The Death of George Lucas. Michael Moore and Donald Sutherland Naked. Friends of Christopher Reeve. CB is Right.

--George Lucas must have realized he is going to die. He seems to be trying to force into existence some ultra-defining piece d’art, so that his Star Wars “masterpiece” will stretch across generations.

This desperation behooves neither him nor his work. His most recent mandate, that we watch and appreciate the films not in the order in which they were shot (which also happens to be an order that corresponds with their worth), but rather in terms of the chronological narrative they tell, is, of course, an absurdity.

As if one should start with Jar Jar and end with R2D2. Oh, wait, Jar Jar has now made it into the first episodes as well.

I’m certain that if anybody makes it back from the dead, it won’t be Houdini, but Lucas, embracing an even newer technology one hundred years from now to degrade his once-upon-an-opus just a bit more.


--On a related note, what do you think of parents who take their children in for plastic surgery?

--Supersize Me. Another graduate from the look-at-me-mom school of documentary film making, this is a Jackass styled piece of performance “art” that hits its high point when our hero cries dramatically into the phone because it seems his McDonald’s diet might kill him. Or at least elevate some negative elements in his blood count.

Don’t get me wrong. McDonald’s is nearly pure evil, and that clown clutches one bloody cleaver, but Spurlock needs better inspirations than Michael Moore and Steve O.

--Incidentally, as much as Michael Moore may be right in a broad sense, his documentaries are so full of misused information that I know composition teachers that show them to classes to demonstrate a variety of fallacies and manipulations.

And those teachers are liberals. Remember, all teachers are.
Even ones like me, who want to see Michael Moore fall on his supersized ass.

Moore doesn’t think he’s a celebrity, but he’s as in love with his self-congratulating brain as Paris Hilton is with her pouty lips.

I can wait to see his sex tapes.

--Writing of people you don’t want to see naked, today, I showed my students ­Don’t Look Now. I don’t know what they find more frightening. Donald Southerland’s curvy spine and oddly shaped ass hopping up and down against Julie Christie, or the dwarf in the red rain coat. Roeg has, though, crafted an excellent experiment: one in which he hypothesizes that the audience is as blind as the protagonist.

--Scientists at the University of Illinoios in Champagne-Urbana have determined that mice who have exercised before getting the flu have a better chance of surviving it. Thank God and tax payers dollars that these people are looking out for us. I never would have guessed that being in good overall shape better prepares a mouse—and maybe even me—for an attack of sickness. 59% of the exercising mice survived the flu to which they were exposed, and only 29% of those that did not exercise survived.

I feel a bit sorry for the 41% and 71% percent of the respective mice groups that succumbed to the flue, but their sacrifice was a worthy one and most certainly I’ll sleep better this night.

I just hope that Spurlock finds it in his mindset to force feed a bunch of mice McDonald’s for the next month and completely validate his experiment.

--Do we grow our inner-strengths the way we grow muscle tissue? Through small and controlled tearing and nutrition?

I don’t know if I can describe this last year of tearing as small, and it sure as hell wasn’t controlled, and I don’t know what I’d call nutrition.

But I’m feeling stronger again.

It’s good to bask in the illusion of strength.