Yup, I finally went and saw this wretched bit of crap that Lucas put out. It was less horrifically bad than I had anticipated but still failed to be a good movie. The dialog was cheesy and the acting wooden. In particular “Annie” aka Darth Vader blew chunks, though he did get slightly better once he was in the Vader suit. To be fair though, the special effects were kind of nice; nothing particularlly innovative (just lots of CG). Still the massive battle scenes were cool. The individual battles of Jedi vs. Sith were just as cheesy as the dialog with tons of flips and swirls that almost looked impressive but were actually a massively dumb way to fight. Overall, I’ll give E3:RotS 1 star out of 5 (vs. -24 for E1:tPM).
As my long time readers might recall, I watched a show called Firefly a while back and greatly enjoyed it. This week, thanks to one of my co-workers, I had an opporunity to drive 5 & 1/2 hours to plant my butt in a packed movie theater at 10 o’clock with a broken air conditioner. That is to say, I was able to attend a special preview showing of the Firefly movie, Serenity. Though the movie hasn’t quite been completed yet; it was fanatastic!
It started off with a short speech by Joss Whedon. He basically thanks the fans for their support and asked them to continue that support by asking them to help promote the movie. Then the movie was off and running. It appears to pick up at least a couple of years after the t.v. show ended1. Not all of the crew is still flying on Serenity though most are. The Alliance is still after River and they seem more desperate than ever to get her back. Desperate to the point where they’ve sent an unamed agent after her. During this agent’s introduction, we get treated to see a holographic recording of Simon rescuing River from the facility where they were experimenting on her; as well as finding out one of the reasons the Alliance wants her back so badly.2 Overall, I thought the story worked very well for fans of Firefly but I’m not sure how well it will play with people who never watched the tv show. The movie doesn’t have any big-name actors and it hasn’t been getting much in the way of promotion from the studio. I hope it does well at the box office (mostly in hopes of the tv show being revived).
Closing thougts about the preview:3
- The preview didn’t have much in the way of music. This really bothered some people and it is one of the things that they’re still working on.
- There weren’t any credits; again this is something they’re working on.
- Supposedly there were some placeholders for special effects that aren’t complete yet, but I didn’t catch them.
1 Supposedly there is a comic book coming out in July (?) that covers what happens between the show & the movie.
2 I bet you’d like it if I told you why, wouldn’t you?. Too bad, this preview-review is going to be spoiler free. :p
3 Sorry, but 11 hours of driving in 2 days plus watching the movie at 10 o’clock, staring straight up at the screen from the front row, doesn’t exactly leave me pumped up for writing an indepth review. Maybe I’ll have something more to say after the official opening on 30 Sept 2005.
I’ve only got 2 links from Pukka this week, as I took a couple says off from work.1
1 There’ll be a post up about that later.
Cameron Marlow is a grad student at the MIT Media Lab. To finish his Ph.D., Mr. Marlow is going to be analyzing the results of a survey “about how people use their weblogs and their general communication behavior.” To get the best results, he needs a large sample size so if you’ve got ~15 minutes or so; why not help the poor guy out? Link found via Dougal Campbell.
I noticed this over on Boing Boing:
URGENT: Call your Senator RIGHT NOW or live with the goddamned Broadcast Flag forever!
Danny sez,We’ve heard rumors that the Broadcast Flag that Cory, the EFF, and a coalition of pressure groups have fought so hard against (and beat in the courts) will be sneaked back via an amendment to the giant Senate Appropriations Bill in a sub-committee at 2PM EST on Tuesday 21st. This week is Hollywood’s last chance to ram the flag past Congress, and they’re working hard to get it under the radar.
There’s no time to write letters or start a media campaign…
Be sure to let your senator know you oppose this fair-use killer! If you’re not sure the best way to contact your senator; then check out this EFF Action Alert for more details.
Update 2005-06-22: For those of you who are unfamiliar with what the Broadcast Flag is…
A broadcast flag is a set of status bits (or “flags”) sent in the data stream of a digital television program that indicates whether or not it can be recorded, or if there are any restrictions on recorded content. Possible restrictions include inability to save a digital program to a hard disk or other non-volatile storage, inability to make secondary copies of recorded content (in order to share or archive), forceful reduction of quality when recording (such as reducing high-definition video to the resolution of standard TVs), and inability to skip over commercials.
Taken from Wikipedia.