If You Can't Wait for the Dark Side

In one week, the last Star Wars film opens, and the local theatres are already selling advance tickets for the Big Day. People who attend the opening day of "Revenge of the Sith" run the risk of playing the character Big Honking Geek, of course. Andy Borowitz, the comic who fills many a mailbox with his daily fake news stories, ran an item this week titled "Shocker: Star Wars Fans Have Sex" (Insert derisive laughter here).

All that said, I'd like to have two of those tickets for one week from today, a seat for me and my wife Abby. (Insert sigh of relief on learning your correspondent has what can pass for a normal life.)

Some people can't wait, and others didn't need to. Last week a string of theatres around the US hosted a series of benefit screenings of Sith at the cool price of $500 a ticket. If you were lucky you also got an appearance of one of the film's production crew. It might not have been as thin as the Seinfeld episode where Kramer hosts a Spartacus screening with "the second assistant costumer" as a special guest. But that's a serious jones to shell out 500 beans for a two-week jump on the lines around your multiplex.

I found it far more entertaining just to consume the many bits of the film over the Web. Yesterday the Star Wars Web Site Empire sent me notice of the "End of War" trailer to watch over my Mac (set your bandwidth on stun, trooper), or the "music video" (quotes required) "A Hero Falls." No less than nine TV-ad-length snippets of the movie are online at the starwars.com site. You can probably see 10 minutes of the movie without even putting a toe across the geek line.

But the best representation of the depth of this culture — it's been with us for 28 years now, meaning the kids who saw the first movie when it opened are already older than Natalie Portman — to see how much Star Wars has spawned, head out the fan film frontier. This week at Cannes, Atom Films is screening the slickest of these little five-minute gems, built with "borrowed" seconds from the saga and often given a comic twist.

May the farce be you, young Jedi.