Catchy Name Needed

I counted, and I had some thirty-five messages with titles obviously referring to Roe v Wade in my inbox today (and even more that were not so obvious, I found when I started looking further). I suppose this mostly reflects how much e-mail I l allow various Democratic/liberal-leaning groups to send me, but still, that's a lot. I don't even want to get into the politics of the whole thing, I'd probably end up making myself ill and probably delete the whole thing in the end anyway. Let's just say I'm profoundly grateful to be past menopause. I always feel for the people who have to make that decision, and it's about to get much much worse, of course.

Hmm, is Yoda here really the only Star Wars icon I brought over from Livejournal? Apparently so. I usually only use that one during November or December, since I manifestly don't post every day for most of the year. I'm doing good to post a couple of times a month, usually. (In the geek realm, I have icons here for Marvel (Black Widow), DC (Wonder Woman), two Buffy quotes, Narnia, and Star Trek, in addition to Yoda.)

Yesterday was our 35th wedding anniversary. We didn't exactly do anything fantastically celebratory - we went out to eat Saturday (Mexican), went to a movie Sunday (The Northman), and dawdled around at home yesterday and picked out an old-favorite movie to watch in the evening. (I suppose it says a lot about us that this was Terminator 2, and.we enjoyed it tremendously. It had been quite a long time since I'd seen it.)

The Northman will not be on my list of favorite movies I've seen this year, but I'm sort of glad I saw it just the same. It was...weirdly old-fashioned. It wasn't actually as violent as I expected - although I'd say that it's still pretty violent unless you watch a lot of that kind of thing. "Well-made but incredibly gloomy" might be the short version of my review.

(And the movie we saw the previous weekend, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, was a hoot. I really enjoyed it. I'm not a huge Nick Cage fan, but Pedro Pascal made up for that, and they were great as a duo.)




===============================================

Movies seen in a theater in 2022:

1. The Northman
2. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
3. Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
4. Everything Everywhere All At Once
5. The Batman (twice)
6. Cyrano
7. Belfast
8. Spider-Man: No Way Home (our third time seeing it)
9. Ghostbusters: Afterlife (our second time seeing it) 

...and Rob also saw:

• X
• The Cursed
• Scream

Here's something that's not about The Mandalorian! (Still Star Wars, but hey, I gotta write about something!)

I watched the Lego Star Wars Holiday Special, and it was pretty funny. I've never seen the old one.

I don't know if younger people understand this, but in 1978 you couldn't just tape things off the TV - I think that technology was probably in its infancy then, but normal people didn't start having VCRs and cable and stuff til the 80s. Something would be on at 8:00, say, on one of the maybe five channels we had at the time -- and if you didn't watch it then you were out of luck. You might not see it again for years. In fact, did they ever repeat the Star Wars Holiday Special at all? I just heard rumors about how terrible it was, later on.

Anyway, I had the vague idea that it had something to do with Life Day and Chewie's family, but that's about all I know about the original. I just looked on Wikipedia and it actually had Harvey Korman and Bea Arthur (I had no idea, but that is so very 70s, Harvey Korman was in everything).

There is some stuff about Life Day and Chewie's family in the new one, but there's also Rey attempting to train Finn, followed by a highly unlikely plot about Rey and BB8 jumping around in time to see various jedis and their padawans. Clearly that's not based on anything in the old one, since there was nothing but the original movie to jump to, at the time. It was silly, but it's Lego Star Wars, that's what you expect. Anyway, I enjoyed it. I've actually seen it twice, because Rob expressed a desire to watch something Christmassy, and I said, "Oh, I know something!" He liked it too.

(And Wikipedia also said that in fact, no, they did NOT ever repeat the show on broadcast TV or anywhere else, for many years. I think you can get hold of it these days, now that it's nostalgia and not quite such an embarrassment.)

(And it also said that it aired in November 1978, not December, so I would have been in my dorm room in Austin, and we didn't have a TV there. You had to go downstairs to watch TV. I bet if I'd gone down there it would have been on, because Star Wars was pretty much a religion at the time I was in college - at least for the geeks - but I don't think I was even aware that the show was airing at the time.)


HOLIDAILIES

Part 1 is here.



SPOILERS    SPOILERS    SPOILERS    SPOILERS    SPOILERS    SPOILERS    SPOILERS   

(and I mean it for real, this time!)


So (continuing where we left off) Din has taken out the dark troopers, at least for the moment. The four women, meanwhile, are kicking stormtrooper ass, not too surprisingly given what we already know about their abilities. Din gets to the brig and Moff Gideon is there, with the Darksaber held over Grogu. Gideon pretends he's going to yield and Din pretends to buy that, but then, of course, they fight. (I didn't mention it earlier, but it was conveniently mentioned earlier - I started to say by Bo-Katan but I've re-watched since I wrote that and I think it was Koska - that the Darksaber can cut through almost anything, EXCEPT beskar. Was that canon before this episode? I don't pretend to be an expert on this stuff.) So Din has a big advantage there, and he wins pretty easily, really - Darksaber or no Darksaber. Cara has already said that she wants Gideon alive, to take back to the Republic - I assume that's why Din doesn't kill him. And Gideon conveniently forgets to mention all the political stuff about the Darksaber and Mandalore. He saves that part to gloat about in front of Bo-Katan, I guess.

So on the bridge, while they're having an argument about politics - Bo-Katan has to win the Darksaber in combat, blah blah - alarms start going off. Remember those droids that went out the airlock? Well, I guess they're self-propelled, because they're coming back. It looked to me like there were a couple of dozen of them, so the five warriors on the bridge are kind of screwed. (Remember that Din in his armor could barely beat one of them.) The dark troopers divide into two groups, once of which immediately starts trying to pound their way into the bridge - I said it reminded me of Rock'em Sock'em Robots.

But then... an X-wing appears. Just the one. Cara makes a sarcastic comment - "We're saved." Personally, I was thinking, "Oh, it can't be." (I was going, Luke? Ezra? Mace? Carson?) But the ship lands, and there's definitely a Jedi inside it, invisible under a dark cloak. Green lightsaber. He - or she - tears through the first batch of dark troopers. Grogu, who has been looking kind of despondent up to this point, perks up the minute the ship lands. Clearly he knows who it is - he's got his hand on the screen, like he's communing with them through the monitor. We've got to assume this is whoever he contacted on Tython. The Jedi comes up the elevator and polishes off the second set of dark troopers at the entrance to the bridge. (Just uses the Force to crush the last one, it's pretty spectacular. In fact the whole thing is very reminiscent of the Darth Vader scene at the end of Rogue One.)

Nobody wants to let the Jedi in, except Din, who's taking his cues from Grogu, I imagine. Din opens the door anyway. The Jedi comes in, sheaths the lightsaber, puts his hood back, and at this point I not-quite-yelled OH MY GOD (but it was pretty loud, and it was like 3 in the morning at the time), because as you probably know by now if you're reading this, it's Luke, CGI'd back 40 years or so. Now in retrospect, of course it was Luke - the X-wing, the green saber, the shots of a glove - but in the moment I wasn't sure. In some of the shots it looked like it could be a woman. And I didn't really think they'd go there with the CGI de-aging, but they did, and I have to admit it looked pretty good, in most of the shots.

Nobody even asks the guy what his name is. (In fact, I don't think anybody but Din and Luke say a word during this conversation.) Din says are you a Jedi, and Luke says Grogo wants Din's permission to go, and several million people around the world start bawling, although I actually did not, which was kind of a surprise to me - I'm a notorious crier. I did shriek, I'm pretty sure, when R2-D2 came around the corner. Din takes off his helmet AGAIN - twice in one season! - and the baby pats his face, and ok, well, maybe a tear or two leaked out, here, but if it did I wasn't even aware of it at the time. Grogu seems reassured by R2-D2's presence. Could he have known him at the Jedi temple?

And there's a lot of eye-contact going on while they're on the way out, and the minute the elevator door shuts, it cuts to black. It's over. Almost.

There's a new end-credits theme. As I noted on Twitter the other day, I love the regular end-credits theme and I always listen to the whole thing. So I wasn't in any danger of missing THE SURPRISE CODA, something they've never done before. (I may have shrieked again when that started, though. I'm not sure.)

Two suns, big round building, most Star Wars fans know what that means - it's Jabba's (former) palace, apparently now run by Bib Fortuna. It's not the party palace it used to be, but there's still a little crowd there, and the guards and the inevitable Twi'lek slave girl. Suddenly Fennec comes in shooting, takes down the guards and anybody else who looks like they might object, frees the slave girl - and Boba Fett comes down the stairs behind her. Bib tries to be smooth, he's all, "Hey dude, long time no see," but Boba just shoots him. And then he tips the body out of the big throne-like chair and sits there himself. With Fennec behind him, swilling spatchka.

Cut to black, and a card:

THE BOOK OF BOBA FETT
Coming December 2021


Incidentally, Rob was already in bed during all this - our apartment has pretty good soundproofing, so apparently I didn't wake him up in my excitement. I left him a note that said, "If you don't want to be spoiled for the Mandalorian, watch it immediately, because I'm not going to be able to restrain myself." (And he did.)

I repeat, SPOILERS, not for the new episode but for last week.

Well, it's almost midnight on Thursday and that means The Mandalorian finale is on in a couple of hours, and since I haven't talked about this past week's episode yet, I might as well do that a little. It was really good. It might have been the best episode yet, in that it really hung together as a narrative and was like a little bitty action movie, really, part Fury Road and part Inglourious Basterds (so I'm told, I haven't ever actually seen the latter - I really need to do that). It pretty much redeemed the character of Mayfeld, which I don't think anybody who saw the episode The Prisoner from last year expected at all, and we actually got to see Pedro's face for more than a hot second, and there was, amazingly, no Baby Yoda whatsoever, other than that he got mentioned a few times, and I didn't even mind that, to my surprise.

The episode was called The Believer, but it was pretty vague about who it was talking about. My theory is that that was deliberate. The character who was most a believer was the Imperial captain, but we don't really care about him, it's more about the other two. Mando is working himself up to believing in family again, maybe, and Mayfeld, the ex-Imperial who had clearly stopped believing in the Empire quite a while back, is maybe getting some sort of belief system to replace that one. Something like that.

The other characters were relegated to background status here. We got to see the inside of Slave One, which was interesting, and Boba's repaired armor, and Fennec and Cara seemed to bond a little - apparently mostly because they both like to shoot things. So it was both lots of fun and really well-done, and I'm not sure it's really my favorite episode ever (I haven't put much thought into that question, I'll have to come back to that) but it's certainly one of the best, overall.

This one was short - thirty-odd minutes, I think? The new one is reportedly something like fifty-seven minutes - "a movie of the week!" Rob said when I told him that. I'm trying to keep my expectations in check for the finale. Jedi? Evil Baby Yoda? The guesses are all over the place. I have no idea, which is kind of cool. (I really don't want Evil Grogu, but I doubt Favreau and Filoni are going to listen to me. And it's too late now, in any case.)

SPOILERS BELOW!! for The Mandalorian Chapter 14.

I said the other day that I was still processing last week's episode, but I've processed and I've watched several videos from various people, and I think I'm ready to talk.

These days, I habitually watch several different YouTubers who discuss everything Star Wars, but one that's new to me that I've really been enjoying is Star Wars Explained's After Show that they've been doing every week. It's really long so I don't always watch the whole thing, but they have a lot of good fannish discussion about such things as: what Jedi was Grogu communing with on Tython? The expectation, since there's only two episodes left in the season (!!), is that whoever it is may swoop in at the last moment in Chapter 16 and save the day. The leading contenders seem to be either Ezra or Luke - and then if it's Luke, how do they do that? There's a faction in favor of Sebastian Stan playing Luke, here - and there's also the "Mace Windu is alive!!!!" contingent. (I don't see why Mace can't be alive - yeah, Palpatine threw him out a window and everything, but he's a Jedi, they survive weird shit ALL THE TIME. If Maul can get cut in half and still be alive, Mace certainly can be.) Apparently Sam Jackson has said hell yeah, he'd like to play Mace again, so there's that.

Honestly, I don't particularly have a horse in the race, as far as who I want it to be. With this show, it's hard to predict what they're going to do. I mean, who expected a Boba Fett/Fennec Shand/Mando team-up? I was never a huge Boba Fett fan - I was the "wrong" age, which is what I always say about Star Wars. I loved it, but I was 17 when the first movie came out and 20 for Empire, I was too old for toys (or I sure thought I was, anyway). I get the feeling that a lot of the people who loved Boba Fett from the first are partly that way because they were younger than me and they had the Boba Fett toys. But I do find his character arc pretty interesting, just the same. And man, they let him go berzerker on those Stormtroopers. (I was unsurprised at the end to find out that Robert Rodriguez directed this one. It definitely looked like his style.)


(That reminds me, I forgot when I was talking about Chapter 13 to mention the presence of Michael Biehn, who I completely did not recognize. That man used to be a god if you were into, like, early James Cameron movies - Terminator and Aliens and stuff. Nice to see him, but I was hoping he'd have a role where he was around longer!)


ADDENDUM - this is what I put in the Holidailies blurb (almost a spoiler in itself, but I guess not quite):
With an episode name like that, you know what to expect, I guess. (I did have to explain to Rob who the weird scarred guy who wanted his armor back was!)

I need to make a tag for, like, Mel's middle-of-the-night opinions, or something like that. When I write this stuff before bed, it's gets very stream-of-consciousness. (I'll try to at least go back and clean up the typos when I wake up!)

OK, so yeah, Holidailies was a bust for me. I felt overwhelmed and something needed to be dropped and journaling turned out to be the thing that got dropped. (I haven't posted on my nail blog either, so it's not just here.) But hey, I'm here now to talk about Star Wars - in a non-spoilery way.

Star Wars (and I mean the original one, here - "Episode 4") was the first movie I saw over and over in a theater. The way they released movies was different back in the 70s, and it came out and was a big hit, and then it disappeared for a while, and then they'd release it again with great fanfare, and over and over, basically til Empire Strikes Back came out.three years later. I saw it an unheard of five times in a theater. (I started to say "unheard of for me" but really it was difficult to do for anybody unless you just went every day for a week, because movies just didn't hang around long enough to do that.)

When The Empire Strikes Back came out, I stood in line for a couple of hours at the Alabama Theater in Houston. (That theater later was a Bookstop for many years - Rob and I spent many, many hours there in the late 80s/early 90s - and I think now there's a Trader Joe's there, or something.) I remember seeing Return of the Jedi at a multiplex in Austin and it being massively crowded, but by then it was not quite as big a deal. The prequels, I never cared about - I saw all of them eventually but I didn't go running out to see any of them. I've watched the original trilogy over and over through the years but I was never the kind of person who read every novelization and went to cons and stuff.

My gaming buddy Col and I did play The Old Republic for a good while, and that was a lot of fun. It was a good immersion in the Star Wars universe - even though it took place in a different time period (much earlier - I think maybe it was a couple of thousand years?), all the trappings with the different races and creatures and Jedi and Sith, etc, were there. I learned a lot of lore stuff from that game.

I loved The Force Awakens, and I also really loved Rogue One, of the new ones. I didn't love love love The Last Jedi, but I didn't hate it either. And (to be unspoilery), I really liked this one just fine. It's got more plot than any movie that's not four hours long really needs, but it worked for me. I said on Twitter just now that Rotten Tomatoes probably did me a favor by lowering my expectations. (And we're going to see it again with my sister and bro-in-law on Christmas Day.)


Movies seen at a theater in 2019:6. Shazam!
7. Avengers: Endgame (four times)
8. Field of Dreams (30th anniversary)
9. Spiderman: Far From Home
10. Ad Astra
11. Ghostbusters (35th anniversary)
12. Zombieland: Double Tap
13. Terminator: Dark Fate
14. Ford vs.Ferrari
15. Knives Out (twice)
16. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

NOTE: this is all very hastily written and stream-of-consciousness, and I'm not going to apologize for that, really. But let me just repeat that it is also totally FULL OF SPOILERS. I put it in the title but if you read it in my journal style the title is not very noticeable.


I'm not going to even try to write anything spoiler-free about The Last Jedi. I... liked it pretty well, that's all I can think of to say that's spoiler-free. But it also had some problems, and a hella lot of surprises, and all that is obviously spoilers, so I'm just rolling with that. Oh, also, lemme say that I don't even know the names of a lot of these characters, and I'm sure I'll figure all that out later (because I've watched The Force Awakens about 17 times and Rogue One maybe 10 times, so I think we can assume I'm going to see this in the theater at least one more time) - and probably I'll look at IMDb and figure some of this stuff out, sometime soon. But right now I'm not worrying about all that. 

I love the surprise of it - it just went off in directions you weren't expecting. (There, a whole basically spoiler-free sentence. Although I suppose you could say that that in itself is a spoiler.) Like Luke at the end - and Luke at the beginning, for that matter, with the lightsaber and the crazy. Also the question of which way Kylo will jump, light or dark? And then they give you a false answer on that for a minute, too, and then switch again. Although I do think the answer they ultimately came up with is the one that feels right to me. I don't much buy that he's savable. (I do buy that he would want Rey as his queen or whatever, but it'd never last 'cause she's too mouthy and he'd want to shut her up eventually. He's that kinda guy.)

Can I just say, OH THANK GOD, NO MIDICHLORIANS. I know, it wasn't in the last movie either, but this was the first (and by far the best) explanation of the Force that I've heard since the very first movie. But I hated the whole idea of the damn midichlorians.

And I kind of love the idea that Luke burns (or well, Yoda does) the whole Jedi library, and Rey hasn't read it and doesn't appear to have any training about it either, and she has no clear notions at all about the old Jedi traditions, so from that standpoint Luke is actually the last Jedi. I really got the idea more from playing a Jedi in The Old Republic game than anywhere else, that the Jedi traditions kinda suck. So there will be Force-users from here on out but no old-school Jedi. (ADDED: I saw a video that said Rey secretly saved the library, so all of this may be technically untrue, in the end. But clearly the idea that the Jedi are changing is correct.)

Questions:
-- I kept waiting for them to say that Benecio Del Toro's character was actually the guy they went to find, but no. They don't actually say one way or the other, but as far as we know he's not, really. We see some other guy who's wearing the flower or whatever it was, for like two seconds. My theory was maybe the other guy had stolen his pin and Benecio was the real guy, but who knows?

-- I've watched a couple of YouTube videos and I agree that the whole casino thing slowed the movie down. (I also told Rob that rich people are the new bad guys, because, you know, who else is left, I guess?*) I liked Rose, and I liked Rose and Finn as a team, but that plot was just ill-conceived, I thought. That whole thing seemed like they didn't think they had enough plot so they came up with this whole big red herring about needing codes. (Also, were they implying Rose/Finn there at the very end? Oh, and then you get Oscar being all, "Hey there, I'm Poe," to Rey, and I'm going, wouldn't these characters have met before? That was mainly why I noticed Finn hovering at Rose's bedside in that scene.)

-- Here's another thing: Did Gwendoline Christie just not want to put a lot of time in on these movies, or something? Because I have a Phasma bobble-head, and I feel like she's ultimately such a minor figure that I wouldn't have bothered if I'd known. (I wanted to collect female Star Wars characters, for a while, and I got up to three - Rey, Leia, and Phasma - and then I just kind of gave up on that. I eventually added Obi-Wan and some random robot, and decided to stop there, because Funkos, much as I love them, kind of take up a lot of room that we really don't have.) I thought she would have a big scene in the first movie and then when she didn't, I was expecting it in this movie, and instead you get about 10 seconds of fight and she's dead. (Another late addition: I'm kidding myself to say I "collected" the Phasma bobblehead in particular - I got it in a Funko box and I think it was limited edition, but I didn't actually pick it out. I think it was more that I got the idea from having the Phasma, and then I went and ordered the LE Rey from Hot Topic to go with it.)


*When I was growing up the bad guys were communists. Then later the bad guys were Iranians or Al-Qaeda or something. I'm kind of glad to see them getting away from the whole ethnicity aspect of it, but while I'm complaining about tax cuts for the rich as much as anybody else, I also think that's kind of an easy target, what with Trump and everything. I don't guess "bad guys" as a concept is going away any time soon, so it'll be interesting to see if rich people or Russian oligarchs or something sticks - we could go back to the Russian accents for that one - or if somebody will come up with something else.)

Well, the junk first of all: If you went to movies a lot in the '80s, like we did, this is a stupendously easy quiz. (A 50-question quiz that 11% of people get 100% right can't be too difficult, after all.) (I did have to guess on a couple, but they don't even make guessing terribly hard. I am kinda the queen of the educated guess.)

We went to see Rogue One again (still love it) and ate lasagne and watched the first episode of Stranger Things. That was our Christmas Eve. Honestly, it beats most Christmas Eves cold, at least the ones of recent years. Tomorrow we have to do the family stuff. I've washed my hair and I need to do my nails and I'm sure I'll think of ten other highly-important things I have to do before bedtime. I can't much make myself care, though.

Stranger Things was pretty awesome, although more of you probably know much more about it than I do. (Does that sentence make any sense at all? I'm not sure, but I'm leaving it like that anyway.) We finished Jessica Jones yesterday (also awesome) and I told Rob that we could watch Stranger Things next if he wanted before we go on to Luke Cage. I don't know that Rob knew anything at all about it, but *I* knew that he would love Stranger Things, it's totally right up his alley. (Speaking of '80s.) It's very, um, early Steven Spielberg crossed with Stand By Me. Or something like that.

Col and I played Marvel Heroes for a while. He is playing Luke Cage and is surprised that he likes it. I liked Luke too (not to mention that he's stupendously hot in Jessica Jones, but I hadn't seen that yet when I was playing him) so I'm not too surprised. Oh, having seen Jessica Jones TV now, I realized suddenly what she's wearing in the game, the other day - it's the "Jewel" superhero outfit that Trish is seen in the series trying to get her to wear. She's been standing talking to Ben Urich in Avengers Tower since I've been playing, and I always wondered what the hell that was she was wearing. (I believe you can also play Jessica as a team-up but I haven't tried it; I'm pretty sure she's wearing something else in that incarnation. And Ben Urich in this game is a younger-looking white guy, in contrast to the older black guy who's in the first season of Daredevil. Reconciling all this now that I've watched half - exactly half - of the existing Marvel Netflix stuff is kind of weird.)

Also (still on the Marvel Heroes track) I spent some money on costumes last week and I now have the girl version of Thor and a couple of Christmas costumes (Daredevil and Squirrel Girl). I'm probably going to feel like I wasted my money on Christmas costumes later but I really like the female Thor. There are actually two female Thors; the other one is Jane Foster (who I think becomes Thor for a while in the comics?) but the one I'm using is the Earth X version, which I really know nothing at all about. She says something about Loki having tricked her into the new body (but she also says she kind of likes it.) Either I read somewhere or Col told me (I have no idea which) that this version, or maybe both versions, won't let anybody call her Lady Thor or anything like that; she's just Thor, still. That's about all I know about that, although I'm interested that they bothered to do two different female voices for Thor. He has a buttload of costumes, too (although not as many as Iron Man) - some of the male ones might have "enhanced" (aka different, rerecorded) voices, too, for all I know. I haven't paid much attention. But I tried playing regular Thor with the default costume and I stalled out about level 30-something. So I was hoping that the different take on Thor would propel me along, and it has - well, I'm still not all that far along in story progression but she hit level 60 tonight, so that's definitely an improvement. I'm not sure why it makes that much difference, exactly, but apparently it does.

OK, that's enough for tonight. I need to go do my nails. Happy Hannukah, Merry Christmas, or other holiday/nonholiday of your choice. Or Christmas Eve Gift, as my grandma used to say. (Family phrase of unknown origin; I think I end up explaining that one pretty much every year.)