This movie should lay to rest any lingering ideas that George Lucas is a good director.

The script: Well, the plot is pretty good, but the dialogue overall is too weighed-down by cliche and hamfisted attempts at political commentary.

One gets the impression that Lucas was trying to create a modern-day "High Noon", which was an allegory for McCarthy's war on Hollywood communists. But Lucas seems to be unfamiliar with the concept of subtlety. In one scene, the Emperor actually paraphrases George Bush's famous "If you are not with us, you are with the terrorists" line. It's a weak, misguided attempt that detracts heavily from the movie.

Directing: Lucas isn't a terrible director, but he's not great either. He isn't sophisticated enough to understand that the dialogue is stilted and cliche, so his directing does nothing to improve it.

The pace of the movie seemed fine, if a bit slow. The action scenes were mostly "I've seen this before in the other Star Wars movie," though. We have the Big Battle Against All Odds, the Jedi Killing Everything Against All Odds, and of course the introductory Huge Space Scene With Infiltration of Mother Ship (Against All Odds). None of it is particularly exciting because none of it feels like there is any real danger.

I guess I can sum up my feelings about this movie thusly: It feels like a documentary about a fictional place. It doesn't draw you in like it should. You don't feel anything while you're watching it.

Production: Well, there's plenty of great CGI work, but I think this movie shows that you can't rely on CGI to make a film interesting any more. To be fair, I don't think Lucas went into the project thinking that the CGI was going to have to carry the movie, but in the absence of a good script or good directing, that's what is needed.

Editing: With all the script and directing issues, I don't think the editors could have done much better.

Sound: Pew! Pew! Pew! Yippee.

We should thank Lucas for one thing, though: Jar Jar Binks is mercifully absent from this movie.

I think most of us can agree now that Iran is the biggest threat to peace and democracy in the Middle East, and it seems to me like they're building up a head of steam about something. But what?

I think it's evident to most of the world's experts, as well as foreign policy luddites and geopolitical neophytes, that Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapon. What concerns me isn't the Iranian bomb. They can't use it against anyone who won't nuke them back in spades. The US is obviously capable of turning Iran into a self-lighting glass-top parking lot, and Israel is estimated to possess between 150 and 200 warheads.

So Iran is not going to nuke Israel if it manufactures one bomb. What does scare me though is what's going to happen when Iran has 20 or 30 nuclear weapons. Then the whole equation changes, and a fanatical and religiously extreme person (like the current Iranian leader) might get the idea that an overwhelming first strike will destroy Israel before it gets the chance to respond. Further, he may be suffering from delusions that Allah will stick his mighty hand down out of the clouds and block the Israeli missiles. This is the level of intellectual achievement that seems to be the norm among the most fanatical Muslims, a group that is well represented in the Iranian theocracy.

The root of the problem is, of course, that the world needs what Iran and other Middle Eastern tyrannies have (oil), and we give them huge amounts of cash for it. What this is leading to, I believe, is an ever more populous and powerful Middle Eastern political block that seeks to return to a respected position on the world stage. Some want to go further, of course, and conquer the world for Allah.

Now the newly-elected terrorist leadership of "Palestine" has invited Iran to support it in the absence of US and Western aid, which is being cancelled as a result of Palestinians electing terrorists. Iran particularly, and Syria, Yemen and Saudi Arabia in addition, cannot be allowed to dictate world events from their fanatical Islamic positions. To even allow them to participate in any way in the Israeli/Palestinian issue is unacceptable. It thus behooves us to defund Iran.

How does one do this? Well, there are subtle ways and obvious ways. We are already costing Iran some amount of money by our presence in Iraq - they spend a fair amount of money (no one knows how much for certain) funding the insurgency there. Supporting a democratic counterinsurgency in Iran itself is one option. Nothing sucks money out of the coffers like angry demonstrators and general strikes. If that doesn't work, we can turn off the spigot, the source of Iran's money, at any time. This is an expensive proposition, as it will definitely have a huge impact on oil prices all over the globe, but if we want to and we have the political will, we can do it. Iran exists and functions as a nation at our behest.

If we choose to, we can reduce the amount of oil shipped from Iran by 98%. It remains to be seen how bad things will get, and they will have to get very bad before we start bombing Iranian oil facilities. But if Tel Aviv disappears in a nuclear fireball, I think that will probably do it.