Haven't had a minute

to read a novel in the last few days, very annoying, but I did see the latest Star Wars movie. And a lower-energy, more stilted s-f epic have I rarely seen. The worst is when Natalie Portman talks about politics, the second-worst is when she bats her eyelids to signal that she's having emotions, and more generally I was cracked up by the last 20 minutes or so where poor Lucas has to compress a million iconic scenes into a short time period for an audience who he can assume know every details of the trilogy to come. Had to see it for old times' sake, of course: I am so totally the Star Wars generation, the first one (1977) was the first movie I remember seeing by a long shot & it's the mythology of childhood. (I was rather too young to understand a lot of what was going on, and had nightmares for years afterwards about the scene where the trash compactor walls are closing in...) In those pre-video days, you didn't watch movies again and again, but that didn't stop us from having a minor obsession, pitiful plastic toy light sabers etc. Someone--it seems unlikely to have been my mother, it's not her kind of present--gave me and my brothers each a Star Wars action figure, and we played with them extensively. Curiously we each had one that suited some aspect of our personality (I'm slightly exaggerating here, BTW, and hoping my brothers won't read this with horror)--the delicate worrier (well, delicate by our family's standards...) had C3PO, the strong silent brother had Chewbacca and I had R2D2, the short & reliable one.