RIP the UK, Part II: Rhymes with Clucking Bell

I note that my post on Labour's broadband plans has reached a respectable 72 hits (not the largest for the year, but nor is it the smallest), so emboldened I guess I'll have a quick go at thoughts on Thursday's general election.

I may have given it away in the title of this post, but I'm not best pleased.

The Conservative party is in unassailable control of Parliament, to the point that it no longer needs its confidence and supply deal with Northern Ireland's DUP. The Liberal Democrats at their second-lowest level in their history, with their own leader, Jo Swinson, losing her seat in Scotland and being forced to resign. The Scottish National Party rules in most of Scotland, with Labour marginalized to a couple of constituencies but the Tories holding more seats in Scotland than them. And Labour is knocked out of a number of its heartlands in the industrial north and midlands by the Tories, as it looks for a new leader to replace the outgoing Jeremy Corbyn.

The SNP is talking about another independence referendum for Scotland, but in the meantime its presence in Westminster deprives Labour of a significant portion of its traditional power base - kind of like if California suddenly elected a whole bunch of third party candidates to its congressional delegation, knocking a hole in the national Democratic caucus.

For Labour the question remains of what to do next, and for starters, who to lead them in 2020. It may be reductive, but I see two major poles within the party: the Blairite wing that sees hewing rightward as the path to success, and the left Momentum wing that sprang up around Corbyn. Momentum will likely not tolerate a Blairite leader; the Blairites will be too scared of seeming leftwing to support a Momentum-approved leader. It's not unthinkable to imagine that the two split into separate parties and weaken Labour further.

(By the way, if I seem scathing of what I call the Blairite wing, it's because I am - he swept to power by being younger and hipper than John Major, admittedly not a difficult trick, but essentially moved the party rightward because he wasn't a natural Labourite, the same way JJ Abrams approached Star Trek as not a fan. He then led the country into an epochally unpopular war, did nothing to staunch the divisions between the Southeast and everywhere else, and his followers moved so far right that they let the Tories stake out ground on their own patch)

Without Scotland, though, the question of power remains academic. The SNP is a party of the left, and so, starting in 2015, they and Labour have duked it out for left voters there across three general elections and counting. But Labour comes second (presumably) because much of the Scottish electorate still hasn't forgiven them for siding with the Tories in the 2014 independence referendum.

As far as I can tell, the only way forward for the left in Britain is for the SNP to stand as a national party - but what relevance does its agenda have for voters in the Home Counties? Still, the UK could do worse than Nicola Sturgeon as PM.

I don't know if I'm qualified to talk about what went wrong with Labour's campaign, though I'll guess that it was a combination of undefined position on Brexit, personal animosity toward Corbyn (which is a shame as he always struck me as fundamentally honest and ethical - more so than Boris Johnson, though that's another quite low bar) and confusion over the party's platform. I addressed part of that in my post about the free broadband plan, but it does seem like the agenda wasn't very straightforward - you can bitch about modern elections being reduced to soundbites all you want but admittedly "Get Brexit done" is quite a bit snappier than Labour's "Time for Real Change".

Which itself isn't bad, but doesn't capture what was on basically everyone's mind.

The other question is, where does the UK go from here? If it leaves the EU as promised on 31 January, I'll need to see what happens to my relatives who live there, such as my sister and my cousin - will they be able to stay, or is the Home Office going to tell their respective employers to get all EU citizens off their books? It may seem fanciful, but this is exactly what happened to a Russian colleague in 2012-13, as companies were forced to reduce the number of non-EU workers they sponsored.

If they are allowed to stay, what services will they and my British friends have access to? Austerity seems to have lasted a lot longer in Britain than in the rest of Europe, presumably because the Tories since 2010 have been gutting public services and selling off as much as they could to business interests both inside and outside the country - this means more funding going toward London and the Southeast, and less to the rest of the country, thereby worsening the underlying condition that led to Brexit.

And as I put it back in August, kicking all the EU citizens out does nothing to lower house prices, because those (at least in the capital) are being driven up by rich Americans, Russians, Chinese, Middle Easterners and anyone else who has enough money that the government wants them. If this had been the case in 2001, when I first moved there and had maybe a couple thousand dollars to my name, they'd have shipped me back home at the first opportunity.

So I'm finding it hard to be sanguine about these results. We'll see more poverty, more homeless, more tragedies like Grenfell Tower, worse outcomes for the sick because of the dismantling of the NHS and increases in hate crimes and regular crimes. And who knows what terrorist plots will march on in the city thanks to the government's cuts in policing?

The UK will soldier on, as I've already said, but it'll be a smaller, meaner place.

RIP Rene Auberjonois

Just read that Rene Auberjonois passed away today, at the age of 79. Reading his wikipedia page now, I'm struck by the breadth and diversity of his work, in film, TV and stage, as well as voiceover work - there are a lot of roles I must have seen or heard him in, without knowing it was him, such as on the film version of MASH and on the animated Young Justice.

But of course I know him mainly for playing one of my favorite characters, Odo, on one of my favorite TV shows, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. He had the most distinctive prosthetics on the show, a sort of smoothed-out, simplified version of a human face, and he was involved in some of the show's best moments, including playing a huge part in the final storyline of the show as it wrapped up the Dominion War.

On the show, Odo was the "outcast" character, in the tradition of Star Trek characters like Spock and Data, but even though the entire cast, in some form or other, consisted of outcasts, he was more noticeable. In part this was because of his portrayal as the stern security officer on the station, whose methods didn't always match up with those of Starfleet. But it was also because of the gentleness that Auberjonois brought to the character - in the season 2 episode Shadowplay, he gradually befriends the young girl on the planet he and Dax are investigating, showing how Odo wasn't as gruff and forbidding as he wanted to appear.

I lost sight of his career after DS9, but I was always excited to see his name among the credits of a show. I'm heartened to read that he was a regular in Boston Legal, a series that my girlfriend loves and that we're going to watch together at some point soon (and, let it not be forgotten, a show that also starred William Shatner). I'm also pleased to read, though I must have known this at some level, that he did the voice of the French chef in Disney's Little Mermaid - another well-known role from my childhood.

My condolences go out to his family, and I'm hoping to find someplace to watch the recent DS9 documentary, What We Left Behind, for some interviews with him (and with Aron Eisenberg, who played Nog and who also passed away suddenly, not long ago).

The Star Wars Prequels: As Bad as You Remember

Between episodes of the Mandalorian with my girlfriend, I've been taking advantage of access to Disney+ by watching stuff that I haven't seen in a long time, like the Simpsons (mostly the Treehouses of Horror), old Mickey Mouse shorts... and the Star Wars prequel trilogy.

I know: why would I do this to myself? I haven't watched the prequels in their entirety in over a decade - in the case of Episode II (2002) and Episode III (2005), not since I watched them in the theater during their original run. I don't even have any memory of the circumstances in which I watched Episode III - it must have been here in the US, because I didn't leave the country, but I'm not sure if it was here in Palo Alto or in New York, nor do I remember who I saw it with.

Episode II sticks in the mind a little more, but for all the wrong reasons: poorly acted, excessive CGI and scenes that are so truncated that they feel perfunctory, as if George Lucas is using them just to remind us that a specific subplot is happening. There are things approaching interesting storytelling - like when Count Dooku claims to be fighting against the Sith Lord who's taking over the Republic - but they get lost almost immediately and walked back.

I think the thing that got me interested in re-watching these movies is this rundown and ranking of the entire series from the AV Club, written before (just before) The Force Awakens came out and kicked off this latest era for the Star Wars saga. The author is quite generous to George Lucas, while still not giving him a pass for his worst excesses, and if I don't agree with ranking Revenge of the Sith ahead of Return of the Jedi, then I can at least appreciate that there's someone else out there who thought Episode II was even worse than Episode I.

The criticisms still hold up. Episode I: The Phantom Menace is too reliant on CGI and on corny, kid-friendly gags to be actually entertaining to watch. The opening crawl is laughable in its discussion of trade disputes and blockades and the middle section on Tatooine, with the pod race, is overly long and not germane to the story.

What struck me on this re-watch was, again, how bad the performances were, or at least the line-readings, and the fact that the scenes are frustratingly truncated just like in Episode II. One feels a little bad criticizing Jake Lloyd as Anakin, given his later struggles with mental illness, but it's undeniable that he needed fewer lines, and that Lucas needed an editor on his script. And where the characters aren't obnoxious, like Anakin or Jar-Jar, they're just wooden, like... well, like everyone else. Natalie Portman, Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor - all are respected and talented actors, but you wouldn't know it watching this movie.

And yet... I still have something of a soft spot for this one, flaws and all. It was the first new Star Wars in years, and I got to see it on opening day. Awkward as a lot of it is, it manages to instill that sense of wonder, of a wider universe, that was present in the original trilogy. It sometimes tries too hard, but it manages to look from the outset like it belongs in the same universe as the original films.

Episode II: Attack of the Clones was also much as I remembered it. Hayden Christensen wasn't much of an improvement over Jake Lloyd, and neither was the dynamic between him and Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan - master chastises student constantly, not because he's actually irresponsible but because the script demands that we show, in the most ham-handed way possible, the wedge driven between them. And the romance subplot between Christensen and Portman is still pretty unconvincing.

There are a couple of nice things to say about this one, though. Especially on the cloners' world of Camino, Lucas shows a gift for coming up with impressive settings for his alien worlds. The craggy, reddish tint to Geonosis doesn't strike me as much but I can't deny that it makes an impressive contrast.

As mentioned above, there's also the bit where Count Dooku (aka Saruman, aka Christopher Lee) captures Obi-Wan and claims that he's fighting against the Sith. It's undercut by the circumstances - Obi-Wan being held shackled by a forcefield in a prison cell - and walked back immediately, but I remember being so excited when I saw that scene, thinking that Lucas was about to throw us a curveball... but no.

But perhaps the best part of the movie is the depiction of how Palpatine maneuvers events to take power for himself. There's a vogue for seeing harbingers of Donald Trump in all media, but this sequence is genuinely impressive - and I'd actually forgotten it was here, given that Episode III is where the collapse of the Republic really takes off (and was accompanied at the time by right-wingers complaining that George Lucas was getting too political - some things never change, clearly).

Also, I can't deny that seeing Yoda leaping around and kicking ass gave me a thrill, both then and now. Maybe it's because so much of the rest of the film was lackluster, but it was great to see just how great a Jedi he was.

And then there's Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. I remembered bits of the movie, from the final fight between Anakin and Obi-Wan, to the slaughter of the Jedi Order and the death of Padme, but little else. I'd forgotten that the opening harks back not to the previous movie but to a whole bunch of crap that happened between the episodes - I presume all that is in the Clone Wars movie and TV show, but I haven't seen those yet, so the transition is still jarring to me.

I haven't finished this re-watch, so I won't belabor the point too much, but it seems like the scenes breathe a little more than its two predecessors. However, the dynamic between Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman remains as wooden as ever - they talk at cross-purposes, and not to reveal character but to reveal plot. There's less of the cutesy crap, because a whole bunch of good guys are going to die, badly, before the end, but it persists in the droid army and in C3PO and R2D2's time on screen.

It also looks great, the initial fight in space over Coruscant looking really impressive... but then, if anyone knows how to put together a gigantic set-piece it's George Lucas.

Now, to sum up, watching these movies again hasn't changed my mind about them. Some bits are worse than I remembered, others better, but the majority is still as I recall, for better or worse. They go way too far in forcing fan service, like showing C3PO and R2D2 or in calling forward to stuff from the original trilogy. And the storylines are just bad, or at least badly written.

Unlike the AV Club, I can't guess how these movies would have done if they'd been the first we'd ever seen of Star Wars. I take them in relation to a group of movies that I grew up loving, and they can't ever measure up to that - nor to the more recent movies, starting with Force Awakens and ending with Solo. But I can't deny that there are some pleasures to be had with them, even Episode II, my least favorite of the films (so far) and easily in my bottom 5 films ever.

So as I prepare for Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, I'm seeing where the saga "began", in the hopes of seeing if it connects to how it "ends". I might not even be too disappointed if they have Hayden Christensen as a Force ghost again, though if JJ Abrams resists that temptation I'll be quite happy.