Star Wars!

A bunch of coworkers and my friend Ivan and I all went out to see Star Wars together when it opened on Friday.

We saw it at a suitably sci-fi building--the Core Pacific City Living Mall. Rather an unwieldy name, I think. It isn't that there is a place called the Living Mall inside another place called Core Pacific City, but rather all five words are a single name for a single place. This is what it looks like:

The movie was everything I expected and not much to comment on. I was probably most interested in finding out why, when Darth Vader's head is shown at the end of Return of the Jedi, that it's all messed up. I had originally thought that he was extremely old, but infact he is just middle aged at that point. Episode three solved that for me.

My favorite scene was probably the openning shot which follows a pair of little fighter ships as they weave through a gigantic battlefield in space. It's hard for me to wrap my head around such a battle. It seems impossibly complex.

Before going to the movie, I was worried that I had forgotten everything I had seen in the other Star Wars movies and thus wouldn't appreciate all the loose-string-tying and whatnot so I found a website to help me reaquaint myself to the Star Wars universe. Check out the main page and the page on Star Wars history(which has been fleshed out alot more in "Expanded Universe" material, ie, comic books and cartoons).

Also this weekend, I went out with my girlfriend, Alfreda (pictured below) and saw a bunch of short animations made in Taiwan. They were shown as part of the Taiwan International Animation Festival in Taipei. Some of the animations were more visually interesting and surprising than Revenge of the Sith because they, much more like the first Star Wars film than the sequels, actually showed you something you had never seen before and couldn't expect.

Me and Alfreda!