I don’t know that Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Disney, 12.15) is even going to approach the occasionally haunting, vise-grip efficiency of The Empire Strikes Back, but if any of the three 21st Century Star Wars sequels have a chance of being this kind of “holy shit” restoration of faith, The Last Jedi, being the middle chapter, has the only chance. But can this happen? Make no mistake — The Last Jedi is Rian Johnson‘s shot. If he succeeds, the rest of his life will take on a certain glow. If he under-delivers or God forbid fails…don’t ask. But Kylo Ren bothers me. He was a problem in The Force Awakens, and he’s likely to be a problem again.
I’m not beginning to suggest that anyone try to make commercial or award-season hay out of the pain and trauma of sexual abuse, but the fact is that John Curran‘s Chappaquiddick (Entertainment Studios, 12.8) is suddenly a film of the moment, and for recently developed reasons that its makers couldn’t have anticipated. What it’s about fits right into the current clamor.
A damning portrait of arrogant male power and the ultimate abuse of a female subordinate, Chappaquiddick was made last year for its own reasons, and is its own raison d’etre.
The story of the 1969 Chappquiddick tragedy is well-known and has been well-investigated, but Curran, producers Mark Ciardi, Chris Fenton and Campbell McInnes and screenwriters Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan wanted to deliver a concise but unequivocating version of this cold, tragic tale in a narrative form.
A critic friend who saw it last summer called it a “hit piece,” but Chappaquiddick has the cojones to call a spade a spade about a late, much beloved political figure, a respected liberal deal-maker and the most powerful and longest serving representative of what was, for decades, American’s premiere political family — the closest thing we ever had to a version of the British royals.
But since last month’s Toronto Film Festival and almost out of the blue, Chappaquiddick has arguably become an unwitting expression of a strong payback movement among tough female journalists and film industry progressives railing against the abusive use of male power, and not just in the form of odious sexual behavior.
Without design or intention, what Chappaquiddick said last year during its making, the portrait it created of a world-famous power abuser and blame-shifter suddenly fits right into what’s happening now with this and that alleged sexual abuser being taken to task and made to walk the public plank — Devin Faraci, Cinefamily’s Shadie Elnashai and Hadrian Belove, Harry Knowles and now Harvey Weinstein and — wait — Honest Trailer‘s creator Andy Signore..
Yeah, I know — who could have ever foreseen Faraci or Knowles being written about in the same sentence with the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy? But here we are and facts are facts. There have been many legit complaints lodged against the afore-mentioned, but who has ever been more heinously abused than Mary Jo Kopechne? During an estimated two-hour period while Kopechne was still alive and gasping for air inside an upside-down Oldsmobile, EMK wasn’t calling for help (a local diver could’ve had her out of the car in minutes) but deciding that reporting the incident would result in his being found guilty of drunk driving, and so he didn’t call local authorities until the next morning.
Yesterday Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman posted a piece about what he describes as obsessive fanboy worship of Ridley Scott‘s Blade Runner, and how that purist fervor found its voice in Blade Runner 2049.
The key element in Scott’s 1982 original, Gleiberman argues, “is its transcendental mystique — the fact that it now plays like the sci-fi blockbuster equivalent of slow food. Its storytelling longueurs have been inflated into the very signifiers of its artistry. It has become not just a movie but a symbol: the anti-Star Wars.”
Key observation: “I remain a fan of Blade Runner, but to be in the cult of Blade Runner is to celebrate the purity of its vision, and to join in a conspiracy theory about the forces that would obliterate that purity.” Gleiberman doesn’t specifically call director Denis Villeneuve a cultist, but he kinda does.
My argument with the piece is in this passage: “[Scott’s Blade Runner was] a majestic science-fiction metaphor, beginning with its opening shot: the perpetual nightscape of Los Angeles in 2019, the smog turned to black, the fallout turned to rain, the smokestacks blasting fireballs that look downright medieval against a backdrop of obsidian blight. Blade Runner wasn’t the first — or last — image of a desiccated future, but it remains one of the only movies that lets you feel the mechanical-spiritual decay.
“There’s a touch of virtual reality to the way we experience it, sinking into those blackened textures, reveling in the details (the corporate Mayan skyscrapers, the synthetic sushi bars, the Times Square-meets-Third World technolopolis clutter), seeing an echo of our own world in every sinister facet.”
But how much of an echo? Scott’s film was a noirish ecological forecast of where we all might be headed, and I fully understand that vision-wise there’s no upside to low-balling whatever horrors the future might bring. But at the same time if you’re predicting…okay, imagining a world as horrific as Blade Runner‘s from a 1982 vantage point, or 37 years into the future back then, shouldn’t you have to pay some kind of piper if your vision has been proven to be way, way off? If what you foresaw hasn’t even begun to manifest?
Scott’s Blade Runner milieu — nightmarish, gloom-ridden, poisoned — is obviously a trip in itself and fun to wallow in, but it was set less than two years from today, in 2019, and as I said last weekend the sprawl of real-world Los Angeles has exposed that realm as absolute noir-fetish fanboy bullshit.
“Blade Runner 2049 is, of course, a prophecy of ecological run to come, and that’s where we’re definitely heading with criminals like Scott Pruitt running the EPA,” I wrote, “but BR49‘s idea of what Los Angeles will look like 32 years hence is almost surely just as ludicrous as Scott’s.
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