Bits & Bobs - 8th Edition

Bits & Bobs collects some of the cool things around the interwebs that I think are noteworthy and worth your time but don't necessarily fill up a full blog post or news item. On with the show...

THERE HAS BEEN AN AWAKENING, AND YOU PROBABLY FELT IT...

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Unless you've been off the grid since Thanksgiving, you probably have already seen and know that a teaser trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens was released on Black Friday. The new sequel film takes place thirty years after the events of Return of the Jedi and features all-new characters and some familiar faces including Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Princess Leia. The teaser trailer clocks in at a mere 88 seconds but is the first official glimpse of the newcomers John Boyega, Daisy Ridley, and Oscar Issac and is intended as something of an amuse-bouche before bigger trailers are released presumably next spring. Of course, fanboys are nitpicking over tiny details including a brand new lightsaber seen sported by what many assume is the new villain of the film but how can you not like everything you see in this trailer? A panicked hero in Stormtooper armor on the run, a tough female jumping onto a souped-up speeder and racing to (or away from) danger, X-Wings, the Millennium Falcon... I mean, c'mon. If you haven't seen it, check it out here in glorious high definition courtesy of StarWars.com.

HER NAME IS AGENT

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Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is about to head off into its mid-season hiatus with a blow-out Winter Finale on December 9th, but the good news is that in between episodes Agent Carter is going to help you pass the time starting with a two-hour film airing on ABC January 6, 2015. The latest TV spots and promos really make the film look true to the first Captain America: The First Avenger film (and in-turn, gets me stoked for the show because it also feels a lot like The Rocketeer). The seven episodes will presumably air weekly leading up to Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s return later in 2015, and knowing how everything in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is connected, will most likely have ramifications for all of the Marvel shows and films to come.

Itchy Wool and Broken Wings

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"Making sequels ain't like dusting crops, kid." Or at least, I think that's how the line went?

Chances are, if you've touched the internet or viewed television at any point over the last couple weeks, you've heard that Harrison Ford broke his leg the second week of June while filming on the latest Star Wars sequel at the Pinewood Studios. This morning, "news" is out there that Ford is up and walking again using "a prosthetic limb" (thanks Daily Mail) - I put both in quotes because the concept of news and the use of such a strange term as prosthetic limb in the headline makes it as attention grabbing as possible, I'm sure.

A while ago, I had written an open letter to my heroes after a viewing of Spielberg's War Horse (unfortunately now that the site has migrated the old blog has been taken offline otherwise I could link back to the past). In short, the letter suggested that the likes of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, who were responsible for so much of my childhood, had gotten too comfortable in their more recent days. Having people around them that never say no and never being challenged by anything had made them complacent and the quality of their films was mirroring that state.

Take a look at a film like Jaws, which is so incredibly effective because the challenges of the mechanical shark forced Spielberg to get creative with how he was playing with the audience. Fear in the unseen. Now, a couple weeks of VFX to the cheapest bitter and you can have all the Bruce you can handle in a film like Jaws.

This is the long way of going about saying it, but Ford breaking his ankle (though you never wish ill of people that they break their legs requiring surgery) might be a good sign of things to come. It's a challenge for the creative team that they have to work around and, to use the cliche, forces them to think outside the box to figure out a workaround. Bluntly, it forces the Above the Liners on the call sheet to move outside their comfort zone and not rely on the easy way out.

Films like Wizard of Oz, the first X-Men film, and countless others have had to deal with major adversity (let's be honest every film has to deal with some sort of adversity which is the main reason a go-to question in EPKs is "what was the biggest challenge of _____"). And for some reason, even though it's at the expense of poor Harrison Ford's leg, I see this as yet another positive toward the film we'll be seeing next December.