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Post by driver1980 on May 3, 2024 6:09:33 GMT -5
For anyone in the UK who can get to Leicester on this date:
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Post by Marv-El on May 4, 2024 17:15:48 GMT -5
This past Thursday (May 2nd) my wife and I attended the NC Symphony's Star Wars Night, the first of three such performances this weekend. They've been doing this (barring the pandemic lock-down phase) for a couple of years now and this was our first attendance of the event. Basically they show a SW film with the orchestra performing John Williams soundtrack live. This year's airing was Return of the Jedi. Having never attended a symphony performance before, we decided to dress up slightly. So when we arrived at the theater, it felt surreal because they were other people there similarly dressed mixed in with geeks in various SW attire. No true cosplayers per se but I did spot a Jedi Robe here and there among the audience. We were seated three rows from the stage front so we had an excellent view of the film screen. The string section of the orchestra was right before us and we had an excellent view of the conductor. However, we could not see the woodwind, brass nor drum sections near the rear (though I could see the top of the harp though ) The lights go down and the film starts. It was close-captioned and the sound effects were slightly muted but man oh man once they started playing, holy cow! I got goosebumps as they played the opening crawl music. Hearing the likes of Luke's Force theme and the Imperial March being played live in front of you is amazing. It's been a long time since I've seen an OT film in a theater environment. Hearing the audience's reaction and laughter to Threepio's comedy, R2's antics, Han's glib remarks, it was refreshing. Coupled with the orchestra's amazing performance, it felt like I was watching ROTJ anew for the first time in a long time. Yes, there was an intermission (it occurred right before Han, Luke and the others go off in search of Leia after the speeder bike chase) and something cool happened in the intermission. Y'see, there were a few moments during the film where the orchestra was silent. During those moments, I spotted quite a few of the musicians gazing upward at the screen. Well one of the cello players was apparently a huge SW fan because during the intermission, he brought out his Darth Vader helmet and placed it underneath his seat. Then his string bow lit up red as Vader's lightsaber! It was so cool! It was really a fun night, the orchestra gave a phenomenal performance, a great way to celebrate (early) Star Wars day.
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Post by lordyam on May 6, 2024 10:58:04 GMT -5
There really is a nasty, toxic underbelly to fandom in general. Tangent, but there's a lot of hostility and venom being spewed about Netflix's upcoming Avatar: The Last Airbender. As part of the ramp-up marketing push, they are doing some interviews and such where the creators are pointing out some (relatively minor, IMO) changes to character arcs and such, and people are losing. Their. Minds. It's just ridiculous, and it casts an ugly shadow on fandom in general. Ahmed Best and Jake Lloyd should have never gotten the venom they did. They were characters in a fantasy movie for Pete's sake. One of them was just a kid, and the movies weren't even that bad. On Star Wars in general, I'm going to paraphrase something I recently read. The OT was mostly great at what it was. The PT had shoddy execution, but the underlying story was good enough people were able to overlook it. The sequel trilogy was just a disjointed chaotic pile of crap from the outset. Shamus Young made the point that just because George Burns lived to be 100 even though he smoked it doesn't mean smoking is good for you as a way to show why just winging the sequels was bad even though the original was also winged to a degree. Lucas got lucky in that regard. And yeah, even many of the people who slammed Jar Jar back in the day have gone on record saying that they went too far in attacking Ahmed Best himself. It's also worth noting that George Lucas's direction hindered some; generally everyone agrees that Hayden Christensen did much better in Kenobi. Lucas is a great idea man and immersion expert, but he treats his actors like props.
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Post by sunofdarkchild on May 8, 2024 12:18:27 GMT -5
I was pretty disappointed with Tales of the Empire. The first 3 episodes retained the same high quality as Tales of the Jedi, but the second set of 3 episodes made the mistake of trying to be a full character arc when the Tales format does not work for that kind of story. In addition, they made the same mistakes as the sequel trilogy in going out of their way to defy expectations, ignoring and ultimately killing off the vast storytelling potential the character started out with for an unnecessary story no one wanted, and having an unnecessary and unsatisfying redemption arc.
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