Jeff Tweiten has been waiting in line outside the IMAX theatre in Seattle, Washington for FIVE MONTHS to see Star Wars Episode III.
Some suspect this must be a publicity stunt, perhaps engineered by the Star Wars publicity department itself. I would agree. I've also noticed a lot of stories on the news about how much money businesses are going to lose on the opening day of Star Wars because of employees cutting work to see the movie. I also suspect that story is being fed to the media by the Star Wars people. (via
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From the Guardian review:
"Dramatically weightless... I looked blearily around the cinema and sensed thousands of scalps failing to prickle. We had all been bored into submission long ago... pointlessly long and artificially complicated... the most unconvincing evil act you can imagine, an event weirdly neutralised by the bloodless unreality that surrounds everything... A range of scandalously dull secondary characters - people such as Senator Bail Organa, played by Jimmy Smits, and Samuel L Jackson as the fiercely uninteresting Mace Windu. They are acting as if on some kind of medication... a heavy blanket of self-consciousness descends, under which they must act out the stilted myth on which depend the hopes and expectations of millions of fans... All too clearly a product of George Lucas's overweening production giant Industrial Light and Magic: no magic, little light, but an awful lot of heavy industry."
Why oh why must my pessimism about George Bloody Lucas always prove well-placed?
The real news story would have to be about how much money moviegoers are going to lose because they get suckered into overpaying to see a second-rate sci-fi retread.
Would someone tell me where Lucas gets these gawd-awful names for all his characters?
Puh-leeeese!
Regarding the movie itself, I'll be seeing it in.... eight hours. I'll reserve judgement until then, but everything I've heard up til now has been 'Good. Not great, but good.'
Me... I'll wait till the later part of the weekend. Or next week.
It's obvious to me that it's directly being marketed to multiple demographics. You can get a lightsaber spoon out of a kid's cereal, there are Star Wars ring tones for the teens & 20s, and for the adults, well, that's just simple - the memory of a movie watched long, long ago, in a dark theater, far, far away.
Hmmm.
Obi Wan is actually Japanese for "great belt", which is most likely a reference to the martial arts that Lucas got most of his inspiration for the Force from in the first place (lots of the metaphysical theory is borrowed straight from Aikido, I've heard).
Mas Amedda is something you tell your latino gardner when he asks what you want in the backyard, of course.
Bib Fortuna allegedly came from a caterer on the set of either Return of the Jedi or Empire. Lucas asked why a key grip had gotten down on his knees, and the sandwich man replied, "He beg for tuna..."
Darth Vader=Dark Father.
Lots of the others are just made-up words that are meant to sound exotic. If you've ever played DND and tried to come up with names for elves, you know just the boat Lucas found himself in, only he didn't fall back on the infamous Axbeard/Leafmoon pattern....
Why pick on Lucas? Why not ask where Tolkein got his names? (well, his research was more in-depth, but still)
And while Obi is the Japanese word for 'belt' (not just martial arts, also the wide belt that one wears when wearing a kimono, etc), and there is a character pronounced "wan" that means talent or ability, I have no idea whether the story is true but it at least sounds plausible.
Oh, by the way, that last sentence was another rhetorical question, everybody. You don't have to answer it. Really.
Japanese is a complex language (I'm sure this isn't news). The word Wan can mean several things depending on which kanji is used to make the sound, but one of the more straightforward translations is Ten Thousand. In Japanese and Chinese culture, this is how you say A Great Many or Everything: the Ten Thousand Gods of Shinto, or golly, your mom must have made Ten Thousand dumplings.
It's easy to see how you can go from Ten Thousand to the meaning of A Lot to the meaning of Really Great and Super. For instance, Wan Hu is Chinese for Ten Thousand Tigers--which is a way to say that one has great courage and ferocity.
If you take the Obi to mean a belt with the implication that the belt in question is a martial arts belt, and thus a symbol of accomplishment and wisdom, then Obi Wan means Ten Thousand Belts, or alternately, Very Great Wisdom and Accomplishment.
Aren't Asian languages neat, with their idiomatic cross-pollination of symbolism? It's so poetic.
Ask me about the Chinese aphorism "Killing a chicken in front of a monkey" sometime.
Mas, of course, is Spanish for 'more', and Amedda is a popular species of front yard shrubbery. I don't really know if that's where Lucas got it, but that's the joke that's been going around in geekdom for a few years now.
The Beg for Tuna story is supposedly true but hasn't been confirmed. I first heard it in the pages of Toyfare magazine, actually.
Darth Vader isn't mangled German, it's Dutch. (Whether you want to say that Dutch is just mangled German is up to you.)
And my hubby is determined to get our kid to call him Vader. (But it's not like Darth's name at all, it sort of rhymes with water. V-ah-der)