And Confront Him You Will

Today's movie:



1983's "Return of the Jedi"

Starring: Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Billy Dee Williams, Ian McDiarmid, and Alec Guinness.

Genre: Science Fiction

Plot: There's this fat blobby bad guy and some teddy bear things and a little old short dude dies and a chick in a gold bikini and a guy who hates his dad like a whole LOT...

It's a trap!: It feels weird posting about this movie alone since it's part of a trilogy (1-3 don't exist to me). I should post about Empire Strikes Back first, but RotJ feels more like an 80s movie to me than ESB does. Anyway.

I saw Star Wars for the first time about a year before this came out. I was about 6 or 7 and it blew my little butt away. It's rare when a person can actually pinpoint the moment in time when they made the transformation from normal person to nerd, but I can. After that, I set about acquiring every piece of Star Wars related crap I could get my hands on and when RotJ came out, there were a few days where this was the only thing out of my mouth: "MomcanIgoseeReturnoftheJedi? MomcanIgoseeReturnoftheJedi?"

I ended up seeing it twice in the theater, which believe me, even at that age was a big deal because I hate going to the movies. At that time, I liked it even more than Star Wars, despite the Ewoks. I knew my mind wasn't right at a young age because the girls in my class who had been forced to see it lost their shit over the cute little bastards. Me, I was crazy about the first act, the one with Jabba the Hutt.

It was SO COOL to me and I didn't know why. Some obese slimy creature and his mutant pals and a half-naked woman that I cared nothing about-why did the whole thing appeal to me so much? It took me a long time to figure it out and now I know-I liked it because it was like a PG-rated Caligula. It was all so sordid and gross and forbidden. People being eaten, shady deals going on in the shadows, captive women, revenge-not only was a I nerd at a young age, I was apparently well on my way to becoming a pervert because I wanted to MOVE there and live with the mutants and the freaks and the criminals. Ewoks? Screw cute, give me ugly any day.

My Star Wars junk is long gone and I'm not as big a fan of it as I once was, but I'll always have a place for it in my heart. My dark, twisted, perverted heart.

Where are they now?:

Mark Hamill does voice-over work, most notably as the Joker on "Batman: The Animated Series".

Harrison Ford is Harrison Ford. He's a little aged, but he was still pretty hot in the last Indiana Jones movie.

Carrie Fisher writes and still acts. She has 2 movies in various stages of completion.

Billy Dee Williams has two movies in post-production.

Ian McDiarmid is currently filming a tv movie where he plays the husband of former British PM Margaret Thatcher.

Alec Guinness became more powerful than you could possibly imagine in August of 2000. RIP.

You can get it Here. That includes both the good version and the "WTF was George Lucas thinking?!" version from a few years back.