Screen Gems

I've been thinking about movies today for a couple of reasons. First of all, I'm working my way through the original Star Wars Trilogy, which is now called episodes 4, 5 and 6. If you didn't realize, these are the originals of the series and much much much better than episodes 1-3. The next couple of paragraphs might be enjoyable only to those who know these movies.

I actually saw the first Star Wars movie in 1977 in Salt Lake City. I was driving across the country with a couple of my college friends and it had just come out. You can't imagine what a huge deal it was. Everything gets so hyped these days that it's hard to separate the spectacular from the merely noisy, but this was the first big, special effects sci-fi movie of the digital age. Most of the stuff you see now was invented for that movie or is a direct descendant. The movie was just called Star Wars back then.

I'm in the middle of The Empire Strikes Back, considered by most to be the "best" of the 3. It's pretty dark, but it has lots of witty banter between Han Solo and Princess Leia, and Luke Skywalker's Jedi training with Yoda. One of the things that I always liked about this series was the concept of "The Force," which is the cumulative power of all the living things in the universe. I've never been a believer in the "old man in the sky" version of God, and the Force is the thing that comes closest to what I do believe. That said, the pseudo-religious claptrap in some of the scenes is almost laughably awful in a campy kind of way. For example, after Yoda levitates the space ship up out of the swamp after Luke can't do it, Luke stairs slack-jawed and says, "I don't believe it." and Yoda says, "That is why you fail."

The other movie thing is that I had part of a line from a movie stuck in my head today, kind of the way you get a few lines from a song stuck in your head. The problem was that I couldn't place it. The line was "You've got an overdeveloped sense of (don't remember). It's going to get you in trouble some day." It took quite a bit of discussion before we remembered it was from The Princess Bride. The six-fingered man says it to Inigo Montoya right before the sword fight scene. The actual line is "You've got an overdeveloped sense of vengeance. It's going to get you into trouble some day." This is funny because you already think Inigo is dying, which of course isn't funny at all.