To quote Jack, "Shut up, Michael Medved!"

This afternoon, I had the radio on the talk stations when I was coming back from doing some lunchtime errands, and when one show went on commercial break, I put it on another station which had the Michael Medved show.  Medved is a movie critic and a social conservative; I got irritated with Medved back in May when he made a big deal out of ROTS's alleged anti-President Bush messages.  He liked the movie as a whole but insisted it had a lot of gratuitous slams against the current administration and said one would have to be a "lunkhead" not to notice them.  Today, he was addressing the issue of liberal bias in Hollywood movies and aside from "War of the Worlds" and the new "Stealth," he brought up ROTS again. 

The point Medved was making today was that box office totals are lower this summer because audiences have had it with Hollywood's left-wing bias.  Even though I'd concur with Medved that when Hollywood addresses political and social issues, it's almost always from a liberal perspective, I don't think that's the reason for the so-called "slump."  It has to do more with lackluster movies, high ticket prices, competition from the internet and video games, and the DVD market than anything else.  I didn't hear how Medved addressed ROTS's success, if at all.  It shows either audiences disagreed that it's biased or that if they thought the film was biased, they didn't care, which punches holes in Medved's initial theory.

I've seen the movie 12 times and given how Medved today botched some of the plot points in the movie (he couldn't remember who said "he controls the Senate and the courts" or the context of the scene), he probably hasn't seen it more than once.  The few callers I heard all disagreed with him (as did most of the callers I heard back in May).  After 12 times, I still can't see what he was talking about either.  Believe me, had I honestly believed ROTS was a Bush-bash fest, I would have gone ballistic not only because of my own politics, but also because Lucas would have made the fatal error of using what was supposed to be a timeless story to make a temporal partisan argument for no apparent purpose.  It would have dated ROTS as a pre-election 2004 timepiece for all eternity, a very stupid thing to do if you want your film to be relevant even 10 years from now.  I do not believe this to be the case.

Medved claimed that you can't have a phony war in a plot in 2004-2005 without it being a comment on the war in Iraq; ROTS had one therefore it must be some sort of statement, right?  Well, every SW fan of every political/social persuasion has known for decades that Palpatine schemes and deceives his way to becoming Emperor; the plotline of Palpie using war and unrest to accomplish just that was set into motion with TPM and AOTC, both of which were written and filmed before Bush ever took office.  How about the infamous "if you are not with me, then you are my enemy"/"only Sith deal in absolutes" exchange?  Well, that's proof, isn't it?  First of all, Sith aren't the only ones dealing in absolutes in that scene (*cough*Obi-Wan*cough) and even though Anakin's line is similar to one of the more famous phrases from Bush's 2001 speech, it's also one that has been commonly used in a number of contexts.  If Lucas wanted people to think Bush = eeville Sith, why have Anakin (a fallen hero) say it as opposed to somebody 100% reliably evil and powerful like Palpatine?  I think the exchange on Mustafar just emphasizes the breach between Anakin and Obi-Wan due to their conflicting--and absolutist--loyalties.

Yes there are people on the left who see parallels between the film and current events but that doesn't mean those parallels are intentional.  It's simply people seeing what they want to see in the movie based on their own political views.  In any case, I don't think very many people saw ROTS or stayed away from it because of politics.  The movie raked in over $377 million in North America and it's a safe bet that about half of the voting-age adults who have seen it voted for Bush.  If they agreed with Medved, don't you think there would be a lot more of a brouhaha and not as much repeat business?

But don't just take my word for it.  Starlog asked Lucas point-blank in a recent interview, "is Bush's America the Evil Empire?"  And this was his answer: "It's more about Julius Caesar, Napoleon, and Adolf Hitler than about anything here and now."

'Nuf said.