This sentence is the beginning of the second draft of this introduction. Originally, I wrote a long explanation for why I’m doing this; it began with: “Star Wars. Those two words alone fill me with a sense of dread, disgust, and weariness.” I talked at length about the way the oversaturation of the franchise since Disney’s purchase of it coupled with the over-politicising – and, to be frank, abject abhorrence – of its fanbase had put me off even the original trilogy that I loved so much in my childhood. I explained my feeling that going through the original film beat-by-beat would either act as a full stop at the end of my love for Star Wars, or make me fall in love with the films all over again.
My friends, I fell in love with the films all over again.
There’s always been a place for Star Wars in my heart; really, when I think of the phrase the magic of movies, I think of those three films. It always amazed me that something with wooden acting, worse dialogue, nonsensical worldbuilding, and occasionally incoherent plotting can hit me right in the soul. It works because so few movies are steeped in the very concept of Story; of people going on journeys and making big scary decisions that warp both themselves and the world around them in astounding ways. Each scene in Star Wars practically vibrates with archetypal power and a grand sense of tradition, creating an emotional journey as only a movie can.
For the next seven days, I’m going to post analysis of almost every single scene in Star Wars (later subtitled: A New Hope), with each part going up every day at 9am Los Angeles time and the final post going up on May the 4th – Star Wars Day. These were all written ahead of time, so any comments you make aren’t going to affect what I say – though of course, I’ll show up in the comments myself. This turned out to be one of the most wonderful critical experiences I’ve had; like seeing the film for the first time all over again, a genuine return to childlike wonder. I hope you’ll enjoy it too.
May the Force be with you.
That opening title, “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away”, fails to predict the direction – indeed, creation – of the franchise, because it’s not setting the table for a world that operates on rules and logic (as the opening text of the first Mass Effect does). Actually, you could also compare it to its direct competitor, Star Trek, which opens with a layout of the philosophy we’ll be chasing. The Star Wars opening text, on the other hand, is the first line of a fairy tale – a scifi variation on ‘once upon a time’. It also sets the tone for odd choices – there’s no reason for it to be set in the past beyond that the line sounds cool.
I have to admit, I’m in from the title. I wonder how much my taste for ‘pantomime’-style soundtracks comes from obsessively rewatching this for the first eight or ten years of my life. Williams weaves a soundtrack that is complicated, but easily understood by children; he’s probably responsible for more guys like me knowing the word ‘leitmotif’ than anything else.
As any red-blooded Star Wars fan knows, the crawl is an update of the openings of serials that George Lucas grew up watching, informing viewers who missed or forgot details of previous chapters. I am reliably informed that the movie didn’t originally screen with the specific subtitle of “Chapter IV: A New Hope”, but it’s one of Lucas’s edits that I think vastly improves the experience. You’re coming in at the middle of things and you’re not gonna have it explained to you. Just try and keep up. Which is especially funny given how simple the setup is; when you get right down to it, ‘Galactic Empire’ and ‘Rebels’ aren’t exactly specific. Though now I’m forced to truly contemplate the simplicity of the term ‘United States’.
I am far from the first to report the brilliant spectacle of the opening shot, with the tiny Rebel ship passing over us followed by the gargantuan Imperial cruiser. Admittedly, I’m going to be repeating a lot of common knowledge in this project, but it really is one of the greatest examples of Spectacle as storytelling. A child can glance at it and tell you which is the good guy ship and which is the bad guy – the Rebel ship has big round lights that make it look cuter, and the Imperial cruiser is all sharp angles, and it absolutely dwarfs the Rebels. It quite famously shows without telling that the Empire is big and scary and powerful and the Rebels are small and weak and likeable. I also always liked how busy the ships look – lots of interlocking parts, lots of wires on the underside, the big hole for a docking bay. Certainly it’s what made the toys so cool.
We also get our first exposure to those iconic laser bolt sounds, an effect I believe was created by hitting a wire with a hammer before futzing with it. Part of the reason the spectacle of Star Wars holds up today – aside from being contextualised by Story – is because you can feel the DIY approach all over it; somebody somewhere built these models with their own two hands.
The first real characters we meet are C-3PO and R2-D2. Famously, the idea of a comedy duo leading us through the first act is lifted from Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, though I’ve always found ‘Lucas ripped off The Hidden Fortress wholesale’ to be more than a tad overstated. Even if you ignore the very different production style and performances, Lucas’s script alone spins very different ideas from similar concepts. Threepio and Artoo use the scifi construction to tap into something like Bob Newhart’s one-sided phone calls in his standup, for example, and Artoo is clearly much smarter and more capable than either Tahei or Matashichi.
One of the big innovations of Star Wars was how dirty and scrappy everything looked, and this is an element that definitely holds up after all this time. Threepio’s gold plating makes him look important – there’s another droid behind him that looks identical aside from being white – but there are so many scratches and dings that show he’s been through the wringer. Not to be all, ‘man, physical props are better’, but maaaaaan, physical props are better. Even the very next shot of the Rebel ship being pulled into the cruiser’s docking bay looks cool; admittedly, this is partly because I know what they had to do to get that shot.
One thing Lucas pretty clearly picked up from Kurosawa is that a dozen people onscreen is inherently, intoxicatingly cinematic. Editor Marcia Lucas builds tension emphasising the soldier’s emotions. It’s bad tactics but good cinema for the Rebels to wear light armour that exposes their faces; the stormtroopers, by comparison, are dehumanised and rigid. Over and over, the movie hammers home through visuals that the Rebels are the David to the Empire’s Goliath.
This leads to a clever little moment where the Rebels are running away (towards the camera) while the stormtroopers are attacking, and Threepio and Artoo walk sideways across the camera inbetween them; two little, fragile people making their way through a larger conflict. It also leads to the badass moment of Vader emerging from the fog of the explosion of the front door; when the stormtroopers did that, they were white emerging from white, whilst Vader is black emerging from white.
Vader’s costume is one of the triumphs of costume design. Every detail is so well chosen; his helmet simultaneously recalls the faceplate of a knight’s helmet and a skull; his chestplate, while black, shines from the middle of what is cinematically a shadow; the eerie breathing works with the technology to tell us this is a man who is half-machine before we’re ever told of this fact, and that he is kept alive artificially; the total effect is a creature we have never seen before and can never see again. Anything that resembles him is simply a reference to him, with at best half the power.
A very simple cinematic trick follows this, when we see Leia’s hand put a file in Artoo before we cut to Threepio finding her, then we see her from a distance and in fog before finally seeing her properly. Combine this with Threepio acting as our identification figure and a gentle application of the Force Theme, and we have a moment of Mystery. I’m a total mark for this kind of way to introduce a character, teasing us with them; we get a similar introduction to Don Draper of Mad Men and John Kavanaugh in The Shield. It makes the start of a story a little more interesting, and it definitely works in this magical world. From a plot level, it also kicks off Artoo’s motivation.
The next scene shows the Rebels being arrested; I enjoy that it skips over seeing them captured. Good craft means knowing what to do, and great art means knowing when not to do it. The way they carry themselves; the discipline of the stormtroopers and the mostly-even spacing; a whole offscreen story is shown that enriches the actual story we’re watching. Artoo and Threepio need to move now if they want to get away.
We also cut to Vader in the middle of choking a Rebel, which is also a great example of skipping over the crap to get to the point. When I watched the prequels and sequels in order in one marathon session, I found the sole way in which the former enhanced the latter was drawing attention to the fact that Vader walked around in a rage at all times, backed up by James Earl Jones’s magnificent, furious performance. Speaking of efficiency, we also get the plot purpose of the scene: Vader is looking for the Death Star plans, and the ambassador of the ship. You think that’s got anything to do with the chick in white who put a file in Artoo earlier?
As Leia gets captured, we see Artoo escape with Threepio following him; I enjoy the weird little tools Artoo uses – things you can throw in when you’re more concerned with quick visual understanding than quote-unquote realism. Threepio and Artoo’s dialogue here is classic comedy, with both clearly exasperated by each other, meaning we get twice as much snark as you usually get in these sequences (and plot exposition to boot).
The scene of the guy deciding not to shoot Artoo and Threepio’s escape pod is somewhat infamous; the Family Guy parody film points out that they have literally no reason not to shoot the pod (“What are we, paying by the bullet now?”), and others have pointed out these guys are the unintentional heroes of the trilogy. I interpret this moment as a nerdy instinct to explain things that didn’t really need explaining; if I were writing this movie, I’d have found some other justification for not shooting, like having Artoo leave an exploding mine behind to hide the pod in debris, then have the guy scanning it.
We have a brief moment of Threepio and Artoo looking up at the Star Destroyer as the pod spins away. This is a really great offhand moment that sells the sadness and fear of the moment; Threepio’s line (“That’s funny. The damage doesn’t look as bad from out here.”) is a really great one for this context; it comes off a little callous and it makes the Rebel ship (and even the Star Destroyer) look smaller and weaker. Threepio and Artoo’s banter that ends the scene is also incredibly funny (“Oh.”).
This leads us into a more functional plot scene, with our first confrontation between Vader and Leia, and then Vader getting commentary from his men and then giving them orders. The set design ends up carrying this moment; there’s a great part where one of Vader’s men is standing in front of a door, putting a big red hole in the middle of the white and keeping things visually interesting. We’re also exposed to the Nazi-like designs of the Imperial officers. Vader is simultaneously part of this aesthetic design and special in his own right.
Threepio and Artoo wander the desert, and it looks as uncomfortable as it must have been (my nerdy tech side is horrified to see electronics move through the sand like that). People before me have observed how Lucas’s move to green screens in the prequels must have been driven by how miserable it was to shoot on location. This scene has some great examples of Artoo’s sound design, clearly chosen for the emotion is pounds like; I particularly enjoy his loud squeal when he’s yelling for Threepio to come back.
Threepio’s little monologue, blaming Artoo for the situation he created, is some classic pantomime comedy; one can practically hear them yelling back “It was you!” to his whining (dig the giant bones of the creature in the background, no pun intended). The movie mirrors how both of them get caught by Jawas – Threepio calls them for help, while they have to sneak up on Artoo (making him do a hilarious scream that leads into an iconic moan before he falls).
I love the design of the Jawa Sandcrawler; the outside looks like a futuristic dump truck and the inside looks like a garage. From a story perspective, the Jawas are effectively droid slavers; it’s a classic rule of storytelling that nonhuman characters can get away with both causing and receiving brutality we wouldn’t tolerate in humans (see also: Bender stealing and smoking or the Bots on Mystery Science Theater 3000), and I never thought until now about the robot slavery thing. Regardless, this is a perfect example of Star Wars finding a vivid and original expression of a very old idea.
You can especially see it in the scene where Artoo wakes up, which is filled with such things; the buglike robot watching over everyone, the weird scraps on Artoo’s head, and the funny walking robot shuffling along. It amazes and amuses me that Artoo’s design naturally evokes my empathy; we get a shot of him nervously looking around, and he’s a little tin bowl that keeps turning! Indeed, it feels genuinely triumphant when he and Threepio find each other! This is the magic of movies.
About the writer
Tristan J. Nankervis
Tristan J Nankervis (aka Drunk Napoleon) has been a writer, pop culture critic, dishwasher, standup comedian, waiter, potato cake factory worker, gamer, TV worker, and various other things. You can find him in Hobart, Tasmania.
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Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
My take on this week’s Hacks is over in Nath’s Sunday TV post, and will be going there for the foreseeable future.
Battle for the Planet of the Apes
This movie has shifted from having no ideas to having quite a few very dumb ideas. Here’s a question: does that mean this film now has negative ideas? It’s fun to watch, but in the way that any dumb post-apocalyptic action movie is fun to watch. It happens to use the cool ape aesthetic; it doesn’t even vaguely make sense in the continuity, despite relying so heavily on it, and the speeches have all the self-importance of Rod Serling and none of his insight or curiosity. Still, it’s cool when there are explosions.
all the self-importance of Rod Serling
HEY–
and none of his insight or curiosity
Okay, I’ll allow this.
I would argue Serling’s self-importance is as important to the positive qualities of his art as Tarantino’s is to his, or Pynchon’s pretentiousness is to his, or Larry David’s neuroticism to his.
Ah, I can see that, and I’m also very here for a Monday essay on this general theme sometime. It’s a really interesting (and inherently dramatic?) way of looking at artistic creation.
Prizzi’s Honor – When I was 16, my mom invited me to come with her and my uncle to see this. My first official movie theater R rated movie. At the time, I really liked this. Was it because I was being treated like an adult? Or only because the movie’s sensibility was right for a callow teen who didn’t know better? Because 40 years later, this is revealed as a mess. A plot that relies too much on coincidence and chaos, a terrible Brooklyn accent from Nicholson that drowns his acting instead of enhancing it, sluggish pacing throughout, and a cartoonish score. Apparently the point of the story is supposed to be that the mobsters are stupid, but instead it feels like the filmmakers are the stupid ones. It’s kind of remarkable how often John Huston, one of the great directors, was just pedestrian. (At least I found his final film, The Dead, to be more worthy than this.) On the plus side, Jack’s chemistry with Kathleen Turner is good, his chemistry with his then-SO Angelica Huston is great (and I think she deserved that Oscar), and John Randolph and Robert Loggia give strong supporting performances.
Kojak, “A Shield for Murder,” second half – The truth comes out, as somehow Kojak manages to release Mary Beth Hurt’s suppressed memories when her therapist couldn’t. One part psychological drama and one part procedural, but the parts mesh well. Kenneth McMillan is great as the now-conflicted corrupt cop, and Geraldine Page is defiant when the cover-up is smashed. The final scene has Kojak swearing to bring down Page from her country party chairmanship, but I think no one watching thinks she is going to lose this fight.
Frasier, “A Crane’s Critique”/”Head Games” – In the former, the brothers Crane discover a Salinger-like author is in Seattle, and are shocked when he turns out to be an average Joe and has become friends with Martin. (As the author is played by Robert Prosky, viewers are not that surprised.) Some funny moments, but the brothers reading the author’s new manuscript without permission is out of character for two people so devoted to ethics. This one also tells us the Mariners are playing a double-header, which by the 90s no team did unless making up a rainout – something that never happened in the Kingdome – just so both brothers could ask what a doubleheader is. Surely after a decade at Cheers Frasier knew was a doubleheader was. The latter is entirely about sports as Niles tries to help a basketball player get his head back in the game, only to discover the player things the secret is not therapy but rubbing Niles’s hair! Why Niles? Because Kelsey Grammer was in rehab. But I think it works better with Niles since his milder approach feels like a better match for the story. Again, however, the writers forget that Niles went to a basketball game earlier in the series to play up his ignorance of sports.
The Avengers, “Mission…Highly Improbable” – A British scientist accidentally discovers a way to shrink things. His greedy associate schemes to sell it to the Commies. Naturally Steed and Peel (separately) are miniaturized. Some fun use of purpose built sets for the seemingly shrunken heroes, though there isn’t much here that you don’t find in other such stories. The high point is a Russian general who seems like a buffoon but is able to sum up his treacherous ally with ease. Nicholas Courtney shows up briefly as a military security agent only to be shrunk and then drowned, fates we are all happy he avoided on Doctor Who.
NBA playoffs, Lakers vs Wolves – really great game, though you could see the Lakers, lacking depth, running down. Amazed at some of what old man LeBron did, though. He’s not the best player on the court anymore, but he is still elite. (The best player here is Ant Edwards.)
I absolutely love the doubleheader nitpick here, I didn’t realize they were limited in that way. And I haven’t seen Prizzi’s Honor since I was much younger either, I recall Nicholson and Turner being really good (and Huston as well) and if the ending is harsh it was earned. But also, William Hickey! The go-to for decrepit malevolence.
Hickey looks like he died ten minutes before he was cast, but I think to a degree that becomes the entire character. I assume someone – Huston? Richard Condon? – wanted to get away from Brando’s physicality in a mob boss but they might have gone too far.
Yeah, Hickey’s the guy. See also Mikey and Nicky.
I quite liked Prizzi’s Honor when I revisited it some months ago. I realized it was a comedy, and therefore I found the coincidences more forgivable.
Shrinking and ending up in “The Land Of The Giants” was a popular trope in 60s and early 70s television. Maybe because of the new technology allowing ease of doing this rather than having interesting stories? The First Doctor had “Planet of Giants” and there were a few other instances in the show during this period. Oh yeah, and Gilligan’s Island did their take.
Notes on the new episode of Hacks and the final episodes of The Pitt are on Nath’s TV post.
Bad Genius
I’d been thinking that I couldn’t feature this on Streaming Shuffle, since I already wrote it up for The Solute, but on the other hand, apparently I was in a rush and only gave it three paragraphs, which is unacceptable, so maybe I’ll write it up anyway. This movie rules: a phenomenally entertaining and clever heist film about high school students cheating on tests, edited for maximum impact on all fronts. There’s so much to enjoy here, from the scheme–the delight I feel at how they use the pencils!–to the performances. The push towards weightier moral choices at the end doesn’t work for me 100%, but it at least grounds that pivot in aspects of the characters that we’ve already seen.
Sinners
Everyone is right, this is fantastic. I’m sure this has already come up 900 times, but I love how Jack O’Connell is a more sinister example of the phenomenon Sammie and Stack discuss: white people love the blues but not the people who make them, and O’Connell’s vampire craves the emotional rush he gets from Sammie’s supernaturally charged music so much that he’ll destroy Sammie and everyone Sammie loves, if necessary, to have that music on tap.
So many incredible, exuberant musical performances here, too, from the blues in the juke joint (the scene with the past and future ghosts dancing with the crowd genuinely feels transcendent; Pearline’s later dance is sultry perfection) to the madcap jig outside.
Can’t get over how good Michael B. Jordan is, which is something I could say every time I’ve ever seen him in anything. But he really is at his best here, with off-the-charts levels of charisma (mostly Stack) and hardcore competence (Smoke and Stack) … and then occasionally letting all that peel back to reveal something rawer and more vulnerable. The reveal that Smoke and Stack were never going to be allowed to “win” is gutting, especially after the earlier line about coming back to the Delta because at least they know the rules there. They thought they did, but it turns out it’s all even more rigged than they realized. And after that, the only catharsis available is the orgy of violence and ownage unleashed at the end.
I think this may be my favorite cinematic use yet of vampires not being able to come in without an invitation, from O’Connell and crew having an excuse to petition for entry to Annie realizing what’s going on with Cornbread and forcing him to repeatedly try to find “normal” ways of asking to be let in, with his plausible deniability slipping away by the second.
Dawn of the Dead (2004)
Watched this with a friend who called this Snyder’s best film, and he’s right–probably, as he also pointed out, because it has a James Gunn script. Gunn can ameliorate some of Snyder’s worst instincts and provide better structure. Some good gore here–chainsawed legs! exploding heads!–and I will always give points for a zombaby. It’s a pretty strong cast, too, and the basic setup here–clearly defined people sharing a space during a crisis–makes me think that Snyder could actually manage some decent disaster movies, too, if he wanted to.
On the music – so gorgeously tied into both the themes and aesthetics and even morality – I do love how they successfully make the vampire’s initial attempt to get in sound so dorky and lifeless and embarrassing. It also puts into perspective their later jib, which is vicious and hungry.
I love the Cornbread scene so much – it reminds me of countless Tarantino scenes and the great setpiece early in Green Room, except Cornbread reveals his hand way too quickly and ends up trying way too hard to seem normal. It manages to be both horrifying and hilarious.
100% agreed on that gutting reveal. It’s the one thing that undermines how I would have enjoyed just watching a movie about these guys setting up a bar – there was no hope as it was. They either have vampires or the KKK.
YouTubers — a buddy wanted to watch some so we did, Patrick Willems on what will follow the post-superhero era and Broey Deschanel on Denis Villeneuve saying he hates dialogue (these were both from a year ago). I do not like this shit, purely on aesthetics, but I also do not respect it and these videos did nothing to alter that opinion. Tedious and unfunny bits (from Willems) and even more tedious, drawn-out “analysis” that has very little rigor and mostly vibes (from both), with an emphasis on second-level interpretations of what people may think instead of the art they make. This would be annoying but vaguely tolerable in an article and is insipid and insidious over a fucking hour — what monstrous disregard for my time, for anyone’s time. Happy to continue writing off the entire genre.
Streetwise — not a documentary on Shedeur Sanders but one of the selections on Criterion’s current Chinese Crime collection, hell yeah give me some crime. Looking up reviews showed that I was not the only one Boss Babying Jia Zhangke here in this tale of low-level crooks in Sichuan, and that is not a fair comparison — Streetwise writer/director Na Jiazuo does not use the same long takes and more openly hunts for poetry in his images, and more to the point does not show people doing shit the way Jia does. The lead is an assistant debt collector with a drunk asshole father and a crush on the local gangster’s wife, he is a huge god damn dweeb who is also full of ennui and most of the other characters are similarly feeling trapped. It slowly occurred to me that in the overly aestheticized listlessness and whiny, whiny dialogue that this is indebted to subUrbia more than anything, and the stupid fatally coincidental ending confirmed this. The film’s closing dedication “to all souls in need of comfort” had me making the jerk-off motion so hard my hand flew off my wrist. This got a fair amount of good reviews but if you squint you can see the vagueness in the praise, and I think its setting covers for the bog-standard precocious indie whininess of the story. The one bright spot is Yu Ailei as the main debt collector, a guy who once saved the boss years ago and suffered for it and is now scraping by with dark humor and limping resilience, he is Eddie Coyle-esque and if he makes some Coyle-level poor decisions they are still actions — he deserved a better movie. Huge whiff from Criterion, will no one provide me decent entertainment this weekend?
Black Caesar — when in need of decent entertainment, turn to Larry Cohen. A rewatch (and this too is on Criterion in their New York in the 60s and 70s collection) and man, right from the start a shoeshine boy helps assassinate a dude and then begins a lifelong feud with a crooked cop. Cohen never filmed a boring minute in his life. Lots of violence packed into Fred Williamson’s rise and fall, as well as lots of racism, Art Lund’s cop is a huge piece of shit and Williamson’s final vengeance is the kind of savage exploitation that you need a Cohen to have the lack of taste for, it still hits brutally hard. But while Williamson is very charismatic he also has a dark side, it wouldn’t be a 70s flick without a rape in there. Crime on streets that are not aestheticized, just shot (and without permits, in the infamous taxi chase scene) and a great soundtrack from James Brown, this is the good shit here.
YouTube has some great cooking shows at least. Also Trchnology Connections is neat.
I occasionally see these kinds of analysis pieces pop up in my algo and every once in a while I see one that looks sort of interesting, and then I look at the length and I just laugh.
Well, a cooking show will show me how to make a thing! That is good and concrete, this stuff is so vague and bullshitty — an actual essay of visual comparison/breakdown would be fine but that is not what these ding-dongs are doing.
Spider-man 3 – As opposed to the first two Spider-men that I have memorized, I hadn’t seen this since a midnight showing when it was released. I had forgotten a lot of it, with most of my impressions replaced by common consensus. Watching it fresh all this time later, the consensus isn’t wrong. Venom is grafted onto the story in a truly half-assed way, the amnesia plot isn’t the right kind of comic book silly, the Emo Parker look is a joke told the day after it’s gone stale. After perfecting the story architecture in 2, it really feels like Raimi took his eye off the ball (or was thrown too many balls by the studio). The Sandman story clearly has Raimi’s attention as in his loving sequence of Marlo reconstructing himself from a scattered pile of grit, but possibly the biggest problem of the movie is it’s not very clear that this would have been compelling without the extra noise. A retcon of an iconic moment and a paper thin character (“I just want my daughter back,” sir, this is going to be a very difficult custody battle even if you stop robbing banks) – this looks less like another masterpiece wrecked by studio interference than a not great idea saddled with more not great ideas.
Yet it’s not without charms. Maguire turns in his most interesting performance of the trilogy and Dunst continues to be the solid center even as her role drifts from undersung to thankless. Uninhibited by budget constraints, a couple action sequences are a lot of fun, particularly the opening Green Goblin battle, which presages the consequence-free MCU time-wasters but doesn’t yet have their total weightlessness. There’s a lot to appreciate here in hindsight, but a lot of sandy mud to wade through along the way.
I haven’t seen the whole thing since the theater either, and I remember being lukewarm at best. But I at least always loved the nerd cool Parker segment. It was something completely unexpected in a tentpole movie.
OBEX (2025)
My only film from IFFBoston. A black and white 80s-set fantasy/horror film about a man who gets sucked into a video game. The film has some good humor to it, and the horror is mostly really good. But it’s a 90 minute movie that spends the first hour in the real world, forcing all the plot in the game to feel rushed and half-baked. The hour in the real world is the best of the movie, though, so I didn’t actually mind. There’s a solid creeping dread to the real world section that benefits the movie greatly. It’s too bad it loses that charm in the game.
Live Music – fuzzy lo-fi indie-rock band called Publicity Department supported by some Albini-esque noise rockers called The Higher Line. Both good, each maybe a little too indebted to other artists but a good time all the same.
Justified, S6 episodes 4 and 5 – this “final” season is proving to be… absolutely fine, so far. It’s not dragging like season 3 did but I’m not really finding myself thinking about it very much either. Dickie Bennett briefly makes an appearance in the first of these episodes though and I’m always down with that. Otherwise, it kinda feels like there’s too much new stuff going on for a show that is reaching an end, maybe? I’m just not really sure how much I care about Mary Steenburgen, Sam Elliott or Garret Dillahunt even though they’re all absolutely A+ casting coups. Boyd recruiting Ava’s eccentric uncle though? There’s some potential for fun there.
Woo, live music!
I should probably revisit Justified S5 and S6 at some point, but they never quite clicked for me at the time, which makes it harder to be excited about going back to them. Loved 1-4 (I’ve got a higher opinion of 3 than you do, I think), but the last two didn’t quite recapture the magic.
You definitely have a higher opinion of 3 than me, I thought it was a total slog and would have ditched the show based on it if I hadn’t had people reassuring me that it got better!
Woooooo live music! Although Publicity Department should find a better name, maybe they can hire some kind of marketing consultant.
Both pretty terrible names to be honest, and there was a third band on the bill called Carpet who ended up dropping out – is this really the best we can do, people? Surely there are a few good names still out there?
Make it Car Pet, with the logo a dog in a car! There, I just did your Publicity Department work for free, lazy ass drop-out band.
Wooooo live music!!
Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii on the big screen: the “live at Pompeii” parts have some stunning moments, the parts that feel more like standard early-1970s rock video footage less so. As an added bonus you get a tour of an early-70s recording studio.
FRIDAY
Andor
Season 2, Episode 3. “The Harvest”. First time.
In typical Andor fashion, the third episode closes out the arc in spectacular fashion. The action is pretty thrilling but what really makes it come alive are all the great character beats throughout. I don’t want to go into full plot spoilers, so I’ll just keep on the characters and jump into:
STRAY OBSERVATIONS (I’ll allude to some spoilers here)
– Syril and Dedra’s domestic life gives me some light Zone of Interest vibes.
– I like how Vel doesn’t seem have much to do in these episodes but she goes through a whole small arc anyway: We see everything she rejected in her Chandrillan upbringing: the rituals, the class system, the heterosexuality. And she finally catches a glimpse at the end of what she chose instead and it breaks her. And she’s just as alone as ever.
– She also must be pissed as hell that Cinta was probably in Chandrilla the whole time. Cinta’s reveal here was brilliantly weaponized here, both by the show and her boss.
– Mon and Luthen’s final exchange is not only great in the moment, it also establishes a dynamic that might recur through the season: Luthen gets nasty shit done, Mon looks the other way trying to maintain plausible denialibility. Getting shitfaced sure helps.
– Absolutely love the filmmaking of that one Stormtrooper taking his shot at Brasso. For once, you know this trooper is absolutely not going to miss and it’s given the gravity it deserves.
– Noticed on rewatc that B2EMO was playing a game with the kids at the big farm breakfast. Awww. Also, one of those kids is playing with an AT-ST marionette at the table. Pretty loaded image.
– Absolutely brutal scene between Bix and the Imperial officer.
https://youtu.be/6E7gfpGql7w?si=CxyF4UZC8HaEqAO6
As always, the TV posts will be found on Sunday’s recap of the week. (And last night’s Righteous Gemstones and Rehearsal were pretty wild.)
Did find the time this weekend to watch two classics…
My Neighbor Totoro – After a little bit of a false start Friday night, we tried again Saturday and made it through. Not really much to say here, a lovely little movie that feels alive, incredibly real portrayals of the two girls, adults who aren’t cranks about the mysteries of life, etc. Not gonna lend itself to much commentary from me, I’m afraid. But there’s plenty of existing commentary already. (I did watch the newer English-language dub that Disney produced with Dakota and Elle Fanning as Satsuki and Mei; I usually prefer subs to dubs, but my attention-span issues made that a tough sell this weekend.)
Collateral – Also first time; also one that there’s so much that’s been said about it already I don’t know that I have any new commentary to add. Thank you, very cool!
doctor who, current season, 1-3. Episode 1 has a douglas adams feel, right down to our new companion, Belinda Chandra (played by Varada Sethu), getting plucked into outer space while
wearing a bathrobe, after it turns out that alien robots honor one of those dumb star registry things. I love that Russell T Davies’ response to the so-called anti-woke vibe shift is just to get more “woke.” Disney’s trying to curry favor with the administration by cutting its dei programs and cutting “woke”* messages from shows? Russell’s response is to make the first villain the overlord of the planet of the incels. It’s great. Every time disney asks him not to he’s going to make the show more “woke.” (Also, something to be said for Russell’s “fuck you” approach versus Chibnall’s; I feel like Chibnall got more backlash despite being less defiant.)
Episode 2, Lux, features a new villain, a god of moonlight, one of the extra-dimensional forces the doctor accidentally let in. An interesting change in the Gutwa era is that when they time travel they have to be aware of racism. Even in the Martha season they didn’t have to worry too much (apart from a passing mention from Shakespeare about how hot he thought Martha was). No matter how weird or alien the world is everyone just accepts the doctor’s
appearance as perhaps strange but not an issue. Now you have to consider it. Unlike the dire Rosa Parks episode, here Jim Crow is part of the setting but not the main point of the story, which works better than having the climax of the episode be the doctor explaining why he can’t and shouldn’t act.
Episode 3, the Well, revisits a 10th doctor episode, with a very creepy unseen monster. Well-directed, creepy, excellent production design and production value. They’re really hitting on all cylinders this season.
interior chinatown, pilot. Are they in a tv show? Or is it the guy’s imagination? It’s not clear. But the leads are funny, there’s some nice classic HK-style kung fu fights, and I’d like to see where this goes. Taika Waititi directed the pilot, and tv comedy that doesn’t star him is really where his talents shine best.
deli boys BJ from Gemstones shows up as an FBI agent, regaling other agents with stories about how he went undercover on J6. Solid bit. I hope they keep it going.
* “woke” is a bad term; basically no one self-describes as a woke. It’s vague. It’s used chiefly as a pejorative for anything in a constellation of things, including progressivism, feminism, support for civil rights, any sort of egalitarianism, etc. But even though everything caught under that label is not necessarily related, a catch-all term for everything in or near the constellation is useful, even though like a constellation it only appears connected because of the perspective of someone outside it.
What did we play?
We’ve finally left Krezk behind in The Curse of Strahd. And all that going in circles might bear fruit if down the line we need allies there. (I really have no idea if that is how this game works.) Off from Krezk to a vineyard with the very un-Strahd name of “The Wizard of Wines,” which is infested by “needle-blights” and druids and is no longer producing wine. More puzzles to unravel, and probably more combat.
Blue Prince – deep enough into this now that I’m searching out info from other players and starting to wonder whether I should say I’ve had enough and move on with my life. Because this game has a ridiculous amount of stuff in it beyond the initial “ending” and it gets to the point where solutions are incredibly abstract and also somewhat dependent on luck. I kinda like this trend for games that have an initial ending for normal players and then a dense post-game for the sickos but also I’m just not sure I have the time or energy to be one of the sickos, even if this one kept me playing a lot longer than, say, Animal Well. But on the other hand the random element does make this one kinda fun to just fire up when I have some time to kill so maybe I’ll unearth another mystery or two.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown on Nintendo Switch
I picked up the DLC where I’d left it some weeks ago. Once again, the best strategy after falling multiple times to beat a boss proves to be “go to sleep and try again the next morning; you’ll get it on the first try”. After getting over that stumbling block I opened some more of the DLC map, realizing it’s far larger than I’d estimated, which is fine by me.
Like Guillermo, I have also been playing Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. Unlike Guillermo, I have just started and am not terribly far in (9.68% according to my saved game; I left off needing to fight some giant scorpion-like boss). Also unlike Guillermo, I am playing on my PC.
So far I am largely enjoying it, although I needed those tutorial sessions on combos and stuff more than I thought I did. Possibly more than the money (or “time crystals” or whatever the currency is in this game is called) I got from completing them. Possibly.
I remember having problem with that boss too. And I remember my “go to sleep” strategy working back then too.
Ha, yeah, I gave it one shot and didn’t come particularly close, and decided that was enough for the night. Maybe with a good night’s sleep I’ll fare better.
Legend of Zelda; Skyward Sword.
When did they make it canon inside the story that it’s the same (?) Link and Zelda getting reincarnated every time? You know how you could really subvert audience expectations with the story: The Legend of Zelda, Ring Cycle. Link is Siegmund then Siegfried. Zelda is Sieglinde and Brunnhilda. Gabon is Hunding and Gudrun.
It’s fun. Do I feel dumb when I get stumped by a puzzle in a game for children? Yes.
I have also tried getting the five year old into it. She watched me play some. When I chopped up some grass to look for rupees she shouted “stop! You’re hurting the nature!”
It’s not quite the same Link and Zelda, if I remember correctly, but rather their spirit gets reborn in new people named Link and Zelda every few generations. It’s how each new Link/Zelda doesn’t remember their past lives, because they didn’t have one, or how one Link gets to meet the ghost of a previous one.)
As opposed to Ganon/Ganondorf, who does get fully reincarnated and keeps his memories for centuries.
(Not talking here about different incarnations of these characters among different timeline branches, which is not something that you’ll have to deal with in Skyward Sword anyway.
Good on your kid for recognizing the insidious lesson implicit in all Zelda games – slashing plant life and breaking peoples’ stuff is okay as long as you’re doing it to get money.
Star Wars week! Star Wars week!
This is a phenomenal start to this set of articles, and it’s reactivating all my old childhood love for the movies, too. I hadn’t specifically thought about how much purely visual storytelling these films do–how much work the costuming and set design and props do to sell not only the sense of the universe but also the sense of character and morality–and so this is especially interesting to me on that front.
I’m glad you singled out Threepio’s “the damage doesn’t look as bad from out here” line, because I always thought that was a great small bit of (funny) pathos: it’s a bit callous, like you said, and that makes it feel like a natural part of the wartime setting and a natural part of being in space at all. Lucas does a lot to keep the series feeling intimate–Luke running into strangers who are actually family, needing to return home to Tattooine, etc.–but this is one of the lightly defamiliarizing moments where someone feels how damn big all this is, and how small they are within it. Threepio was on the ship; he knows what a disaster it was, and that almost everyone he knew there is probably dead. But in the rearview mirror, out in space, even that seems small.
Star Waaaaaars!
One recurring thing I found over this series that will become obvious is how much the original set design and costuming elevates even rather plot-mechanical scenes; there are actually quite a few that do nothing more than tell you a character has figured something out or decided to go somewhere, and the sheer strangeness of what they’re wearing and where they are manages to make it still feel interesting.
The movie’s also filled with a lot of what TV Tropes once called narrative filigree, with scenes and moments that don’t necessarily push the plot forward but make it feel more lived in, and make you feel the weight of what’s happening. Tomorrow has the most iconic and by far my favourite.
I think this article helped pinpoint something within myself. I also recently rewatched the original Star Wars, but I didn’t fall in love with it all over again. My brain could only see it in cold calculating “this is so different than what it evolved into” terms. I compare it with one of the films with which it’s most closely tied culturally, Raiders of the Lost Ark. Where Raiders has been a film I’ve rewatched many times over the years, growing with me as I go through phases of my life, Star Wars just existed in my memory. And that memory was warped so completely by my jaded response to the sequel trilogy that I simply can’t see Star Wars the way I did years ago. Culture never let Star Wars simply exist without needing to capitalize on it further. Indiana Jones as a franchise was allowed to cool, for people to remind themselves why they love it. There wasn’t a culture war that helped inform the worst viewpoints on the internet, and that prevented the franchise from revealing that it was run by cowards who would kowtow to the loudest and lowest among us. I simply have too much baggage from the Star Wars franchise for me to approach it with wonder. And that’s a shame. I used to really love this.
That’s actually a pretty good summary of the introduction I wrote before diving deep into this project. The long, arduous process of analysis helped me find the movie under all the sludge put on it by the horrible culture wars and content.
“It amazes and amuses me that Artoo’s design naturally evokes my empathy; we get a shot of him nervously looking around, and he’s a little tin bowl that keeps turning! Indeed, it feels genuinely triumphant when he and Threepio find each other! This is the magic of movies.”
We recently introduced this to the eight-year-old nephews and they absolutely loved the bots and C-3P0 in particular, I had forgotten how funny he is. And in the early going their humor carries the film, it is shocking how fast the movie moves through new and confusing situations (space attack, desert planet, incomprehensible slave traders) with only these pissy droids as an anchor. Artoo’s bleeps having character is remarkable and Daniels plays off them wonderfully, I love the Newhart comparison. And yet — I think your description here is telling in another way, that Lucas and his collaborators find great emotion in an effect and as we will see, it can be rougher sledding with human interactions. I don’t think the dialogue/performances here are truly bad, some power converters aside, and they work well in the film, but it is not hard to see this as a path Lucas would follow into prioritizing effects over people, and as the effects became both more complicated and easier to tweak they would lose the magic you see here.
Lucas has a terrific sense of visuals and sound and a much more limited sense of how humans operate and (especially) talk, but like you said, a certain simplicity is key to that. I actually would watch the hell out of him doing something like the first season of Primal, with action and spectacle and evocative sound and barely any dialogue to speak of, with hand-drawn animation granting a sense of limitlessness while also keeping him from getting too carried away into technical achievement for technical achievement’s sake.
Primal with Ewoks, hell fucking yeah.
Finishing the movie made me, naturally think ahead – I do think Lucas has an understanding of character, if not the day-to-day minutiae of how people act, because I think Luke, Han, and Leia do all manage to get very weird with time. I remember some of your analysis of Luke towards the end of the third film, for example.
And of course this might be why Tartarovsky’s Clone Wars shorts are so good. Two creative talents who at heart revel in the visual and the visceral.
One of the little things I picked up this watch is how funny Threepio is, and how much of this comes from the sheer diversity of comedy he gets to play – later in the movie, he’ll manage to pull off the dizzying tightrope walk of simultaneous comic foil and clown.
You are both making me feel a little crazy because on my most recent rewatch I was almost all the way in on the movies (I’ve wavered over the years, but seeing the “despecialized editions” on a big screen helped a lot) but thought C-3P0 suuuuuuuucked
He sucks on purpose in terms of at nearly all times being a coward actively opposed to continuing the story (and the other times he is a suck-up), but this is load-bearing suckage — it gives everyone else a chance to tell him to shut up and for him to get all pissy about it, which is great comic relief. If you don’t find that funny then yeah, he will be pretty annoying because he has nothing else going on, but he’s just so goofy and out of place in all this.
I just checked my reviews from that last round of rewatches and it appears my favourite parts of Empire Strikes Back were “the bits where C-3P0 gets blown up or turned off”.
I’m excited for this breakdown. This has been said better by others and you. But Lucas had no idea what the future would bring. Even with its in medias res storytelling and even with the New Hope addition underlining this, the film still feels like the most self-contained story of any of the theatrical releases. While Empire opened up the universe and the floodgates there is a special power in the self-contained universe here by what is not said or shown. Like you mention, without explaining too much of what came before or its internal history – no Senate, no Emperor, “Clone Wars” is only said once, and no answers to many more things is given – the world-building lies in the ambiguous, referential, and allusive exposition. The history comes out in and is created by the actions of the characters. There is a trust and intelligence here that is lost in the spelled out, “all answers” filmmaking of today. I’ve seen and read a lot of bad Star Wars over the years. Then there is the shitty fandom. But when I watch this, the last fifty-years of the property doesn’t exist for me. I can still separate and enjoy the film despite everything that’s come after. It still holds marvel and wonder for me.
“Artoo and Threepio”
Aw, man, do people really do this? Maybe the trend started with Teeache Chexeleven Thirty-eight.
I’m also annoyed that those are supposed to be “for short,” when they take longer to write out. (And if you said “R2” and “3PO” out loud, people would know what you meant. I mean, they don’t even sound different.)
It’s the standardised approach to writing their names, I think because a lot of style guides prefer to write out numbers where possible.
But… that’s their damn name, the version with the numbers! When it’s a proper name, that’s different. Nobody’s writing “Nissan Threehundredzeeeks.”