the groundhog day project

Han Solo likes it when Leia calls him a scoundrel. He gets involved with the rebellion only because he's out for cash. And, decades later (presumably after some brief attempt at settling down and starting a family with Leia) he's a smuggler all over again. And then he dies. Delve into the Expanded Universe--most of which is no longer canon--and he used to be an Imperial soldier. He defected when he saved Chewbacca from being enslaved by the Empire. That's why Chewbacca owes him a "life debt". One bright light of action in an otherwise scoundrelous (c) existence-- (Which brings to mind an interesting sidenote: How did I know about that life debt as a kid? Was that something they put on the description text of the Chewbacca action figure? Like everybody knows those smaller furry forest folk in Return of the Jedi are Ewoks, but no one ever calls them that. We know it because of licensed products, action figures, books, promotional materials. (Similarly, I wonder i...

I was always a bigger fan of Luke than of Han. Probably because I was so young when I first came to them, or they first came to me. Luke made for the more interesting fantasy. So, I'm looking up articles about this, Hand versus Luke, and I really wish there were a serious study, but I might be the only person who would think studying that would be worth it for the sake of, say, a film program, a communication studies program, a psychology program. Glenn Geher, PhD, writing for Psychology Today , 5 March 2013, talks about a class discussion in a graduate course in social psychology... The conversation touched on several themes relevant to evolutionary psychology--mate choice, optimal features of long-term mates, optimal features of short-term mates, morphological features of sexually attractive mates, the handicap principle applied to high levels of testosterone, inbreeding depression, and so forth... Let's unpack a bit of that before moving on. Evolutionary psychology is sp...

More Star Wars , more SPOILERS. Not that I will make a particular effort to SPOIL things this time, but since I do not deal in straight reviews in this blog, it is inevitable that I will bring up details of Star Wars: The Force Awakens that are SPOILERS. Proceed with caution.           I was going to write today about how it is okay that The Force Awakens echoes plot points from the original trilogy because there are only so many available plotlines anyway, and as Maz Kanata (Lupita Nyong'o) describes it, the fight going on in the present is the only fight, the same fight that keeps happening in different guises. Whether it is the Sith or the Knights of Ren or some megalomaniacal dictator who isn't even force sensitive--Domhnall Gleeson evokes a good Hitlerian vibe in his General Hux, and it really a different type of villain than Star Wars has had before. We can assume that Palpatine made some big speeches like Hux's but we've never been shown those thing...