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Star Wars Premier: The Line People
proudtobeageek writes "A friend of mine, an attendee of a midnight opening of Star Wars Episode III, took the opportunity to conduct a short documentary/interview of the costumed movie goers. He has his short movie available here on his blog."
This movie sounds interesting. Conan O'brien made one a few years back as well. Unfortunately, I can't see this one because I've had a lot of problems in the past with the Quicktime plugin.
Any chance he can convert to another format? I hate installing quicktime, maybe it has something to do with the way it interacted with some old versions of firefox, but it has a way of invading my system and setting itself as default for everything that I don't want it to.
I know it's probably a bad thing to look down on some of these people and quite a bit hypocritical seeing as I'm posting on a site billed as "News for Nerds", but I feel really bad for some of these people. Not all of them, mind you, but there are a handful of people who seem so far removed from reality and that actually fit into the "35-year old unbathed computer nerd living in parents' basement" stereotype that it makes one wonder where we as a society have let these people down.
Do I have better things to do than criticize Star Wars/Star Trek/LOTR fans? Yes, of course. And that's what I think sets me apart from these (for lack of a better term) "losers".
But their "loser"-status can't be all their fault. At some point, we as a society have turned them into these monsters by shunning them, excluding them, or mocking them for their odd and sometimes strange behavior. Perhaps it's some mild autism that they suffer from, or maybe some other neural disease that makes them "different" from most of us (and I use the word loosely) "normals".
A quarter of a century ago many people lined up to see Star Wars. The theaters were sold out. But they were sold out to relatively normal people. This week's Star Wars opening was sold out to a group of weirdoes who have lost touch with reality.
But perhaps it is us, the rest of the world, who has lost touch with them. And that is the real shame, I think.
A friend and I were standing in line that wrapped around to the back side of a dome-style theater and some jerk forced the line to move up against the wall because he wanted to drive his SUV on through. I know this is California but driving a SUV doesn't give you the right to drive through a Star Wars line! Too bad no one had any working light sabers...
Oh my God, that was so lame, it scared me.
And now I feel really old - I saw the first bloody movie when I was the age of some of those kids there.
We also queued up outside the cinema, about 5 of us, in Bangor, England.
Nobody had a movie camera. Nobody was dressed up. It was raining.
The movie was brilliant.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
WRT the movie take, I can't believe how many news stories I've seen about the evils of piracy (omigawd, there's already copies on the net!) followed or preceeded almost immediately by stories about how much money this movie has taken in.
No matter how much protection is put in place, people who want to see the movie for free will see it for free. People who believe in paying for what they get will continue to pay for what they get. And as long as the quality of a movie is good enough, the ratio of payors to non-payors will remain good enough that there will be no reason to cry for the producers, who will inevitably be sleeping on beds stuffed with money.
I'm not totally against DRM, but when it's totally invasive (if the fingerprint stuff takes off, I'm switching to shadow-puppets for entertainment!), it's worthless. And when our lawmakers are wasting time on protecting the wealth of billionaires instead of educating our children and providing for the health care of the masses, I wonder where we all went wrong.
OK, I'll get off my soapbox now.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Now you know why Wookie Hookie fits so many people. They didn't want to be in costume at work while they waited so they just skipped work altogheter.
There was a hilarious little clip called the l33ttrailer, but it was pulled from the official website due to Lucas making copyright infringement claims. Good luck finding it now.
MacroHard - Boning you in a big way! (TM)
Movie Tickets (for two): 15.00
Fresh Popcorn / OK drink (for two, free refills): $8.50
Getting to watch people in costume whack each other with light sabers, not to mention the Storm Trooper hired for "crowd control": Free
Not standing in line because we had reserved seating: Priceless!
Not that standing in line can't be fun. I've done it for every other Star Wars film (except the first), for Batman, and a few others. But I'll take the reserved seating any time.
I've now seen every Star Wars at the first (local, open to the public) showing. The first one the theater was almost empty, walked in slightly late to see the big cruiser rumbling overhead just before it captures Leia's ship, then of course I had to sit through it a second time since I missed the first few minutes...I'm pretty sure that was the last movie I saw where they let you sit through a show as many times as you wanted - it was common practice to arrive at the theater pretty much any time, watch the last part of the movie, then watch the first part and leave when you got to the part you walked in.
When I want to see a movie, I wait at least a few weeks before I can see it, so the theater is almost empty.
Nothing better then seeing LotR in a big theater when there are only 5 people in it. Nobody is kicking mty chair, nobody is asking stupid questions and nobody comes in late.
Yes, I go alone to the movies. I want to see the movie, so I do not give a rats ass if I know the person who sits next to me.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
...to the guys lining up at the wrong theatre? Did they get a showing?
Of course being a Star Wars fan is not a disease and I didn't mean to imply that such was the case.
Rather I meant that rates of diseases like autism seem to run pretty high in the geek community. Aspergers is the most commonly mentioned mental handicap around Slashdot, and it is closely related with autism. The people who have Aspergers typically withdraw from normal interaction and as a result get pigeonholed by "normal" people as being weird and strange. Rather than being seen as victims of a disease, they are treated like monsters, avoided and mocked.
Anecdotal evidence aside, I'd love to see the rates of Aspergers/autism among those camping out to see Star Wars/LOTR/etc compared to the general populace. It would even be enlightening to see those rates compared with those who work in the IT industry at large.
After seeing the photo in his blog, I can imagine this guy lining up in costume as Harry Potter for the upcoming Goblet of Fire movie....
I had my own 15 minutes of fame here in Wichita, KS because of Star Wars and my Jedi costume:
Me in the Newspaper
It was fun being on every newscast. People I've never met before recognize me.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Another one was Carrie Fisher in the slave costume in Return of the Jedi.
Hard to believe Mark Hamill is in his late 50's with kids of his own. He's done well as an actor.
Lucas came out pretty well, too, with a personal worth of around 3bn. I could live on that. :)
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
(in Atlanta) We had a Female storm trooper. An initial doubletake revealed a, um, Breast Plate with a different profile, and an exposed middrift.
She pulled it off admirably well. But the whole 'clone trooper' thing muddies the issue somewhat. Perhaps there was a bored lab tech worker.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
This was one pretty sad theater... we see like 2 or 3 people! I can tell you, the atmosphere was really twelve thousand times better than on that piece of video. Unfortunatly, video cams were not allowed in the theater, so I couldn't grab this wonderful moment. Where else can you see two people disguised as a AT-AT walker? I ask you!