Quick update

[stormkeeper_lovedoris]

Just a quick update to let you know that I'm feeling a bit better. My coughing is still here but is really slowing down and my throat doesn't hurt so much. My abs are actually really sore from my coughing so much during the last 3 days (is it just me, or does everyone squeeze their abs when they cough?) The one cough medicine that seems to work totally knocks me out so I can only take it at night.

In other news, yesterday I experienced the grossest cicada incident ever. Let me back up to explain. The area I live in gets overrun by cicadas once every 17 years. They are large insects that fly around, have huge red eyes, and make lots of noise. Every 17 years we get hit with a ton of them; they are everywhere for about 6 weeks. So my town is in the middle of the invasion. Yesterday I went to the farmers' market. Since it was like 9:00 in the morning and already 85 degrees, I wore a tank top. This one has a built-in bra. One cicada flies around and manages to fly into my tank top. For a few horrifying seconds, it is caught between my breast and the underwire. I pull on the bottom of my shirt to let it out and fortunately it drops right out. Ewwwww.

Oh yeah, I am still enjoying Rifftrax. They are these hilarious MP3's that you buy (most cost $2.99) where some of the guys from MST3K make fun of mainstream movies. I've seen their X-men, LOTR, and Star Wars Phantom Menace ones so far. They are funny. They always have some dumb jokes but lots of good ones. They were brutal with Phantom Menace. Didn't have much of anything positive to say about it as a movie.

Be warned - if you get the LOTR one, the Rifftrax goes with the version of the movie that was released to theaters, not the version with all the extended and additional scenes.

Comments

[stormkpr.livejournal.com]

Yeah, don't get me started on the treatment of female characters - not just in the prequel trilogy but in all of Star Wars. Would it kill them to ever have more than 1 woman in a film?? AotC was one of the few movies that even had more than one female with speaking roles. But as far as I recall, RotS went back to having Padme being the only woman who has dialog to speak. And how hard would it have been for them to make some of the female Jedi more prominent in episodes 1 - 3??

And don't get me started on all the racial problems in episode 1. On Rifftrax, the MST3K guys had a field day with that.

[yubsie]

I figure the original trilogy does get credit for Leia, considering the female characters in MOST science fiction in that era. The prequels, on the other hand, are in a lot of ways a huge step BACKWARDS, especially with the majority of Padme's non-love interest scenes getting cut from 2 and 3, not to mention the whole "Now she dead from stupid" bit.

The decline in the expanded universe was similarly saddening. In the Bantam era, Leia was leader of the bloody GALAXY, and an effective one at that. And what does the Del Rey era harp on? The fact that she was too busy leading the galaxy and raising children to be a Jedi. Leia's daughter went from being an ace pilot and generally well adjusted teenager to permanently fourteen years old, with no storyline beyond "Which guy will she pick?" And poor Mara Jade Skywalker, former assassin, randomly switched between bitchy (there is a LINE between willing to knock some sense into Luke with sarcasm and being bitchy) and... CLINGY? The Bantam books had a lot of strong female characters, but other than my beloved Aaron Allston (who is a holdover from the Bantam books...), no one under Del Rey seemed to be able to WRITE these women.