I got a kick out of this guy's comments...
Not so, apparently, for Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. Man, I thought it was terrible. And you know what? Part of the reason I thought it was so terrible was because of what I'd learned from Mr. Roth! The opening shot of the battle on Kashyyyk I thought to myself "Now there's a crowded CGI action shot, I don't even know what to focus on. As JD might say, when everything's important enough to be on fire and exploding, nothing's important." Really, I thought both of those sentences.
Much worse, of course, for me was the acting. Perhaps the most important thing the new trilogy has done for me is to reveal that good (or even great) film actors are entirely at the mercy of their directors. Lucas has a deep and mysterious power to make any actor suck. In this installment, only McDiarmid seems able to resist the influence and deliver an interesting performance. I would also concede that McGregor's last speech on the Terrifying Hillside of Lava was pretty good.
How does Lucas do it? How does he suck the life out of these otherwise incandescent performers? I'm not sure of all of his techniques, but a very simple one he uses repeatedly is the Reaction Pause. It goes like this:
Actor 1: (pause, look troubled) My people are suspicious of you.
Actor 2: (pause, smile slightly, then look troubled) Well of course they tell you that. That's what they want you to think.
Actor 1: (pause, look away briefly, look troubled, look back and then look defiant) Oh, do they?
These Reaction pauses suck the energy from a scene like a giant space leech imbued with Dark Force Suckage Power. It's such a simple acting no-no. They teach it in every acting class I've ever taken, every director I've ever worked for will, at some point during rehearsal, say "Pick up your cues, people." Which means very simply that you say your line as soon as the other actor is finished and you react while you're saying your line!