Wednesday: I no longer need to avoid all the spoilers.

Today's plan was to go see the new Star Wars movie.

With lunch.  We ended up at Lola's, and I ordered too much chicken and too few not-chicken.

But then we discovered that the movie was not playing when expected, but rather an hour later.  So we got coffee.

And saw this very cold dog waiting for someone to get coffee and come back outside.  I have enough images to do a gif, but I'm lazy today.

And coffee cups have squirrels on them for the holidays.

But yeah.  Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Ticket fun!

We saw it at the Alameda Theater, which as the CGI food kept mentioning, was built in 1932.  This means that it's very old and highly decorated.

Lobby.

Gilt detail above the theater entrance.

Poorly illuminated interior shot.

Reasonably exposed exterior shot.

I'll do links, and keep with the "no Star Wars spoilers" bit by putting those after the cut.

• This is a mistake.  The last Indiana Jones movie wasn't very good, so making more bad movies isn't a great idea.
• Cosplay.
• I'll have to keep an eye out for this movie.
• Disguise. 

Spoilers.


I didn't think it was as good as the internet has been pushing.  Let's do a good news/bad news thing, I guess, since that's the laziest way to organize thoughts.

Good things in green, bad things in red.

1. Rey.  I want to see a lot more of her, because she has a nice story arc here, and is an interesting character.  Also: kind of kicks a lot of ass.
2. Kylo Ren.  I want to see a lot less of him, because he's the same fucking whiny jackass that everyone hated when he was played by Hayden Christensen and called Anakin.  I could not possibly care less about him, because it's the same "I'm doing the dark side thing because I'm tortured due to reasons, but I'm too lame to explain those reasons to you.  I also probably hate sand" bullshit.  Fuck the lazy "he's just like Vader" writing.
3. The lack of discussion of taxes and trade.  So there's a New Republic, the First Order has taken over from the Empire, and there's also a Resistance that's working with the NR against the FO?  I don't understand the politics here.  The NR had a fleet, but it was destroyed by the FO during that first giant weapon attack?  The R seems to have the firepower of about half the rebels at the battle of Yavin 4.  Is that accurate?  Are they really squeezed for resources?  Who knows, there's so little exposition of the underlying economics and politics that it's just a vague blur.  Sure, the prequels went too far, but cutting all that out is bad too.  Even episode 4 introduced a lot of background stuff during the Death Star committee meetings with Tarkin and Admiral Motti.
4. Han.  It's a bit convenient that he shows up just in time, but he adds a lot of character that would be missing if they had just stuck to the new people.
5. Desert planets.  I hate sand, too.  Also: what happened with all those crashed ships?  Can we see that movie?  I suspect there's a lot of story there.
6. Poe Dameron.  Who knows.  He's the best pilot in the Resistance.  Great.  Good for him.  I don't really care about him much.  He's not onscreen long enough for me to care.
7. Giant space lasers.  It's like the Empire spent all their development points on GSLs, and ignored everything else.  That might explain why none of the other ships seem to have progressed much.
8. Luke.  I want to see a lot more Mark Hamill, because I like him.  His "start up a new school, have somebody Anakin it up, and then close down and go hide because trying something more than once is hard" plan isn't very well thought out, but whatever.  I like Mark Hamill.
9. Diversity.  After six movies that were largely "white dudes flying planes around space while aliens drink in bars," this one finally had a more reasonable distribution.  Jess Pava and Admiral Statura are apparently the names of the two that stuck out to me.
10. Nien Nunb.  He's back, and he's still as ridiculous as ever.  Never change, Nien Nunb.