My 4 Favorite Things About Each Star Wars Movies

"May the Fourth be with you," my friends. Since everyone is required to talk about Star Wars every May 4th, even if they don't want to, here you go. 

Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977)
01. "I recognized your foul stench when I was brought on board..." Carrie Fisher in all her royally bitchy double-bunned glory
02. "These aren't the droids you're looking for." Sir Alec Guiness (in general) and those delicious British intonations 
03. The opening scrawl and in media res Storm Troopers / Vader attack. This is how you start a movie/trilogy. Death to backstory - just throw us in!
04. The trash compactor sequence. As a child I was obsessed for some reason so it's merely a nostalgic choice.

Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
01. Love Yoda and the existential mysteries of the Dagobah swamps, you must.
02. That it inspired this cartoon (above) about my youth. "Luke, I am your father"
02. "I love you" / "I know."
04. The perfect mirror of Star Wars opening planet, a hot dry desert (Tatooine), in the unforgiving freezing ice planet of Hoth.

Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983)
01. The entire Jabba the Hut opening act (my favorite complete act in any Star Wars film). Love every fucking second of it (especially Jabba the Hut) and that it fully earns the wonders of that immortal gold bikini.
02. That the movies kept finding new weird things to do Leia's hair that seemed organic to Princess Organa. 
03. That speeder bike race on Endor
04. The teaser highly graphic poster art with the red and the purple/blue lightsabers. One entire wall of my bedroom (!) was Return of the Jedi posters/stills.

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999)
01. The release of the trailer. It was so exciting that even a glimpse of the Gungan (Jar Jar Binks and crew) seemed rife with possibility. The horror being yet to come!
02. "The Duel of The Fates" three-way lightsaber battle: great scoring, great choreography, great everything
03. Any glimpse of Darth Maul. And there are only glimpses.
04. Princess Amidala's Kabuki/Geisha/WTF costumes (designed by Trisha Biggar)

Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002)
01. The title had a certain cheesy B movie grandeur about it
02. Um... shots of the Storm Troopers had a kind of military fetishistic panache. 
03. Yoda's bouncing lightsaber fighting style had a big memorability factor despite being stoopid.
04. Ewan McGregor

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005)
I don't remember anything other than that I was so glad Star Wars was over. But then... (gulp)...

the cast of Star Wars Episode VII at their first table read last week

Star Wars Episode VII: Title To Be Determined (2015)
01. Hamill & Fisher & Ford. Oh my.
02. Peter Mayhew as Chewbacca (oh please let him have grey fur now! That'd be hot and funny) 
03. Andy Serkis as someone or other or possibly multiple others (because you have to respect that he completely monopolizes that whole new wing of film acting: CGI/actor creations)
04. John Boyega. Finally someone using him for something big and poppy after Attack of the Block.  

Your turn!

Hot Docs '14: In the Spotlight

[Amir, our Canadian correspondent, is reporting from The Hot Docs Film Festival, the biggest documentary festival in North America currently underway in Toronto.]

 One of the tendencies that festival-goers develop over time is finding connecting threads between films that might otherwise be completely unrelated. This unconscious search for umbrella themes, even if unintended by festival programmers, intensifies when you sit down to write about the films. At first glance, there is little connecting three films about aging Belgian transsexuals, Argentinian civilians on camera, and Turkish-American political pundits. Beneath the surface, though, all deal in some way with a desire for self-expression in the spotlight.

Before the Last Curtain Falls follows a group of gay and transsexual performers who get together in the later years of their lives to put on an avant-garde show called Gardenia. When the film begins in the hauntingly beautiful city of Ghent in Belgium, where the performers hail from, the show has already become a massive international success and it is returning home for one final performance after more than 200 outings. Director Thomas Wallner combines interviews with the cast members with footage of the show to paint a portrait of each of them, drawing on their experiences of sexual identity struggle, social oppression and therapeutic theatre work.

Click to read more ...

First Round Oscar Predix: Leading Actor

Oh how I love this time of year. When anything is possible...

There's no easy way to break down what might come to pass in 2014's Best Actor race. Numerous Oscar winners like Russell Crowe, Tommy Lee Jones, Christian Bale, Ben Affleck, Christoph Waltz could be in play if they or their films deliver. Actors who've been nominated but have yet to win like Robert Downey Jr, Joaquin Phoenix, Jonah Hill, and Ralph Fiennes could also be campaigned for gold.

What's more exciting about 2014 is the plethora of men who've never been honored from comebacks like Michael Keaton  (in a possibly plum fusion or role and star in Birdman) to a handful who feel like they're at just the right career moment for the Academy to say "Join the club!", either because they're in demand right about now or because they've been doing fine work for a long time without walking the red carpet much.

In this latter category several of them are playing real life roles which is often a leg up with Oscar... unless everyone is playing a real life role in which case, that advantage is cut off at the knees, don'cha think? Consider these seven never nominated players:  Tobey Maguire as chess prodigy Bobby Fischer; Eddie Redmayne as theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking in Theory of Everything; Benedict Cumberbatch as gay codebreaker Alan Turing in The Imitation Game; Timothy Spall as the eccentric painter Mr Turner; Steve Carell as wealthy schizo benefactor John du Pont in Foxcatcher; Jack O'Connell as soldier/Olympian Louis Zamperini in Unbroken; and Chadwick Boseman as singer James Brown in Get On Up.

And that's just scratching the surface...

The Chart!
Which of these men are you most looking forward to seeing in their new roles? And if you controlled the tier rankings, who would you place up top as Most Likely To Be Nominated at this ridiculously early juncture? Sound off. 

ICYMI

This last week was crazy crowded with postings between the Tribeca Film Festival, the Mean Girls 10th Anniversary and regular blog bits. We managed to review (gulp) 40 festival movies and with all the Mean Girls quoting online. Mean Girls was so dominant that it reignited talk of doing a stage musical version.  Surely your eyes and ears glazed over; that was a lot of Tribeca and North Shore High to imbibe. But let's make it simpler for you with five takeaway posts you shouldn't have missed...

Starred Up Breakout watch out for rising actor Jack O'Connell this year 
Actress a new doc with the most appealing title imaginable ;) kicked off our Hot Docs coverage
Genius a new prestige film starring Colin Firth, Jude Law & Nicole Kidman
Pocahontas Again in which I try to purge myself of "the Cymbeline of Disney Animation" from my system. (I'm addicted on Netflix Instant Watch)
"Home School Freaks" a personal essay from Tim on his unique connection to Mean Girls 

And thanks for getting all wet with April Showers!
This season we looked at 12 different shower scenes spanning 34 years: Silkwood, The Paperboy, Midnight Express, Les Misérables, The Piano, Thelma & Louise, Pulp Fiction, Like Crazy, Heathers, An Education, Home Alone 2, and Flirting With Disaster. Each April I consider dropping this series because we've done it for five years and I worry about staying fresh. But then what better way to freshen up than showering? It always proves hard to resist writing about this movie (and life) staple. 

COMING THIS WEEK ON THE BLOG
We'll announce all four Summer Supporting Actress Smackdown years for May, June, July and August so you can start catching up on old Oscar battles and be ready. Also the Oscar Predictions (just begun) continue.

First Round Oscar Predix: Animated Feature

The first chart is up and we're starting with the toons since they're the easiest to tackle given a limited slate of contenders. Not that "easy" is a word one should use when surveying the current state of animation which is, shall we say, robust. Give or take live action superheroes, it's the single most popular film genre in the US marketplace. We'd prefer to call animation a "medium" which is more accurate given that there's no reason why there couldn't be animated dramas, noirs, westerns, horror flicks, thrillers, etcetera but in the US at least animation is not a medium but a genre (the computer generated family action comedy... with or without musical numbers).

Is Laika Animation still too unique for Oscar or are they 'thisclose' to finally winning? Could The Boxtrolls be their breakthrough?

In terms of the Oscar race ahead, I've already heard whisperings (including my own preemie voice) that this will be a slim or "weak" year but let's not get ahead of ourselves. That's what everyone was saying last year and everyone turned out to be wrong. Last year's shortlist was hardly an embarassment; Frozen, Ernest & Celestine, and The Wind Rises would be a fairly worthy trio of nominees in any year and The Croods wasn't half bad. (I never saw Despicable Me 2 but its popularity with the public was indisputable)

While I still think there's very little cause for this particular category to exist given the expanded Best Picture field, the animated genre produces its fair share of strong movies annually with most of the major studios upping their games steadily after nearly 20 years of watching Pixar horde all the loot & respect. The problem in current perception may well be Pixar itself. They've finally proven themselves fallible critically and awards-wise (they missed even a nomination in 2 of the last 3 Oscar battles) and 2015 is the first year in a decade without a new Pixar film in release. That was bound to cast weird shadows on "The State of Animation." But the sky isn't falling. If you love animation there are still a lot of films to look forward to.

first look at a fictional San Francisco in "Big Hero 6"

The Chart!
Which of these films are you most looking forward to and what you think will become of animation in the next few years? Do you think the race will be hotly contested this year or we'll have another slam dunk like Frozen?