There Is No Try

The Empire Strikes Back is 30 years old today. Ars Technica has a nice current-day review.

I won a couple of tickets to the midnight first show at the Clark Cinema in Enterprise, Alabama. I was only 11, so the other ticket went to a neighbor with a driver's license. It was quite a night. That was the last movie that played on the original full-sized Clark screen; after TESB's run (which lasted most of that summer) they cut it in half and made two shoebox theaters out of the old large room, which was really too bad.

It's a little hard to believe today, but back in 1980, that movie was widely panned by critics for essentially just being a big loud thrill ride and not having a satisfying ending. It was at least a decade before Empire became the critical darling it is today.