Better movies through Rains

Lileks snippet of the day:

There is no movie on earth that cannot benefit from the presence of Claude Rains. If I could redo the Star Wars sequel I would have made Yoda look like him and sound like him. Shocked. Shocked am I to gambling find here.

I concur, although I think the syntax needs to be Yoda'd up some more. Shocked I am gambling to find here. Shocked here am I gambling to find. There's probably at least one language where that order is allowed.

Speaking of ways to improve the Star Wars prequels, I've got some ideas of my own. If only intellectual property laws allowed, some spectacular fan-written remakes could be made. (And I could have all the music I want. Whose idea was intellectual property, anyway? Ah, les frances.)

The fundamental problem with the prequels is, of course, that the multiple "payoff" moments failed to, well, pay off. Anakin's final turn to the Dark Side? Psychologically ridiculous. His physical transformation into Vader? All I remember is the cheesy Noooooooooo! The Jedi
completely whiff the Sith threat and get cut down from behind, and the only pathos comes from the slo-mo and John Williams's soundtrack. The romance: less chemistry than my wife and I had the first time we dated (if you were around, you remember). The dialog: a ninth-grader could have written it (heck, I could have written it).

Where was I going with this? Oh, so my main idea is to increase the tragedy of the Jedi by having them reject a genuine offer from rebel systems to oppose the Sith. If that sounds familiar, it's because Count Dooku made a bogus offer along those lines in the second movie. You have in these systems the seed of what eventually becomes the rebel alliance, maybe even some figures that show up in the original movies. The tragedy is that the Jedi join the proto-Imperial forces in hunting these rebels down and destroy their best hope of defeating the Sith.

You have any ideas? What would you change about the movies? Anything's fair game, plot, casting, set design, characterization. Just don't say anything against Jar-Jar Binks. I love Jar-Jar Binks.