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.

32 years ago, and the cultural minutiae contained in this Leonard Maltin report feels as exotic and ancient as Egyptian heiroglyphs. “Virtually indestructable”? Laser rot was a common term ten years later.

HE salutes The Hollywood Reporter‘s Seth Abramson for tweeting what appear to be apparent facts about the alleged but still unconfirmed pee-pee incident between Donald Trump and “a group of women” at the Ritz Moscow in November 2013. Abramson’s understanding is that “the FBI has made contact with a former Trump Organization employee who confirms there was a fracas in the lobby of the Ritz during the second week of November 2013,” and that “multiple media outlets” and “certain political operatives” are aware of this, etc. Said outlets aren’t reporting because the information “can’t be triple-sourced or confirmed for attribution,” Abramson says.

Read the whole message here.

…and put ’em where the sun don’t shine. Consider what Jason Aldean tweeted just after the Las Vegas massacre. Not a word about looney gun culture, bump stocks, small dicks, universal background checks, how nobody needs an automatic weapons for anything, etc.

HE’s own Svetlana Cvetko has been making the film-festival rounds with her short, Yours Sincerely, Lois Weber, which was exec produced by Elizabeth Banks. Weber (1879 – 1939) is commonly regarded as “the most important female director the American film industry has ever known“, and certainly was the industry’s most prolific director in the silent-film era.

Last night the doc screened at the Mill Valley Film Festival; it next shows at Arkansas’s Hot Springs Documentary Festival on 10.12, and then the Savannah Film Festival on 10.24. I’ve seen it — it wakes you up to the life of a major pathfinder and makes you want to know a lot more. Weber’s life should be made into a feature…hello? Here’s the film’s Facebook page

Svetlana Cvetko, director of Yours Sincerely, Lois Weber, following last night’s screening at the Mill Valley Film Festival.  (Photo by Allison Levenson.)

Tatyana and I watched Robert Redford‘s Ordinary People last night. It hit me that there’s a vague parallel between it and Sean Baker‘s The Florida Project in that (a) both focus on emotionally destructive mothers and (b) they both conclude with Evil Mom, to the audience’s great relief, finally being defeated and prevented from doing further harm.

Tatyana’s main take-away from the Redford flick, which she’d never seen, is that life is nothing without love. She based that on the fact Timothy Hutton‘s Conrad character seemed to be as much restored or healed by his budding relationship with Elizabeth McGovern as by his therapy sessions with Judd Hirsch.

I was once Conrad, I told her, except the villain in in my situation was my alcoholic dad, and work (i.e., gradually becoming a respected film journalist) was my salvation, and not love from this or that girlfriend or wife. 

Because for years and years I was hidden and conflicted, mainly because I felt held back by a little barking man in my chest who didn’t like who I was or approve of anything I did. The only way I was able to gradually smother that little fucker was to do well in journalism. He finally started to lose his voice in the late ’80s, when my two sons were born. The little man was further subdued when I stopped vodka in ’96, and was weakened all the more when I embraced full sobriety 5 and 1/2 years ago. **

I’ve never had a great deal of faith in the the idea of a relationship making my life whole because work is the only thing that has led to any feelings of accomplishment or peace or security. I’ve tried to be a reliable, full-hearted boyfriend or a loyal and supportive husband, but I’d be lying if I said I’ve been a radiant success in that department. 

How am I doing right now? The more important question is “how is Tatyana doing?”  Sometimes I feel inspired and carried aloft and other times not so much. I’m not doing too badly, I guess, but marriage is a day-by-day thing. Two steps forward, one step back, a half-step forward, etc. That said, I’m very happy to be with someone as tough and loving and demanding (in all respects) as Tatyana.

Getting eight and 1/2 hours (as opposed to the usual five or six) does wonders for your basic outlook upon life. It’s almost Halloween, November is just around the corner, and it feels like July here. The sky is radiant blue and everyone I see seems to be in a great or at least an easy mellow mood. I had the car washed this morning, and as I drove out of the lot it seemed as if all of West Hollywood was just as gleaming and squeaky clean. Ridley Scott‘s Blade Runner milieu, a portrait of a poisoned Los Angeles in 2019, was absolute 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, but BR49‘s idea of what Los Angeles will look like 32 years hence is almost surely just as ludicrous as Scott’s.

Is she in the shower? What’s she doing, snapping her fingers or snorting cocaine out of a small spoon that we can’t see? One of the two.

In the comment thread for last night’s “Save Idris Elba“post, I was beaten up for saying that Kate Winslet‘s performance as a photojournalist in The Mountain Between Us (which of course is composed of her own personality and psyche) was not, in my estimation, an attractive component in the midst of the life-of-death survival struggle in the Rocky Mountains. I said that it seemed ill-advised for Idris Elba‘s surgeon character to fall for an obviously contentious and difficult woman under such circumstances. I expanded upon this a couple of hours ago:

“I’m sure Winslet is fine and gracious and ‘attractive’ when you get to know her, but to me she seems, under the guise of her photojournalist character, like a stressed and prickly lady with all the usual issues and baggage that any 42 year-old, Type-A personality has acquired, and that in the middle of a survive-or-die ordeal in rugged snowy mountain terrain THE LAST THING you’d want to add to your already-heavy backpack is a romantic relationship with a woman who is clearly a hive of thorns and contrary opinions and anxieties and skittish mannerisms and so on. NO DAY AT THE BEACH. Life is short, survival in the mountains is hard enough…later.

“I’m married to a ravishing 40-plus woman who has her particular issues like anyone else, but she doesn’t exude those jagged-edge anxiety vibes. I have enough of those on my own, thanks.”

Last night Deadline‘s Anthony D’Allesandro posted a financial obituary for Blade Runner 2049. At a suspected cost of $170 million plus p & a, it might make $35 million by Sunday night…maybe. “An awful start…kerplunk,” says D’Allesandro. And it’ll be lucky to hit $100 million by the end of its domestic run. And European returns aren’t so hot either….phfffft.

D’Allesandro quote: “One financier remarked that they weren’t impressed by Friday’s early European B.O. results, and that it’s now up to Asia to save Blade Runner 2049.” Asia! We’re dying! Please save us!

Before this toxic gloomfest disappears with its tail between its legs, please share what you thought and felt as you sat through it last night or earlier today. If you hated it, fine. If you hated watching it but respected it anyway (like me), fine. But please post something from the heart or the head before it becomes a dead issue.

From Nick “Action Man” Clement: “Not a fan. Yes, it looks amazing, and it felt like a Denis Villeneuve movie in construction and aesthetic design and I still absolutely love this spellbinding filmmaker, but the 2049 narrative offered zero surprises, far too much bloat (there’s no valid reason this should have been close to three hours), and nothing of any serious engagement other than some really nice shots of the spinners flying around and Ryan Gosling giving a nice Ryan Gosling performance.

“I found it rote, stunningly predictable (I could have written this movie), and stodgy where it should have been gripping. The musical score is unmemorable, offering nothing but annoying BLLLAAAAAAAAAMMMMMMMMMM on the soundtrack, often times drowning out the dialogue.”