“Skywalker” Thought Fragments

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Updated on 12.18, 9:15 am: There have been seven Star Wars films since The Empire Strikes Back, which opened on 5.21.80. For 39 years I’ve been hoping for another that would be as good. None of them have made the grade, and that includes Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, which I saw yesterday afternoon.

I was talking with a critic friend a few hours later, and he said something I more or less agreed with. He said “it’s okay.” That’s a fair way of putting it. And not a put-down.

I didn’t mind the classic fan-friendly stuff (echoes and replays of A New Hope, Empire and Return of the Jedi). There’s a whole lot of this in the second half, but the first half…yeesh. Director J.J. Abrams pushes the action along in such a crazy-ass, pell-mell, Mexican jumping bean way I had a headache within minutes.

Then again Rise is a somewhat better film than Abrams’ The Force Awakens. Or the last 45 to 50 minutes are, at least.

But that first hour is rough. “I don’t think I can take this,” I was muttering to myself. “If it doesn’t slow down I might have to…I don’t know, hit the lobby, walk around, check my phone messages.” But I manned up and toughed it out.

The Rise of Skywalker finally slowed down and became more or less coherent around…oh, the 75-minute mark, somewhere around there.

I took some notes after it ended and sent them to a friend. I won’t spoil anything important, I promise.

“There was a 50something fanboy sitting behind me going ‘aahwwww’ when anything the least bit endearing happened. Or “hah-HAH!” or “whoo-whoo!” when anything the least bit exciting happened.  He wouldn’t stop. It was all I could do to keep myself from turning around and giving him my death-ray look.

“J.J. levitated the [redacted] out of the water and used the exact same John Williams music…great!

“And he re-did the Return of the Jedi finale on the forest planet of Endor with love, joy, hugs and great relief. And he included a lesbian couple kissing and hugging. (A real quickie.) But he also brought back [redacted]!  I thought I’d seen the last of those guys. 

“And I loved returning to a certain desert-like planet…

“I still don’t get why Kylo Ren has to wear a face-shield helmet. Darth Vader did so because his face was disfigured; Ren has a huge schnozz but otherwise has nothing to mitigate.

“Who’s the overweight bearded guy who plays one of the rebel pilots?” It turns out he’s Greg Grunberg.

“Emperor Palpatine was thrown into a black void by Darth Vader at the end of Return of the Jedi. Does anybody ever stay dead in these films? Back in the early ’80s dead Star Wars characters (such as Obi Wan Kenobi) would return as ghostly see-through figures with ice-blue lines around their edges. This happens again in The Rise of Skywalker but that’s all I can say.

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NYC Journo “Cats” Shakeout

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HE to NYC journos (some at early afternoon Cats screening, two who’ve already seen it): “What’s the likely aggregate numerical opinion of Cats going to be? Straight from the shoulder….most people are likely to give it a 9, an 8.5, a 7, a 6…what?”

Journo #1 “I’ll say 45% on Rotten Tomatoes unless expectations going in are lower than expected.”

Journo #2: “Saw it last night. It won’t be a high number.”

Journo #3: “I’m here at 1 pm screening where they have real people ‘recruited ny marketing firms.’ And when I asked a prominent independent publicist, she said “I saw it last night…it’s the play.”

Journo #1: “I’m here too. Not sure why they need seat-fillers who probably will tweet about the movie while we can’t.”

Journo #4: “I guess you are all at Cats? Very good performances, but it’s an odd show. It was odd on Broadway. There is no plot, which is why Japanese audiences flock to it. They loved the music and the costumes. There is a slight plot line which makes no sense. Jennifer Hudson is amazing. Judi Dench is lovely. RT 75%.”

Journo #5: “I have a long-standing record of never having seen Cats. I don’t intend to break that now.”

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Initial “Skywalker” Fallout

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Based on the bees-in-the-brain reactions to last night’s premiere of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (or at least the first half of it), the word is that J.J. Abrams hasn’t so much dumbed it down as fanned it down — i.e., “course-corrected” some of Rian Johnson’s Last Jedi inclinations in order to appease old-school loyalists.

“I think approaching any creative process with [making fandoms happy] would be a mistake that would lead to probably the exact opposite result,” Johnson said in 12.13 Radio.com interview. “What I’m aiming for every time I sit down in a theater is to have the experience [I had] with The Empire Strikes Back.

“I want to be shocked, I want to be surprised, I want to be thrown off-guard, I want to have things recontextualized…I want to be challenged as a fan when I sit down in the theater.”

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Short List Slumber

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Yesterday’s announcements of short lists weren’t exactly earthshaking. We all know Bong Joon-ho‘s Parasite will win the Best International Feature Oscar…right? And that the Best Doc Oscar will go to either Apollo 11 or American Factory. I’m not feeling the suspense element. Is anyone?

It’s pleasing that six HE faves — Ladj Ly‘s Les Misérables, Pedro Almodóvar‘s Pain and Glory, Mati Dop‘s Atlantics, Kantemir Balagov‘s Beanpole, Jan Komasa‘s Corpus Christi and Václav Marhoul‘s The Painted Bird — were short-listed. Ditto doc faves The Edge of Democracy, One Child Nation, The Biggest Little Farm, The Cave, The Great Hack and especially Knock Down the House.

Continuing HE heartbreak: Once again A.J. Eaton and Cameron Crowe‘s David Crosby: Remember My Name, easily among the strongest and most penetrating docs of the year, has been completely blown off.

The reason for this is that mid-July dustup between Crosby and The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg, which ended with Feinberg throwing up his hands and Crosby walking out.

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Is Paris Burning?

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Yesterday’s USA Today presidential poll dropped me into a terrible pit of despair. The Beast, it said, is running ahead of all Democratic contenders. Trump is bettering “Typewriter” Joe Biden by 3 percentage points, Bernie Sanders by 5, Sen. Elizabeth Warren by 8, Mayor Pete by 10 and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg by 9.

This country has never been led by anyone as remotely horrific and diseased as Trump, and yet a majority of Average Joes prefer him to any or all of the Dems? Thoughtless swine. Reprehensible cattle. Diseased scum. Disciples of fascism.

This plus BoJo’s decisive trouncing of Jeremy Corbyn has me scared shitless. British Joe Bumblefucks couldn’t stand Corbyn, and our domestic variety can’t abide immigrant-embracing, big-government progressives and their general submission to the p.c. twitter narrative.

Better a strong sociopathic gangster with all his myriad corruptions and dedication to increasing the pace of climate change, they seem to be saying, than allowing the country to be overrun by immigrants, minorities and LGBTQs and operating on a general principle that white, under-educated, working-class people are bad news.

This is a living, gasping, bleeding nightmare. How can this be happening? The only thing Trump hasn’t done to defy decency and the general principle of lawful behavior is shoot someone in broad daylight in the middle of Fifth Avenue, and the bumblefucks are still with him. We’re living in a facsimile of Hitler’s Germany.

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Black List Link

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If anyone has a link to the new Black list scripts with a suggestion or two about which ones I absolutely must read, please pass along. I know nothing but I’d like to at least move beyond that a bit. Favorite title: A Magical Place Called Glendale by Sara Monge.

Last Two Biggies

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Tomorrow (Tuesday, 12.17) is a double-header on Hollywood Boulevard — J.J. Abrams‘ Stars Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (Disney, 12.20) at the El Capitan at 2 pm, followed by a 7 pm screening of Tom Hooper‘s Cats (Universal 12.20). Cats runs 110 minutes; at 142 minutes, The Rise of Skywalker is over a half-hour longer. Both films will open on Thursday evening.

There’s also a Trump impeachment rally at 5:30 pm across from City Hall.


I don’t know when this was taken (roughly the early to mid ’50s) but the idea of paying $1.50 for a place to crash in midtown Manhattan is mind-boggling. The rooms were almost certainly shitholes but still.

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He Said / She Said

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East Coast critic (i.e., not HE): “I find it funny to see the entire media world tie itself into yoga knots pretending that Little Women is a good movie. Sasha is right about it — as storytelling it’s a mess, eager but muddled, and as a result it lacks cumulative power. The overpraise is ludicrous and sexist — it’s the empress’s new clothes.”

West Coast critic (ditto): “He’s right. Men are taken seriously and thus are given a decent and respectful critique. Women? People are ‘nice’ to them, forgiving and thus aren’t taking them seriously. Meet the new patriarchy, same as the old patriarchy. It’s a way of keeping women in a box or a gilded cage, so as not to be any kind of real threat. It’s infuriating. Women can never be taken seriously if they aren’t treated as equals.”

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“One Unbroken Egg”

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“Just as the Kavalry activate their system, Trieu teleports the setup to downtown Tulsa, finding Joe has become ooze, and kills the Cyclops leadership. Before Trieu kills him, Manhattan uses the distraction to teleport Veidt, Laurie, and Wade to Karnak, where Veidt reworks his squid-rain system to send frozen squid to pulverize Trieu’s device; killing Trieu in the process. Angela takes shelter in the theater where Will and her children are; where Will explains Manhattan had worked with him to bring about this necessary conclusion. While cleaning up eggs from the night before, Angela recalls Manhattan’s statement about transferring his powers through an organic medium. Finding one unbroken egg, Angela eats it and attempts to walk on water as she saw Manhattan do the night before.” — from synopsis of final episode (#9) of Damon Lindelof‘s Watchmen series, which concluded last night.

Profile in Courage

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Rep. Elissa Slotkin (Democrat, Michigan’s 8th district) was booed by rightwing lunatics as she explained her decision to vote to to impeach President Trump. The 43 year-old Slotkin previously worked for the Central Intelligence Agency and for the Director of National Intelligence. She was a senior advisor on Iraq policy at the U.S. State Department, and worked for the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy as an advisor on Middle East policy. In 2012 she became chief of staff for the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy, and later that year was appointed Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy. Last November she defeated Rep. Mike Bishop, a Trump-supporting rightie, with 50.6% of the vote.

Tail Riders in the Sky

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What I’m absorbing from this new Maverick: Top Gun teaser is Tom Cruise‘s Maverick doing loop-dee-loops in the manner of Han Solo flying the Millennium Falcon…a lot of wild-ass, bordering-on-reckless stuff. Plus the usual testosterone shenanigans, some of which alarms Jon Hamm‘s three-star admiral. Plus confirmation that Jennifer Connelly‘s “single mother running a bar near the Naval base” is in fact an age-appropriate romantic partner for Maverick. And yaddah yaddah.

There’s a brief shot of a flag-draped coffin so who buys it? My money’s on either Miles Teller‘s “Rooster” Bradshaw or Monica Barbaro‘s “Phoenix”.

Boilerplate: “When Maverick finds himself training a detachment of Top Gun graduates for a specialized mission, he encounters the chip-off-the-old-block son of Maverick’s late friend ‘Goose’ Bradshaw. Facing an uncertain future and confronting the ghosts of his past, Maverick is drawn into a confrontation with his own deepest fears, culminating in a mission that demands the ultimate sacrifice from those who will fly it.”

Posted on 7.18.19: “San Diego-based fighter pilots!….the aura of studly military rock stars, coping with buried anger and the burden of expectations, brusque and strapping and throwing their heads back in laughter while playing piano in a honky tonk.

“And the women who both love and compete with them. With the big climactic test of skill and character looming. And so on.

“I haven’t read the script (co-authored by Peter Craig, Justin Marks, Christopher McQuarrie and Eric Warren Singer) but I want a scene in which Cruise tells Connelly that Kelly McGillis‘ Charlie Blackwood left him for another woman, and then (beat, beat) Connelly tells Cruise, ‘Yeah, I know…it was me.’ Or: ‘I’m sorry, that’s tough. (beat) She left me too.’

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Back In The Swing

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Last week gender-equity gendarmes were shocked and appalled after Greta Gerwig’s Little Women was shafted by the total absence of Golden Globe and SAG awards noms. An apparently reactionary “male tsunami” factor had kicked in, and alarm bells sounded far and wide. To be sure, N.Y. Times reporters Nicole Sperling and Brooks Barnes echoed the concern.

The distress signals were heard in Boston, I can tell you, for yesterday the Boston Society of Film Critics offered reassuring hugs of support for Little Women by handing it three top awards — Best Film, Best Ensemble and Best Actress (Saoirse Ronan‘s performance as Jo March). Beantown crix had Little Women’s six

But that was almost nothing compared to this morning’s Little Women endorsement by the Capri, Hollywood Int’l Film Festival. Gerwig’s coming-of-age period drama will open the celebrated annual gathering on 12.27.

I think it’s safe to say that after the Boston-Capri one-two punch (plus Best Screenplay trophies from Chicago and Kansas City critics plus a Windy City Best Supporting Actress award for Florence Pugh) that Little Women has regained momentum, turned the tide and is now poised to land a Best Picture Oscar nom. (Right?) Were she with us Agnes Varda would almost certainly concur.