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Two and a half more days. Yesssssssss!
When we drove by the theater yesterday, there were people camped out: lawn chairs, tent, clothes-line for laundry. Pretty cool :D
Also, I've never seen anything like the SW blitz in the last few days. It's crazy! And I don't mean the ROTS ads on TV or even the Cartoon Network's rerunning the Clone Wars. Side note: how cute are toon Padme and Anakin? It makes me want to go "awwwwww" just looking at them. I have to say, toon Anakin is so impressively muscled, that Hayden Christensen would have to work out all of his waking hours for the ten next years, every day, plus take steroids, to be THAT buff (also, armpit hair. I am reasonable about male body hair, but it looks like a squirrel is nesting there).
I walked past Burger King today, and there are three separate posters in the window. The newspaper stand had USA Today's review with Yoda on the cover (haven't read it, but they seemed to have loved it, as the quote on the cover said "might be the best one of them all"), and the Burger King ads crack me up. But my faves are the M&M ads. When Vader force-chokes that M&M, the world is better :D The thing is, I am so unfamiliar with the hype. I was in college when TPM opened, thus pretty isolated from RL (also uninterested), and ditto for AotC (though I don't think it had anywhere near as much hype) and this beats LOTR hype hands down. Yesterday's episode of Family Guy ended with the parody of the end of ANH, when Peter recieved an award for saving someone's life and the SW music was playing, Chewy, R2D2 and C3PO were there, and SW music played over credits. Surreal.
Also surreal is that the critics seem to love it. Of course they have problems here and there, but the overwhelmingly positive response surprises me. NYT review was flat out a rave, with the reviewer saying he liked it better than Episode IV(!!) and that it made him feel 11 again.
He also said something in his review that made me think. He said that one realizes how good a movie that is, when one thinks what is has going against it: (1) it goes against optimistic bend of blockbusters, taking a flawed hero and transforming him into horrible villain (not an arc I can think of in any blockbuster) and (2) you know what happens to everyone, and who survives the dangers unscathed. And yet you are completely drawn in.
And this is where Lucas' smart plan comes in. I think the PT has such a resonance precisely because we know how everything is going to end. That way, not only is there no rioting when Hero Anakin turns into Villain Vader (without foreknowledge, it would be like watching LotR and at the end, Frodo claims the ring and becomes evil overlord), but actions are given a layer of meaning, and foreshadowing and complexity. We see the seeds of Vader or of Empire in actions we would not pay much attention to otherwise (e.g. all of Anakin's emotional outbursts or his political comment about dictatorship). In fact, normally an audience wouldn't even see anything wrong with them at all, since the rebel maverick is the standard hero of blockbusters (Tom Cruise in Top Gun saved the day, not crossed over to the Lybians). But something like the tender scene in AotC, where Anakin floats fruit to impress Padme (not something he should do), saying Obi-Wan would be angry, is not just a tender scene any more. It has a shadow of Vader force-choking people in the OT, also using the Force in inappropriate ways.
ETA: USA Today review is here, concluding with "But for adults who may have avoided the series, this is the one to see. Even for non-fans, Revenge of the Sith is engrossing, and fans of the series will likely be over the moon — and into another galaxy — with this film."
When we drove by the theater yesterday, there were people camped out: lawn chairs, tent, clothes-line for laundry. Pretty cool :D
Also, I've never seen anything like the SW blitz in the last few days. It's crazy! And I don't mean the ROTS ads on TV or even the Cartoon Network's rerunning the Clone Wars. Side note: how cute are toon Padme and Anakin? It makes me want to go "awwwwww" just looking at them. I have to say, toon Anakin is so impressively muscled, that Hayden Christensen would have to work out all of his waking hours for the ten next years, every day, plus take steroids, to be THAT buff (also, armpit hair. I am reasonable about male body hair, but it looks like a squirrel is nesting there).
I walked past Burger King today, and there are three separate posters in the window. The newspaper stand had USA Today's review with Yoda on the cover (haven't read it, but they seemed to have loved it, as the quote on the cover said "might be the best one of them all"), and the Burger King ads crack me up. But my faves are the M&M ads. When Vader force-chokes that M&M, the world is better :D The thing is, I am so unfamiliar with the hype. I was in college when TPM opened, thus pretty isolated from RL (also uninterested), and ditto for AotC (though I don't think it had anywhere near as much hype) and this beats LOTR hype hands down. Yesterday's episode of Family Guy ended with the parody of the end of ANH, when Peter recieved an award for saving someone's life and the SW music was playing, Chewy, R2D2 and C3PO were there, and SW music played over credits. Surreal.
Also surreal is that the critics seem to love it. Of course they have problems here and there, but the overwhelmingly positive response surprises me. NYT review was flat out a rave, with the reviewer saying he liked it better than Episode IV(!!) and that it made him feel 11 again.
He also said something in his review that made me think. He said that one realizes how good a movie that is, when one thinks what is has going against it: (1) it goes against optimistic bend of blockbusters, taking a flawed hero and transforming him into horrible villain (not an arc I can think of in any blockbuster) and (2) you know what happens to everyone, and who survives the dangers unscathed. And yet you are completely drawn in.
And this is where Lucas' smart plan comes in. I think the PT has such a resonance precisely because we know how everything is going to end. That way, not only is there no rioting when Hero Anakin turns into Villain Vader (without foreknowledge, it would be like watching LotR and at the end, Frodo claims the ring and becomes evil overlord), but actions are given a layer of meaning, and foreshadowing and complexity. We see the seeds of Vader or of Empire in actions we would not pay much attention to otherwise (e.g. all of Anakin's emotional outbursts or his political comment about dictatorship). In fact, normally an audience wouldn't even see anything wrong with them at all, since the rebel maverick is the standard hero of blockbusters (Tom Cruise in Top Gun saved the day, not crossed over to the Lybians). But something like the tender scene in AotC, where Anakin floats fruit to impress Padme (not something he should do), saying Obi-Wan would be angry, is not just a tender scene any more. It has a shadow of Vader force-choking people in the OT, also using the Force in inappropriate ways.
ETA: USA Today review is here, concluding with "But for adults who may have avoided the series, this is the one to see. Even for non-fans, Revenge of the Sith is engrossing, and fans of the series will likely be over the moon — and into another galaxy — with this film."
