| 16 may 2002 "-you're not all-powerful -well i SHOULD be" i decided last night during my shower (taken at 4am) that star wars is kinda like good porn. both movies know what they do well, and they don't really stray from the primary purpose: delivering pleasure. i mean, both are kind of campy and fun, and the visuals are stunning... and honestly, if you go for the deep dialogue and the brilliant acting, then you must be really clueless. it's all about the money shot in these movies... and the dialogue is just a device used to get from one money shot to another. to those critics who want more artful dialogue... so imagine some character in _attack of the clones_ goes into a beautiful soliloquy. that would just be out of place! this might not make much sense, but i think that we *expect* bad dialogue from lucas. i was trying to compare this movie to another special-effects laden epic, _lord of the rings_. but from the latter movie, i expected better scripting, because well, tolkein was a writer. but still... i reiterate... star wars is like porn; if you treat it as such and just get off on the action, then it's good shit. adam's pictures of the night are here. adam got to the theater over 6 hours before the 12:01am showing, and i got there around 7:30 or so after going home, changing, and setting my vcr to record the _dawson's_ finale and _felicity_. the line wasn't too bad when i arrived, and i was pleased to hear that there were going to be FIVE simultaneous showings at midnight, so it's not like the three of us (dishi was the third) would get screwed by making it into the best theatre but being forced to sit in shitty seats. when i called adam earlier, there was all this buzz of conversation in the background. adam told me, "i'm standing next to luke skywalker!" and i thought, "oh fuck. i'm going to be with all these geeks for HOURS." but when i got there, the skywalker guy was actually really cool. his name was milton, and he had an amazing homemade x-wing pilot jumpsuit, complete with helmet! he had some silver accessories, so you can guess that i eagerly asked him about them. the bullets on his belt were actually whistles, and the flares that were strapped to his boots were toilet roll bars! wow. ingenious. milton got so many people asking him for photo ops. i liked him because he was obviously a fanatic, but he didn't have that maladjusted dork syndrome. i think one of the women there was his wife (kinda cute), and one of the first thing i noticed was the blazing rock on her left ring finger. for the first two or three hours, i was pretty bored. i called quite a few people on my cell phone (thank god for those things), but i'm glad i didn't smoke as much as i thought i would. but as the opening time drew closer, i got more and more excited. and hungry, too! for the first time in years, i bought food at the theatre: a scoop of pistachio nut ice cream and a chocolate coconut pecan thing. both were good at first, but had i finished them both, i would have puked. there were lots of stanford people there. which made me feel hella old. there were these two stanford girls that sat next to us (and left later on), and i swear one of them looked 12. dishi said that she looked 16, but either way, that's more than a decade younger than me. i remember feeling that i wish _episode I_ had come out when i was in college... it must be so fun to go with a huge throng, on a school night no less! the crowd was rather obnoxious during the previews, and i was like, "oh shit. this is gonna suck." especially during the lil bow wow movie preview _like mike_. and then, during that really annoying fandango commercial, people just started jeering. there's that fine line between being animated and being really obnoxious... but luckily, once the movie started, the audience was respectfully quiet. except during the funny parts and the horribly cheesy parts. oh, at the beginning of the 007 preview, there was this sea of curves in the opening shot. it looked like an ocean of breasts (without the nipplage). turns out i wasn't that far from the truth... they were in fact women's butts undulated in this arena of orgiastic density. one of the things that i liked was that the audience had done its homework. we all knew that the _matrix_ preview was coming, and when that first trademark green hiragana-like streak dribbled down the screen, everybody cheered. the visuals looked amazing, but at the end, the numbers "2003" appeared. everybody groaned in dismay. :) and the movie? well, i'm not going to reveal anything, but like i said in the beginning, if you know what to expect, then the movie will totally deliver as promised. the first half was kind of slow, and the pacing and ping-ponging of scenes between two locations was kind of annoying, but all of that is just setup for the 2nd half. and it's a glorious motherfucker of a 2nd half. lightsabers bring out this pseudo-autistic trance in me. it is possibly the coolest invention in the fantasy world. when i saw _the phantom menace_, i got to the theater at 11pm for the 1am showing. it sucked. the movie sucked, the experience sucked... and i promised i would never do it again. but i'm so glad i went last night. i can't wait to see the movie again. when i got home, my whole body was buzzing. i was afraid i wouldn't be able to sleep (luckily i was wrong). the first thing i did was log on and write to myself: there's something incredibly satisfying about walking out of the theater and knowing for a *fact* that all over the pacific time zone, thousands upon thousands of people are feeling the exact same thing i am feeling... the awe at seeing something fucking spectacular. if there is such a thing as a mass consciousness, _star wars_ is one of the things that taps into it with force. forgive me for the little punny thing at the end. puns are the lowest form of humor. :) yoda is a studmuffin. |