I saw and enjoyed "Batman Begins," feeling new and additional respect for Christopher Nolan. We're in a golden age of comic book movies: "Batman Begins," "Spiderman 2," "Sin City," and "The Incredibles" are all within the last fourteen months, and all have to be within the top ten comic-book movies of all time, and one of them is probably the best of all time, though I haven't decided which. The combination of CGI and directors and writers who really care about the material makes a big difference. It's fascinating how much Michael Keaton's portrayal fifteen years ago influenced Christian Bale.

It amused me as I watched the movie to think how the plaintiffs' lawyers of today would sue deep pockets like Bruce Wayne, Wayne Industries, and Gotham City for their slight relationship for the actions of super-bad-guys. After all, LA fears a nine-digit verdict in the insane trial of the city for the murder of Notorious B.I.G. Plus the movie showed Hollywood's typical confusion of corporate governance issues. (Paging Larry Ribstein.)

I started to do a post for this blog, then decided to spend twenty minutes making it marginally substantive, and posted it to Overlawyered. Fark picked it up, 34000 people clicked through, and the Batman fanboys went absolutely nuts in the comment section, if you want to read several dozen people expound upon how I have no life because I spent slightly less time writing a post as someone who wrote several hundred words trying to explain the plausibility of possible legal loopholes Bruce Wayne could've used in a movie featuring a "focused microwave beam that can vaporize the water supply" without damaging anything else and an antidote that can be created in under 48 hours to permanently immunize someone from a permanently-acting hallucinogen. (Let's not forget the giant castle of ninjas on the top of a remote mountaintop.)

I'm not a big Wiki fan, but I have to say that Wikipedia's Star Wars entries are awfully useful in trying to understand the whole thing without having to read loads of krep.

Saw a matinee today in a mostly empty theater. I was going to say that this was the longest I waited ever to see a Star Wars movie, but then I remembered that I was a deprived eight-year-old who waited seemingly forever to see the movie because my parents didn't want to wait on line. I remember seeing lines stretching forever in the Houston Galleria, this in the days before several-thousand-theater releases. Of course, "forever" to a small kid might just be a few weeks—does anyone remember when the Star Wars phenomenon stopped crowding the theaters so? I did see it in a full movie theater, I think for Keith Goehring's birthday party, though it may have been that of some other E.O. Lovett Elementary classmate, and went on to see it another six times that year. I'm trying to remember the last time a movie enthralled me so that I saw it multiple times in the theater during its opening release. Probably "Pulp Fiction."

As for the movie itself? I entirely endorse my brother's take on the movie. I couldn't hear Yoda talk without thinking of Anthony Lane's hilarious line "Break me a f—ing give." (Ah, how Mr. Shawn rolls over in his grave.) And the continuity errors! Lane notes the implausibility of the lack of ultrasound in the high-tech Star Wars world. The effort to shovel every member of the original trilogy into the backstory seems mistaken to me. Now that we know that Chewbacca fought with Yoda side by side, are we to believe he never breathed a word of the Jedi to Han Solo, even as the legendary last of the Jedi, Obi-Wan Kenobi boards the Falcon? Rumors about a moon-sized battleship didn't sweep the galaxy in the twenty years it was being constructed? How come Leia's going after Kenobi instead of Yoda? If Vader's already the Emperor's life-saving sidekick in III, why is he so deferential to the Peter Cushing in IV? How come the technology has regressed in the twenty years between III and IV? What happened to all of R2-D2's powers? If one can program a droid to be nearly top-level Jedi Master-quality, and individual Jedi Masters can wipe out hundreds of droid army regulars, why not build a handful of General Grievouses instead of millions of cannon-fodder Roger Roger robots? (Damn government contractors!) And how come General Grievous gets a cool name instead of a letter-number combo?

Tyler Cowen gives a public choice reading of the double trilogy, gives a not entirely convincing defense of the movies as movies and links to Easter Eggs in the new movie (like the blink-and-you'll-miss-it scene with the Millennium Falcon, as well as Jar Jar Binks's only line).

Special bonus: my February 21, 1997 review of the rerelease of The Empire Strikes Back. The date brings back memories, since it was the week I met the woman who'd later divorce me, and I know she'd be upset if she googled me and found no reference to her whatsoever.