A Sense of Doubt blog post #1903 - 2020: May the Fourth Be With You - Always

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2539309/Stars-Wars-scenes-Never-seen-images-70s-trilogy-shared-man-played-Chewbacca.html

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1903 - 2020: May the Fourth Be With You - Always

I didn't manage to get this published on May the Fourth, so it's going out on May fifth, which is apparently both Cinco de Mayo (Yay! Mexican Army Victory!) and now also day two of Star Wars days: the Revenge of the Fifth. [Heh].

My blog reveals my fandom in numbers. I have categories for both Star Wars and Star Trek. There are 19 posts in Star Wars and 29 posts in Star Trek, and this is the right ratio.

I do love Star Wars. Very much. But Star Trek came first. Trek is part of my childhood, originally debuting when I am four years old and too young to watch it. Though I caught some of that original run, I fell in love with it in reruns in the early 1970s. The original Star Wars trilogy came out when I was in high school and finished when I was in college. My least favourite of all the films is Return of the Jedi, which should have been and was going to be called Revenge of the Jedi, but they thought it was going to be too dark for young viewers. Yes, I wrote "least favorite," which means I like Phantom Menace more. You read that right. I do not detest Phantom Menace as much as most WAY TOO VOCAL Star Wars fans.

I did see the original film like thirty some times in the theatre and Empire maybe twenty some. We didn't have streaming back then; we didn't even have commercial video tape quite yet.

So, despite loving Star Trek first and a little more (maybe just because it was first or maybe because there's more product, still, despite the recent surge of Star Wars product), I want to wish everyone

MAY THE FOURTH BE WITH YOU, ALWAYS.

I send my wishes with the reprint of my Carrie Fisher Princess Leia specific tribute and RIP send off.

I also added links for all my Star Wars content, minus a couple minor ones as testament that I have written about it here.

Also, there's a slashdot news piece that will lead to an article by a guy who really HATES The Rise of Skywalker, much like those who criticize Rey for being a Mary Sue, I think the opinions are a bit over wrought, reactionary, and lacking in gratitude, but then, that's a lot like how I felt about Return of the Jedi, and  The Rise of Skywalker is INFINITELY better than that film!!

ENJOY.

RIP Peter Mayhew, please send our love to Carrie Fisher. pic.twitter.com/QcBmzByEYb

— David Leavitt (@David_Leavitt) May 2, 2019

Never seen star wars - http://xkcd.com/1769/

• 🧵 by Jack Appleby: Star Wars just had 10+ min event in Fortnite that included:- an exclusive movie trailer premiered INSIDE the game- a custom game scene w/ the Millennium Falcon - a live interview w/ JJ Abrams- PLAYABLE LIGHTSABERS Quick thread + analysis.

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1786 - Best TOR Articles of 2019

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1514 - First STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER Trailer Teases Lando & Emperor Palpatine

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1412 - Rey and the Sad Devolution of the Female Character

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1069 - Toxic Fan Culture, Star Wars, and Kelly Marie Tran

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #999 - "Honest" Trailers - Star Trek, STNG, The Last Jedi, and Wonder Woman

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #920 - It's not Always Nice - Star Wars and the Last Jedi

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #826 - The Last Jedi - new trailer

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #528 - Everything is a re-mix: Star Wars without Star Wars

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #385 - Star Trek Beyond, Kubrick, and Trailers: Dr. Strange, Wonder Woman, Star Trek Discovery, JLA, King Arthur, Rogue One, and Fantastic Beasts

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #204 - Slash shippers & fandom

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #154 - "Get used to it." The Force Awakens & Diversity

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #106 - Star Wars Boycott



https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/20/05/04/0456220/this-may-the-4th-gets-unusual-celebrations-for-star-wars-day

This May the 4th Gets Unusual Celebrations For 'Star Wars Day' (usatoday.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on Monday May 04, 2020 @12:59AM from the droids-you're-looking-for dept.

Star Wars Day "is getting a virtual convention," reports Movieweb.Reedpop, the organization behind New York Comic-Con and Star Wars Celebration have put the convention together... The two-day event is called An Online Revelry: May the 4th Be With You and Revenge of the 5th celebration. Star Wars fans can expect all kinds of activities to take part in, right from the comfort of their own homes. This is in addition to Disney+ launching their behind-the-scenes docuseries on The Mandalorian, along with The Rise of Skywalker streaming premiere.

An Online Revelry: May the 4th Be With You and Revenge of the 5th celebration will feature live-tweeting "movies and episodes of both Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars: Rebels, as well as Q&A sessions and discussions with writers and voice actors associated with the franchise... The event will take place across the many social media accounts of Reedpop, including "New York Comic Con, C2E2, BookCon, Emerald City Comic Con, and Florida SuperCon, on both Twitter and Facebook."
And USA Today reports on some other homegrown celebrations:On Monday starting at 12:01 a.m. PT/3:01 ET, LA's "Star Wars" bar Scum and Villainy Cantina is presenting a 24-hour livestream on Twitch featuring director Kevin Smith, movie historian Leonard Maltin, "Rise of Skywalker" actor Greg Grunberg and more. And that same day, Hollywood trainer Eric Fleishman is hosting a live online themed, costumed workout (4 ET/1 PT, registration required) featuring guest Matt Lanter (who voices Anakin Skywalker in "Clone Wars") and a live performance by Echosmith.
Meanwhile, one Ohio news site even resurrected their image of a homegrown Star Wars board game they'd created in 2005 to celebrate the release of Star Wars III: Return of the Sith.

And CNET just published an article complaining about how much they hated The Rise of Skywalker.

THE REPRINT from:

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #540 - Carrie Fisher, RIP, you will be missed

http://pixalry.io/post/155056851712/drowned-by-moonlight-and-strangled-by-her-own-bra

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #540 - Carrie Fisher, RIP, you will be missed

Hi Mom,

What a helluva a year. I felt rocked hard enough by your passing away 542 days ago.

So many big name deaths this year.

And now Carrie Fisher, Richard Adams among all the others: Prince, Leonard Cohen, George Michael, Florence Henderson, Alan Rickman, Muhammed Ali, Edward Albee, Patty Duke, Harper Lee, Elie Wiesel, José Fernandez, Darwyn Cooke, Umberto Eco, Pat Conroy, Glenn Frey, Keith Emerson, Tony Phillips, Gene Wilder, Anton Yelchin, Doris Roberts, and most of all how the year started with the loss of DAVID BOWIE.

I wrote about all this death here: Hey Mom #248 but that was back in March. So many more since then. I have a death category on the right in the category list to see other posts.

I repost Scalzi a lot. He's one of my go to choices as I follow his work closely. Though he nails it, I may re-post other work soon and add some more thoughts on this year of big name deaths not to mention the deaths of friends and loved ones. A close friend's father just died and a few weeks ago a friend's eighteen year old son died. Those deaths seem more tragic as they are closer to home.

http://gabecebro.tumblr.com/post/155038349186/may-the-force-be-with-you-princess

http://brokenlynx21.tumblr.com/post/155042606471

http://nikoniko808.tumblr.com/post/155046460275/thank-you

http://matereya.tumblr.com/post/155045188467/rip-carrie-fisher-i-still-cant-believe-this-is

UNCATEGORIZED

RIP Carrie Fisher

DECEMBER 27, 2016 JOHN SCALZI61 COMMENTS

People reports she died this morning.

Obviously she will be remembered for Star Wars — she played one of its most iconic characters, who was a general, a senator and a princess. But as much as I liked her in that role, she came most alive for me when I learned that she was a writer, and a good one, and not only a good one, but an extraordinarily witty one, one who was called in to save movie scripts and who could write novels and memoirs with characters and turns of phrase that inspired me at least to want to be that witty too.

Beyond that I admired her openness talking about her struggles with addiction and mental illness. I think she did good work in helping people who shared her struggles in their own life know that they didn’t have to stop you, you just had to know they were part of the landscape. I think she saved lives being open about her own.

So she not only played a role model but was one in her own life, for all sorts of people, including me. I’m glad she was here with us. I’m sad she is gone now. I just know she would have a great parting shot about it.

Update: I wrote a longer piece on Carrie Fisher as a writer, for the Los Angeles Times. Here it is.

Carrie Fisher the writer: Witty and vulnerable, she took us to the edge of our comfort zone

John Scalzi

Out on the Internet, along with the many heart-touching tributes to Carrie Fisher, photographs of her as Leia Organa, either as princess (the original trilogy) or general (from “The Force Awakens”) and with her beloved French bulldog Gary, there’s another picture, originally placed there by cinema documentarian Will McCrabb, showing a page of the script of “The Empire Strikes Back.” On the script are several edits, in red pen, condensing and improving the script. McCrabb said the hand that put the edits there was Carrie Fisher’s, noting on Twitter that Fisher herself confirmed it to him.

Is he correct? The edits might have been made by Irwin Kershner, “Empire’s” director, instead. At the time — 1979 — Fisher would have been 22 years old. Yet here she was, looking at a script written by Lawrence Kasdan, who would go on to several screenwriting Oscar nominations, and Leigh Brackett, Howard Hawks’ secret screenwriting weapon and one of the great science fiction writers of her time, and thinking “this needs some fixing.” And then getting out her pen and doing just that.

Whoever made the edits wasn’t wrong. At least some of the edits to the scene (in which Leia, Han and Chewbacca plot a course to visit Lando Calrissian) made it to the final cut of the film. Simpler, tighter, better — and with the rhythm of speech rather than exposition (science fiction, forever the genre of people explaining things to other people). Carrie Fisher played a galactic princess, but she had a working writer’s gift for understanding how people talk, and how language works. At 22.

She published her first novel, “Postcards From the Edge,” in 1987, which she would adapt for the 1990 Mike Nichols film of the same name, starring Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine. Fisher’s four novels were based to some extent on her own life — as an author, “write what you know” was something Fisher took seriously — but the books were more than veiled tidbits of the life of a Hollywood scion. They announced the arrival of a writer whose voice — witty but vulnerable, willing to push her readers to the edge of their comfort zone with the same lines that made them laugh — was both all her own, and part of a literary tradition that included writers like Dorothy Parker and Elaine May. 

"By about 16 I wanted to be Dorothy Parker," she told The Times in 2008. "I figured out the ways I am like her…. She’s short. She was half Jewish. She had brown hair and brown eyes. She was an alcoholic or addict. And she married a gay guy!"

And like Parker and May, Hollywood found its uses for Fisher as a writer. In addition to “Postcards,” Fisher had a healthy career as one of the film industry’s most sought-after script doctors — the (largely) anonymous people who would go in and punch up a script in dire need of laugh lines and emotional heft. She worked on some of the biggest hits and franchises of the ’90s, including Steven Spielberg’s “Hook,” “Lethal Weapon 3,” “Sister Act” and “The Wedding Singer.” Not every script she worked on could be saved — she was reported to have worked the scripts for the “Star Wars” prequel trilogy, which are generally considered to be dire — but no doctor saves every patient. 

In 2008, Fisher told Newsweek that she had stopped script-doctoring because producers started requiring rewrite notes on spec with no guarantees of payment. The same year, Fisher ditched fiction and began releasing memoirs, starting with “Wishful Drinking,” which, along with the usual anecdotes that come with the territory of a celebrity memoir, also dealt frankly, if sardonically, with Fisher’s history of addiction and mental illness.

“I feel I'm very sane about how crazy I am," Fisher wrote in "Wishful Drinking," directly after describing "being invited" to go to a mental hospital. That was part of the charm of her writing: it would take you places you might not have wanted to go, and kept up a stream of chatter to help you remain, if not comfortable, at least comforted. Your friend Carrie Fisher was with you, even as she was observing herself.

Fisher’s memoirs were not universally loved (Salon reviewer Rebecca Traister complained, of “Wishful Drinking,” that “it retreads much of the terrain she’s already covered in her novels”), but it’s possible that in the final accounting, the openness in which Fisher addressed her struggles with mental illness, pills and other drugs may have been the most important thing she’d done. It’s not easy to lay yourself bare to millions and say, basically, “this is what was going on while you thought I was a princess.” Fisher did it, fearlessly and unapologetically, and in the process of living out loud helped to erase at least some of the stigma that still attaches to addiction recovery and treating mental illness. Her second memoir, 2012’s “Shockaholic,” detailed undergoing electroconvulsive therapy — called, in the old days, shock treatment — as a remedy for depression.

There’s no doubt that Fisher’s fame comes from “Star Wars,” and Leia Organa, who “Star Wars” fans are likely to see one more time, at least, when “Episode VIII” of the film franchise comes to theaters in late 2017. But Fisher’s legacy includes her written words -- cutting, clever, observant, self-aware and unbowed.  

Scalzi is a Los Angeles Times Critic at Large and the author of the Hugo-winning novel “Redshirts.” 

original HEY MOM sign off redacted.

sorry, can't find the original now...

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2005.04 - 10:10

- Days ago = 1766 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.