Bite-sized reviews of things we like:

Clean Characters, Crappy Film: In the Monty Python film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, one peasant says to another, "Look, it's the king!" His companion asks, "How do you know it's the king?" to which he replies: "Because he hasn't got shit all over him." The king goes on to bore the hell out of them with a long, windy speech. This scene sums up how I feel about George Lucas' latest installment in the Star Wars trilogy, Star Wars II: The Clone Wars.

The original Star Wars trilogy featured characters that were human. Princess Leia and Han Solo did get shit all over them. They also got tired, sweaty, scared, scarred, and their costumes got messed up. Luke Skywalker suffered doubts, was clumsy, clueless, and occasionally helpless. Obi Wan and Yoda were cranky and made mistakes. The characters argued a lot and fought each other almost as much as the bad guys, and this made them very human. Of course, it helped that Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford, and Alec Guinness were decent actors.

In the current trilogy, Lucas seems to have cast Natalie Portman (whose wooden acting is painful to watch) as Padme Amidala simply because of her boyish, pre-pubescent good looks. (Is Lucas gay? -- Portman's character certainly dresses like a drag queen. And another thing: if the future is full of corsets, I don't want to go there!)

Hayden Christensen does his best with a character that's only allowed two emotions: frustration and anger. Compare Anakin Skywalker with Peter Parker (Spiderman), who experiences shame, fear, self-doubt, pride, and a whole host of other emotions that make him human, and the Lucas movie looks ridiculous by comparison. How can we care about Anakin when he only expresses the two emotions usually allotted to a film's bad guy? Can I sympathize with a teenage Green Goblin? Not really.

It doesn't help that no shit sticks to them, either. The last half hour of the film is one long battle scene (finally!), wherein many good people die, but our heroes sustain no injury until the very last scenes. Numerous falls from high places and speeding vehicles leave no scratch. A creature rakes its claws across Amidala's back, but the bloody marks magically disappear a few seconds later.

You might say that these are Jedi knights, masters of The Force, so nothing can really hurt them, which begs the question: "Then why should I care what happens to them?" They aren't human, so big deal. Even when the boy goblin himself is disfigured, it somehow doesn't humanize him. There is no pain, no blood, and he's not even consciously aware that he's been badly hurt, much less horrified at his disfigurement. And there's no sense of loss; instead, I can imagine twelve-year-old boys all over America seeing his cybernetic implant and thinking: "Cool!" Skip immediately to Happy Ending, do not pass Rehab.

Lucas' boyhood fantasies are yawningly dull.

One last gripe. Even the spiritual and thematic center of the previous trilogy is gone. What the hell happened to The Force? Oh, sure, characters use The Force, but they take it for granted and seem bored with it. Count Dooku (or is it Yoda?) sums it up at the end: "Since our mastery of The Force is equal, I shall have to beat you with my light saber!" -- or something equally ridiculous. Gone is the idea that The Force is important, that it permeates everything, that the character of the person using it determines the outcome of the struggle. The audience is used to seeing a butt-kicking, sword-wielding fight to the finish, so Lucas gives it to them. We get the brilliant sword fight, which looks like so many other brilliant sword fights that I temporarily forgot which movie I was watching. Is this Blade II? Oh, no, that's next month.

And when a two-foot-tall alien steals the whole film, you know it's a clunker. I caught myself mumbling Yoda-style this morning: "Clean bathroom I must!" What a far cry from "May The Force be with you." --Maria Tomchick

If you want to see a great film, skip Star Wars and see Sherman Alexie's The Business of Fancydancing, instead. It's a film so delicious, so smart, and so poetic that I cried during the opening credits. Not out of sadness, either, but out of pure joy that I was gonna see something that lacked a butt-kicking sword fight. Alexie and an ensemble cast and crew have proved that films can be as rich and multi-layered as novels. See it. You must! --Maria Tomchick

(And yes, since people have asked, that's me in Alexie's film for about three lunging seconds...)--Geov Parrish

The guy who runs the fine Ravenna-area restaurant Good Morning Healing Earth--and who, it turns out, is a big ETS! fan -- insisted I borrow his copy of David Broxck's kiss-n-tell memoir on the conservative right, Blinded By the Right. Brock, he said, confirmed what we all suspected all along about those folks (a young Brock made his name by an "investigative" book smearing Anita Hill) -- that they were vicious, lying, amoral traitors to the essential human decency that used to be associated with at least some true conservatives.

And, sure enough, it's all there -- Brock's distortion of facts to suit the purposes of a hit piece on Hill, his work as a journo-foot soldier for the Gingrich counter-revolution, and his gradual awakening -- spurred largely by his status as a closeted gay man in a nest full of homophobic bigots -- to the moral bankruptcy of both his actions and those of his Beloved Cause.

But something bugged me about the book -- Brock himself. His tone throughout, even (especially) when he flagellates himself for past duplicity, is relentlessly smug and self-aggrandizing; he was not just a Dirtbag, but THE Dirtbag, and isn't it wonderful that he's now seen the light. I'm supposed to like this guy cuz he's now a liberal (sort of), but frankly, I don't want him on my team, either.

I asked a couple of conservative friends with DC experience about Brock; one summed him up nicely as a "social climber then, and a social climber now." It shows. Thanks for the loan, tho!--G.P.

A book much more likely to tell you things you didn't already know -- or even suspect -- is The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by British investigative journalist Greg Palast. Palast is making something of a name for himself these days; as a U.S. reporter for the British press, he has consistently scooped American media on stories regarding the corruption and fallacies of our own political system and its global impact: vote-fixing in Florida 2000; internal memos that give the lie to the IMF, World Bank, and World Trade Organization; campaign finance horrors; corporate predations; and on, and on. Palast supplies exhaustive details on some of these stories, and begs the question of why his scoops almost never seem to make it into the papers here. Must be that free and unfettered press we keep reading about.--G.P.

In the Presence of Fear: Three Essays for a Changed World is a small book (44 pages) containing three timely essays by poet, farmer, and philosopher Wendell Berry. Berry is a veteran critic of our insane economic structure with its enforced dissociation between society and the planet, and these essays put the post 9-11 crisis into that larger perspective. He doesn't talk about terrorism and its causes per se, but rather about our murderously absurd economic system that is itself in a state of perpetual war, every corporation at war with literally everyone and everything else.

Berry takes the critique of globalization a little deeper than usual and brings the responsibility for reconnecting the economy with the planet back where it belongs, to the individual reader, citizen, and human being--the only place where such responsibility will do any good. The first essay, "Thoughts in the Presence of Fear" contains twenty-eight numbered paragraphs of post 9-11 thoughts, starting with this: "The time will soon come when we will not be able to remember the horrors of September 11 without remembering also the unquestioning technological and economic optimism that ended on that day."

"The Idea of a Local Economy" ties the environmental crisis, war, and globalization into the reality that our modern "human household or economy is in conflict at almost every point with the household of nature." In our world where the agricultural west of the US faces the same neocolonial pressures as agricultural Africa, he suggests a fundamental necessity is for each region to be self sufficient in providing its own food and other basic necessities. Globalized food, globalized oil, and globalized war are really the same thing.

The third essay, "In Distrust of Movements," thinks that narrow issue movements are not radical enough and ultimately insincere. "Industrialism, which is the name of our economy...has been from its beginnings in a state of riot. It is based squarely upon the principle of violence toward everything on which it depends." In such a world, movements to promote "soil conservation or clean water or clean air or wilderness preservation or sustainable agriculture" are not enough. Berry is "dissatisfied with such efforts because they are too specialized...they virtually predict their own failure by implying we can remedy or control effects while leaving causes in place." Berry is ultimately asking us to quit being tourists on our own planet. He's not suggesting everyone become farmers, but that we start looking past the bread and understand the farmer, the wheat, and the dirt that is behind it. He's saying that our choices really do matter. It's not about lifestyle, it's about life. In the Presence of Fear is Published by the Orion Society.--Troy Skeels