STAR WARS CELEBRATION

The month before before Revenge of the Sith came out in theatres, the largest Star Wars convention in at least three years took place in Indiana. Called Celebration III, it was a dream gathering for any Star Wars fan. Even the plaid-shirted one himself, George Lucas attended.

I was going through the endless online photo galleries that fans have posted. There are lots of very cool pictures. Here’s an interesting one: a collection of fans in “slave girl” Princess Leia outfits.

This next picture is amazing. The guy below is in fact not Hayden Christensen though the resemblance is super uncanny. I’ve included a still photo of Christensen himself for comparison.

Seeing all the photos of the props and toys made me wish I could have gone. If you’re interested, here are some more photos from the convention.

COME CELEBRATE WITH ME

Current and former SJC residents, I invite you to join me at the spring graduation reception today at the Fairmont Social Lounge at 5pm. You were supposed to RSVP, but I’m sure no one will notice if you slip in a few minutes after it has started.

There will be refreshments, alcoholic ones as well. A rumour also exists that they might be serving shrimp dumplings too.

In any case, be there as I transition gracefully from grad student to an unemployed bum with an advanced degree.

KEVIN SMITH'S BLOG

I am sure at least some of you are familiar with Kevin Smith, director of movies like Clerks, Mallrats, and Dogma. I like his work and from what I’ve seen and heard, he seems like a cool, down-to-earth type of guy.

He’s had a website for a while now where he would occasionally make a post on a messageboard telling his fans what he was up to. Smith has finally made the leap to a more formal blog and it’s been a treat to read. He’s an interesting subject to begin with, but he posts so frequently, it’s hard not to get hooked.

While his life would be blog-worthy normally, the blog has recently taken on a local Vancouver flavour. Smith is in town shooting Catch and Release, in a rare take as an actor instead of a director. He drove his entire family up from California for the shoot and most of his blog for the month of May is about working in good old Van-city. You may not know it, but Smith actually lived in Vancouver for six months many years ago as a student at VFS. In one blog entry, he drives his wife around the old neighbourhood showing her where he used to hang out.

From reading his blog, you get the feeling Smith is still a regular dude. He writes about going to Safeway to pick up peanut butter and London Drugs to buy a fan. Could you imagine Jennifer Lopez doing that? No way. In one entry, he writes about taking his daughter Harley to Denny’s for the first time. Which Denny’s? The one on Broadway near the Toy’R’Us. I think it’s pretty cool that Smith isn’t above just being a regular dad taking his kid for greasy breakfast.

I think Smith is still in town for a few days yet, but he strangely hasn’t posted to his blog for a few days now. If you think you’ve seen Kevin Smith in town, that very well maybe him. His posts in Vancouver start here. Have a read.

BEHIND THE SCENES

From what I see on the server logs, there’s a fair amount of visitors who come to this site daily, looking for whatever string of words I’ve managed to bash out on the keyboard. Because of the frequency of visits from some readers, I do my best to post at least once a day. Though some of you out there have your own blogs, have you ever wondered how a post comes to be? Well, in this very special installment of erwintang.com I’ll take you on a never seen before behind the scenes tour!

After arriving at the glass and steel adorned headquarters of erwintang.com, I usually spend the first hour of my day reading my e-mail. I then spend an hour and a bit in a meeting with the various department heads of the site. We discuss possible post ideas and flesh out the more viable ones or ones that have caught my attention. I then leave the staff to firm up one or two ideas so that they’ll be in postable form by the afternoon. By then, it’s time for my daily fried chicken break…

Actually, that’s not how the process goes at all, but wouldn’t it be cool if it was like that? In reality, ideas for posts can come from anywhere and at anytime. Over the years, I’ve realized my posts can be more or less put into several categories. The first is the “life” post which is common among most bloggers. This is simply a post about what happened to the blog author that day or in between the last post and the current one. Usually, the event or events I describe I hope will be of some entertainment value to my readers. It could be humourous, but it could also be something which causes me to vent plasma frustration. For example, the first time Woba and I checked out a suspicious car is a “life” post. It is these types of posts that keep most of my readers up to date on my life, so much so that friends of mine who I haven’t spoke to in weeks will have no questions to ask me when we finally talk in person.

The second type of posts I have are what I called “set” posts. This type of entry have no reliance on current events nor do they necessarily have to involve me personally. Most often, I am presenting an opinion on something. These set pieces might have been drifting in the back of my mind for days, weeks, or even months. For whatever reason I’ll feel the need to solidify my ideas in the form of a post on my blog. These entries are rarer than the previous types of posts. An example would be when I confessed I was a noob at pumping my own gas.

The third type of post I have is something I call “what I had for lunch” posts. Though I literally post what I had for lunch sometimes in a short one or two sentence entry, this type of post has expanded in meaning over the years. Any short post that really has no substantial meaning falls under this category. Examples include a single picture with a caption, a short tirade about being tired and/or hungry, a link to a news story (usually involving wang flies), a link to a funny video, or a link to another web site. When all else fails, I rely on this type of post to inject at least something onto the blog for people to read. At least for me, my philosophy about blogs is that frequency of posting is a hair more important than quality.

Well, there you have it, a small peek at how we do things here at erwintang.com. I hope you enjoyed it. I must take my leave of you now as I’ve arranged for the entire staff to see Revenge of the Sith later this afternoon. Bye!

HMMMM…

I’ve lost Internet connectivity at my apartment for some reason. I’ve been forced to trek over two minutes to the CS labs to write this.

The issue appears to be network-wide for a large majority, if not all Resnet users. I hope everything will be back to normal some time in the morning.

THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF MY LIFE

I saw Revenge of the Sith today. You know a movie has made an impact when you and the people you went with can only sit in silence for minutes as the credits roll. That can indicate either a good thing or a bad thing. Today, it was a positive sign.

For some of us, we’ve waited nearly two decades to see the events unfold on screen as we did today. I was ten years old when I read about the near-legendary battle between Anakin and Obi-wan on a lava filled planet. Master and former apprentice facing off in a climatic battle. Former friends forced to fight each other. How did it come to this? What exactly happened? Why did Obi-wan leave a horribly scarred Anakin to seemingly die? These were the questions I’ve asked myself since I was a child. Today, those questions were answered.

For almost the same amount of time, I’ve also wondered how Luke and Leia’s mother died. What tragedy had befallen her? What prevented her from from raising her twin babies? Again, we found our answers today.

The movie was satisfying to a great extent because so much information was provided. Information that we’ve only guessed about for so many years. Closure is such a good thing.

So why did we sit silently as the film ended? For me, I was struck by the tragic and sad details that Lucas finally provided us. I doubt if there were any of us who didn’t know the general ending of the movie. The original three films spelled out the story in broad strokes for us. It was seeing the fine details that made it emotional. I’ve known for twenty years that Anakin was burned by lava, but to see and hear him immolated by fire was shocking. I’ve also known that Luke and Leia were split up to be raised on separate planets, but to see the babies actually delivered to their surrogate parents tugged at the heartstrings. Though I didn’t see grown men reduced to tears as one reviewer witnessed, I certainly could understand why.

Yeah, the special effects kicked ass, but I was most impressed with the darker tone of the movie. If you don’t think it’s dark, go see it and we’ll talk about the younglings afterwards. I’ve read how Lucas has described the Star Wars saga as a tragic and sad tale, but today I fully understand what he meant by that.

Sith is easily the best of the prequels and better than Jedi. It doesn’t quite surpass Empire, but only time will tell how I compare it with A New Hope.

SO THIS IS IT

Tomorrow, Revenge of the Sith opens worldwide (except in Japan, sorry Newmark) in theatres. As some of you know, it will be the last Star Wars movie to ever hit the silver screen. For many fans, this will be a bittersweet month as the movie series draws to a close.

I’ve always wondered about the stark contrast between Star Wars fans and those who don’t have an affinity for the movies. The people who aren’t fans, at least to me, have always expressed a failure to understand why some people love the Star Wars universe so much. There seems to be this wide gap between the two groups.

I can only speak for myself, but I’d like to shed some light on why I have a special place for the Star Wars universe in my heart.

I first saw A New Hope, in either 1978 or 1979, when the first movie was re-released to the theatres. I wasn’t even in kindergarten at the time and the whole movie-going experience was completely new to me. My dad brought me to the theatre. There, I saw my first movie screen, how the seats were arranged, the concession stands, the bathrooms, the nervous wait for the movie to start, the trailers, and unfortunately, the guy with the big 70s hair in front of me.

The first movie basically showed me the ropes about the whole process of going to the movies. The film itself left a huge impression on my young mind. There were heroes and a big bad villain. There were spaceships and huge space battles with lasers. There were droids and strange-looking creatures. In the late 70s, entertainment options for children sucked. Back then, we had no video games, no Internet, no specialty channels for kids, nothing. Star Wars was unlike anything I had seen before.

Somehow, little Erwin found out that there would be a sequel to A New Hope. Even before I was ten years old, I was going to learn the painful lesson of waiting for a movie sequel. Though I had to wait only about two years, it was an excruciating long time for a child since that amounted to a third of my entire life up until that point.

When Empire came out, I quickly learned to read the movie listings in the paper, which back then, was basically the only place you could get movie times. Again, my dad took me to see it. When Vader told Luke he was his father, that was probably the most shocking thing I had heard as a six-year old.

The three-year wait for Jedi was much easier to endure for some reason, probably because I was gettin’ it done in elementary school by that time. At the time, I think enjoyed Jedi less because it got a bit dark at the end and I think I was still in the space battles part of my childhood. That or maybe I thought the Ewoks sucked.

The thing about Star Wars that I love the most is that there is so much to enjoy on so many different levels. Yeah sure, as a kid, I loved the space battles mostly, but as I grew older, I began finding a lot of depth to the movies. There were a lot of themes that Star Wars presented that I had never seen before. As a kid, where else did I see murder, betrayal, jealousy, hope, and redemption rolled into one story?

I was nine years old when I thought that in Jedi, Luke would be forced to kill his own father to save his friends and the galaxy. Space battles aside, what other movie presented such issues? When Luke lit the funeral pyre to cremate his father, I thought, wow, that’s gotta be tough.

To this day, I still believe the archetypical mentor is Yoda. The dimunitive Jedi Master was essentially a rubber puppet in real-life, but his image in popular culture will remain as a wise and sometimes playful teacher of all things Jedi. Think of all the times you’ve taught or been taught by someone. I bet at least once, a Yoda reference was brought up.

Then there are the Jedi, who I have always liked. Sure they were super cool mystical warriors with lightsabers, but they were more than that. They shunned feeling anger, fear, or aggression in life, but instead preached understanding, knowledge, and peace. They weren’t wussies either, ’cause they kick your ass in a bar fight if they had to. If you’re thinking the ways of the Jedi have almost religious undertones, you’d be right. In the last British census, enough respondents listed “Jedi” as their faith that the government was forced to recognize it as an “official” religion.

Of course, all of this didn’t come to me when I was a kid. Much of my appreciation occurred when I was older. I didn’t fully appreciate that Yoda stuff until I was in my late teens or early twenties, when I was thinking, man, I wish I had a mentor at work. The point is, for a series of movies to give you stuff to think about even decades after their release, that in itself makes them worthy of watching.

While I admit the prequels won’t have the same effect on me as did the original trilogy, I am looking forward to seeing how the last movie ends. I’ve waited twenty years to see this legendary battle between Obi-wan and Anakin among the lava, let’s hope it doesn’t disappoint.

INTERESTING

As of 1am PST, if 2000 out of the 3500 or so people who voted for the Green Party had changed their vote to NDP in the Vancouver-Point Grey riding, Gordon Campbell would have lost his place as premier. Two thousand votes is still a lot of votes, but think of it this way, in Campbell’s riding, more people voted against him than for him. The same cannot be said of Carole James who garnered more votes than the entire slate running against her.

I’m not an expert in politics, but these are the interesting trends that my solar-powered calculator shows me.