When I was a sophomore in high school, wondering how to scrape together the funds to go with my French club for a week in Paris and London for Spring Break, my mother said something I will never forget. As she allowed me to cash in a bond that her honorary grandfather had given me, originally intended to pay for my college, she said, "Mr McCauley would have told us, 'There are more places to learn than in a school.'" (Considering it took me 13 years to pay off the college loans I ended up taking, even that was a significant learning experience. I consider the thought proven correct.) I have worked on that theory for my entire life, ever since. I applied it to my own kids, once taking them out of elementary school for two whole weeks while we drove cross-country to spend my 30th birthday back in Colorado with family, and to take an educational tour of the country while we were at it. The school administrators frowned on us, but I really didn't care. That trip meant far more to us than attendance quotas and standardized tests for the year.
At the risk of sounding like Mr Garrison from South Park, I made sure that I gave my kids a full pop culture education along the way. It was on that same cross country tour that we started drilling them on their rock and roll vocabularies, making sure that they knew their classics and their outliers. (It was also on that trip that my younger daughter first began to tire of that game, sighing and answering every "Who's on the radio now" question with, "I don't know. Pink Floyd?" Every time. It became a thing.) So it really shouldn't come as a shock when I admit that all three times, as the Star Wars prequels were released, both our daughters conveniently had "appointments" that required us signing them out of school a couple hours early on opening day. Yeah, all three movies were horrible disappointments, but it was family time, and it was worth it. (It was worth it to travel back to Colorado to see all three Lord of the Rings movies with the Mr's high school buddies too, but that is a different fandom for a different blog post.)
I will construct this next paragraph very carefully, to avoid spoilers of any kind. I will keep my details vague, as I am wont to do.
Last week, when we finally got around to seeing the last James Bond movie at the town's freshly rebuilt movie theater, we went ahead and bought our opening day Star Wars tickets. We chose an early morning show as much for the availability of decent assigned seats as for the chance to see it before anyone ruined it for us on Facebook. It was a gorgeous morning as we set out, the bright sun offsetting the bitter single-digit temperatures that were lingering from overnight. The theater wasn't overly crowded, and the assigned seating seemed to have provided a relaxed atmosphere in the theater (other than the one doofus who parked his big diesel truck on top of a 3 foot tall snow bank, and later choked the parking lot with thick black smoke while he struggled to get it back out later). It would have been nice if the theater had set up a couple coffee makers for the event, but we can't have everything. There were previews to every single major movie opening in 2016, and about half of the minor ones. Our 9 am show time meant an actual start around 9:25. As for the movie itself? You know I'm not going to ruin it for you. I liked it. Mr S-P was less enthusiastic. I thought it was much more character driven, less about throwing every special effect and action sequence they could think of at the audience. There was only action when there needed to be. No little Anakin in pod races, no clone army that could be turned off with a toggle switch, just to show off CGI. The Mr said that it didn't feel like an original enough story for him, too close to Episodes 4-6. We both agreed that it was way better than Episodes 1-3. I felt like it was exactly the palate cleanser I needed to be willing to go on to an Episode 8, whenever that comes around. In short, unless you absolutely hated the series from the time it premiered in the 70s, go see it. You won't see a single Gungun. My word as a Jedi.
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