Actually I couldn't make heads or tails of the article. It reads more like a facsimile of an article than the real thing (ironically, since this seemed to be the point he was trying to make about movies).
Is this anything other than a variation on the old "stuff was better in my day" theme? The movies this guy used to watch were "real" entertainment, but all current movies are "facsimiles" or "imitations". Yeah, ok, whatever you say, old-timer. Now I'm real impressed that he front-loaded and straw-manned his argument to death by stacking up a freakin' Adam Sandler movie to the one it was "based on", but really: is that a fair comparison?
Ugh. I mean just cuz he can throw a couple Umberto Eco quotes together and bash America doesn't mean he's making any actual good point of any kind.
The use of music, in particular, to suggest a romance between Anakin and Padme that would be non-sensical otherwise.
Um, once you accept that these events are taking place "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away"; that Padme is the former Queen of her planet but posed as her maidservant practically the whole time; that a Jedi named Qui-Gon Jinn just happened to land on a planet called Tattoine, just happened to wander into a junk shop where the owner just happened to have a slave named Anakin who (wouldn't you know it) it turns out just happened to have a "high midichlorian count" and perhaps was even conceived immaculately - once you accept all these things, seems a little silly to me to complain that a romance between this Anakin and that Padme was "non-sensical". He was a strapping teenager assigned to protect her, and she in her early 20s; in fact a romance between them would be one of the more believable things about those movies, it seems to me :)
Well, that's part of the problem. You can only mess with the audience's willing suspension of disbelief for so long. And so my point was that if you're watching a film, and have to continually fill in the characters motivations, etc, etc, I think the criticism in the article about letting the audience 'fill in the blanks' because they know what to expect, applies.
What nerve! Who does he think he is, to go comparing a remake of a movie to the original? What unmitigated gall! What breathtaking arrogance!
Is that a fair comparison? Of course not! Let's not be silly.
Sometimes I wonder just what this world is coming to...