But once the trailers started, I was much happier. The crowd was definitely ready — there was applause for a couple of the trailers, and then when the Lucasfilm logo came up, there was loud applause. Followed by a respectful silence for the movie itself. And more applause at the end.
I thought this movie was much better than the Phantom Menace — though I wish they’d found someone with more oomph to play Anakin. I won’t say more, just in case there’s someone reading this who hasn’t seen the movie yet — there aren’t many surprises (we all know where it all ends, after all), but I don’t want to spoil the few that there are.
We saw the film version of the movie; I want to go back and see the digital version, maybe next weekend. And we now need to re-watch Episode I (so we have to buy it), as well as the original trilogy (so I have to dust off the laserdisc player). We watched Hardware Wars as soon as we got home, but now I just discovered that they’ve released Hardware Wars – The Collector’s Edition on DVD. Diane and Jeffrey are pleading with me not to get it (Diane is even calling it the “Nuts’ Edition”) — but their pleas may well fall on deaf ears.
Art was pretty good, too — it was very funny. I didn’t like the first half-hour much, but it got better, and I quite liked the coda. The play is rather short (80 minutes, no intermission), which surprised me — but it was just about the right length. The play was originally written in French and took place in Paris, and they left prices in francs in the translation; I think they should have changed the unit to dollars, because the shock value of “200,000 francs” isn’t as strong as “30,000 dollars” would have been (and that’s for an all-white painting!).