glitter_n_gore

So hey, look at that, it's not March anymore! And it's DEFINITELY not February anymore. What happened? I'll tell you: I didn't finish my retrospective. Surprise! I'll tell you what else though: I kinda felt like I was biting off more than I could chew, trying to cover ten years in that time span. So I'm going to leave the Box Office Retrospective at 2010 for now, and come back with the next five years for the next Women In Horror / Women's History Month in 2016. Sound good? Good.

That in mind, I'd like to return to my Film of the Book series soon, since I finally got a chance to see Gone Girl and it's every bit as brilliant as you've heard. I also saw both The Maze Runner and Seventh Son, which were varying degrees of ridiculous and try-too-hard, but surprisingly enjoyable despite--or perhaps because of--those things. I'll expand on that later.

But first, I need to talk about something more important to me than box office numbers, badass women in horror movies, or even vampires.

I need to talk about Star Wars.


A long time ago, in a bedroom not so far away, I watched Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope for the very first time. I was ten years old, it was my brother's bedroom in my dad's house (because that's where the TV went--can't remember why), and we had pizza. Every Friday night was Pizza Movie Night, and this week Dad decided to introduce us to some of, in his view, the greatest movies ever made.

Boy was he right, because I absolutely fell in love with it, and turned into an obsessed superfan overnight. We only watched the first movie that night, then The Empire Strikes Back the next week, and finally Return of the Jedi the week after that. For a long time I didn't even own the movies in any format, and Dad eventually (having only rented them previously) got a VHS box set that we wore out gleefully for the next ten years or so. I didn't get the trilogy on DVD until the 2 disc Limited Edition set came out in 2006, including both the "original" "theatrical" cuts of all three movies, and the re-edits that came out in cinemas before the prequels were announced. (I'll talk about those re-edits . . . later.)

Then in 1999, we got Episode I: The Phantom Menace. I had not yet learned to be skeptical about revisitations to beloved movie franchises, mostly because I hadn't seen it done to anything I really loved before, so I had no reason not to expect anything but the best. My dad, my brother and I waited in a long, long line wrapped around the block on opening weekend to see it, and came out of the theater . . . underwhelmed, maybe, but not disappointed to the levels of other superfans who couldn't stand the thing. It didn't incite the levels of rage in me that, say Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull did. Its greatest sin is being a bit boring and talky, which I can live with.

However, by the time Attack of the Clones came out in 2002, not only were there significantly lower expectations across the board, but it also had to compete with Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter for devotees. That's when the fandom wars really heated up. I remember a lot of conversations like this one from Clerks 2. <<<<< Clip not AT ALL Safe For Work by the way, being a Kevin Smith movie and all. (Also, warning for vomit, if you're sensitive to that kind of thing like me.) It felt a bit unfair that I had to pick a side between LOTR and Star Wars, because while I basically loved them both, I was not blind to the many, many flaws in the prequel trilogy. I hated Attack of the Clones, and if not for having grown up with the original trilogy and gotten them embedded into my DNA at an early age, I may have dropped the series altogether. At the same time, LOTR was a new entity. It was right up my alley in terms of mythic archetypes and epic fantasy, but I grew up with Star Wars. I'd known those characters so long, they felt like old friends, and despite all my issues with Episodes I & II, I can't help but get chills when I hear John Williams' score over those opening credits.

So, because I'm a devoted, loyal, and eternally optimistic fangirl, I saw Revenge of the Sith despite having been burned before. And it wasn't too bad, that last one. Still not on the level of the original trilogy (and there's a fandom war here too, regarding how you feel about the different timelines, and I'm not going to get into it), but it had higher stakes, a better emotional impact, and more solid, satisfying action than the previous two. And *slightly* better acting and dialogue, but let's be honest, that wasn't a high bar to clear. Plus, there's Ewan MacGregor as Obi-Wan, possibly the most successful case of casting a known actor as a known character in a preexisting franchise and having it still feel like the one we met in A New Hope. It restored my faith somewhat, and in recent years I've gotten a lot less judgy and hateful about the prequel trilogy as a whole.

Now, we have another movie to look forward to: Episode VII: The Force Awakens. As the announcements, casting news, set photographs, and teaser trailers have come out, I've watched the general opinion swing from skeptical and dismissive, to cautiously optimistic, to OMG TAKE MY MONEY WHY ISN'T IT DECEMBER YET!?!?! For the record, I'm firmly in that last one. The overall opinion of fans elsewhere has ebbed and wavered as it's wont to do, but the impression I'm getting is a mostly positive one. People are excited about this movie in a way that I haven't seen for a decade and a half. And that excitement has been a fairly recent phenomenon.

If you're curious as to why the pitch turned so fast in the past couple weeks, you need to see the latest teaser. It feels like a new movie--as in, something that could only happen in the current cinematic climate with all the technology and high resolution cameras and visual effects we have right now. But it also feels very classic and warm and nostalgic. Something about the voiceover, and the music, and the all-too-brief glimpse of the actors, especially at the end, is just right.



Basically, what I'm trying to say here is I am not scared of what to expect anymore. Even with the ups and downs of the prequel trilogy, the fan theories and speculation, the fierce debates over what order to watch the entire saga in and whether or not the prequels "ruin" it, the re-edits and fan edits and reissues, I feel like ^^that^^. Like we're finally back where we belong with this universe. We are home.