Star Wars: The Marketing Awakens

Manuel (and Yoda!) here to talk more Star Wars! 

A photo posted by Manuel Betancourt (@bmanuel) on May 4, 2015 at 4:30am PDT

I have been an avid Star Wars fan since as far back as I can remember (blame my mom who was obsessed with Harrison Ford!) and so I couldn't let this celebration go by without throwing my two cents.

Nathaniel already wished you all a Happy May the Fourth, but as if intent on making sure the franchise isn't resting on nostalgia, Vanity Fair has just released a number of beautiful portraits of the new recruits of The Force Awakens and I couldn't not share three of them with you: 

Oscar Isaac: woofworthy since 2011 (and probably even before but I do love him in Drive)

The helmet is off and we get a first glimpse at bad guy Kylo Ren (Adam Driver)

And I saved the best for last:

Lupita: luminous even when doing motion capture (her character is apparently a pirate named Maz Kanata) 

Which of these pics will you be framing and swooning over until December when the film opens? Do these portraits give you hope, or do they just give you flashbacks to the equally glossy and gawk-worthy ones that greeted Episode One?

May the Fourth Be With You

Happy annual Star Wars day. Since Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (just 228 days away) will make this whole year a perpetual Star Wars Day elsewhere on the net, we'll keep this brief. Here are four unqualified positive feelings about the franchise.

1. Nathaniel hearts Leia, Luke and Han (in roughly that order) as much as anyone & forever.
2. Jabba the Hutt, Darth Vader, Emperor Palpatine, and even Darth Maul are superb villains. Deeply memorable villains are incredibly important to adventure genres such as space fantasy, action, sci-fi, superheroes, etcetera and it's one thing nearly every franchise could learn from this one.
3. The Empire Strikes Back is awesome.
4. Where would the world of sound design be without Ben Burtt? The world has never forgotten Darth Vader's breath, Chewie's throaty protestations, and R2-D2's beep bop boop beeping and never shall. What a great call Oscar made in 1977 to give him a special achievement Oscar. 

Classic Post Alert - Click for similar lovelies

Related:
Last Year's May the Fourth Be With You post 

Now you say four nice things about Star Wars in the comments.

April Foolish Predictions: Sound, Score, Make Up & FX

April is almost over and we MUST finish our April Foolish tradition - the first wave of Oscar nomination predictions before anyone knows anything. The film year is still only a toddler but they grow up so fast. The first third of the year always features the least amount of Oscar content but from movies already released we'll hope for miracles that Cinderella and Ex Machina could be remembered in the places they deserve to be. But the bulk of the heavy hitters are yet to come. Even in the more popcorn categories like Visual Effects.

NEW CHARTS --> ORIGINAL SCORE, ORIGINAL SONG, SOUND MIXING, SOUND EDITING
Which movies will have original songs? Will the composer Thomas Newman ever win an Oscar? Will Skyfall, atypically embraced by the Academy, have any sort of afterglow with AMPAS to help Spectre win nominations as well? And who will the composers be on a whole slew of Oscar Bait movies that haven't revealed their composer yet (since the score is one of the last things to happen)? These are the questions we're already asking so please do suggest answers in the comments once you've looked at the charts. 

NEW CHARTS ---> VISUAL EFFECTS, MAKEUP AND HAIR
Is Ex Machina too subtle for Oscar? Will Mad Max Fury Road be too outre for them? Will the visual effects category just be a quintet of franchise favorites they've honored before like Jurassic World, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Avengers: Age of Ultron and so on? Will the makeup category be dominated by old age latex, fantastical character creations or a trans woman's journey? 

Care to make any predictions yourself? 

Tim's Toons: Star Wars - the Animated Misadventures

Tim here. A good cinephile would be able to look around the world and think about the whole range of possible movies in all their splendid variety. Me, I haven't been able to stop thinking about Star Wars ever since the new Episode VII trailer dropped yesterday. That's the poisonous fever bog of nostalgia for you.

So, as long as I'm not going to get my head right anyway, how about we take a little wander through the corridors of Star Wars and animation? Because, golly, talk about being gripped by a dubious affection for a brand name...

At some point, people subjected themselves to all of these things just to get a little tiny bit more of a Star Wars fix. And even if The Force Awakens can't live up to the awesome pileup of top-shelf fanservice in that trailer, there's not any chance in hell that it can be as bad as some of these:

The Star Wars Holiday Special (1979)
Two and a half years after the original film redefined what blockbuster box office could look like, the very first expansion of the universe came in the form of this legendarily wretched variety show that starts with ten damn minutes of people in terrible shaggy suits barking at each other in unsubtitled Wookiee-ese. After which it proceeds to get worse. The solitary highlight, and that's almost solely because of the lowlights surrounding it on all sides, is a short animated sequence by Nelvana in which Luke, Han Solo, and Chewbacca fall for the most transparent con job in the universe and future fan-favorite Boba Fett is introduced. He rides a dinosaur. [More...]

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The Internet Awakens

Not that it ever sleeps. But the arrival of a Star Wars: The Force Awakens teaser, a second one, shook things up. I mean Chris Hayes on MSNBC, the host of a political news hour, devoted a whole quarter hour to this trailer! At one point today all of my feeds were only Star Wars. I wasn't sure if it felt celebratory or oppressive and came to the conclusion that it was definitely both.

The heighth of my own personal Star Wars mania -- everyone seems to go through it though many never come out of it -- was 1983. One entire wall of my young bedroom was devoted to Return of the Jedi with posters, magazine pages, collectible film stills, you name it, stickied on. Princess Leia, Jabba the Hutt and (the shame the shame) ewoks took up the most space. Sorry Han & Chewie!

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