You’re probably already somewhat confused, so let me begin by clarifying one point: the snow you see in the SOAP trailer is fake — it doesn’t (often) snow in Hibbing, MN in the summer.

The trailer itself is not fake. It exists. You can watch it. See, I just posted it on this blog.

There is, however, no SOAP movie. That should be obvious after watching the trailer. If there were a SOAP movie, and if I were the director, and if I didn’t have any control over the trailer, and then I watched the trailer, I’d be kinda T.O.’d at the trailer.

I mean, the trailer gives away every single plot “twist” as well as the entire ending. A trailer for a real movie would never, ever do that. (It seemed as though “never, ever do that” should have linked to a trailer that does, in fact, do just that, but I was too lazy to look one up, so I just underlined the phrase instead to sort of make it look like a link — then I included this note to undermine my own efforts.)

Anyway, if there were a SOAP movie, the trailer would never, ever show that, at the end, Sam builds a fake friend out of construction material, only to realize that his true friends had been in front of him the entire time. Also, if you haven’t seen the trailer yet, SPOILER ALERT.

And, once again for the sake of clarity, I should point out one inaccuracy in the title of this post. The alternate title is “How I Spent My Summer Vacation,” which implies, incorrectly, that the SOAP trailer was created by me. It wasn’t. My contribution to the project was to gather some supplies and then drive back and forth across town after forgetting to bring the supplies.

A. Reini (a.k.a “the Hermit,” a.k.a. “BB2,” a.k.a. “Manny Ramir-Andrew Bank One Ball-Andrew,” a.k.a. “Doogie — no, not that ’Doogie’”) shot and edited the video — seriously, I think he spent something like 10,000 hours just tweaking the color of “Cop #2′s” moustache. (Also, if you see Dan Scally, don’t mention that he was “Cop #2.”)

So A. Reini gets the credit (blame?) for this. You can thank him by going to his funny and clever blog. As of now, 50 percent of his posts are about James Bond — which, as most blog-experts will tell you, is the perfect ratio.

– Reinman

SOAP is daily Bible reading program. This video was created to promote the program at First Assembly of God in Hibbing, MN.

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Note: Big assist on this post from Reinman’s younger-er brother, the Hermit (a.k.a. BB2, a.k.a. Manny Ramir-Andrew Bank One Ball-Andrew).

I love The Empire Strikes Back. Obviously. But there is one moment that doesn’t make a lick of sense.

So, following the Dumbest Battle in Movie History, Han Solo and company are fleeing from the Imperial fleet. With four TIE fighters and a Star Destroyer already hot on their tail, Han sees two more Star Destroyers heading straight toward them.

“Great. Well, I can still out maneuver them,” he says, throwing the Falcon into a twisting “dive.” (I love that in order to make the Falcon go “down” Han first has to pull a special lever, as though “up” and “down” aren’t mapped to the normal flight controls.)

What follows is a wonderful little sequence — the Falcon momentarily escaping, while the three Star Destroyers nearly collide. I love the chaos we see in the Star Destroyer bridge — the howling (distinctively Imperial) alarm, the grinding noise as shields slam against shields, the crew losing their balance from the impact — it all reinforces the immense size of these ships.

And then we cut from the chaotic to the ordered. From below, we see — for, really, the only time in the trilogy — the wedge-shaped Destroyers in their full geometrical glory. They crawl toward one another, looking not as though they’re accidentally ramming into each other, but rather as though they’re completing some grand, celestial puzzle — of course they’re supposed to fit together like that.

But here’s the nagging question — how did the Star Destroyers get that close to each other in the first place? Maybe the Destroyer captains simply forgot that ships can go “up” or “down” in space. Maybe they were using flat, table-top charts, having not yet invested in those fancy “three-dimensional” charts that the rebels use in Jedi. Slashes to military spending and all.

Even so, let’s take the engagement to its logical conclusion. Let’s say the Falcon did not suddenly dive down and continued on a straight course. If that were the case, the Star Destroyers…would STILL collide into one another.

Therefore, the only logical conclusion is that colliding into each other was the plan all along.

Here’s what I think happened. I think the captain of the middle Destroyer saw the other two ships coming toward him, and he saw a golden opportunity to not only take out the Falcon but to do it in style — he decided to physically “crunch” the Falcon in between the hulls of the Destroyers.

And his plan might’ve worked, too, if one of the Destroyers hadn’t chickened out at the last moment.

My theory isn’t as ridiculous as it seems. By this point, we’ve already seen the fingerprints of that renegade Imperial officer. As a young lieutenant on the Death Star, he was the one who decided to try to crunch Luke, Han, Leia, and Chewie in the trash compacter rather than, say, posting three squads of stormtroopers outside the only escape hatch.

Piloting a walker during the battle of Hoth, he was the one who decided to take a half an hour to try to crunch Luke underfoot rather than, say, shooting him. Vader — who is obviously a fan of not only killing but killing with style — appreciated the attempted crunching and immediately promoted the officer to Star Destroyer captain.

(In the original cut of Empire — before Lucas started screwing with the film — you can see the pilot ejecting straight up into an awaiting shuttle right before the walker’s head explodes. And no, I don’t know why the head explodes when Luke throws the charge into the middle of the walker’s underbelly.)

So, the accidental, near-collision of the Star Destroyers wasn’t an accident at all — it was an inspired plan, a work of true genius. And so now only one question remains — what is the name of that daring young officer, that brilliant captain?

I won’t tell you his name, but if you search your heart, you’ll find you’ve known the answer all along.

– Reinman

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Star Wars characters go around mispronuncing each others’ names all the time — that’s pretty common Knerd Knowledge.

You know, Han pronounces his own name like “Con,” and so does everyone else, but then Lando comes along and starts saying “Han” like “Can,” and so everyone starts saying it that way for awhile — just to try something new.  And Leia’s name is “LAY-uh” unless it’s some old dude saying it — then it’s “LEE-uh.”

I get it.  Mostly.

But there’s a certain, one-time mispronuncation that I’ve never heard anyone discuss, and yet it seems way more out-of-place than all the others put together.

It’s this.

Quoth Darth Vader (as the Death Star approaches Yavin 4): “This will be a day long remembered. It has seen the end of Kenobi and will soon see the end of the Rebellion.”

It’s a fairly memorable line, and a fun little scene — Vader staring, I assume, into the middle-distance while Tarkin gives him a look like who gave you permission to start randomly monologuing?

The only problem is, Vader completely butchers “Kenobi.”

In the line, he says it “KIN-OH-bee” when, of course, everyone knows it should be pronounced “keh-NOH-bee.”

I know that doesn’t look like a big deal, especially spelled out that way with phonetic-type symbols — like, one syllable is in bold instead of the other one, but who cares? — but it is a big deal because “Kenobi” is one of those names that, once you hear it, is impossible to forget how to pronounce (like, ahem, “Reini”).

I think this is because “Kenobi” — already a great name in and of itself — is made even better by the sing-song rhyme it creates with “Obi-Wan.”

Try it.  ”Obi-Wan Kenobi” (OH-bee-whon keh-NOH-bee).

And now try it again, but this time with the un-stated conclusion of the rhyme:

“Obi-Wan Kenobi-Wan” (OH-bee-whon keh-NOH-bee-whon).

See? Fun!

And unforgettable. So I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I doubt James Earl Jones had ever heard the name “Kenobi” before he recorded the line. After all, he only says the name “Kenobi” once.  For the rest of the movie — indeed (I think) the rest of the trilogy — Vader refers to his old master only as “Obi-Wan.”

(“Obi-Wan is here. The Force is with him.” “Obi-Wan has taught you well.” “Obi-Wan was wise to hide her from me.” “I’ve been waiting for you, Obi-Wan. We meet again, at last. The circle is now complete. When I left you, I was but the learner; now I am the master.”  Obi-Wan: “Only a master of evil, Darth.” — you know, back when “Darth” was obviously Vader’s first name instead of some prequelly title.)

I don’t blame James Earl Jones. He did, after all, record all of his lines in a mere two hours for a tidy $7,000 paycheck. (Nor did Jones, after the fact, seem to be particularly obsessed with the minutia of Star Wars. He’s on record as saying his favorite Darth Vader line is “I have you now, Obi-Wan.” I’ll give you all my Landos if you can find that one in the trilogy.)

But where was the guy in the sound booth? Did he, too, not know the correct pronunciation, or did he not think anyone would notice? Did James Earl Jones receive any direction whatsoever, or was he just tossed a script and told to read? And where were the film editors? Did they not catch the mistake? Or did they not think it was worth the extra 200 bucks to call Jones’s butt back into the studio and have him say it the right way?

This is normally the part where I’d take a shot at George, but this was still the time of young, svelte, killing-himself-just-to-get-his-crazy-little-movie-made George, for whom I have a lot of respect. (As opposed to this George.)

Regardless of who’s ultimately to blame, that line caused me a good deal of confusion as a youngster. So, “this day has seen the end of Kinno Vee,” huh? (Because, if Vader meant “Kenobi,” he would’ve just said “Kenobi.”) So was this “Kinno Vee,” like, the capital city of Alderaan or something? Or maybe it was that guy.

Anyway, unraveling that mystery was almost as hard as figuring out what Obi-Wan meant when he told Luke “A gentleman wastes enough to be traveled lightly.”

But I eventually got it. Obviously, Obi-Wan meant that he (Obi-Wan, a gentleman) was wasting time when he could be hauling Artoo (a decidedly un-light droid) back to his place. Duh.

– Reinman

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I am now going to spoil movies for you, just to be a jerk.

In The Usual Suspects, it turns out that Keyser Soze is really, really mean.

At the end of The Sixth Sense, we learn that Bruce Willis, in a ground-breaking twist, has been bald the whole time.

Speaking of Bruce Willis, in what is arguably an even bigger shocker, we learn at the end of Die Hard 2 that the ultimate villain is not Col. Stuart — as the entire movie leads us to believe — but rather the nefarious Mr. Falcon.

At the end of Star Wars, Luke blows up the Death Star.  It’s awesome.

In Citizen Kane, Citizen Kane says “Rosebud” on his deathbed.  Let me spare you two hours: “Rosebud” was his fourth wife — the shrew owed him money.

– Reinman

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Hustle & Flow and Once would pretty much be the exact same movie if not for significant differences in setting, characters, tone, style, and plot.

(For example, one is set in Memphis, the other in Dublin. One centers around a rapping pimp, the other a guitar-strumming Hoover repairman. And in one, the main character tends to look down while holding a mic and wearing a “D-jay” gold necklace, while in the other, the main character often walks out of the frame on a giant, physics-defying guitar neck.)

But casting aside those minor quibbles, both movies share something at the core — characters who feel compelled to make music. It is no coincidence, then, that the the best scene in Hustle & Flow and the best scene in Once are more alike than not.

In the best Hustle & Flow scene, D-jay is preparing, for the first time, to record the rap lyrics he’s been working on for years, hoping that a career in music will help him escape from his crappy life (because it’s hard out there for a pimp). But things aren’t looking too hopeful. His recording studio is little more than a small bedroom that he’s “soundproofed” by stapling cardboard cartons to the walls, and the person who’s about to lay down the music track is some gangly white geek named “Shelby.”

Shelby begins the session by experimenting on a keyboard, trying out variations on a six-note riff, while D-jay looks on, impassive. But after just a few quick moments, Shelby finds something that works and begins layering the track — hand-claps, and high-hat, and rattles, and snare, and bass — completing a radio-ready music track in about thirty seconds. D-jay, almost involuntarily at first, begins bobbing to the music and then, after his friend Key prompts him, launches into his hook, “Whoop that trick.”

By the end of the song, the bedroom has drawn a little crowd, with D-jay, Shelby, Key, and two of D-jay’s “employees” all waving their arms in the air and hollering “Whoop that trick!” at the top of their lungs, lost in the music and forgetting, for a moment, their hopeless circumstances. (It’s a magical moment, to be sure, and it’s only slightly tempered by the fact that the song is about beating up prostitutes.)

While the best scene from Once doesn’t match that raw energy, it shares in that same thrill of spontaneously creating something special with someone else. In the scene, a street musician, named simply “the Guy,” and a flower vendor, named “the Girl,” are sitting down at a piano in a music shop. The Girl admires the Guy’s songs and wants to accompany him on the piano. After the Guy shows her the sheet music to one of his songs, he begins playing, slowly picking the opening notes on his acoustic guitar while carefully watching the Girl to make sure she’s following along.

Midway through the first verse, the Girl not only is easily keeping pace with the piano, but she begins singing as well, perfectly harmonizing with him. The Guy can only smile. At that moment, it’s become abundantly clear to him that, musically at least, they are completely compatible.

In both scenes, the main characters have a burning drive to create music, but they are unable to reach their full potential alone. So they find help. There is, then, in both scenes, a sense of uncertainty early on, but this soon gives way to trust — once the others prove themselves — followed by complete rapture during the performance.

It is, I think, that spontaneous thrill of creating with others that at least partly explains why Jill and I are on our fourth blog, or why the Colonel and I are beginning Book 2 even while Book 1 remains in limbo, or why I’m constantly collaborating with friends and family to write, shoot, and edit videos that will only be seen by a handful of people.

(Speaking of which, if you’re out there, Professor — soon to be Dr. Professor — I know you’re busy writing about curriculum mapping, and collaborative learning, and, um, other doctorly things, but it’s time to finish The Pilot.)

Like the characters in in those scenes, we’re all seeking that thrill when we create — that sense that, by ourselves, we can be good, but with someone else, we can be something truly special.

That, and money.

– Reinman

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I love The Empire Strikes Back. Obviously. But let’s all be honest for a moment — the battle of Hoth doesn’t make a lick of sense.

Let’s start with the most iconic feature of the battle — the walkers, which are, perhaps, the most impractical war machines ever devised, real or imagined. Now don’t get me wrong — I love the design of the walkers. There is something sublime (read: “terrifying” in the Romantic sense) in watching these hulking machines, these mythological giants, slowly and deliberately lay waste to everything in their path. When the Rebels call for retreat, I get chills every time I see the shot of three walkers simultaneously tilting their heads down — away from strategic targets and toward the soldiers, fleeing across the icy plain with no cover, seconds from being massacred (yet another “chill moment” I forgot to add to that old YNCTwB post.)

But — artistic merit aside — from a strategic standpoint, they’re absolutely ridiculous. They’re comically slow (seriously, when Luke crashes in front of a walker, and one of the feet is descending to crush him, he has enough time to grab a handful of supplies, pour a cup of coffee, and have a nice little chat with ghost-Ben before diving out of the way, right in the nick of time), their weapons only face one direction, and their long legs create a glaring weakness. AT-ATs are slow, gangly, and awkward — not the best combination for an instrument of war. Imagine the Rohirrim riding into the battle of Minas Tirith on a thundering herd of giraffes (actually, that would be pretty awesome).

But it takes two sides to wage the dumbest battle in movie history, and the Rebels certainly pull their weight. Let’s examine their strategy. They’re fighting war machines that, as we’ve already determined, have some pretty obvious limitations. Because the walkers’ guns only face forward, and because it takes so long for walkers to change direction, there is only a very limited area in which they can hurt you — namely, a straight line directly in front of them.

And so what do the Rebels do? They insist on flying straight along this imaginary “hurt line” like they’re on some sort of two-lane highway. Now, doing this once at the beginning of the battle would be bad enough, and yet, every time the movie cuts back to the Snowspeeders, there they are again, flying directly at the front of the walkers. It’s like they’re going out of their way to put themselves in danger. Like, they race past the walkers, and then immediately turn around in a wide loop so they can get shot at again as quickly as possible. As always, I blame the Force.

Clearly, what the Rebels should’ve done was circle the battlefield to get behind the walkers. Then, they could’ve just hovered behind them and blasted the crap of their rear-ends since, you know, there were no guns back there. And by the way, where were the X-wings during all of this? And don’t say they were all escorting the transports because there were a bunch of them just sitting around after the battle. (You remember the scene — it’s when Luke and some random pilot were making upbeat small-talk after their base had just been overrun and all of their friends were either dead or fleeing for their lives.) So that armor was “too strong for blasters,” huh? Why not try a pair of proton torpedoes? They only blew up the Death Star. Morons.

Instead, Luke was too busy giving helpful orders like “attack pattern Delta” (which, apparently, is a very specific attack that involves flying between the legs of one walker and shooting the unimportant, armored top panel of another — if I were in Rogue Squadron, it would be just the sort of hyper-specific attack pattern I would enjoy, if, you know, my life weren’t on the line) and “stay tight and low,” an order he gives while, you guessed it, flying directly at the front of the walkers.

Not Commander Skywalker’s finest hour.

By the way, I realize that George tried to fix the walker design in Episode II with the, um, AAT-TETE. It has six, stubby legs, so it can’t be easily tripped up, and its guns turrets can swivel and point in more than one direction. I guess.

AAT-TETE. Awesome.

So, if you want to argue that the battle of Geoniminsimino is better than the battle of Hoth because the walkers are more practical, feel free to never read this blog again.

On the other hand, I doubt that anyone who bothered to read this entire post is in danger of thinking that.

– Reinman

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