Lessons of Father's Day: Don't kill your father

It looks like we've decided to go OT -> sequels -> prequels. 

Or rather, I've decided. When we watched Return of the Jedi back in April, we came to a fork in the road. We could either go back and examine the origins of Darth Vader -- boooring -- or we could follow the characters we had just been watching, in what my older son said was the first Star Wars movie he felt really enthusiastic about, to see what happens to them 30 years later. 

Easy choice.

A thing that made it easier? When we were at Disneyland last month, my younger son cajoled us into buying him a "cinema quality" version of the Resistance fighter pilot helmet that's seen in the sequel trilogy. (Not thinking how we would transport it back to Australia, which involved some creative packing.) That purchase was based solely on the excellent ride Rise of the Resistance -- which I had hoped to write about here, but I think the moment has passed -- and not on having actually seen these helmets in action in a movie.

Time to change that.

Funnily enough, an argument did come along for The Phantom Menace, from an unexpected source. My older son had a birthday ten days ago, and we ended up getting him a Star Wars game for his Nintendo Switch. As the one who purchased it, I thought "Well, that pod race game must have better graphics than I would have guessed, if they bothered to make a version of it for the Switch." Nope, but he seemed to enjoy it well enough anyway. Maybe not so much that he needed to match up his gaming experiences to something that happened in a movie.

So embracing the new rather than the old -- the new in this case being much better -- Star Wars: The Force Awakens was, indeed, my fourth of Sunday's five-movie Australian Father's Day movie marathon, projected on the garage wall. (I won't write about this marathon as its own post, but may touch on it in my next couple.) It was the first time all day I'd invited my family in to join me. And yes, five is a rather modest total for a full day in the garage -- unless you consider that I also watched two hours of baseball, and one of the movies was three hours and 43 minutes long. More on that in upcoming posts.

We had delivery pizza and some treats later on, and the kids were very interactive with the movie, hailing the first on-screen arrival of Kylo Ren, as well as various returning characters. At a break in the action at one point, the recently turned 12-year-old said that Finn was his favorite character. A strong choice, I thought, given John Boyega's funny and charismatic line deliveries that I appreciate more with each viewing. (This is my sixth of The Force Awakens -- in only seven years. That's a lot. However, it's my first in nearly three years, easily my longest Awakens drought. And it's not quite so much when you consider that the first two were both in the theater, just a week apart. Plus the previous two were both as a lead-up to the release of the next movie in the series. Okay end parenthesis now.)

I was waiting to see how they would react to [SPOILER ALERT - ha ha] the death of Han Solo. Having not lived with this character for nearly 40 years of their lives, they didn't say much about it. When I specifically asked them about it after the movie, the older one said, "Well, someone dies in each one of these movies." He's got a point there, though to me, Han Solo is not just "someone."

I think the younger one, though he didn't say it as such, may have been a bit more shocked by the idea that a boy would kill his own father -- even a boy as clearly disturbed as Ben Solo. I think they were both surprised to see the identity of Kylo Ren when he took off his helmet -- my older son said "That's not what I expected him to look like" -- which confronted them with the idea not of some incomprehensible evil, but of a young man who's lost his way. We don't get that sort of humanity from Darth Vader until the final minutes of Return of the Jedi -- and then, I suppose, for three more movies in the prequels.

Since it was late and past their bedtime when we finished, I didn't have a chance to talk to the younger one about fathers and sons and how they don't usually kill each other. I guess at least it wasn't the father killing the son, so he could sleep well enough. He probably knows he won't ever try to kill me ... I hope.

If it weren't 10 o'clock and completely inappropriate for them to watch it, they could have stayed on and watched Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf with me. (Clearly my appetite to see this was whetted by writing about Zemeckis in this post.) But before we get into that, I thought it was worth a word on how Zemeckis improved on the "uncanny valley" from The Polar Express, which I wrote about in that same post.

In the first few shots, I was worried. A lot of herky jerky movements, a lot of dead eyes. But it only took a few minutes for me to be reminded of what making a movie this way, instead of with real actors, gave you in terms of storytelling advantages. Just as it did in 2007, that moment when we pull out from the Hrothgar's castle -- following the path of a bird carrying a rat, all the way to where the sounds are reverberating in Grendel's head in the distant forest -- brought me into the film's good graces and kept me there. And despite a few jerks of the herky variety and a few eyes that are not focused on anything in particular, the overwhelming impression of Beowulf is of a movie whose technical and storytelling innovations are worth celebrating.

(Side note: Was Beowulf a model for the Thor movies? Not only are Odin and Ragnarok name-checked here, but the mo-cap version of Ray Winstone looks a lot like Chris Hemsworth would eventually look as Thor. Plus, Anthony Hopkins is in both.)

Anyway, if my sons, particularly my younger son, had watched Beowulf, they would have seen a very disturbed creature on a murderous rampage -- not unlike Kylo Ren -- who consciously spares his own father. You'd argue that Grendel would be less able to distinguish relatives from strangers, given that he doesn't spend any time with his father the king, and that he's not a lot more than a deformed id. For whatever else he is, Ren is extremely intelligent, and has a chance to take premeditated actions despite his proclivity for tantrums.

Because he didn't see it, I'll be sure to tell my younger son that don't worry, the crazy, 14-foot-tall deformed creature who tears a bunch of Vikings limb from limb decided to spare his father in a similar scenario. 

As for the prequels ... well, we can get to them one day if the kids are ever interested in a history lesson.

My fourth Awakens

When Star Wars: The Force Awakens came out in December 2015, I prepared for it by watching all six previous Star Wars movies, chronologically in terms of the storyline, one every two months starting in February.

My preparations for Star Wars: The Last Jedi are a bit more modest. I'm just watching Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

And I likely would not have done even that except that they revisited their review of the movie on Filmspotting to whet our appetites for the new movie. And whet mine it did. In fact, I became so whetted that after listening to that on Friday, I determined that I was going to watch it on Saturday night -- and wasn't dissuaded from that position even once I found that the movie was no longer streaming on Netflix. Undeterred, I downloaded it from iTunes.

As this was my fourth viewing, it puts the movie in very rare company indeed: It's one of only a few films I can definitely say I have seen four times in the first two years of their existence. In fact, there's only one other one that I am 100% sure of, which is Pulp Fiction, still my personal record holder for the most number of theatrical viewings at four. That record will likely never be broken, nor will the record for the speed of reaching a fourth viewing after its release date. But The Force Awakens is now in rarefied company indeed, reaching its fourth viewing even faster than Spring Breakers, which took two years and four months to get there. (However, Breakers did that without the benefit of two theatrical viewings, which is a different kind of impressive.)

That tends to exaggerate how much I like The Force Awakens, actually. Obviously I like it quite a bit, but if I were making a list of my top 25 movies of the decade -- as I will be in about two years -- I don't even know that I would consider it a serious contender. An honorable mention at best.

One reason I've seen it so much, of course, is that it's Star Wars. My total number of viewings of even The Phantom Menace is four, possibly as many as five. (And will become a definite five and possible six whenever I end up watching it with my kids.) The Phantom Menace is not, of course, a great movie. But it is Star Wars, and that counts for a lot.

I don't know that my fourth viewing has given me many or even any new takeaways, but it did seem worth noting on my blog, if only for the play on words in the subject line and to do a little bit of pre-Last Jedi hype. (However, you should expect a hype post with an actual Last Jedi poster before the week is out.)

I did have one observation that could apply to almost any movie like this, and it has to do with the internal timeframe. How many days is this movie supposed to take? Once the action really gets going, one thing flows into the other and we don't see anybody sleep -- nor is it even implied that they do. This is just a screenwriting shortcut of course -- sleep is boring and you don't need to see it -- but the only nightfall we can even be sure happens is when Rey eats her dinner and saves BB8 from the fellow scavenger. Beyond that, you wouldn't be surprised to learn that the period of time between Rey engaging in her normal daily routine of scavenging parts from downed star destroyers to having a lightsaber duel with one of the most powerful Sith apprentices in existence is about 36 hours.

I also wanted to push back against a strain of Star Wars criticism that I find to be totally unfounded. There's an article going around the internet right now that speaks of Kylo Ren's popularity relative to that of the infamous Jar Jar Binks, the result of a recent survey. Apparently, Binks placed ahead of both Ren and Mace Windu.

I didn't dignify this by reading the details, so I have no idea why Windu is unpopular, but I've heard that Ren's lack of popularity is not only a function of his notorious act of patricide. Apparently, people really take issue with his "emo ways," drawing unfavorable comparisons between Adam Driver's portrayal of that role and Hayden Christensen's portrayal of Anakin Skywalker. I don't think Christensen fully deserves his own bad rap, but Driver definitely doesn't deserve it. Looking at the four major characters introduced in The Force Awakens -- I will include Poe Dameron in that group, and exclude Snoke and General Hux -- Kylo Ren is at an equal level of interest for me as Rey and Finn, and slighly ahead of Poe. And that has entirely to do with Driver's performance. In fact, I would say that I did not like Driver prior to this movie and was wary of his involvement. Now, I look forward to every next thing I see him in.

The next of which will be a little movie called Star Wars: The Last Jedi, opening here on Thursday.

The novelty of streaming The Force Awakens

It wasn't too long ago that I thought Star Wars and Netflix streaming were a very unlikely match.

In this post almost exactly five years ago, entitled "Searching for Star Wars on Netflix" and written on the occasion of the announced division of the company into a streaming service and a DVD-through-the-mail service called Qwikster (a plan that was quickly scuttled after a resounding public backlash), I wrote: "I don't expect a movie like Star Wars ever to be available on streaming. 'Ever' is a long time, but let's just put it this way: it's not going to happen anytime soon."

I guess five years was fairly soon after all.

No, the original Star Wars is not available for streaming. But a movie "like" Star Wars -- that's what I said, anyway -- is. In fact, it's so much "like" Star Wars that this was one of the reasons the people who didn't like it didn't like it. The new Star Wars movie is available on Netflix, as will every subsequent Star Wars that gets released, according to the recent (not that recent now) distribution deal between Disney and Netflix.

And so Friday night, almost purely for the sake of its seeming lack of likelihood, I watched Star Wars: The Force Awakens on Netflix.

There was really no need for me to see this movie for the third time in its first ten months of existence. In fact, you might argue that intense initial exposure to a movie has the chance to turn you against it. I mean, I still love Creed, but my third viewing of that back in June was probably too soon.

But there was no denying that every time I scrolled past it on Netflix, my salivary glands activated just a little bit. It was a physical reaction I couldn't deny. I wanted to see this movie again.

And, I'm glad to report, pretty much no change in my feeling about it after a third viewing. I still love it.

But it occurred to me that it does represent a bit of a watershed moment in our relationship with various delivery systems for our movies.

Five years ago, I discounted the possibility of Star Wars being available for streaming because it seemed to me, even if I didn't state it aloud or even consciously define my own perspective, that making something available for streaming reduces its sense of glamour. If you can just watch a movie any old time with a click of a button, its value takes a hit. It's no longer some elite commodity that you will want to buy in order to have it in your collection. By it streaming, it's in your collection without you even having to do anything.

Star Wars seemed unlikely to cross that line. As it has perennial resale value as a physical disc, Lucasfilm seemed likely to remain content to milk every last cent out of it in that format. Giving it to us for free -- with our monthly streaming subscription, that is -- seemed an admission of defeat for that particular revenue stream.

Has that defeat now been admitted? Or does Disney just have a different way of doing things?

Maybe a little from Column A and a little from Column B.

One of the ways I knew I was excited to see The Force Awakens again, beyond the mere likelihood of watching Star Wars movies multiple times, was that I recently looked for it on the shelf at Target. Not to buy it -- DVD prices here are still outrageous. No, I just wanted to look at it. I just wanted to marvel over the fact that I could purchase this on DVD or BluRay, this Star Wars movie we had all been anticipating for so long. I still get a little excited by the possibility of owning a new movie that had excited me, even if I do it less and less these days.

But you know what? I couldn't find it.

I figured I had just been looking in the wrong place. There was a Lego version of The Force Awakens, but not the one starring actual people. I shrugged and gave up, not thinking much more about it.

Until now.

Now I wonder if we've reached a point in the devaluation of physical media that they actually didn't have The Force Awakens at Target. Available on Netflix? Who needs a disc?

Because now the assumption is that we all have Netflix, and really, don't we?

I guess I'll take the glass is half full approach, though. The glass is half full approach meant that I got to watch this movie I wanted to see on Friday night without lifting a finger.

Correction: I lifted the finger necessary to press play on my remote.

My Force Awakens thoughts - in my own voice

You need to read everything related to Star Wars: The Force Awakens with a spoiler awareness anyway, but I'll make it official: SPOILER WARNING. Anything and everything about the movie will be spoiled in this post.

There are such a mind-boggling number of things a person could discuss related to Star Wars: The Force Awakens that it leaves me daunted to even consider doing it here. However, leaving none of my thoughts on the movie on my blog also didn't sit well with me, and seems irresponsible to you, my loyal readers. (One of whom actually asked me if I'd be writing something about it.)

Fortunately, I've got a good compromise.

I recorded a podcast on Saturday night, the latest ReelGood podcast, all about it. We had been off since August until two weeks ago, in part because one of the guys was out of the country for two months, and then due to some scheduling conflicts once he returned. But we're back in full force, pun totally not intended. Two weeks ago we started up again with In the Heart of the Sea, and this time, we sunk our teeth into the seventh Star Wars movie, perhaps unsurprisingly at twice our normal length.

You can listen to it here.

However, on the off chance you don't want to or don't have time to listen to an hour-long podcast in the heart of Christmas season, I'll included a few little "featurettes" below on the movie. They don't come close to addressing my full thoughts, but they do give you two stand-alone blog post ideas that seeing the movie inspired me to think of.

My private pain

Given that I saw this movie at least 36 hours before most people I know, you can imagine how difficult it was to live with the knowledge that was burdening me: that the lovable rogue known as Han Solo, one of the most iconic characters in film history, is no more.

I wanted to tell someone. I had to tell someone. But I told no one. I lived with this pain privately.

And indeed it was pain. The death of Han Solo really ruined the end of the movie for me, not to mention parts of the next few days. Which is no comment on the way the movie ends, or the events of those days in my life. It's just a comment on how difficult it was to feel optimistic about anything when one of cinema's great characters has just gotten impaled by a lightsaber and fallen down one of Star Wars' trademark bottomless pits. At the hands of his own son, no less.

The first thing I could compare it to (SPOILER COMING ABOUT A REALLY OLD STAR TREK MOVIE) was the death of James T. Kirk. Kirk of course dies in Star Trek Generations, a movie that, my God, is now 21 years old. And though that was tragic, at least Kirk died saving the universe, pretty much literally. He fell heroically to his death, but not his instant death, allowing him a few dying words before the lights go out. Sad but satisfying.

Han Solo? He gets a touching final gesture, the soft caress of his son's cheek, but other than that, his death is pretty much immediate. It was heroic in its own right, I suppose, as it involved trying to save the soul of his son. I guess not everyone can die saving the universe.

It felt so funny walking around with this knowledge imprisoned in my breast, knowledge I couldn't share with almost anybody. It wasn't that I wanted to spoil the movie for other people, only that I wanted to seek some kind of personal counseling while talking it over with them. Being killed by your own son is crazy hardcore, even if that was a possibility that was underlying both The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. If these new movies are going to be about the redemption of Kylo Ren -- and Adam Driver's conflicted performance certainly suggests they will be -- then having killed your father makes that a lot harder. To quote Seinfeld, that's a pretty big matzah ball.

I couldn't keep it in, but somehow I did. But now you all know, and that does make it a little bit better. We'll get through this ... together.

Stormtroopers are people too

My favorite new character was Finn, played by John Boyega. Having not been a huge fan of Attack the Block, I was surprised by just how much I liked him here. He was everything I wanted from a Star Wars character.

Though it did make me ponder the nature of the stormtrooper.

I think we don't yet know everything we are eventually going to know about the back story of this reformed stormtrooper, which might explain why he's actually pretty good with a lightsaber and why he has the heightened sense of empathy that seems to be entirely lacking from other stormtroopers. But if we are to take it on face value, that he is "just" a stromtrooper, it does make us reconsider everything we think we know about stormtroopers.

Even though stormtroopers are not actual clones, we've kind of always thought of them that way, haven't we? Even when we've heard their voices and they do sound like "regular guys," we haven't seen a single stormtrooper with his helmet off -- the only unhelmeted stormtroopers we've ever seen were Han and Luke posing as stormtroopers. They must have thought, wisely, that it would be too humanizing of these villainous pawns, many of whom are killed or otherwise disposed of in thoughtless fashion, if we saw what they really looked like. Saw just how much they are "regular guys."

But they certainly have a clone mentality. They do what they're told and they don't ask questions. They never doubt the morality of their orders and they never hesitate when asked to carry them out. In short, they are deserving of no mercy.

Until Finn, that is.

Finn -- whose "name" is some alphanumeric code beginning with FN -- first has an awakening about the evil nature of The First Order when he mourns the death of a fellow stormtrooper. Yeah, he's horrified about the killing of civilians on Jakku, but his actual moment of crisis relates to the death of a fellow stormtrooper on the battlfield. In that moment, and for the rest of the film, the guy is overloaded with empathy. And eventually, he also has a surplus of bravery and moral fortitude.

What I want to know is: Is any stormtrooper capable of this? Could any of these "drones" break rank and decide to rebel against the nefarious ways of their masters? And if so, why doesn't it happen more often? WHAT HAPPENED WITH FINN ON JAKKU?

The Star Wars movies have never shied away from coincidence in the telling of their stories, so I won't be all that surprised when it turns out that Finn is a "special" stormtrooper. Though so far, the idea that he might be Lando Calrissian's son seems a little far-fetched, and also possibly racist -- the only two black guys in the Star Wars universe don't need to be related to each other.

But wait ... there is another black guy in the Star Wars universe. Could he be ... Mace Windu's son? Or grandson? Or great great grandson?

Episode VIII comes out in May of 2017.

As for this one ... I'm seeing it again on Wednesday. That's as good a single-sentence summation of my thoughts on The Force Awakens as you're likely to get.

I'm seeing Star Wars before you are

I've been giving Australian release dates a hard time lately.

Today, I praise them.

Because release dates are a day earlier in Australia than in the U.S. -- Thursday vs. Friday -- and because Australia is x number of hours ahead of the U.S. anyway -- between 16 and 19, depending on what coast you live on, or whether you live on a coast at all -- I can say with confidence, no matter who you are or when you read this:

I'm seeing Star Wars before you are.

It's 17 hours away as I type this. Less when you read it.

It'll be about 8 a.m. Wednesday on the east coast when my midnight screening starts, some 40 hours before even the most die-hard American fans figure out how to finagle their way into the earliest possible screening.

Miraculously, I go in almost completely untainted by excess familiarity with the images from this movie.

I watched the original teaser and then the second teaser, but I never watched the full-length trailer for The Force Awakens. It didn't appear before any films I saw in the theater, and now that I'm not planning to see any more films in the theater before tonight, I can say with certainty that I've avoided that entirely. I've also avoided it online, which was easier when the choice to click or not click was always mine.

So I will basically be awash in this new world, or in this revisitation of a world I know, just with fresh new permutations.

I will do you the courtesy of not posting my thoughts here. If there were ever a movie that you should go into with full reserves of optimism, it should be this one. In fact, I don't even know if the buzz is good or bad on it yet, except for what people who have seen it early -- like, actors in the movie and, I believe, the poster artist Drew Struzan -- have glowingly said about it. I'm not going to go to Metacritic now to check, but I believe if I did, I would not even see an existing Metascore for this movie. Good job Disney on really keeping the lid on this movie until it came out.

The thing that worries me the most now is that I don't know what kind of shape I'll be in come midnight tonight. I meant to go to bed early last night, but didn't. I meant to sleep a little later this morning, but couldn't. I'm going to load myself up on caffeine tonight, but I don't want to create a dire bathroom emergency that overtakes me about halfway through the running time.

In the end, though, I guess it's reasonable to assume that the inherent excitement of the experience, couple with a raucous crowd, will be enough to carry me through to the finish line.

I've got my Millennium Falcon shirt ready and my tickets already in my backpack. It's now -- hey -- it's now only 16 and a half hours away.

Look, I'm not trying to make you feel bad. You'll see Star Wars soon. Really you will.

But not as soon as me.

A surefire cure for spoilers

The only real way to avoid spoilers about Star Wars: The Force Awakens is to not read anything about it, look at anything about it, or watch anything about it. Even this newly released poster supposedly contains some previously unspoiled plot and character information, though I'm not trying too hard to piece it together. And then of course there's yesterday's release of the latest (and final?) trailer, which I have not yet watched -- though I suppose it's only a matter of time until I do.

However, at least these are only the spoilers the filmmakers are happy to give us. And I've got a great way to avoid spoilers that are spread the other way, from people who have already seen it.

Simple: See the movie before anybody else does.

And that's what I'll be doing on Thursday, December 17th at 12:01 a.m. Melbourne time, which is 8:01 a.m. Eastern time -- on Wednesday the 16th.

Yesterday my wife surprised me with a birthday present of tickets to the first Melbourne screening. Because our release days are a day earlier anyway, and because our time zone puts us a minimum of 14 hours ahead of the U.S., that means I'll likely be seeing Star Wars: The Force Awakens more than 36 hours before even the most ardent American fans out there. It's possible I'll see it even before the early critical buzz has christened it as a classic or damned it as another misfire.

Try spoiling this movie for me now, trolls!

Assuming that the problem of having the movie spoiled for me will be solved by this, the next problem is how to start watching a movie that's two hours and 16 minutes at midnight.

Then again, with the crowd whoopering and hollering and cheering constantly, I don't think nodding off will even be a consideration.

I can't wait.