The Friday High Five

Nerdy anniversaries, big timing it, and long, slow, but exciting stories

20th Century Fox

Every Friday I share 5 things I enjoyed this week. Also, high fives are inherently cool, and I think we can all agree Friday is the bestest day. Hence the Friday High Five. 🙏🏻

My Favorite Thing

The Phantom Menace on May the 4th

It may surprise you to learn my house doesn’t observe May the 4th.

When you’ve seen the movies as many times as I have, you don’t really need an excuse to watch them again. I do it because I want to, not because a calendar suggests I should.

Knowing Episode One was being re-released in theaters for its 25th anniversary, I made plans with my son to go see it. He suggested Saturday would work best. By fate, happenstance, or the will of the Force, Saturday was May the 4th.

I wore my best Boba Fett t-shirt for the occasion.

We went to an evening showing. The theater was half-full of middle-aged people, some with kids in tow. The adults were all variations of me—people who’d been there 25 years earlier and returned now, partly out of nostalgia and partly in homage.

There was no pre-film buzz. We sat comfortable in the knowledge of what was coming. I was looking forward to the pod race and the Duel of the Fates. What can I say—I’m just a simple man trying to make my way in the universe.

It’s sort of a weird thing, paying to see a movie you own, one that is largely committed to memory. If the power cut-out midway through the film, I’m sure myself and the other theatergoers could’ve performed the remainder of the movie with 99% script accuracy. I was already doing that throughout the film—in many scenes, I internally recited the dialogue before the actor got the chance. I wasn’t doing this intentionally. It was done at a level below consciousness, like how your body will just breathe without any input from your brain.

I saw Episode One in theaters when I was just a bit older than my son is now. My son had never had the opportunity to see it in theaters because he was busy not existing. As a famous ballad goes:

First comes love
Then comes marriage
Then comes baby
In the baby carriage

When Episode One released, my wife was my girlfriend, and we were still in the first stage.¹

Boy, that’s crazy to think about.

We compared notes afterwards and agreed the highlights were the pod race and the final duel. The pod race shines on the big screen with all that surround sound. I’d forgotten just how immersive it could be.

On the way out, my son said, “This was fun. We should do it again in two years when they re-release Attack of the Clones.”

It’s a date.

As for the movie itself: I have a long form article coming next week about the film, and a podcast episode that would’ve been next week if I was any kind of planner. The pod will be in a few weeks. It’ll probably overlap with the article a bit, but more will be about what being a Star Wars fan felt like in the before times, my memories of that first viewing, and the film’s legacy.

Other Things I Enjoyed

Microphone Boom Arm

As you probably know, I’m launching a companion podcast to this newsletter and the main site. I published (posted? what’s the podcast lingo for this sort of thing? released?) an episode # 0 this past Wednesday, which is just 2 minutes of me talking about what’s to come. I didn’t really expect anyone to listen, but as of this morning we are well over 100 downloads.² Which frankly blows my mind.

Anyway.

To date, I’ve recorded two legit episodes. Those were done with the microphone on my desk and me leaning toward it, which is neither ergonomically recommended nor cool-looking. Imagine Gollum hunched over, clutching his precious, but with Star Wars references.

I realized This Will Not Do, and found a well-rated yet economical arm for my microphone. I guess the technical term is boom arm.

Let me tell you something, brother—the arm has made all the difference.

It improved my posture—obv—which both improved my breathing and cadence. More so, it upped my confidence. I recorded episode 0 with the new setup and it felt so right. I briefly considered re-recording the first two episodes, but ain’t nobody got time for that.

I have the mic setup so that it comes down from above, as though there’s a schlubby guy on the other end keeping it poised just so, which feeds into my fantasy that I’m big time, and not just a guy with way too many opinions about space wizards.

The Choice

Lionsgate

I’m gonna be real with you—The Choice is not the best movie.

If Lifetime ever adapted a Nicholas Spark movie, it’d look like this. The Choice is sappy and predictable. But it’s a fine way to spend a Friday night curled up with someone you love when you are both too tired for anything too involved.

If you’ve seen one Nicholas Spark movie, you’ve basically seen them all. You could watch The Notebook and then pretend no other movie has been made based on his books, and I don’t think you’d miss anything.

I feel no shame in admitting The Notebook destroyed me. I haven’t felt the need to revisit it since the first time, but it basically lives rent free in my head. And my wife’s.

Here’s how you know a movie is somehow special: When it enters the sacred lexicon of in-jokes and references shared between two people in love. It’s not really notable if half my speech is liberally borrowed from movies. That’s sorta my brand. If my wife latches onto something, then it’s special. That doesn’t necessarily make the movie good—sometimes she drops Anakin Skywalker’s “It’s working! It’s working!” line, in jest, I think as my penance for repeatedly subjecting her to The Phantom Menace—but it does mean it’s somehow unforgettable.

Neither of us will be quoting The Choice anytime soon. I watched it 7 days ago and can’t even tell you one line from the movie.

Actually, there is one, but it’s totally a spoiler. So I’ll put it in a footnote.³

The Crown

We’ve been slow-playing the final season of The Crown for months. Not really intentionally. There are just some shows you don’t even want to turn on unless you can give them all your attention, which is sometimes difficult when your energy is flagging from a long day.

There have been a lot of long days lately. But we’ve finally finished The Crown.

It always felt somewhere between a drama and a documentary. Watching it, I had the sense I was witnessing living history, as though my TV had become a porthole in time, through which I could glimpse events long gone and people long dead. Fictionalized or not, the show is grounded in reality, in truth. It also did something I previously considered impossible: It humanized the royal family.

Much like the show’s subject matter, The Crown is deliberate and cautious, but never boring. There’s plenty of drama, but the show always sat slightly above it all, perceiving but not partaking in the emotions.

Perhaps my favorite part was how keenly The Crown depicted the passage of time. In the course of the show, the principal characters—who are based on real people—grow up and grow old. Some of them die. The compression of entire lifetimes into a handful of seasons only digs the knife in deeper. What happened to them will happen to us.

I was happy we got a few scenes with young Queen Elizabeth in the finale, who was always my favorite Elizabeth, probably because she was the most human Elizabeth.

Fairy Tale

Scribner

I started reading Fairy Tale last weekend. In the Stephen King tradition, it’s a fat book. I’m something like 130 pages in and the story hasn’t even started yet! Things are happening—it’d be a boring book otherwise—but none of the magic promised by the title has yet to be glimpsed. There’s plenty of mystery, and you can sense the shape of what’s to come. But we’re still firmly in Kansas. The winds are picking up, though.

This is my first King since Doctor Sleep. I consider myself a fan, not a diehard. But no question, the dude knows how to spin a tale.

1. I guess technically kissing is the first stage, which leads to love and all the rest; we had that box checked, too.

It occurs to me that this romantic journey is akin to Episode One’s “fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering,” though obviously a lot more lighthearted. My wife hasn’t tried to disembowel me with a lightsaber. Yet.

2. And I am only responsible for 3 of those downloads!

3. The line: “I breathed for you.” I think it’s meant to be the movie’s version of, “It still isn’t over,” but it’s not in the same ballpark.