Hmm, I guess I left this entry in the preview window instead of submitting it yesterday morning. Anyway, the trip to Waterloo was fun. We didn’t really know what to expect hanging out at the house of a couple of CS profs, but it turned out to be a good time. Their two young boys had plenty of cool tools to keep us amused. On with the delayed material …
Yes, but maybe she’s just a lazy whore. That happens, right? They can’t all have hearts of gold and good work ethics.
Wow, it’s a Saturday and I’m actually at home. But not for too long. Luke will be picking me up in a little while and we’ll be heading to Waterloo, meeting up with Jen and some others, then going to his supervisor’s to celebrate him finishing off his Masters.
Last Saturday, Jen hosted a Wonderfalls marathon. We crammed a surprising number of people in her room, including me, Luke, one of her roommates and a couple other friends. I went early to catch the whole thing and listened to Luke’s advice and took the GO bus instead of dealing with downtown Toronto traffic and finding parking near Jen’s. And at $4.15 it’s is a reasonable deal, especially considering what I might have had to pay for parking anyway.
While we were there, Luke and I made some last minute plans to try and catch a midnight showing of Revenge of the Sith. There was some ambiguous info as to showings and ticket availability at the Famous Players and AMC web sites, which only lead to frustration on Friday afternoon when I tried to find out more. What kind of lousy customer service operation doesn’t have the option to speak to humans? Must be SOP in the theatre business. So after work on Monday I stopped off at the AMC across the street, and then the Silver City near home. The AMC had 4 or 5 showings with plenty of seats left, whereas the Silver City had only 2, one of which was already sold out. So we made the choice of going to AMC and I picked up our tickets on Tuesday.
We got to the theater a little after nine on Wednesday night, and there was already a lineup of a good 150 people or so. They just had one big queue and directed people to the right auditorium once they let us in around 10:30. We got good seats, although the theater wasn’t so full that people had to take the crappy ones right at the front.
The movie itself? Wicked. Definitely the best of the prequels so far; I’ll have to watch it a few more times, but a tentative ranking puts it at or near A New Hope as #2 in the series. This was definitely the quality people were hoping for from the past two movies, and if Lucas had delivered something like this from the get go, some of the poorer aspects would be more easily forgiven (there are some weak moments in RotS, but they are toned down here).
The movie is overrated. Certainly it improves on the action, but padme dying because she “lost the will to live” was moronic. Darth Vader shouting “nooooooo” also was a bummer. George Lucas needs to stick to coming up with story ideas, and leave the actual implementation to others.
Definitely ranks below IV-VI, still better than I-II though.
There’s no shortage of silliness in the original trilogy (even before some of the Special Edition modifications). It’s more the vision, ideas, and spectacle that I want from the movies than the execution. I’ve found that people who didn’t grow up with the originals are much more critical and just don’t get it like we do.
The offshoot material helps fill in the logic and pacing holes of the movies, but the films are the basis for the SW universe and I rank Sith quite highly. We’ll see how that holds up as the years go by.