Against the advice of my peers, Rushabh and I took in a showing of \"Star Wars: The Clone Wars\" last Thursday at the local cineplex. And while I'm certainly going to stand up and say that this was the best movie ever, or even the best movie of the year (it wasn't, I mean, have you freakin' seen Wall-E?), what I am going to say is that any time you can see a bunch of Jedi on the big screen swinging their lightsabers and generally kicking ass - that's gotta go down as a good day.

I have recently re-watched \"The Empire Strikes Back\" and \"Return of the Jedi\", and while there is no dissing the quality of those films, they really only give the merest hints of what the Jedi are really all about. All of the \"young generation\" characters in the original trilogy (Han, Leia, Luke, etc.) came of age after the Jedi were extinct - so they never saw them in action, never knew what was possible.

And until Lucas made the prequels, we didn't know either! What I love most about the prequels is seeing the Jedi in their prime. Seeing all of the different force powers, seeing them train the younglings, seeing the Jedi culture in action. It is such a different vibe than the original trilogy, but something that I am very thankful that Lucas went out and created.

So yeah, even though the new \"Clone Wars\" movie has significant issues, I'm still pretty glad that I went and saw it. Because the level of imagination and creativity that comes out of Lucasfilm, even on a bad day, still trumps pretty much everything else that's out there.

-Andy.