Every day I am in a chatroom organized by my friend Marv. It is an informal environment where a bunch of Marv’s friends get together and discuss technical problems and life in general.

I met Marv at Convergys, where I spent five years of my life, escaping in August 2004. Marv is one of the more interesting people on the planet, and well-loved by the many many people who call him a friend. Marv also escaped the Borg and now works for Cisco in North Carolina.

On May 19th, Marv was back in SLC … his presence also dragging Gwen from Austin, Texas. We were all hanging out in a corner of the Jordan Commons movie theater, waiting for seats in the 12:10 PM (that’s noon, not midnight) showing of Episode III. Julie, Wyatt, and Janet reserved the front spot in line three hours before show time.

When Kathy and I showed up with Gwen (who spent the weekend at our house), there was only one other person in line, holding the number two spot for his family. I brought my Scrabble board and found that Wyatt had also brought his. I slaughtered Kathy and Gwen, due mostly to “reduced” which pulled in 94 points. They really didn’t play badly – if it weren’t for that 50 point bonus, I probably would have lost the game.

Over the next couple of hours, Marv and Ben (another of Marv’s friends, not my son) showed up as well. Shortly before we were seated, Brad (another friend from Convergys) arrived, as did Marv’s friend Mikey and his girlfriend. The three of them were not able to get in line with us, because the theater management had already insisted that we stand up and pack the line.

We got GREAT seats … a natural by-product of being first in line. The three seats we reserved for our stragglers resulted in inquiries of “are these seats taken” from almost everyone who came in, but we did not have any problems with the management about them, which was a little surprising.

This is the first time I have participated in a line party. I enjoyed it a lot and would like to go to more of them.

As for the movie itself …

Overall the movie is good, but there are some things that could have been better.

Hayden Christensen is excellent at lightsaber fighting and looking really pissed. He can’t really do any other acting dimension, and his scenes with Padme are particularly bad. Lucas is no great romance writer, but even if the material were top-notch, his acting and the total lack of chemistry between him and Natalie Portman would ruin it. If they had found a better actor for Anakin, the other problems with the movie might not have been as noticeable. Ewan McGregor did an EXCELLENT job, and I was particularly impressed with how well he mirrored the older Obi-Wan in episodes IV-VI.

As a whole, but particularly with Episode III, there are a number of glaring inconsistencies between the two trilogies. I’m not going to go into them, as they have likely been dealt with very efficiently by many online forums.

The end of the movie was very rushed … as if Lucas got all his action sequences in and at the end of the process suddenly realized he still hadn’t linked everything between the two trilogies, but only had 5 minutes of screen time left to do it.