Next stop, 2010.

Not having seen anything worth reviewing since my last post, I wasn’t sure how to bridge the gap between that and my next review. I did, briefly, consider a list of the Top 10 Movies of 2009, however, quickly decided that was a terrible idea.

Mainly, because, among my hopes for a new decade is the swift dismissal of Top 10 Lists. Ten is an arbitrary number and I can’t understand why we let David Letterman decide that there can only be ten acceptable or superior items of any sort!

And what’s the point of ranking movies? Doesn’t the box office do that? After all, it is an entirely democratic and meritocratic system. Reviewers who rank movies are dictators… but maybe the box office is too socialist? If we transpose this system to economics or the free-market, you would end up with the iPod as the biggest smash hit of all time, with syndicated columnists playing up the unnoticed and brilliant virtues of the Zune. (Which is how you end up with “Titantic” as the highest grossing movie of all time, yet “Citizen Kane” atop the list of critics everywhere.)

Okay, I’ve derailed - because this wasn’t the point. To bridge this gap, I am reposting, courtesy of The Daily Beast (www.thedailybeast.com), a seven-part, 70 minute, ‘take-down’ of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace as “delivered by an elderly schizophrenic who talks like a cross between Dan Aykroyd in The Blues Brothers and The Silence of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill.”

But, not exactly. The narrator isn’t one of those poorly lit nerds talking into a webcam, rather a clever creation by the creator of this YouTube series who happens to be an independent filmmaker. And, (as I step on my preachy Klosterman soapbox), maybe this is the best way to not only bridge posts, but to send us into the next decade. What can better sum up the end of this decade than the popularity of a 70-minute YouTube video, reviewing a movie that nobody liked, told through the eyes of a schizophrenic felon.

Happy New Year everyone!

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-12-28/making-an-enemy-of-george-lucas/full/