I grew out of Star Wars at around the same time I developed acne and acquired my first girlfriend. I was about 13 at the time. Hence I've not really been too affected by the hysteria around the new films. Sure, I saw 'Phantom Menace' and my considered opinion was that it was a big bag of wank. The next one was better - more things got blown up, which qualified it as one of my favourite "put your brain in neutral" fun movies of the year (if you take out all of the excrutiatingly bad dialog.)
I'm told the third one will also be quite good, and worth the price of a cinema ticket for the spectacle alone. I had similar criteria for the Lord Of The Rings films, which looked lovely but had an appalling - really appalling - script.
This week is the week when George Lucas finally runs out of space to store his money as 'Episode 3' is released. In honour of this release, one of the big London cinemas is doing a back-to-back showing of all the Star Wars films culminating in the new film. Now like I said, I'm not a fan but even I can see how thats going to be a little odd for all the members of the audience in their various home-made costumes ("Look at me! I'm Princess Leia!" "No you're not, Princess Leia was played by Carrie Fisher, not a 25 stone male video-store employee with personal hygiene issues".) The sequence will go Episode 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3.
Then again, I suspect that after 12 hours of George Lucas's awful, awful dialog and some of the worst acting to be splattered over the screen since... er... since the last Star Wars film, the audience will be too numbed to care.
