A Repost: "Whacking. I'm hell at whacking."

 A repost, published in 2008, on the occasion of Harrison Ford's 79th birthday. Ford has long been one of my absolute favorite actors.

Sheila waxes poetic on one of my favorite movies, Witness. (Yeah, I didn't rank it highly enough.) Here's Sheila:

Let's look at how delicately things are set up in this film - so much so that you don't notice them. John Book has recovered (somewhat) from his wound and Samuel Lapp takes him on a tour of the farm. He shows him the well. ("It goes ... it makes ... it goes ..." so cute) He shows him the silo and tells him how it works. He shows him the trap door. All of this will become crucial in the final scenes, as John Book sneaks around, trying to evade the murderers. But what becomes clear, beautifully, in subsequent viewings - is that it is SAMUEL who showed Book the way. It is SAMUEL who, innocently, gave John Book the tools for survival in those crucial end moments. And so the title of the film takes on even more meaning, more depth. WITNESS. "What's up there?" asks John Book. "Corn," answers Samuel. Notice the grace and simplicity of how that information is imparted. You might not even notice it. A lesser film would have just had John Book figuring out how the silo worked while he was under the gun (which is how so many thrillers operate - they ARE their plots. That's it.) ... but in Witness we are introduced, via Samuel, to "the way things work". And he's excited to show John Book around and to show him the well and also to show him how much he knows. It isn't until later that we realize what Samuel Lapp has done, in that innocent tour.

She's absolutely right. The exposition there is handled so well. Problems can often arise with this kind of thing, in movies like this; they've got to get that gun onto the mantle in Act One so it can go off in Act Three, but so many times, the filmmakers go overboard, making it blindingly obvious that they're setting up something for later. This quiet scene between Samuel and Book, where Sam's just showing Book around the farm, helps us get our bearings, and we never realize that we're being set up for the climax.

Done wrong, this sort of scene-setting stands out like a sore thumb. A perfect example is in James Cameron's Aliens, where we have that early scene where the one female Marine is demonstrating the robotic forklift-you-can-wear thing: there's never one iota of doubt that Ripley will be putting that thing on and using it as a weapon by film's end. That's just badly done. Of course, Cameron would later get it right in Titanic, where he knew that he would have to make clear to the audience what exactly was going on at each stage of the ship's sinking, but he also know that he couldn't stop the tension of Rose and Jack's harrowing exploits in the ship's water-filled lower decks to explain it all, so he gives us the computer simulation of the sinking early in the movie. We never have to stop the action so Jack can tell Rose something like "See, the ship is going down by the head, so the stern's going to rise up. I just hope the ship's hull can withstand that pressure, because if it can't, the ship will break in two!" Likewise, in Witness, we're spared John Book talking to himself (us), saying things like "This is a silo! I'll bet there's corn up there!"

Sheila's post also gives an appreciation for Harrison Ford's work in Witness, a performance that Ford has never since come close to equaling. His work in this film is as good an example of character creation as I've ever seen. There's not one moment in the film where Ford in the slightest way echoes something he did as Han Solo or Indiana Jones. His performance is full of tiny little touches, moments it's so easy to miss, that add up to John Book being a real person, and not just a guy on a screen. I commented over there as follows (fixing my own typos):

Every time I watch this film I get a little more sad that this appears to be the last time Harrison Ford really used his talent to great effect. His performance is full of so many little details. I love how, after Eli interrupts his dancing with Rachel, he heartbreakingly wipes the sweat of his forehead on his shoulder. I love how the first time he's handed a glass of lemonade (by Rachel) he downs the whole thing in one gulp, but the next time (by Hochleitner) he takes a single small sip and hands it back. I love how at the end, after he's beaten the bad guys and all the cops are there on the farm, he's standing there, leaning exhaustedly against a police car, having a much needed cigarette, when we haven't seen him smoke at all in the whole film to that point. I think that a good test for people I meet is to see if they give me a knowing smile when I tell them to "Be careful out among them English."

Of course, I could go on. I love the bashful smile that Rachel gives John Book when they're in the workshop and Book's working on fixing the birdhouse he'd earlier driven into. She's smiled at him politely before, usually with her lips, but this is different; she shows her teeth here in a full smile that's at once more revealing and yet more shy than she's been to that point. I think that's when she first starts realizing her attraction to Book, because of the line that accompanies that smile, a very simple observation on her part: "You know carpentry." In that moment I think that Book stops being something alien to her, some being almost literally from another world she can never know. I think that's where it starts. Witness really is full of tiny moments of magic that you don't even realize are there until you think about them.

On another tangent, a recent thread over at FSM included speculation on the relative lack of eroticism in the scores of John Williams. While only a couple of readers make the obvious point that John Williams really hasn't scored any movies much at all that would call for an erotic kind of tone, others bring up as an example of a "sexy" score Jerry Goldsmith's Basic Instinct. Now, that is a terrific thriller score, but I'm not sure how sexy it is. Basic Instinct, for all its kinky subject matter, just isn't sexy to me. In the whole of that film, with all its nudity and violent sex and infamous shots of Sharon Stone's privates, there is nothing at all that is nearly as erotic and beautiful and sexy as in Witness when John Book and Rachel Lapp dance in the barn to a golden oldie, with no clothing being removed at all.

(One of my favorite bits of trivia about Witness is that the barn dance was filmed during daylight in the middle of summer. Since it had to be night, the crew basically draped tarps over every entrance to the barn, thus creating the necessary darkness, but also making it really really hot in there; hence the sweating that only highlights the emotion of the moment.)

For me, just about the only flaw in Witness is the film's score, by Maurice Jarre. It was the mid-80s, and at the time Jarre was into heavy synthesizer use, and this score is just about entirely on synth, if not entirely outright. Some of the atmospheric music early on works nicely, but it's all mostly long chords that set a tone, and of course, the barn-raising scene is a wonderfully scored sequence. (When watching it, there's a bit early on where John Book introduces himself to a new group of Amish men he hasn't met before. The first one whose hand he shakes, the one in the light green shirt? That's a young Viggo Mortensen, there, fifteen years before he'd take up his role as Aragorn son of Arathorn, King of Gondor.) The score's "suspense" material is all fairly routine and a bit repetitive; none of the music hurts the film, but I've always thought that the film would have been better served with a more strong touch of melody, excepting that great barn raising set piece. (Speaking of which, "Building the Barn" is done brilliantly by full orchestra on the Jarre compilation album The Emotion and the Strength. You can listen to a different recording of that orchestral arrangement here. On a more personal note, this bit of music reminds me strongly of one of my favorite days of my recent years.)

Anyway, you all be careful, out among them English.

"I don't know, I'm making this up as I go!" Forty Years of Indiana Jones

 Last week was the 40th anniversary of the initial theatrical release of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Raiders arrived in the summer that my family uprooted from Hillsboro, OR, for Allegany, NY, all the way across the country. I was still three months shy of turning ten, and this would be my sixth cross-country move in that time. (Fortunately it was the final such move.) Raiders was the big movie that summer, and when it came out I knew nothing about it at all, save for that it starred my favorite actor at the time, Harrison Ford. I also knew from the ads that the creative team behind it was Steven Spielberg, the director of Jaws (which I hadn't seen) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (which I had), and George Lucas, with whom I was quite familiar indeed. Ford's presence was the bigger factor in my wanting to see Raiders, after the previous summer's The Empire Strikes Back had left his onscreen fate unresolved, frozen in that block of carbonite.

I'm not sure when in the course of all our moving and unpacking Raiders arrived, but we didn't see it until we got to our new town. The theater where we saw it, the Palace Theater in downtown Olean, NY, was probably a wonderful place back in the day, but by 1981, it was...very much not. It was a rundown dump, to be honest, and it would close sometime in the next ten years before being finally demolished in 1998 so a cookie-cutter Rite-Aid could be built on the lot. Oh well. The Palace had a giant marquee and an enormous auditorium with a big screen and a balcony, and it must have been something to see years ago. By the time we were there, the chairs were beat up and torn and uncomfortable, the "concessions" consisted of a coin-operated popcorn machine, the sound was lousy, and it was just a terrible place to see a movie. I think that Raiders hadn't been out that long when we got there, because the theater was mostly empty. The movie got a lot bigger as the summer went on, and it eventually screened at each of Olean's three (at the time) movie places.

As the lights went down and the movie started, I still had no idea what this thing was about. What was the "Lost Ark"? Was this a movie about looking for Noah's boat? It opened in...South America? In 1936? Who were these people tromping around a jungle? Why was that one guy going to shoot the leader? Wait---the guy with the leather jacket and the hat just defeated a guy with a gun with a bullwhip? And they're searching a trap-filled old tomb for some golden statue? Betrayals? Bottomless pits? Guys getting impaled on spikes? Giant boulders?

And then our hero (I guess this is our hero) gets through all that only to have some clean-cut French asshole steal the treasure from him? But he escapes in a waiting seaplane? And he's afraid of snakes?

What the hell was I watching?!

Just as with Star Wars four years earlier, I had no frame of reference for this movie, but by the time that plane disappeared into the sky, whisking our hero Indiana Jones away (albeit having failed), I was settling in for what was clearly going to be a thrill ride of a movie. Thankfully by this time I had some movie-going under my belt, and I was able to come to Raiders on its own terms. Poor Star Wars, four years before, had been sufficiently alien to me that I didn't even like it at first and it took my sister's raging enthusiasm to bring me over to it.

Raiders was the first time I ever heard of the Ark of the Covenant, and the film's Egyptology content was appealing. There were hissable villains (some open and some skulking about in the shadows), a plucky heroine who apparently could outdrink fat Sherpas, and there was even a cool twist on the treasure map idea: the map wasn't one you could fold up and carry around with you. It was a scale model and you could only make "X" mark the spot if you had an amulet with a crystal in the middle of it that rested atop a stick of a certain height, so that the morning sun would make a beam that would tell you where the secret vault was located that apparently contained the Ark.

(In a surprising moment of opportunity, I would much later recreate this moment at work.)

There was also a wonderful device to show our hero's globetrotting in pursuit of the magical ark, in which footage of his plane is superimposed over a map with a red line showing his progress:

And the action sequences! Fistfights in Nepalese taverns! Chases through the Cairo marketplace! A fight atop and below a cargo plane whose propellers were whirling! And, most spectacularly, a chase through the desert roads of Egypt in which our hero is on a horse and he's chasing after a Nazi convoy of various vehicles including a big truck.

Raiders of the Lost Ark rocked my world in 1981, just as surely as Star Wars had in 1977, Superman and the animated The Hobbit had in 1978, and Moonraker did in 1979. In terms of the big formative influences on my inner world as a story lover and a storyteller, it's probably the case that by the time Raiders was out, I only had one more world-rocking encounter in store (which would be the middle-grade Gothic horror novels of John Bellairs). I love stories about quests for ancient artifacts, and mysterious treasure maps and sinister traps laid for those who do the questing. I love that in each Indiana Jones movie, the villain is ultimately undone by his or her own terrible failure to actually understand the nature of the thing of power they are pursuing. And I love when the hero is just plugging along, refusing to give up, and sometimes surviving just by sheer luck and escaping bad situations not through pure brawn or might or fighting skill, but by being observant and instantly sizing up an opportunity to gain just a second or two of advantage.

Next time you watch Raiders, or really any of the Indiana Jones movies, pay attention in the chases or the fight scenes, and you'll see Indy looking around, processing what's going on around him, noting other developments in the periphery. You'll see him about to get skewered by a guy with a sword, so he ducks aside just as the guy starts plunging the sword forward so it's the bad guy behind Indy who gets run through. Or you'll see him realize that the airplane's propeller is about to do his dirty work for him. Or that...well, you get the picture.

Ten years or so ago--probably more, actually--we watched Raiders for the first time with our daughter, and it was a delight watching her reactions as the movie drew her in as it had me. She tensed up in all the right places, including a fun tease-moment when the torture-minded Nazi goon shows up and pulls out a chain-and-rod thing that initially looks like a torture gizmo, but then turns out to just be a hangar for his coat; she laughed at all the right moments, like when a dazzling swordsman is dazzlingly brandishing his deadly cutlass in front of Indy, clearly intending to dazzlingly cut Indy into pieces with the deadly cutlass--until Indy just casually shoots him with his deadly pistol. (One of the two great moments of improvisatory movie magic by Harrison Ford, who suggested just shooting the guy instead of doing the big fight scene that was planned for that spot in the movie, because Ford was suffering from dysentery that day; Ford's other iconic bit of improv was suggesting "I know" as Han Solo's response to Leia's "I love you" in The Empire Strikes Back.)

Is Raiders perfect? Of course not! The logic of the whole basket chase doesn't hold up (Why would the bad guys have switched the baskets? How would they have planned for that?), and the movie's climax simply doesn't quite work, an opinion I've always had, though it took me many years to figure out just why. For one thing, how Indy knows not to look on the magic of the Ark comes out of the blue; in the novel there's a line or two in the scene where the wise man is translating the inscription on the Headpiece, which says something like "The power of the Ark will destroy any who look upon it". I don't know is that was in the script and cut, or if it was just an addition by the novelist who thought the film's ending lacked proper set-up. And in all honesty, there really is something just slightly unsatisfying about watching a movie in which the hero fights, chases, escapes, his way through everything, only to be a passive observer in the climax.

Not one bit of that is remotely damaging to the movie, though. Raiders of the Lost Ark remains a thrilling experience to behold, each time I watch it, and Indiana Jones remains one of the great recurring movie heroes. He was clearly intended to be a kind of James Bond character, having lots of completely different adventures from one unrelated movie to the next, and while I'm glad that Indy never became as ubiquitous as Bond (with a movie ever two years for a long time), I do wish we'd had more than the small number of adventures that we had. We had Raiders and Temple in the first three years, but then it took five years before Last Crusade arrived, and then Indy sat on the back burner for almost two decades before Kingdom of the Crystal Skull showed up, with mixed results. And as I write this, a fifth film (whose title is as yet unrevealed) is in production, now that Harrison Ford is in his late 70s. I'm not sure how I feel about this.

The tone of the serials that Indiana Jones was originally intended to reflect is from a time in storytelling when certain tropes were less cringeworthy than they are seen now. Temple of Doom especially suffers in this regard; it requires a lot of mental calibration to watch it without getting that feeling of "Geez, we really did, and in many ways still do, think that we white Westerners are the civilized beings bringing wisdom to the brown heathen savages of the world, don't we?" (And as I watched Temple just last night, I'm pretty up-to-the-minute in this realization.) Crystal Skull was partially intended to bring Indy into the realm of Cold War-influenced 50s sci-fi, which was a great idea that wasn't totally executed well in that movie. Maybe Indiana Jones never should have become a franchise at all. Movie producers in 1939 were perfectly happy to let Errol Flynn be done with Robin Hood, after all. Raiders is an adventure classic; Temple might be as well, with reservations. Last Crusade doesn't hold up for me as well as its two predecessors, and Crystal Skull is just OK. We'll see what happens with this fifth movie in a franchise that is somehow going to extend longer than 40 years with the same guy playing the same adventuring character.

Meanwhile, we'll always have Raiders of the Lost Ark. Like Star Wars four years earlier, Raiders ended up being an enormous temporary influence on pop culture, as Hollywood suddenly figured that the film's success indicated an unknown appetite in audiences for period adventures. Thus came a bunch of copycat kinds of movies, like two featuring Richard Chamberlain as H. Rider Haggard's adventurer Allan Quatermain and a forgettable pirate movie called Nate and Hayes. Tom Selleck, who was originally to have played Indiana Jones in Raiders until his teevee contract for Magnum PI forced him to drop out of the project, got a consolation prize in a somewhat sleepy adventure flick about a biplane pilot called High Road to China (and Selleck would eventually get to actually dress up as an Indiana Jones look-alike in a Raiders spoof episode of Magnum). On television, ABC had a show called Tales of the Gold Monkey about a seaplane-flying pilot in the 1930s South Pacific, and CBS had Bring 'Em Back Alive, a one-season adventure show featuring Bruce Boxleitner as hunter/naturalist Frank Buck in Singapore. Comics got in on the act as well; Marvel had an anthology series called Amazing High Adventure that it sporadically published for a few years in the 80s. Eventually Hollywood seems to have decided that Raiders hadn't been a wild success because of some deep appetite for period adventure, but because it was simply a great film, made well. Funny how that works. Not even George Lucas's attempt to bring Indiana Jones to the small screen, in a series called The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones, succeeded particularly well. This style of adventure tale wouldn't really have another big hit until 1998's The Mummy, which, like Raiders, likely became a big hit by virtue of being a really good adventure movie, well-made. Again, funny how that works.

For me, Raiders of the Lost Ark's appeal and influence wasn't on a specific character or time period in history (though I do confess that for a time in 1981 I said "archaeologist!" when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up--it was nice to have a real-world thing to aspire to be from the current geek obsession movie, since one couldn't exactly want to be "Starship Captain" or "space smuggler" or "Jedi knight"). It was more a style and approach to adventure storytelling: an attentiveness to pace and to carefully setting up everything that is to come later, and it's about giving each character a definite motivation for what they're pursuing. It's about the idea that hero and villain can want the exact same thing, for completely different reasons, and it's about a hero who keeps going, who doesn't give up, and whose intelligence allows them to make it up as they go.

Thanks for 40 years of adventure, Dr. Jones.

On Ned Beatty and HEAR MY SONG (in part, a repost)

Actor Ned Beatty has died at the age of 83. Beatty had a long and wonderful and varied career, and he played a wide variety of characters. I suppose he's seen more as a "character actor" than as a lead, but...I don't know, surely there should be something between a character actor and a proper lead, right? Beatty was always recognizable, but he never seemed the same, if that makes any sense. Every time I saw him in something he managed to create something all new. My first exposure to him was in Superman: The Movie, which remains my favorite superhero movie to this day, even after everything the MCU has done, and he showed up pretty reliably over the years. Even if the movie I was seeing was a total stinker--the Richard Pryor movie The Toy leaps to mind, and it's mindboggling that a movie that bad could result despite the presence of Pryor, Jackie Gleason, and Ned Beatty--there was always a total professionalism to Beatty's work.

My favorite of Ned Beatty's movies is Hear My Song, a comedy from 1991, which is not at all well-known. I take every opportunity that comes along to beat the drum for this movie, because it's just a warm-hearted joyful romp through the world of beloved Irish tenors, old seaside villages, skeevy concert promoters, and angry tax cops. I wrote about Hear My Song some years ago, and I repost that review below. I'm only sorry to note that I don't actually single out Mr. Beatty's performance in the movie for special mention, because the movie wouldn't work if he wasn't absolutely fantastic.

Please watch Hear My Song, if you can! It's available to rent on YouTube (and as I write this, the entire thing is actually available for free via some user I don't know, but who knows how long it will take the copyright folks to shut that down). You won't regret it, I promise.

Thanks for the movies, Ned Beatty! You were one of the greats.

Hear My Song (1991)

Years ago, when we'd been dating a year or so, The Girlfriend (now The Wife) rented a movie for us to watch. It was a British comedy that I'd never heard of, called Hear My Song. We both absolutely loved it, and it's been one of those movies that I've wanted to watch again ever since, even though it's been really hard to locate a copy, to the point where it then became one of those movies of which I have greatly fond memories that maybe I don't want to revisit, on the off chance that my memories of it are more nostalgic than accurate. Or, to put it another way, I was afraid that maybe this movie had been visited by the Suck Fairy.

Well, Hear My Song is, as of this writing, available for streaming on Netflix, which proved to be a temptation too great. So I watched it, and...absolutely loved it again.

Adrian Dunbar (who co-wrote the movie, and who would later secure semi-immortality in Star Wars lore by playing Senator Bail Organa in The Phantom Menace, only to see his scenes cut entirely from the film and the role recast with Jimmy Smits in the subsequent Prequels) plays Mickey O'Neill, a young man who runs a dinner club and musical revue. The place isn't making great money (in the first scene, Mickey has to take the stage himself) and he isn't popular with his landlords, who decide to evict after a scheme to let word of mouth sell tickets for a crappy singer named Franc Cinatra results in bad blood. His next money-making effort is to book Irish tenor Joseph Locke, who is legendary in this town but has lived in Ireland for more than thirty years because he's wanted for tax evasion.

Locke is the Maguffin of the movie. First, no one is sure if the guy claiming to be Locke is really Locke or not, and second, Locke didn't just evade taxes as much as he literally ran out of town, avoiding arrest by inches (and by pushing a cop off the boat on which he was fleeing) and running out on the affair he was having with a local beauty queen. This beauty queen turns out, later on, to be Mickey's girlfriend's mother, and after she has a late-night tryst with the man claiming to be Joseph Locke, she loudly announces that he is not. Ouch. Mickey loses the theater, his girlfriend, everything...unless he can get to Ireland and bring back the real Joseph Locke.

There's nothing in this movie that's really all that surprising at all, at least until the end, when things turn in a way that is reminiscent of endings like The Shawshank Redemption's, in that elements that have been in place the entire way suddenly turn out to be relevant in surprising and deeply pleasing ways. I don't want to spell it out, but this movie has one of my favorite endings, ever.

But an ending can't work as well as this one does by being clever; it also has to have the emotional heft to it, and this one does. This is a movie about likable people who have, occasionally in their lives, done unlikable things, but in most cases they are trying to atone for them, or recognize their misdeeds when they come back to haunt them. There isn't a single unflawed character in this film, all the way to Mickey himself, who seems emotionally stunted in some ways, and whose main skill in life seems to be a gift for bullshit. (One of his favorite tricks is to appeal to the older generation, who lived through World War II, by giving a speech that starts off with "I grew up in peacetime."

With comedies like this, it's easy to describe them in such a way that makes them sound like serious dramas. Hear My Song is most definitely a comedy; in fact, it ranks high on my personal list of funniest movies I've seen. A scene involving a bar full of Irishmen trying to assist one of their brethren with a dental problem is hysterical, and the best gag involves our two drunken heroes and their curiosity as to the depth of a particular well. More than that I must not say.

Hear My Song is, for me, so good that I don't understand how it's managed to fall so completely off the radar. It has a wonderfully witty script full of memorable characters, it's photographed beautifully, the music is fantastic, and the cast is tremendous, led by Dunbar and by Ned Beatty as Joseph Locke (the real one). And if you've ever watched Star Wars: A New Hope and wondered just how good an actor William Hootkins really was (he sadly died a few years back), well, Hear My Song will give you an answer.

What a wonderful, wonderful movie!

"What Happened Was...." (Thoughts on the Film)

 I suppose I am lucky that I never had to negotiate the world of dating as a single adult, out there in "the wild". My dating life was mercifully short, and it took place in the context of the sheltered existence of college. It was also by the greatest good luck that the last person I dated in college ended up being the last person I dated at all, because we're still together now.

What Happened Was is a movie that not about dating, but it's about one specific date, and that's it. Ninety minutes that track the entirety of a single date between two people who work in the same New York City law firm. He ((Michael, played by Tom Noonan, the film's writer and director) is a paralegal  and she (Jackie, played by Karen Sillas) is an executive assistant. The movie was made in 1994, so he can make a crack about "That's what they're calling secretaries now." He's a very tall, gangly man, bald except for around the edges. She wears her red hair tied back, but loosely. The entire date takes place in her apartment (one set, which fits since the film is an adaptation of a stage play). She has made dinner. They eat, they drink, and gradually they bare their souls to one another, with results that disappoint each, in each other and in themselves.

I wouldn't have even known this movie exists if not for Sheila O'Malley, who wrote glowingly of it last week (and previously in her paid column which I hope returns one day). Apparently the film was released in 1994 to some acclaim, and then it managed to disappear into the memory hole pretty completely. It had a VHS release but never a DVD, and the version that was haltingly available on streaming services wasn't in great shape. But a restoration has taken place and now that version is in release and is getting wider streaming access. I watched the film on YouTube, as a rental, but I'm not sure which version I saw, the restoration or the earlier, cruddier print. (I did try to watch the restored one on Fandango, but for some reason Fandango's credit card interface wasn't working at all, prompting me to correct my information even though it was correct each and every time. YouTube, being a Google company, uses Google Pay, which makes that sort of thing much easier.)

Here is Sheila on What Happened Was:

In her 2016 book The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, an essential entry in the sparse study of loneliness, Olivia Laing writes, “What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged.” When I read Laing’s book, I thought of 1994’s What Happened Was…, written and directed by Tom Noonan, one of the great films about loneliness, in particular loneliness of the urban variety. The film unnerved me so much when I saw it in its initial release—25 years ago—that it was a long time before I re-visited it. Images from it haunted me for years. Marketed as a meet-cute gone awry, What Happened Was… is, instead, an unblinking look at the havoc loneliness can wreak on humans. It’s only 91 minutes, but every minute is excruciating.

The description--a movie unfolding in real time with just two people on a date--made me think of another classic film of the same general description, which came out right around the same time, Before Sunrise. But where that film is about the fire of youthful lust between two people who are walking around Vienna, What Happened Was is about older people who have been adults long enough to feel some disappointment that their adult lives have not tracked their younger dreams, but they haven't given up the dreams yet, either. It's harder for them to open up, and when they do, the results are much, much, much messier. This movie plays out almost like a psychological thriller, but the thrills are purely internal. Don't read anything into the brief moment where she brandishes a knife at him. She laughs, saying "I'm kidding!" She does this a lot: saying something to provoke him or push him off kilter, and then laughing and assuring him (and us) that she's joking. It never really quite defuses the tension, though. He does it too, and it doesn't work for him, either.

We first see her sleeping, naked, face down, on a mattress with no pillows and only a sheet wrapped around her waist. Her phone--the kind of cordless handset once found in every home in America, though this one's pink--lies on the bed next to her and she is clutching a ceramic cat. Why? We don't know. Minutes later she'll drop the cat and break it while in her last frantic moments of getting ready for the date. She picks up the pieces and drops them in the fish tank. Nothing is ever explained of the ceramic cat. This isn't the kind of movie where characters linger over personal belongings: "Oh, that. My grandmother bought that for me at a flea market when she was traveling through Dubuque. She always loved the Mississippi River...." Nope; none of that. Oddly this makes the apartment seem like a real place for me. All of our personal spaces have things in them that only make sense to us.

Her apartment is oddly large, for someone living alone. I wonder what it costs. She has a sitting area with enough space for four or five people, but a separate dining area just for two. She has a dressing area cordoned off by drapes, and a mannequin that is draped with scarves. The mannequin shows up throughout the film, coming and going from the background shots, almost like a third person, silently watching the night's events unfold. Others seem to watch, too: she has a poster of Martin Luther King and the famous "cat's eyes" poster from the musical Cats. These posters, along with the mannequin, create almost a constant presence of other eyes, watching Karen and Michael throughout their evening (the only other piece of wall art in Jackie's apartment is a print of album cover art from the band Asia)...and the film also establishes that Karen's apartment has a view into other apartments across the streets. She needs to live in a place with a view, she tells Michael several times. No one seems to be looking from their own views into her apartment, though.

I notice that the layout of the apartment is such that the Cats and the MLK posters don't have a direct line of sight into the kitchen, though. They can't see into there, and that's where the Asia cover-art print hangs. It's almost as if Jackie has constructed her life as to leave her kitchen as private as she can. 

(A beautiful time-lapse shot during the credits shows one of the other buildings, viewed from Jackie's apartment, as the day fades and the various apartment lights come on.)

We next see her returning home from work; she has bought wine and a cake for the night. A fluorescent light in the hallway outside her front door is constantly flickering, and she finds it annoying enough to smack it a few times, with no result. When Michael arrives he comments on it, and she gives him the usual excuse: the landlord won't fix it. But before he arrives, she is already sipping from the wine, and a few minutes earlier, when her alarm clock went off, we see an unfinished glass of wine next to it. Jackie drinks a lot, apparently. This is never really commented on, but it's always there, and Sillas has to trace Jackie's mannerisms throughout the evening as the alcohol takes its grip on her.

We see her getting dressed for her date, in the not-quite-private dressing area. She tries on a few items, rejects them; she touches her own face in a gesture that will be reprised later by Michael, and she has an expression throughout all of this that is very hard to read. Is she afraid? Nervous? Is she questioning herself? I don't know. We're not given any internal (or external) monologue. All we can do is watch...but as she is clearly struggling with something, the mannequin is looking away.

I seem to be focusing a lot on the visual nature of this film, don't I? But that's because...well, a movie is a visual thing, and a movie doesn't have to be some gigantic blockbuster filled with million-dollar digital effects to be a visual masterpiece. What Happened Was relies on visuals to create its story every bit as much as it does its dialogue and acting. All of this creates mood, all the way down to the lighting. Jackie is very particular about the lighting. She has different kinds of lights all over the apartment. Normal lamps and lamps with cloth draped over for color. Cannister track lights over the bar separating the kitchen from the rest of the place. Candles. A chandelier over the dining table. The light in the aquarium. And, eventually, a light-up Mother Goose. Jackie is forever turning this light off and that one on, dimming this and brightening that. And then there's the light out there in the hallway, the one that flickers so garishly you think it might cause seizures.

Michael arrives, and the first minutes of the date are incredibly awkward. He is carrying his briefcase and the requisite bottle of wine that you bring to someone's house; when he offers it he stands there for a few seconds, clearly trying to will himself into action, and then he says, "Oh, I brought this wine!" as if he'd forgotten about it...which he very clearly had not. His collar is open and he's wearing a sweater vest; his necktie is hanging from his jacket pocket. Throughout the first half of the movie, there is usually something between Jackie and Michael: a dining table, a coffee table, the kitchen bar. When they finally reach a point where there's nothing between them, first on the couch and then later in a part of the apartment we don't even know is there at first, it feels...neither quite right nor quite wrong.

And there's the movie's master stroke, right there, in addition to the brilliant visual construction of the film itself: We never really have a sense of how this date is going. Is this two awkward people being awkward at first and gradually feeling at ease with each other? Or is the awkwardness permanent and these people are a disaster who should never ever date again? We never know. Not even after the film has ended. That's what makes it linger.

As Jackie and Michael talk through the first half of their date, some things--themes--emerge, and their dialogue is intriguingly constructed. Each says things that they repeat a few times, like how Jackie likes to live with a view. It's almost like they feel the need to return to conversational safe space as they feel themselves starting to drift toward a confessional space. Michael seems to get there first, opening up about how he is gathering information for a book he's writing about the law firm; this catches Jackie's ear, because her own dialogue conveys a strong sense that even at the firm she feels like she's on the outside looking in, a little.

At first Michael definitely comes off as being the stranger of these two people. One of his early confessions is that he hears his own name mentioned subliminally in a Beatles song. Jackie is briefly taken aback by this, but she recovers by claiming that "Oh yeah, something like that happened to me once!", but she gives no details. Her own awkwardness is less overt: she has invited this guy over to dinner at her place, so she's cooking for him--but she does all her cooking on the weekend and freezes everything to be microwaved through the week, so her big dinner for him is a microwaved scallop dish that she literally serves to him from the Tupperware container she nuked it in. He grins through this, in a way that seems a little mocking--but then he says weird shit like "I hate the word 'seafood'," so it's hard to tell just where he's landing on all this. Meanwhile, she keeps drinking and filling his glass. She almost forgets that she has rolls on the table, and she doesn't serve the salad until after they've been eating for ten minutes.

Michael's book-writing sounds like real social crusader stuff: he wants to get the truth out there, let the people know what's going on! But it's all vague and he says things about publishing that seem...wrong, made-up. He pulls out a little notebook at one point to jot something down, but he doesn't tell Jackie what he's written, and we never do find out. There are a lot of such moments in What Happened Was: tiny moments that might be meaningful or might not be, and all we can do is watch it all play out and decide for ourselves, later on.

Jackie, it turns out, also writes. She writes stories, and she has even published a few--but that turns out to have been a vanity publisher. Michael seems to know this, but he's got enough kindness not to squash her on that basis, and eventually he gets her to read one of her stories to him. She tells him that it's a kid's story, but it very much...is...not. She reads it to him in another room, separated by a curtain. She keeps her notebooks in a lockbox (the same kind of notebook, albeit larger, as the one in which he had jotted his secret note earlier). She reads a story that starts off sounding awkward, stilted; I have to note Sillas's performance here as she starts the reading haltingly, in the manner of someone who is reading their work aloud for the first time (and yes, I know what that feels like). But she gets over that and reads...and reads...and reads. The story is quite a bit longer than we (or Michael) expected, and it's here that the movie makes its most use of close-ups. The reaction shots on Michael are disorienting, in the dim light of this secret space that's illuminated by a Mother Goose lamp.

Returning to visual elements, the use of color in What Happened Was is pretty amazing. The palette seems muted early on, but aspects of the set take on a more saturated appearance as we proceed. Even the Asia poster in the kitchen shows this: in the last scene, it has red highlights that aren't there in the opening scenes. The visuals are more and more stark as the emotions our characters are plumbing become more and more stark.

I don't want to spoil too much of this, but in the end, the date doesn't end particularly well. Nor does it end spectacularly badly, either. Jackie may eventually be too drunk to make sense of what's gone on (though she's not wrecked, either) and Michael makes a final confessional that feels like a desperate attempt on his part to salvage a night that has not gone the way he may have hoped...but then, he never really seemed to bring much by way of hope into the night to begin with. Michael's final confessional might be the part of the film I liked least, because...it's honestly the one thing that happens in this movie, the one thing said by either character, that's not surprising. I'll just leave it at that. But as the movie ends, we're not sure really if the situation between Jackie and Michael is completely doomed, or if it can be repaired (they're going to see each other Monday morning, right?), or if they'll exist in some kind of relational limbo for a while. But it's worth noting one last visual cue: when Michael leaves for the night, as he heads out into that hallway, the formerly flickering garish light is no longer flickering. It's just garish.

Sillas and Noonan are both incredibly effective in these roles. Noonan even makes use of his own incredibly long fingers for some shots, like when he picks a piece of lettuce off the table (it fell out of his salad bowl when she overfilled it) and puts it in his mouth after a second or two of clearly thinking, "I'm not sure what to do with this." Sillas tracks quite the emotional journey here as she hurries to get ready for this date, then pours herself into it, then opens herself up, and then has to process her deep disappointment that it hasn't gone the way she had hoped, though we never really know what she hoped for this night. Meanwhile, Noonan's Michael seems like a guy who has a lot of initial bluster, then some retreat, then some more bluster, followed by defensive retreat...and when he finally decides to commit to his own feelings in any way, it may be too late. In the end he finally admits that he has no idea what he's doing, and Jackie has to clarify that for him.

In the two days since I watched What Happened Was, I keep thinking about it and about these two characters. I wonder what happened for both of them. I have my thoughts on that (I think this night ends up a one-off that they never even mention again to anyone), but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe. I keep thinking about it, and I suspect that's the entire point.

ADDENDUM: In Sheila's article above, she also mentions that the film's marketing campaign did it no favors, and after looking into that a little, Holy SHIT, is she right. The trailer really does make it look like an erotic thriller, and the poster makes it look like...I don't even know what you'd expect from a movie with this poster, but it sure isn't what the movie ends up delivering.

I wonder if the movie's 1994 vintage hurt it a bit. This was when the "rise of indie film" in the 90s was just starting to gather steam, and I suspect that the people in charge of marketing this film just simply had no idea at all of how to do that. So, they came up with a terrible campaign that likely gave audiences the complete wrong idea, so any word of mouth was likely not great. That's a shame.

The Chairman of the Board will see you now.

 Sheila O'Malley has a typically lovely post about Frank Sinatra, whose birthday is today. I started composing a comment on her site, but then I realized that my thoughts were getting away from me, so I decided to bring it over here. Sinatra has been a part of my universe for as long as I can remember; my parents owned a bunch of his records, which were on constant rotation in my childhood. I remember his distinctive sound, sometimes clear and sometimes with just a hint of rasp (depending on what he wanted to express), his sense of rhythm (he could make a song swing without any assisting percussion at all), his lyricism, and his unfailing sense of how to land the emotional beats of a song. This last gift is rare indeed, and it's interesting to me that I'm featuring two singers so highly gifted in that regard on the same day (scroll down to today's Daily Dose of Christmas post). And of course he wasn't just a singer; Sinatra was also a very fine actor with a lot of range. He was in a lot of movies and he won an Oscar along the way and he still might be underrated as such.

The earliest of his roles that I've seen is Anchors Aweigh, in which he plays a Navy sailor who is very young and naive, who has to be instructed by his older buddy Gene Kelly in the ways of the world (meaning, how to flirt without seeming weird about it...in the late-1940s meaning of 'flirting'). Somehow he pulls this off without getting blown off the screen by Kelly; in fact, the two men have a partnership in that movie that elevates it. Anchors Aweigh isn't quite one of the immortal musicals--it's no Singin' in the Rain--but it's damned close.

Just eight years later Sinatra put his dramatic skills on display in a dark turn as Private Maggio in From Here to Eternity, a movie that hit me between the eyes when I watched it in high school. I was channel-flipping lazily, and I happened to land on the opening credits; next thing I knew it was two hours later and the movie was over and I hadn't touched the remote the entire time. Sinatra plays the cocky, arrogant young hothead whose actions end up costing him everything. There are some weird stories--legends, actually--about how Sinatra got the role in the first place, but it doesn't really matter how he got it. The man ended up winning a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for it, and there's a reason for that. Last time I watched From Here to Eternity I found it every bit as gripping as I did when I accidentally watched it as a sixteen-year-old.

Sinatra would bounce in and out of musicals a lot, and his dramatic turns always seemed to be in the crime genre. There was a teevee movie in the 70s called Contract on Cherry Street that I remember, and there's his amazing performance in The Machurian Candidate. He even turned up in the 1980s in an episode of Magnum PI, a show that often leavened its generally light-hearted tone with detours into espionage thrillers and, in the case of Sinatra's episode, pure noir.

Maybe it's easy to discount Frank Sinatra a little because of the genres in which he worked or the popular forms he pursued, but for my money, you can't tell the story of American art in the 20th century without talking about Frank Sinatra.

Sheila starts her post with this quote (possibly aprocryphal) by Bing Crosby: "Frank is a singer who comes along once in a lifetime, but why did he have to come along in mine?" I can't read that quote without thinking of High Society, a movie that was also a favorite of both my parents. It's a musical remake of The Philadelphia Story, with Crosby as C.K. Dexter Haven (the romantic lead who is pining for Grace Kelly), and Sinatra as Mike Connor, the gossip rag reporter sent to cover Kelly's impending nuptials. (Those roles were originated by Cary Grant and James Stewart, with Katherine Hepburn in the later-Grace Kelly part.) High Society is a fun movie, though this story is really better told in the original, as parts of the script had to be set aside to make room for the musical numbers, and...well, I have to agree with my sister, who once said on a Christmas Eve when one of Crosby's Christmas movies was on and we'd all taken in a few beers, "Whoever thought to cast Bing Crosby as a romantic lead was out of their mind."

Well, I don't know about that, but it's always struck me as very strange that this movie has Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra together, and it gives them exactly one number together...and that number had to be added at the last minute when the producers suddenly realized that they had Crosby and Sinatra in the same movie with no shared numbers. Astonishing! Can you imagine such a thing? Almost making an entire movie with two of the 20th century's greatest American singers in it and only realizing near the end that you've given them zero duets? That's like having Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle on the same team, but benching one of them at all times. Luckily for High Society, that one number is a hell of a number:

Of course, I can't write about Sinatra without discussing his singing a little bit. Many years ago I read an interview with one of my personal musical heroes, the great Chicago Symphony orchestra trumpet player Adolph Herseht, in which among many other things he recommended that young trumpet players (among others) listen to great vocalists like Frank Sinatra, on the basis that all music, even for instrumentalists, starts with the human voice, and I remember Herseth citing Sinatra for always telling a story with his singing. That is absolutely true.

I'll close this with my favorite track from my favorite Sinatra album, Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely. Just listen to Sinatra's absolute control in this song! He fades away at the end, fading fading fading ("Answer, echoes, dying dying dying," Tennyson might write), but his pitch never wavers, which is something that requires enormous technical skill: singing (or playing, if you're on an instrument) a note correctly, and making it sound full, while also making it piano or pianissimo is a skill that many musicians don't realize they need until well into their careers. And I'll have to write sometime about my father's favorite Sinatra song...but that needs a post of its own.

Something's afoot, aye!

 Apparently they made a movie about Sherlock Holmes's younger sister Enola, featuring Mille Bobbie Brown in the title role. The movie drops on Netflix just a few days before my birthday.

If it's good, this might be one of 2020's stopped-clock moments (even a stopped clock is right twice a day)!

"Thy dawn, O master of the world, thy dawn....": ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE AT 50 (a repost)

Fifty years ago today, on December 18, 1969, the sixth James Bond movie opened. Its initial reception was mixed, partly because the Bond mania of the 60s was simmering down, and partly because it was the first time that Sean Connery had not starred as Agent 007, in favor of complete unknown newcomer George Lazenby. While I didn't see the movie until an ABC telecast sometime in the early 80s, I liked it from that very first viewing and it very quickly shot up my personal rankings until by the time I was fifteen or sixteen I was willing to crown it as my favorite Bond movie of all time. And while certain opinions that we have in our youth shift as we learn and grow, some do not...and for me, this is one of the opinions that stuck. To this day, almost 19 movies later, OHMSS has never been equaled.

I wrote the following essay almost nine years ago and repost it here without a single word changed, except to fix a broken link.




Sometimes I change my mind about movies. Sometimes I don't. Some movies meant a lot to me, years ago, but have dropped away to the point that I've forgotten about them. Other movies, though, have stayed with me forever. One of those is On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the sixth James Bond film, which I have regarded since I was a teenager as the best Bond film ever made. In fact, I consider it one of my favorite films of all time, in any genre.

My long examination of the film, with lots of screencaps, after the page break.

Of Cackling Emperors and other things....

OK, so now that I'm done cranking out the words every day in a final push to complete a novel draft, what should we talk about? Why...how about the teaser trailer to Star Wars Episode IX that dropped a few weeks ago?

If you haven't seen it, here it is:


As with all teasers, there's simultaneously a lot to unpack there and...there's nothing to unpack there. Teaser trailers are designed to tantalize in any of a hundred different ways, and since this thing showed up online during the Star Wars Celebration fan festival, the Interwebs have been all a-tizzy as they try to read the tea leaves.

Well, never one to leave a muddle of wet tea unscrutinized, here are some random thoughts of my own!

1. As the Lucasfilm logo fades in we hear breathing. It's Rey, and our first glimpse of anything in the trailer is Rey herself, standing alone in the middle of a desert wasteland. This is already reminiscent of the first shot of the trailer for The Force Awakens, in which we saw Finn also standing alone in the middle of a desert wasteland...but where Finn looked visibly afraid and distraught, Rey's manner is one of calm. She is relaxing into...a moment.

2. Luke Skywalker's voice: "We've passed on all we know," and Rey pulls out her lightsaber. It's the Anakin-and-Luke model that she's been sporting through this trilogy, but...it was broken in two when she and Kylo Ren Force-battled to claim in in The Last Jedi, so now it's been reforged. The lightsaber is now Anduril to the original Narsil, if I may.

3. Luke, continued: "A thousand generations live in you now." This establishes that Rey is, after all, the last Jedi. It's all down to her.

4. Onscreen text: "Every generation has a legend." This calls back to the "Every saga has a beginning" line in that first trailer way back in 1998 for The Phantom Menace. Interesting choice, given the lengths this creative team went during the TFA build-up to differentiate their movie from the Prequels.

5. A TIE ship zooms across the same landscape, approaching Rey. It's flying right-to-left, kicking up a cloud of dust. This echoes the pod race from TPM, but reversed (the pod race mostly went left-to-right), and also the attack of the Resistance X-wings from TFA, when they streaked across a lake and kicked up water spray (and also went left-to-right).

6. The TIE ship bears down, Rey runs, we don't see who's flying the ship although I guess we're supposed to assume it's Kylo Ren, and then...Rey does this big slow-motion backflip toward the ship, with her lightsaber ignited. Hmmmm. This is not the type of action move we've ever really seen in a Star Wars movie. We cut away as the music erupts into a powerful rendition of Princess Leia's theme, which is, for all intents and purposes, the Star Wars music of choice for really big emotional beats.

7. A ship flying through mountains to a city at night on some planet. No idea. Someone online noted a similarity between that ship and the one that Rey envisioned during her Force-dream in TFA, the ship that presumably carried her parents away as young Rey screamed "Come back!" But I don't know.

8. Kylo Ren in action. I guess we have to see him, but Kylo Ren remains for me one of this trilogy's least well-executed factors. He's reforging his mask, he makes a power move in a fight with his goofy lightsaber.

9. Finn and Poe on some desert planet. The same one Rey's on? Maybe. Finn seems to be holding Rey's staff, and Poe Dameron is standing behind him on a rock outcropping that looks a bit like one of those from Obi Wan Kenobi's skulkings-about on the planet Geonosis way back in Attack of the Clones. Hmmmm....

10. The Millennium Falcon, flying through hyperspace as LANDO F***ING CALRISSIAN laughs with glee. I'm not gonna tell you I'm not excited to see Lando in action again, because I am! I do continue to think that this trilogy's use of the classic characters has not been handled as well as I would like. But anyway, the Falcon exits hyperspace but we don't get to see where. Hmmmm....

11. Onscreen text: "The Saga comes to an end." Well, yup, I suppose. I continue to view this story as not the third part of a saga but as a tacked-on thing added on by someone other than the author. Unfair? Maybe. But this trilogy, even with all its merits (and it does have them, even if most of them are in The Last Jedi), just doesn't feel to me like an organic continuation of what went before.

12. A series of quick cuts: speeder vehicles including ones so small they look like Quidditch brooms, Poe and Finn and C-3PO in some kind of action shot, and then...fingers caressing what looks like one of the medals Luke and Han got for blowing up the Death Star in ANH, and Rey hugging Leia. I'm interested to see how this movie constructs a satisfying narrative for Leia out of pre-existing cut footage from the last two movies, now that Carrie Fisher is gone.

13. A wide shot of our heroes! Rey in the foreground, with Finn, Poe, C-3PO, BB8, some new droid, and Chewbacca all behind her. They have the classic "There it is!" expression that all movie adventurers get when they crest the last rise before whatever it is they're looking for.

14. Then we cut to the other view: what they're looking at. It's an ocean shore, with crashing waves and...way out amongst the rocks...a giant piece of metal wreckage with a particular indentation in it, circular. It's a crash chunk of a Death Star.

15. Luke: "No one is ever really gone." Cut to black, and....

16. The unmistakable laughter of Emperor Palpatine.

17. The trailer ends with the title card: STAR WARS, and then the episode's subtitle: The Rise of Skywalker.

OK. Operating under the assumption that this teaser is designed to create all kinds of misdirection and speculation-fodder for thoughts that will turn out false, we should go down the rabbit hole anyway! But first, here's a cool moment from the trailer's first screening at STAR WARS Celebration. The fans are cheering and going nuts...and then the lights come back on and there, on stage, all by himself, is actor Ian McDiarmid, who played Palpatine in the first six films. It's a great moment, and really, shouldn't we all admit now that McDiarmid created one of the iconic villains in movies in Palpatine?

Watch:


"ROLL IT AGAIN!" Love it!

All right. So. The trailer.

Again, most of this will almost certainly be false.

First, the title: The Rise of Skywalker. What does that mean?

Well I don't know, but I do not think it will mean that Rey's backstory from TLJ, of being a nobody born to worthless parents, will be retconned. A lot of fans seem to think that JJ Abrams is going to be using this movie to walk back all the stuff that many fans recoiled against in the last film, but Abrams was involved in TLJ's production. He executive produced it, and Kathleen Kennedy has overseen all of these movies. Rian Johnson was not simply handed a wad of cash and told "Come back to us with a Star Wars movie."

Plus, the creative team has made no bones about their using this trilogy to put the entire "Skywalker Saga" to bed, so that moving forward after Episode IX, any new Star Wars stories will be non-Skywalker tales. I'm fine with that, to be honest. It's a big galaxy, after all. Lots of stories to be told.

But the title is The Rise of Skywalker, so if the saga is ending, what can be rising? One fan theory has the Jedi ending entirely with a new brand of Force-users coming in the wake of these events, called "Skywalkers". Maybe. Or maybe this title simply refers to the Skywalker family's final coming-down on the light side of the Force, after decades of being good then bad then good then bad again.

The problem there is that in this movie there's only one Skywalker descendant left, and that's Kylo Ren. If he's the one who is supposed to balance the Skywalker clan's books with regard to the Force, it implies that he gets a redemption arc, which I'm not that interested in seeing, on pure story grounds: We already had a Sith redemption arc with Darth Vader. And these films have been a lot more up front with Kylo Ren's evil, right down to his murdering his own father, Han Solo. Can Kylo Ren be redeemed? Of course he can. These movies have already established it. But for me, a Kylo Ren redemption arc would feel like one more echo of the Original Trilogy in a trilogy that has too many such echoes already.

Maybe Rey, when all is said and done and all of the remaining Skywalkers have died, takes on the name herself, kind of like how in Titanic Rose took the surname Dawson when she arrived in New York on the Carpathia, in tribute to Jack Dawson who died saving her from the sinking ship. In that way the Skywalkers would end...but they would also rise. Maybe.

Second, what about that Death Star?

I'd hoped that we could have a Star Wars story that does not involve a giant planet-destroying weapon, and yet, here we've got a wrecked Death Star. Fan speculation here centers on just which of the two Death Stars we've seen destroyed this is: Is it the one from A New Hope, crashed on Yavin IV or another of Yavin's moons? Or is it the one from Return of the Jedi, crashed on Endor after its destruction? And if that's Endor we're looking at, are the Ewoks all dead, having been wiped out in a planetary calamity of a big piece of Death Star falling out of the sky?

Maybe it's neither.

There was a lot of galactic history outside of just the movies. Remember that the Prequels established that the Death Star was at least in the conceptual stage as far back as Attack of the Clones, and that we saw the very beginnings of a Death Star shell under construction at the very end of Revenge of the Sith, whose events took place a full two decades before the Original Trilogy.

That shot has always been slightly problematic, hasn't it? Is that supposed to be the very Death Star that would later show up in A New Hope? Did it really take twenty years to build it?

Maybe the one in the Episode IX trailer is neither of the two Death Stars from the OT. Maybe it was a prototype. Remember above, when I noted that the rock formation that Poe is standing on looks more than a little like some of those seen on Geonosis, the planet where the Death Star was first designed.

From The Rise of Skywalker

From Attack of the Clones

Again, I'm probably completely wrong in this, but this is what makes it fun!

So, what if our heroes are on Geonosis, where construction first began on the Death Star? According to the new canon established by Disney after their kinda-reboot, the Empire eventually moved Death Star construction away from Geonosis and sterilized the planet, killing all of the Geonosans. But maybe a prototype that was never operational was scuttled, and maybe that wreckage fell onto an already-dead planet, winding up at the edge of a Geonosan ocean.

Remember, from Rogue One we know that Death Star development took many years and ran into huge technical problems that were only surmounted once Galen Erso was brought in by Orson Krennic to figure out how to make the superlaser work. So maybe the crashed Death Star is one that was never close to working...but there's something important about it.

Maybe...Kyber crystals, which power many weapons in the Star Wars universe, from lightsabers to Death Star superlasers.

Much rumor about Episode IX has at least part of the plot revolving around a secret mission that our heroes are entrusted with by General Leia Organa. Maybe that mission is to find the crashed Death Star and recover its Kyber crystals, for the Rebellion to use against the First Order. Maybe this time it's the Rebellion that's trying to build a super weapon, which would actually make sense, given how the Rebellion's numbers were reduced in TLJ to the carrying capacity of the Millennium Falcon.

So, enough about Death Stars. What about our friend the Emperor? Old Papa Palpatine? Well, I was a bit surprised to head his laughter, along with everybody else. I'm less thrilled about this, since we've already had a Palpatine-back-from-the-dead story (in Dark Empire, a comics series that came out in the 90s and became an accepted part of the "Star Wars expanded universe," as the non-film content before Disney's Lucasfilm purchase came to be known). Also, a very-much still-active-after-all-these-years Palpatine negates yet another of the happy-ending outcomes of Return of the Jedi, if it turns out that Darth Vader's self-sacrifice wasn't to kill Palpatine but to just inconvenience him for a few years.

No, I'm not in love with the idea of Palpatine showing up again. But...here he is, apparently. In some form.

Backing up a bit, we have Supreme Leader Snoke, murdered by Kylo Ren in TLJ. I've been pretty open about my frustration regarding Snoke and his personification of what I see as some serious worldbuilding errors in this trilogy. Snoke is completely without backstory of any kind, which has always annoyed me. I've always been bothered by the fact that these movies give no explanation for how the triumph at the end of Return of the Jedi ended up being pretty much meaningless and that the galaxy went to shit anyway. We're given this evil Force user (Snoke never actually claims the mantle of "Sith"), with no hint of where he came from or who he is or anything at all. And then he's killed and that's that for Snoke.

Or is it?

First of all, I've wondered if Snoke actually was killed in TLJ, because Luke Skywalker clearly establishes that for a Force user of sufficient power, projecting a physical copy of oneself across the universe is a thing. Maybe Snoke was doing that and thus was never in that Throne Room.

But maybe Snoke was just a simulacrum operated by Palpatine, or a mere puppet for Palpatine...or maybe Snoke actually was Palpatine. Maybe Palpatine has been a disembodied Force spirit who moves from one body to the next. Heck, springing off my point just above...maybe Palpatine was Force-projecting a copy of himself into the Throne Room in Return of the Jedi! Maybe Vader wasn't throwing anybody into the shaft at all!

Well, probably not. But if Palpatine's around in a way similar to the way that Yoda and Luke and others are, maybe this makes Kylo Ren the proxy stand-in for the entire line of Sith, just as Rey is for the Jedi.

You never know...and all this navel-gazing may end up completely refuted by the next trailer. I guess we'll see...but we're a mere eight months away from this movie's release. Revealed, all shall soon be....

Travels Along the Yellow Brick Road

I suppose I am hardly unique among Americans in that The Wizard of Oz has been a part of my life almost as long as I can remember. I grew up during that hazy prehistory when the only way to watch Wizard was to wait an entire year for one of CBS’s annual airings of the movie—usually in springtime, as I recall. When you’re a kid that wait is so long that you’re barely aware of it. Suddenly one day it’s spring again, and one day you’re in front of the teevee to watch The Wizard of Oz.

I don’t remember much about those viewings of the movie when I was very young; just a few images here and there. I remember the early moment when Dorothy falls into the pig pen. I remember the Scarecrow pointing in both directions, and the Tin Man’s oil can, and the crown the Lion wore for his big song number, a crown made from a shattered flower pot. I remember the Wicked Witch melting, and Dorothy’s farewells to her friends. I always cried at those, and I’ve had a terrible time with “forever farewells” in stories ever since. The worst, though? I remember one year—maybe this was when we lived in Oregon, when I would have been a preschooler—that I burst into tears when the words “The End” appeared on the screen.

The Land of Oz, as shown in The Wizard of Oz, was my earliest fantasy world, and certainly the first one that I didn’t want to leave when it was time. More of those would come. I’ve always thought of Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain as my proto-fantasy world, but in truth, two came earlier: Middle Earth, via the animated version of The Hobbit, and the kingdom of Oz.

Nowadays, of course, I find that as a writer I too can be “that man behind the curtain.” In the end, after Dorothy’s adventures with her wonderful friends (who, I am sorry to admit, took me adulthood before I realized their strong resemblance to the farmhands of Dorothy’s Kansas home), the character with whom I identify most may well be the Wizard, that kindly and wise man who is still something of a charlatan.

Of course, experiencing The Wizard of Oz as a fleeting, once-a-year thing is long a thing of the past. First there was VHS and then DVD and then Ted Turner bought the rights so the movie showed up on TBS only a little less often than The Beastmaster. Now, you can pretty much watch The Wizard of Oz whenever you want. I don’t much pine for the “old days”, but there was a certain charm back then of going to school the next day knowing that you and all your friends would be equally basking in the post-Oz afterglow.

Several weeks ago, The Wife, The Kid, and I attended a screening of Wizard as part of its 80th Anniversary Celebration at one of the Fathom Events. (These are special screenings of many artistic presentations—classic films, live operas, and more—shown digitally at certain movie theaters.) Eighty years of The Wizard of Oz astonishes me on many levels. The movie came out in 1939, the year my father was born. I have a solid chance of seeing Wizard hit 100. The theater was packed on the day we attended, which for some reason we found surprising. We’ve been attending Fathom Event films off and on for a couple years now, and we’ve never seen the theater sold out. There were even families with children in costume, little girls in blue gingham dresses and “ruby slippers”.

This was the second time The Wife and I saw Wizard on the big screen, with the last time coming twenty years ago for the film’s 60th jubilee. Like any great film, the experience of seeing it on a big screen in a darkened theater crowded with people who are sharing the same journey is deeply different from watching it on the finest teevee or computer screen. The crowd laughs, hisses, and tears up at all the right moments. I found myself fearing a little that some of the film’s moments that have become so ingrained in popular culture as to become cliché might be met with laughter, but not so. No one sniggered at the Wicked Witch’s cackling threat: “I’ll get you, my pretty—and your little dog, too!”

I was struck at how funny this movie is, too. When Dorothy, running away from home early on in order to save her poor Toto’s life, encounters a man who is clearly a charlatan, he puts on a display of cold-reading that is dead-on, and the scene is intelligent and full of wit. This goes on throughout the movie, with laughs both famous and laughs that are only remembered when one encounters them, like a forgotten acquaintance for whom we once felt a particular fondness.

Wizard’s opening act is so engrossing that the famous moment when Dorothy enters Oz and steps into a Technicolor world, the enchantment is as spellbinding as ever. I do wonder what that moment must have felt like to the movie’s first audiences, back in 1939. Surely those audiences gasped loudly, because today’s audiences still do, even when they know it’s coming.

From that moment on The Wizard of Oz marches on, building its world quickly and confidently. It weaves its magic so completely that we never really stop for a moment to consider what we’re not being told: What’s so amazing about those Ruby Slippers, anyway? Why does the Wicked Witch want them so badly? What will she do when she gets them? And...do we care about any of that? Of course not. It’s fine. And when Dorothy meets the Scarecrow it’s at a fork in the Yellow Brick Road, so how do they know which way to go? Who cares! None of these things are lapses in the storytelling, just things left unexplained because they don’t need explanation. And so it goes.

(I do, though, wonder just where Scarecrow got the gun he’s holding in one scene. Once you realize the Scarecrow is walking around with a pistol, you can’t unsee it.)

I also rediscovered the delight of the music of The Wizard of Oz. Obviously “Over the Rainbow” is the film’s most iconic song (and how stunning that the producers briefly thought to cut it!), but every song in this movie is distinctive and cleverly written. The Munchkins’ “Follow the Yellow Brick Road” segues perfectly into “We’re Off To See the Wizard”, which becomes a recurring anthem as Dorothy progresses through Oz. And the introduction of the Munchkins themselves contains some incredibly witty wordplay, from the representatives of the Lollipop Guild to the Munchkin Coroner:

As Coroner I must aver,
I’ve thoroughly examined her;
And she’s not only merely dead:
She’s most sincerely dead!

A more cheerfully morbid lyric might exist, but as of this writing I’ve no idea what it might be.

The film’s songs and musical styles shift throughout the film, too. The Munchkins have their childlike sound, contrasted with the good cheer of the denizens of Emerald City as they welcome Dorothy and company to the “Merry Old Land of Oz”. Surprisingly, after the Cowardly Lion’s “If I Were King of the Forest,” the movie stops being a musical: there are no more numbers at that. I wonder why that might be the case. Maybe the producers didn’t feel the need for any, or maybe they felt that any songs past that point might slow down the narrative. I don’t know that any other songs might have worked. Maybe a reprise of “Over the Rainbow” as Dorothy sits captive in the Wicked Witch’s tower, which might be when she seems to really start to learn the film’s central message that “There’s no place like home.” I don’t know if that would have worked, but it is interesting that Dorothy’s initial dream of going “Over the Rainbow” is not bookended in song with her learning that she doesn’t really need to go over the rainbow at all.

This screening was also the first time I’ve seen The Wizard of Oz after we saw the Broadway show Wicked, which tells the story of the Wicked Witch, whom we learn is named Elphaba. The movie is, of course, very much its own thing, and I found that at no point was I envisioning the events of Wizard in light of the events of Wicked. The Wizard of Oz is such a classic as to maintain its own storytelling heft, which stands alone, unshared by such follow-ups as The Wiz, or Wicked, or the 1980s movie The Return to Oz.

Ultimately The Wizard of Oz remains what it always was, what it always has been: a grand fantasy, a touching story, a thrilling adventure, a witty and sophisticated tale, a wonderfully tuneful musical, and ultimately a sublimely well-made film that is a constant touchstone for the youth in all of us. And why shouldn’t it be that? It is, after all, dedicated on screen to the “young in heart.”