No - I am your father.

The Empire Strikes Back Is One Of The Greatest Motion Pictures Ever Created
Notice how I said the uber-snobbish "motion pictures" instead of "movies"or the slightly snobby "films." It makes my opinion sound important and makes me seem in-the-know about such motion-picture-related matters. I've been mulling over where the prequel trilogy went wrong and I've narrowed it down to EVERY SECOND OF FOOTAGE IN EPISODES I & II & MUCH OF EPISODE III. Some more specific problem points however:

• First of all, in Empire Yoda is not a cartoon action hero. He does not speak Yoda-speak on every line to the point that it sounds absurdly stupid like "Go, I will. Good relations with the Wookies, I have". Yoda should have been used sparingly in the prequels.
• The films should have began with Anakin as an older teen, not a whiny boy. Furthermore, Anaking should have been played by an actor with a much stronger screen presence than Hayden Christiansen. Same goes for Portman. Good actress in other stuff, but doesn't have the strength or add the liveliness to her performance to make her interesting. Carrie Fisher would so kick her ass in a fight. Even now.
• Lucas should have bothered rewatching the original trilogy before making the new films. He may have noticed that they were not part of an epic theatrical opera, and that the actors in those films actually acted, rather than doing what Simon accurately calls putting on an "acting voice." They sound like they're trying to do Shakespeare half the time, only with Lucas's shit lines to read (which get away with their cheesiness in the originals BECAUSE of the American-hero way they're played out). Lucas obviously thought the whole Anakin-transformation story had to be extremely serious, forgetting that Luke's story was fun yet still almost led him to being converted to the dark side (obviously he wouldn't have crossed-over so "almost" may be a tad misleading, but what I mean is that with Anakin's ambitions and what had happened in his life, the same arc for Luke plus these Anakin-specific-factors could have seen Anakin go to the dark side in an original-trilogy-esque space-adventure trilogy).
• A big problem I think is that when Lucas realised how much *could* be done with today's technology, he didn't seem to consider whether or not it *should* be used to such an over-saturating extent. The new films seem so out-of-whack with the old ones with their clustered artifical cities etc. The old movies basically stuck to simple landscapes like the swamps of Dagobah, the desert of Tattoine, the frozen plains of Hoth, and the jungle of Endor. Small gripe? No way. It changes the whole feel and mood of the film. Big problem in the middle of all that is that they applied this "can-do, will-do" attitude to the cinematography too and neglected to use angles which added to the films, but rather those that "looked cool." Empire Strikes Back (which has the greatest score of any film in history, just thought I'd say) is a perfect example of masterfully constructed mood. Only Episode III even attempts to recapture this.
• And related to that landscape thing, when they weren't at those places they were on an enemy ship on some mission, or else fighting shit in space inside the Falcon. They weren't off having little political debates and I believe that this may have been the prequel trilogy's cardinal sin; it didn't know how to do what it wanted to do. Or maybe didn't know what it wanted to do. Either way, the plots are not simple adventures which along the way develop (through efficient means) relationships between characters and advance the big-picture-plot, but rather the plots are overly-complicated by uninteresting politics, and the adventures they DO embark on are of course are too CG-overloaded (see above).
• General Grievous is another cartoon character that should have been either omitted or, if required for the plot, been some sort of human character. Like Dooku. Ie. JUST HAVE DOOKU.
• The lightsabre fights were another case of overdoing things. Gone was the grace of the slow, calculating mind-battles of the originals. Here, Yoda flips around like an epileptic garden gnome and brute force seems to bring about victory in most cases. Anakin vs Dooku in Episode III was closer to the originals though I guess the "feel" still isn't there because of the CG backgrounds which give this and every other scene an artificial feel.

And these points are on-top of the obvious things like Jar-Jar and calling Anakin "Annie."

Episode III at least was a move towards the type of film we wanted to see, but was of course stuck within the confines of the "style" of the previous two films in the prequel series. I think in hindsight there shouldn't have been 3 new movies. There should have been 1 movie discovering Anakin etc. while setting-up the rise of the Empire as a background sub-plot, and then a second concluding film having that sub-plot rise into the foreground a bit more. We didn't need to know the origins of the Queen's political struggles on Naboo and all that shit. Maybe Star Wars geeks who read the novels and fanfic background info want to see it but it's too far removed from what the trilogy was about. Keep. Things. Simple. Of course, this two-part prequel series idea runs into a problem in that re-naming the first film "Episode IV: A New Hope" in the 1979 Star Wars re-release kind of left little room for negotiation.

Some More On The Oscars
From: http://www.the-deli.org/item/239

"What the fuck is with the Best Actresses though? Judi Dench could sit on a chair and look straight out of a window and critics would call it a "Masterpiece of unspoken virtue" or "Splendidly emotive and minimalist" and say that Dench is "surely the frontrunner for this years Best Actress Oscar" Her Mrs Henderson movie is supposed to be total ass."

Hehe.