Friday, May 26, 2017

Stay Wars: 40 years old

Forty years ago today I was sitting in a local movie theater with my sister and ex-boyfriend, watching the first Star Wars film (prequels don't count) ... ‘Star Wars’ Opened 40 Years Ago: Background Actors Recount How Movie Changed Their Lives. I had been a fan of science fiction since I was a kid and was so happy that someone had made this movie. Luke Skywalker was my favorite character (still is) but I liked everyone and everything about it ...

And I love its latest iteration too, which still retains Luke Sywalker :)

Did you guys see the first movie too?

10 comments:

  1. Never saw any of the star wars series.

    I started out as a movie fan in college, as part of the film classics society. We brought popular movies to campus (shortly after they ran in theatres)and used the profits to bring film classics (mainly foreign films) to campus. They were also privately screened and discussed by the film classics club.

    I continued viewing high quality films in graduate school; we had a small theatre that specialized in them. My companions were a mathematics graduate student and his wife. John knew his films and would analyze each one in terms of the whole history of film making.

    This he did at our lunches when he was not explaining to me his latest adventure in mathematics. We had met when I took a graduate course in distance geometry taught by a world expert in the field (who was very entertaining).

    After graduate school I lost my community of critics, and my interest in films. Stars came later.

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    1. Jack! You must watch movies! :)

      I watched a lot of movies at college too - many by Ingmar Bergman. One I especially remember was by Sergei Eisenstein about St. Alexander Nevsky and the famous battle of the Orthodox Russians against the Catholic Teutonic Knights on a frozen lake.

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  2. My brother and I saw it together and laughed our heads off. Loved it. It was funny and kind of a satire on old time sci fi serials. We loved the characters. The other two entries in the original series were disappointing.

    And then there was Jar-Jar Binks. Meesa no want see no sequels!

    I opted out of the later iterations. I guess my chloridian levels just weren't up to snuff.

    I have to wonder why Carrie Fisher caught all that flak for not being cute enough. Hamill looks pretty rough and a little porky. Not that I don't like a man with some miles, but women are sure held to an impossible standard.

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    1. Jean, yeah I tried to watch the "prequels" that came after the first three but didn't like them at all.

      But the newer one that came out last year I did like a lot. That was the one with Hamil and Fisher and Ford, and I remember how mean everyone was to Fisher about her appearance. Sexism. That actually made me get interested in her and I read one of her books, The Princess Diarist. Sad that she died.

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  3. Liked the original three. Will watch the rest one time when I can catch it on TV but it's pretty much a Disney industrial assembly line now.

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    1. Yes, but if you like the characters, it can still be fun. I didn't care for the films that came out in the middle after the original three, but the most recent ones are better, if formulaic, I think. Disney and J.J. Abrams own the movie world ;)

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  4. Star Wars, kind of a three generation thing for us. We saw the first one twice, once the first time it came through, and then when it came back as second run. That time we took the kids, aged 2 and 6. They were hooked. It was Star Wars everything for the next few years. Didn't have to wonder what to get for Christmas and birthdays. My oldest got a Millenium Falcon for one birthday. It was played with pretty hard and spent some time in the Mom Body Shop getting epoxied back together. The boys would either play "big space" or "little space". Big space was when they played that they were the characters, little space was when they played with their action figures. My husband and I only saw the first 3, and then "The Force Awakens". Of course the boys saw them all. Now our oldest (soon to by 9 yrs.)granddaughter is a fan, too. She binge-watched all the old ones, and then went with her dad and uncle to "Rogue". My son asked for the Millenium Falcon to be taken out of storage in the closet. He's going to trick it out for Miss E.

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  5. My husband and I only saw the first 3, and then "The Force Awakens"

    Me too, except I just recently rented Rogue One. Had to see that one because it had one of my sister's favorite actors, Danish Mads Mikkelsen.

    So you liked The Force Awakens? Did you happen to see this funny bit from Saturday Night Live about the bad guy, Kylo Ren? ... link :)

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  6. The SNL video is pretty funny! I thought The Force Awakens was good. I liked Rey. Couldn't stand Kylo though, the patricidal little twerp. I was sad that Han Solo died, but I guess that's how Harrison Ford wanted it.

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  7. Yes, sad. But I guess they are already putting together a new movie about the "young" Han Solo.

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