Category Archives: Movies

In Defense of The Last Jedi

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Yesterday, while recovering from minor oral surgery, I watched a YouTube video from the channel ‘Feral Historian’ where he discussed the history of myths and their cultural command throughout human civilization, concluding with the observation that while Disney owns the intellectual property of Star Wars the myth of that franchise belongs to the wider American and even global culture. It is a very fine distinction that can ‘separate ownership’ from ‘belongs to’ but in my opinion his essay seemed to boil down to essentially, ‘Not my Luke Skywalker.’

It is a fairly common refrain that the character of Luke Skywalker as presented is strikingly at odds with how the character is in the original trilogy. That his fall and sulky isolation degrades his heroic stature and is an insult to the fanbase.

I don’t agree. In fact, I think there are signs and traits exhibited in the original trilogy that support the actions taken by Skywalker in The Last Jedi.

Disney/Lucasfilm

Luke started his journey to becoming a Jedi Knight driven by anger and a thirst for vengeance after discovering the charred corpses of his Aunt and Uncle. His first steps into that wider mystical existence were steps that often lead to the Dark Side. This is a small factor, Luke clearly tries to devote himself to the Rebellion and the fight for freedom, but it is an important emotional fact to keep in mind.

In The Empire Strikes Back it becomes clearer that the Dark Side of the Force holds an allure and draw to Luke just as it did for his father. (In either the original backstory presentation as told by Obi-Wan or in the retconned version of the prequels.) When confronted with a cave that is ‘strong with the Dark Side’ Luke is told by Yoda that he must confront it, and he should do so without his lightsaber.

He ignores the sage advice of his tutor, strapping on his weapon, and venturing into the lair of the Dark Side. There he is confronted by a vision of Darth Vader. There was the unmistakable sound of a lightsaber igniting, and Luke raised his weapon to fight. Only after Luke has lit his weapon does the image of Vader ignite his.

Luke, even after being told that hate and anger are paths to the Dark Side, starts the violence of the encounter. Defeating the image of Vader, it was revealed to be Luke under the mask, his real fight is and always had been with himself.

Luke, again ignores the counsel of his teachers, abandons his training to fly into a trap set by Vader and the Emperor in the Cloud City of Bespin. There he is maneuvered into a confrontation with the real Vader and having not learned the lesson of the cave, Luke starts aggressively, lighting his weapon first. Luke escaped but was bitter that he was not told what he thinks he should have known and not reprimanding himself for repeatedly ignoring the people wiser than himself in these matters.

The Return of the Jedi in addition to the space and ground battles represents Luke’s final temptation by the Dark Side and he starts the story off in a bad place. Setting aside the elaborate and knowingly doomed attempts to make a deal with Jabba the Hutt, when Luke enters Jabba’s palace his very first action, though difficult to see due to the bulky costumes, is to force choke the Gammorrean guards and reserve the ‘Jedi Mind Trick’ for the majordomo. While there are no on-screen fatalities from the choking it is quite reminiscent of the scene from the original Star Wars when Vader is simply annoyed by an Imperial Officer.

Luke displayed a fair amount of control as the Emperor pushed, prodded, and tempted Luke to give in emotionally to the Dark Side as the Rebel forces are being destroyed in the battle of the Second Death Star but eventually Luke did break, seizing his weapon, and giving in to his anger. He briefly regained his calm but only until, again unable to control his emotional nature, it is revealed he has a twin sister and all of Luke’s composure vanishes.

He is very nearly turned to the Dark Side with only the image of his father’s mechanical, hand so much like Luke’s own, shattered the rage that had propelled him, allowing him to accept death rather than be seduced by the Dark Side. Luke did not get to that moment of serenity quickly or easily. He is an emotionally volatile man, given to storm changes in his mood, demons that have been present throughout the character’s arc.

Which brings us to The Last Jedi and its Rashomon-like backstory of Luke and that night with Ben Solo.

Luke, sensing a Dark Side power he had not encountered since Vader, nearly twenty years earlier, reacts as he has always done when suddenly confronted in this manner, ignites his lightsaber. It is a moment of fear and weakness, but a moment was all that was required to destroy the future. Luke did not strike, but before he could take any further action, Ben awoke, and the die was cast for both their fates. Luke, always a person short on patience and given to grand gestures, flees in the face of his failure.

Here it is important to remember that Luke is also older than he was when he confronted his own failings. When one is young it is much easier to ‘pick yourself up’ and start over. There is an air of limitless possibility and invulnerability to youth but as you age you become more cautious, you feel the failures more painfully, and you are so much more aware that time is closing off all those limitless possibilities of youth. The idea that Luke flees, hides his failure and his shame from everyone else, wallowing in self-hatred for what he has done, is wholly in character with the young man I met on the silver screen in 1977.

He may not be ‘your Luke Skywalker’ and any honest critique cannot be wrong, but he is not divergent.

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Revisiting Across 110th Street

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This Sunday, as part of Film Geeks San Diego’s Neo-Noir festival for 2025, we watched the 1972 film Across 110th Street. Often considered a ‘blaxploitation’ feature, I think the film is more accurately part of the crime sub-genre than that one. While the movie has a large cast of Black actors and the setting is the gritty, grimy conditions of their lives in run-down Harlem of the early 70s, the novel was written by a white author, and the film was produced and directed by a white filmmaker, which I think takes it seriously away from the ‘own voices’ nature of most blaxploitation movies.

I watched this film on the Criterion Channel a few years ago, but it is a different experience watching it on the big screen, even if that screen is the 50-seat micro-theater of San Diego’s Digital Gym.

In the story, three Black men rob a ‘counting house’ where the Italian Mafia counts and acquires the funds from the Black Harlem gangsters that are their subjugated gang. The robbery goes awry with both Italian and Black gangsters being killed along with a pair of New York police patrolmen, sparking an intense hunt for the robbers by the police and the criminal gangs.

Thematically, Across 110th Street is very much about the old being supplanted by the new. Within the police, for purely political posturing, the investigation is given to a young and relatively inexperienced officer, Lieutenant Pope (Yaphet Kotto), solely because Pope is Black, infuriating Captain Matelli (Anthony Quinn), a racist cop but with decades of experience in Harlem. The Mafia Don sends a hotheaded and expendable nephew, Nick D’Salvio (Anthony Franciosa), to identify, find, and make an example of the three robbers. Nick’s interfacing with the local Black criminal organization, run by ‘Doc’ Johnson (Richard Ward), reveals serious friction between the gangs with the implication clear that the Italian Mafia’s days controlling Harlem are rapidly closing. In both cases—the criminals and the police—it is the younger, more vibrant actors that repeatedly succeed in uncovering information leading to the three doomed robbers while the tired and brutal methods of the older generation prove ineffective.

As was typical for films of the 70s, now released from the restrictive Motion Picture Production Code, Across 110th Streetis a violent, cynical affair populated with characters of whom none can truly be called heroes save for the still, in many ways naïve, Lt. Pope.

Directed by veteran television director Barry Shear and utilizing new lightweight cameras, Across 110th Street was filmed on location using location sound instead of the more conventional studio shoots and dubbing of location dialog, giving the film a realism that indicated the future of cinema. While the feature may not fit neatly into the genre of ‘blaxploitation,’ its treatment of its Harlem-based characters indicates a compassion and understanding that is often absent from films of the period. The characters, good and bad, have depth and characteristics beyond the needs of the plot. Even the racist and bigoted Captain Matelli has a compassion even for those for whom he normally harbors only resentment and hatred.

Across 110th Street has now been released in a newly restored 4K Blu-ray from Shout Factory. It was this release we watched, and the film looked fantastic.

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Superman and Assimilation

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James Gunn’s relaunching of a film franchise based upon DC comic book heroes has begun with his Superman and in these politically charged and patently insane partisan times it of course has launched a million takes.

Sonny Bunch, culture editor for The Bulwark, an online home and community for displaced former Republicans and centrist Democrats, recently revealed that his interpretation of this variant of the character was to see it as a conservative character, principally due to Clark Kent’s end-to-end assimilation as an immigrant of American culture and values.

This is, of course, a ludicrous interpretation. Clark Kent AKA Kal-El, rocketed to Earth from the doomed planet Krypton as an infant.  Assimilation implies, quite strongly, the discarding of some of a person’s former cultural practices and traditions while adopting the same from their new home’s culture. Kal-El carried with him none of that planet’s culture and was raised in the heartland of American as the only culture he knew. This was no more assimilation than it is for any person born and raised in Kansas.

But assimilation is a Trojan Horse argument, meant to ‘other’ the immigrant and as such make it easier to treat them as non-persons, which of course makes it easier to be cruel and uncaring.

America is an idea, and anyone can become an American, but that process does not at all require them to reject everything of their former culture and it never has. American culture is an amalgam of cultures from around the globe, our food, our holidays, our practices are not and never have been just one thing, one culture, one idea.

The poisonous idea at the heart of MAGA and its hatred of ‘DEI’ is the idea that there is one way and only one way to be American. It is the desire to use a great metal stamp to force everyone into a single mold, a single form and to fear and hate anything that resists that process.

Nothing is more ‘Big Brother’ than MAGA.

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Movie Review: Superman (2025)

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Writer/Director James Gunn and cinematographer Henry Braham powerfully diverts from the grim, grounded, and gritty aesthetic of recent DC Comics superhero film gives the audience in Superman a colorful and gloriously goofy rendition of the iconic ‘Man of Steel.’ A trailer featuring the super canine ‘Krypto’ coming to a battered and beaten Superman sets the tone audiences should expect with this movie.

Eschewing re-harvesting the overly tilled fields of the character’s origin story or Marvel Studios’ course of building a cinematic universe element by element introduced in features focused on individual character Gunn drops the audience into a comic inspired universe already in progress and populated by ‘metahumans.’

DC Studios

What writers refer to as ‘the inciting incident’, Superman’s (David Corenswet) intercession into a war and losing in a battle against a new supervillain, happens before the film even starts the character crashing into the frame beaten and defeated. Gunn skips many of the familiar beats found in stories of these characters, hurling the audience into a film where Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) is already aware of his dual identity, allowing the story to focus on their relationship instead of secret identity shenanigans.

This new DC Cinematic Universe is one where the heroes of the ‘Silver Age’ are already present and active. Gunn, rightly, in my opinion, understands that the audience, after 17 years of the MCU, is ready to accept a world of comic book characters without the need to establish and detail each and every origin. As such the Guy Gardner Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion), Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced) and Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi) simply fly into their scenes without the scrip stopping to explain them.

Quickly the plot develops as manipulated public opinion turns against Superman and the hero finds himself questioning his purpose on Earth and the challenges doing the right thing in a complex morally grey world. Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) fueled by a fiery envy and hatred to destroy Superman is here presented in a composite of attributes that the character has exhibited in various media, he is scientifically and technologically brilliant, a billionaire businessman, politically influential, as well as having a predilection for land and its ownership.

There are a number of nods and references to 1978’s Superman The Movie, most notably even in the trailer is that the score by John Murphy and David Fleming is inspired and around the well-known theme written by the legendary John Williams. There are more subtle callbacks, in the background of one scene Perry White (Wendell Pierce) can be heard shouting ‘Don’t call me Chief!’ This Lex Luthor has a large number of people assisting his villainous plot including one referred named Otis a nice Easter egg but one that is expanded in the credits where his surname is revealed to be ‘Berg.’

There is a major change in the canon of the character, one on which a great deal of the plot revolves about that is sure to upset some fans. To avoid spoilers, I cannot reveal it here but when it unfolds people familiar with the history and lore of Superman will see it. Personally, I was fine with it, but others may not be.

James Gunn’s Superman is about as far as one can get in tone and style from Nolan’s Batman Begins, but both are crafted by talented director/writers who knew exactly the kind of film that they wanted to see on the screen. It was a fun frolic but one with heart and soul and a powerful theme that we are not tools of our parents designs but of our own.

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The Accidental Hero of Superman ’78– Otis

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WB Studios

I was 17 years old and in my senior year of high school when Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie hit the screens in the United States. Despite never being a deep fan of the comic books and possessing only a surface knowledge of the character, this was still a movie that I rode my bicycle a couple of miles to the local twin cinema to see. I can recall quite vividly pumping the pedals quite hard and fast with John Williams’ icon score replaying in my head as I went home from that screening. While not as campy as the Batman television series of 1966 and a far cry from the grounded, gritty DC superhero movies of the ‘Snyderverse’ to come in the next century, Superman: The Movie set a high bar for superhero films in general, and Christopher Reeve’s excellent portrayal as Clark Kent/Superman remains in the minds of many unmatched.

What is surprising is that after 47 years, the number of people who do not quite grasp that the plot of the film and its resolution rotates around the fumbling failure of one henchman.

Otis (Ned Beatty), while a seductively costumed and faux-injured Ms. Teschmacher (Valerie Perrine) distracts the Army’s security detail escorting a nuclear-armed ICBM, alters the missile’s targeting at the behest of his supervillain boss, Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman.) Later, Lex learns that Otis bungled his assignment inputting only three updated coordinates instead of the required four. When it comes to the second missile, this time being transported and guarded by the US Navy, it is Ms. Teschmacher whom Lex sends to corrupt the missile’s targeting, ensuring it hits his intended target: the San Andreas Fault line to create ‘New West Coast’ that he will own and control.

Lex Luthor’s plan is when both missiles are launched Superman, due the missiles divergent courses, will be able to intercept only one. But to ensure even that outcome does not come to pass, he chains lethal kryptonite to Superman and drops him in a pool to drown.

When Ms. Teschmacher learns that the other missile will detonate its nuclear warhead over her mother’s town of Hackensack, New Jersey, she betrays Lex Luthor and rescues Superman but only after he promises to save her mother first.

It seems an idiotic mistake for Lex Luthor to send his expendable nuclear warhead to the hometown of his expendable girlfriend but of course that was never Lex’s plan. That missile is the one whose targeting was charged by the bumbling Otis, who failed to input the coordinates correctly. Because it was not the warhead that would create the ‘New West Coast’ Lex never bothered to correct that mistake leading to the targeting of Hackensack and Ms. Teschmacher’s betrayal.

Without Otis’ ineptitude, Superman would have perished, and Lex Luthor’s plan would have succeeded. Otis is the accidental hero of Superman: The Movie.

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Movie Review: Magic (1978)

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For many people, the astounding acting skills of Anthony Hopkins exploded into their perceptions, despite decades of on-screen performances, with his Oscar-winning turn in 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs. That is not the case with me. I was wowed by his portrayal of William Bligh in 1984’s The Bounty, but I first experienced Hopkins in 1978’s Magic.

20th Century Fox

Adapted by legendary screenwriter William Goldman from his novel of the same title and directed by legendary actor and director Richard Attenborough, Magic is a psychological horror film centered on Corky Williams (Hopkins), a stage magician who utilizes a ventriloquist’s dummy, ‘Fats’ (also voiced by Hopkins), as part of his performance. When his agent Ben Greene (Burgess Meredith) informs Corky that a medical exam is required for his upcoming television network special, Corky flees the city for the isolated Catskills town of his childhood, reconnecting with his high school crush Peggy Ann Snow (Ann-Margret). But ‘Fats’ may have other ideas about what is best for Corky.

The trailers and commercials for Magic hinted at possible supernatural causes for the film’s horror, and Attenborough used a deft and light directorial touch to keep things off balance concerning ‘Fats.’ But this story and movie is essentially a horror of the human mind and how it betrays itself when faced with crushing psychological trauma and an inability to escape it.

With limited settings and cast, Magic is a film that could have been produced for television, but Goldman as writer, Attenborough as director, and cinematographer Victor Kemper use the limitation to create an atmosphere of dread and claustrophobia even in the open woods of the Catskills.

I was seventeen when I walked to the local twin theater to see Magic, and the film has stuck with me over the decades. Unnerving and powerful in its use of what would become known as ‘the uncanny valley,’ Magic is a prime example that horror is not always found in ghouls, ghosts, and vampires but sometimes within the tortured soul of the outcast.

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Twin Peaks: The Entire Shebang

A year ago, Mike Muncer, podcaster behind the excellent Evolution of Horror series launched a new show The Detective & The Log Lady, a Twin Peaks rewatch podcast. I decided to rewatch the series along with episodes of the podcast and my sweetie-wife came along for the ride as well.

This past Sunday we completed the voyage watching part 18 of the Twin Peaks‘ third season, also known as Twin Peaks: The Return which aired on the Showtime premium cable channel in 2017.

ABC Television

It has been quite a ride. I have not rewatched the original series in decades, watched the prequel film Fire Walk With Me only once in the theaters and retained very little of it, and did not even know of the existence of Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces, a feature film length collection of deleted scenes from the prequel film. Watching it all week in, week out for a year, keeping the characters and story elements fresh in my mind as I experience the 27-year journey was an entertainment journey unlike anything I had experienced.

Twin Peaks when it aired in 1990 on ABC became a national and cultural phenomenon but the second season, adrift after the creators stepped back because the networked forced them to reveal the solution to mysteries they preferred not to, lost that grip on the nation’s imagination and the series ended on a cliffhanger that would not be resolved until 2017.

Freed from network constraints and interference the series’ third and final season presented almost nothing that the fan base demanded, instead diving deep into the abstract dream-logic that so defines the work of director and co-writer David Lynch. The entire series defies easy explanation or interpretation. Is it about the evil and corruption that lies just under the surface of American life? Is it about trans-dimension beings waging a war for humanity with entities such as ‘Bob’ and ‘The Fireman’? It is merely a strange dream held by television characters where some of them are actually aware of their nature as fictional constructs?

Arguments can be made for any and all of these premises, often with all of them playing a part in interpreting the program.

What is undeniable is that Twin Peaks had a massive impact on television going forward from the 1990s. Not only did programming become more experimental in their plots and conceptions but Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost showed that it was possible to bring feature film cinema quality to television, paving the way for today’s prestige TV.

I may not understand it all, but I admire it all just the same.

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Movie Review: Fountain of Youth

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In 1981 Steven Spielberg and George Lucas released the box-office-busting adventure film Raiders of the Lost Ark earning $354 million dollars and setting off a wave of copycat movies hoping to reproduce that lightning in a bottle financial effect.

Most of the copycat productions were of limited budgets, lacking major stars, and frankly poor-quality scripts. As with Alien before it, Raiders of the Lost Ark is singular and stands out well ahead of any imitators.

Now, 44 years after Raiders of the Lost Ark, comes another imitator trying to capture that sense of adventure and fun that so marked the original film, Guy Ritchie’s Fountain of Youth.

Siblings Luke and Charlotte Purdue (John Krasinski and Natalie Portman) the children of an

Apple TV+

adventure-loving archeologist are estranged because Luke continues their father’s adventuring ways while Charlotte has settled into a routine mundane existence as a museum curator. Luke pulls Charlotte out of her dull life and onto a globe-spanning hunt for clues hidden in historical artifacts for the location of the fabled Fountain of Youth. They are being bankrolled by billionaire Owen Carter seeking to avoid an untimely death due to liver cancer. Along the way they are pursued by both Interpol for the crimes they are committing and a shadowy secret society.

With Guy Ritchie directing and Apple producing Fountain of Youth is no cheap, hastily thrown-together production of a movie. It boasts an impressive list of talent, shooting locations around the world, well-crafted action and chase scenes, but still fails to be engaging.

The characters are reflections of archetypes seen over and over again. Attempts to give them rich inner lives that might elevate them from flat to people with depth utterly fail and no chemistry exists either on the screen or the page for the enemy to lovers subplot between Luke and the woman representing the secret society determined to stop him.

At no point was I ever really caring about the characters or events on the screen, which is not how I always feel about Guy Ritchie’s work. He has directed some very entertaining and engrossing films, but this is not one of them. It does strike me that anytime Ritchie strays from modern criminal London his odds of producing a movie I really like drops considerably.

Fountain of Youth is streaming on Apple TV+.

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Overtures: Vanishing Cultural Knowledge

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One of my brain-resting pastimes is watching ‘reactors’ on YouTube. These are generally millennials viewing classic films, which depressingly are often from the 80s & 70s, for the first time. As a boomer born in the early 60s these are movies I have seen many that are close to my heart and among my favorites. It is surprising just how successful some of these channels have become. One Canadian lady now in the US, who until she started this project described herself as a rom-com and comedy gal, had her channel, Popcorn in Bed, become so large that Tom Cruise’s production company invited her to the premiere of a Mission Impossible film.

One of the fascinating aspects of watching these channels is seeing how some things that were once common knowledge slip away into obscurity. It makes me feel like Galadriel’s narration at the start of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring: “…some things were lost because none now live who remember it.”

I have written before about how these younger people have no context for the little white nitroglycerin tablets Father Merrin takes for his heart disease in The Exorcist but another larger thing on my mind this morning: overtures.

Taken from ballet and opera, an overture in film is a piece of music played before the start of a movie used to set a mood. They were never common, but overtures were once employed much more often, usually of grand elaborate productions such as Gone with the Wind (1939) or Ben-Hur (1959). I can’t recall when I learned about overtures in feature films, but it was long ago, so much so that it is just part of what I know about movies. I think the first overture I experienced before a film was for the original release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

So many of these millennials, coming to adulthood in a world so unlike mine own, have never encountered an overture nor have they learned what they were from some text or book. When these people, who are not dumb or stupid, encounter an overture it is a period of confusion as they sit through several minutes of sometimes a black screen, neither Star Trek: The Motion Picture nor 2001: A Space Odyssey employed a title card with their overtures, with only a score playing. Aside from people who manage to see live Broadway-style productions, and the rare film that still employs them, the overture seems to be slipping out of all knowledge.

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M3GAN 2.0

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I cannot recall ever being this uninterested in the sequel to a film I enjoyed as I am with M3GAN 2.0.

2022’s M3GAN was not in any way a classic of cinema. The premise was quite simple,  Gemma ( Allison Williams) a designer of advanced robotic toys following a tragic accident, becomes the guardian of her niece. Unsuited to the sudden role of substitute mother Gemma effectively turns the task over to her newly created and quite untested android M3GAN, which, taking its instructions far too literally, ends up becoming a murderous machine.

M3GAN leaned heavily into camp with occasional forays into violence that for the theatrical cut were toned down and not explicitly graphic. The resulting movie was one that was fun, did not take itself too seriously, and provided a brief, in not predictable, period of escape from the dreary world of 2022. The fact that the movie grossed more than 10 times its modest budget, and that the script deliberately left this door open, doomed the cinema landscape to a sequel.

Now, three years later, that sequel has arrived and the lackluster, paint by the numbers approach devoid of camp nature makes it one of the least interesting trailers I have seen in quite a while.

As has happened with previous horror franchises, M3GAN the character has developed a fanbase not unlike Michael from Halloween, Jason from Friday the 13th, and Freddy, from A Nightmare on Elm Street. The monsters have become the heroes and M3GAN now follows that dull and trite path as a new evil artificial intelligence arrives and, in one of the least surprising concepts, only M3GAN can counter it. Of course, if she is to be more of a protagonist then M3GAN required an upgrade that transformed her from a little girl to something with a disturbing amount of sexuality.

This is a horror movie that not only will I miss its theatrical run, I shall also miss its video on demand release, and its streaming debut.

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