1977, Episode 1 wasn't made for you. I was six when the original Star Wars came out, so I can barely say it was made for my age group. More to the point, Star Wars in general always skewed young. It effectively is made for children. Hence the toys. Forty year olds presumably don't play with action figures (maybe they do?). So the first point in understanding Jar Jar is the fact that he wasn't made for adults; he was made for children. Guess what? Know who likes Jar Jar? Children.


And that's the way Star Wars has always been. There were characters in the original trilogy simply created for action figures. Seriously, did almost any characters in the cantina scene actually do anything? No, but they all had their own action figures. I know because I had (have) those action figures.

The second thing to realize about Jar Jar is what exactly he is and what Star Wars in general is. Star Wars is, in fact, a serial. Rumor has it that Lucas's original idea was to remake Flash Gordon. He settled on an original property, instead, and at one point planned to make 12 episodes. In other words, an actual 12 chapter serial. What serial fans know about but the average movie fan doesn't is that the serials had a habit, especially in the 1930s, of tossing comic relief into the action. Republic serials, generally considered the best serials in the business, were also uniformly the worst at comic relief. From 1936-1938, they tried again and again, mostly with Smiley Burnette or a pair of yokels called Oscar and Elmer. Time and again, the problem with these characters came to the foreground. The serial would be moving along at a nice clip and then it would come screeching to a halt for the so called comedy act to do their shtick for two minutes, then things would continue. The comedy bits would nearly ruin otherwise great serials like The Painted Stallion. Certain B Westerns (Durango Kid) would have a similar problem with the film stopping dead for bad Country tunes to be sung.


Jar Jar was obviously built around those type of comics. That seems to be a primary reason why the story seems to stop for him to do some schtick or another. I will give Lucas this, however. Jar Jar's routines are infinitely shorter than Oscar and Elmer and there's at least an attempt to integrate his routines into what's going on.


Finally, there's the fact that he's not as totally useless as you may think. He does do some stuff in the trilogy beyond be a goof. He leads the heroes to the Gungans in Phantom Menace, which helps set up the battle of Naboo. He also ends up making Palpatine the Emperor by giving him Emergency Powers in Attack of the Clones. No, that wasn't a good thing for the heroes, but it does help explain how Palpatine becomes Emperor. Compare that to the character of Alfrid in The Hobbit trilogy: here's a character who does absolutely nothing but snivel and act cowardly and greedy. He has no redeeming moment saving Bard's kids nor does he end up dying like we pretty actively hope he does. Compared to that, Jar Jar is the greatest sidekick in movie history.

Interestingly, going back to point two for a moment, there were comic relief sidekicks in serials who did occassionally do something smart. Smiley Burnette fumbles his way through the first Dick Tracy serial, but does save Tracy on at least one occassion. So yeah, Jar Jar is clearly based off that type of character.


So lighten up. Besides, Phantom Menace has worse problems than just Jar Jar. But like I said, that's for another post.

3-D Classics on Blu Ray: Inferno (1953)

There is a very odd thing about the existence of Roy Ward Baker's 3D color noir Inferno, and that is the fact that it was made by 20th Century Fox. When 3D movies went big in 1953, most studios eagerly jumped on the bandwagon. Fox, however, was putting their money on CinemaScope, a widescreen process where the image was roughly 2 1/2 times as wide as it was high. Fox did a ton of press for the new process and even snarkily referred to it as "The Modern Miracle You See Without Glasses". And then they turned around and made a movie that is not only one of the top 10 3D movies of the 1950s, it's a top 10 3D movie for all time.

Robert Ryan is Donald Carson III, an arrogant and not particularly likeable businessman. He goes on a trip to the desert with wife Geraldine (Rhonda Fleming) and speculator Joe Duncan (William Lundigan). What he doesn't know is that Geraldine and Duncan are lovers, so when he breaks his leg at the top of a cliff, they take the opportunity to make it look like he got drunk and ran off, effectively abandoning him to die in the desert. Carson realizes that if he's going to get back to civilization, it's going to be on his own.

The performances in this movie are great. Ryan does a lot with just a voice over and his facial expressions. The look of increasing desperation turns him into a more sympathetic character. While he starts the movie as fairly hateful, by halfway through we're completely on his side. In contrast are Fleming and Lundigan. While Lundigan is straight unapologetically evil, Fleming is far more sinister. She seems to be uncomfortable with what they've done, but is totally willing to abandon her lover in the desert the same as her husband. It's equally interesting since this isn't the type of role I'm used to seeing Fleming in. Those three are the majority of the film, but TV fans will get a kick out of seeing Larry Keating (Mr. Drysdale on The Beverly Hillbillies) as Carson's concerned business manager. Universal monster fans will equally enjoy seeing Henry Hull (Werewolf of London) as the desert old timer who ends up helping save Ryan in the end.

Inferno features one of the most stunning uses of 3D ever. Like several great 3D westerns of the era (Hondo, Gun Fury), the movie makes the most of its desert setting. The screen seems to stretch on forever, letting us know just how isolated Carson really is. There's one absolutely dizzying shot from the top of the cliff looking down that gives us a very good idea of just how precarious Ryan's position is. On top of that, the movie employs a trick that most 3D movies of the era did: concentrating on depth, but having gimmick shots during big movies. In fact, most of the gimmick shots in the movie show up during the climactic fight between Ryan and Lundigan. The only knock on the gimmick shots is when Ryan throws a lantern at the camera towards the end, it comes off a bit as a 3 Stooges style 3D effect.

U.K. company Panamint released Inferno on 3D Blu Ray last year, initially only Region B but later making it Region Free. The Blu Ray comes from a restoration done by the late Dan Symmes in which all the misalignments in the film were corrected. The result is a beautiful looking and practically perfect 3D Blu Ray of one of the all time great 3D movies. Only the credits are in reverse 3D and that's the way they were in the original film. Any true 3D fan needs this movie in their collection.