In the Driver's seat

NO STAR WARS SPOILERS.

In fact, I specifically chose a picture from The Last Jedi just so you don't have any photographic spoilers.

I figured it was finally time to write a post about Adam Driver, and I had a pretty good excuse, as the last four films I've watched (new and revisited) all feature Driver.

Three of those were, of course, Star Wars movies, as I revisited The Force Awakens (Saturday night) and The Last Jedi (Sunday night) in the lead-up to my midnight viewing of The Rise of Skywalker on Wednesday. Marriage Story was, as you know from my last two posts, the other film crammed in there on Tuesday night.

The only thing preventing this from being a complete Driver lovefest was hearing that he walked out of an interview with Terry Gross that had scarcely begun because a clip of himself singing from Marriage Story was going to be played as part of the package. Apparently, Adam Driver can't watch or even listen to himself perform, a quirk that sounds like false modesty until you back it up by storming out on one of America's most respected interviewers.

It's too bad, because I love watching and listening to Adam Driver perform.

It wasn't always this way. My first tastes of Driver were decidedly mixed. They were based on short experiences with him in Frances Ha, a film I really liked, though found his character a bit insufferable, and Girls, of which I only watched a handful of episodes. I recognized a kind of magnetism in his abilities, but got the impression of self-involvement, a kid of obnoxious sense of the privilege of the young Greenwich Village intellectual. That was surely the characters he was playing rather than the man himself, but if you play too many of that type of character, it becomes more difficult to distinguish the two.

I'm glad Driver wasn't pigeonholed, because he has gone on to impress me time and again throughout the rest of the decade. It probably all started halfway through the 2010s with The Force Awakens. When I first heard it, his casting struck me as odd, and then infinitely more so when I learned he was set to be The Big Bad. Actually seeing the film immediately convinced me that I had underestimated Driver -- vastly.

This isn't a spoiler for The Rise of Skywalker because you've surely seen enough images to know that he repairs his Kylo Ren mask in this film. J.J. Abrams liked that mask, and I kind of feel like its destruction was one of the "fuck you"s Rian Johnson gave him in The Last Jedi that rankled him the most.

But Johnson knew what he was doing, and I'll just say that Abrams acknowledges it in Rise of Skywalker as well. To have Adam Driver behind a mask is to not see Adam Driver act. And Adam Driver can act at a level few of his peers can achieve.

Even the still photo above contains more acting than certain performers in the prequel trilogy accomplished over the entire trilogy. Last night in talking to a friend, I characterized Driver as "Hayden Christensen, but good." By that I meant that both actors played young, emotionally immature, yet extremely powerful force users who were tempted by the dark side and confused by their negative thoughts. While Christensen received enough backlash for the petulance of his performance to have possibly poisoned the well for that character type in all future Star Wars movies, Driver made it immediately clear how that type of character is supposed to work, and thereby salvaged that character type. (Side note: I actually do think Christensen is frequently effective in those movies.)

Even if the mask is cool and the voice distortion is chilling, you don't get the real Ben Solo/Kylo Ren until he's unencumbered by the mask.

Driver carries the performance through to the finish line in Rise of Skywalker, which is all I'll say.

Then you have Marriage Story, one of two other Driver movies released in the past couple months, along with The Report, which I understand is kind of disappointing. If it is disappointing, I have no doubt it's not Driver's fault.

Driver has already received a Golden Globe nomination for Marriage Story, and an Oscar nomination is surely also forthcoming. In fact, I haven't handicapped the field, but it's possible he's even the favorite to take home the award.

And that's just. I may have some quibbles with the balance of the film between its two main characters, but I can understand Noah Baumbach being seduced by the notion of more screen time for this charismatic actor. (It helps, of course, that Driver is the Baumbach stand-in in the film.) His every instinct in this film is on point. He knows how to play someone who is generous, and he knows how to play someone who is shitty. He presents us with a character who has a continuum of selves, and in certain key emotional moments, he delivers the kind of performance you don't forget, which they use for Oscar clips. That's not a backhanded compliment in this case, because they are not staged as moments of Oscar bait. Driver would probably reject a moment that was staged like that, would find a way to use his peculiarities as a performer to render that moment utterly scaled and believable.

It ended up being a bit of an Adam Driver lovefest anyway.

If walking out on Terry Gross makes Driver a diva, then I guess that's something we can live with. Not everyone can be as ingratiating as Tom Hanks, and also be a really great actor. In fact, history is littered with actors who were absolute shitheads, but held the screen in a way you couldn't take your eyes off.

It's a bit bittersweet to know I (probably) won't be seeing Driver in any more Star Wars movies, but the timing of Marriage Story is a useful reminder that Kylo Ren was merely the breakout role for him.

And now that he's broken out, anything is possible.

The pendulum swings back on The Last Jedi

You'd think that everything that could be said in video form about Star Wars: The Last Jedi would
have hit the internet by about March, if only to capitalize on it still being at the forefront of our conversations. Late August, after the release of the next Star Wars movie, seems like an odd time to still be contributing to that conversation.

But apparently, that's how long it takes to craft an epic takedown like the one crafted by the guys at Red Letter Media, through the voice of their cranky old man character, Mr. Plinkett.

August 28th was when this video dropped. I urge you to watch it as soon as possible, even though it's 58 minutes long.

Not only is it hilarious, but man is it filled with salient points.

I won't enumerate them here because you really should watch the video. But I'll give you a taste. There's a whole brilliant section on the pointlessness and bullheadedness of Admiral Holdo withholding her master plan from Poe. Plinkett contrasts this with footage of the crew of Star Trek: The Next Generation discussing in an open forum, in which Captain Picard is just one of ten participants, all the options for a particular course of action. Picard nods and continually solicits more input from other people. There might be a full two minutes of this footage (which is one of the reasons the video is 58 minutes long). But it makes its point admirably. It's logical to seek input from other qualified military experts when coming to a decision. It's not logical to say "Do as your told." In fact, it's First Order-like.

I agree with almost everything Mr. Plinkett says, and I only say "almost" because "everything" feels too absolutist. I don't remember disagreeing with anything, I'll say that.

Which is a surprise to me, as my appreciation of The Last Jedi had been on the upswing.

You may remember in this post I told you, very briefly, about watching the film for the second time on the plane, of all places, and developing a new appreciation of it. (It was one sentence, so don't bother to go to the link. I'm not even sure why I linked it.) I believe I went into that viewing with the burden of "it must be me," like I was too conventional in my needs from a Star Wars movie and I failed to appreciate all the subversive things Rian Johnson was doing. Whatever my mindset was, I did indeed boost my assessment of its qualities a notch or two.

But Mr. Plinkett reminded me of all the problems I had the first time, which I may not have even been able to articulate without him articulating them for me. Twice in this video he says "You may not have noticed it, but your brain did." Exactly. There are so many things wrong with that movie structurally, tonally and logically that you can't put you're finger on all of them unless someone breaks it down over the course of an irreverent hour of commentary/comedy. Just because it's funny doesn't mean it's not so, so true.

So go watch it. And let's appreciate that Mr. Plinkett waited until he had full, easy video access, had collected all his thoughts and other video clips, and was ready to drop the mic on us as he's done here.

I'm not going into the "I hate The Last Jedi" camp. I'm not one of those cretins who trolled Kellie Marie Tran into disappearing from social media. But I do think this movie has a ton of problems that are clear as day when someone like Mr. Plinkett shows them to us.

And I'm not sure if this Last Jedi pendulum is going to swing back in the other direction anytime soon. 

The right thing to want from Star Wars

SPOILERS. I hope this goes without saying at this point.

Such an online debate has cropped up around Star Wars: The Last Jedi that it has started to resemble other big binary debates in recent memory, like Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton. But really, this is more like political in-fighting in the same party. A true parallel with Trump vs. Clinton would be people who like Star Wars vs. people who do not like Star Wars. This fight is entirely between people who love Star Wars.

I love Star Wars, but I just now had to defend myself against being a “hater.” It was not done in an aggressive way. The person said “I can’t keep track. Are you a TLJ hater? It would seem so.”

My response: “I only hate the term ‘hater.’ ‘Hater’ implies disliking something for illegitimate reasons with the possible intent to troll. I have legitimate concerns with the movie, which does not make me a hater. I give it 3.5 stars out of 5 with a far greater inclination to talk about the things that disappointed me than the things I liked.”

I was possibly going to grapple with my feelings about the movie by seeing it again last night, in conjunction with a trip to the mall to do Christmas shopping. (The mall is open until midnight the week before Christmas, as opposed to closing at 5:30 (!) like it usually does on weekdays.) The other options was Bad Moms 2, which had the benefit of being an hour shorter. As it turned out, my shopping took too long and I saw neither.

I did, however, grapple with The Last Jedi last night by consuming two different well-argued pieces that took both a pro and a con stance on the movie. The first was this piece during my dinner at the mall, entitled “The Last Jedi Doesn’t Care What You Think About Star Wars.” The second was after I got home, when, exhausted from walking around the mall for four hours, I should have just gone to sleep. Instead I watched the Red Letter Media video on The Last Jedi, all 45 minutes of it, which can be found here.

The Red Letter Media video was nice because it made me laugh and confirmed a number of my own concerns with the movie, plus added some I had not previously considered. (The line about the cumulative effect of these two movies being like John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison being shot in the same night was the best.) But I’d be lying if I didn’t mention that the arguments made in the SlashFilm piece were also resonant for me.

Whether you like this Star Wars movie or not comes down to what you want from a Star Wars movie. And what’s frustrating about this debate is that people are trying to tell each other what they should want, rather than just accepting that everyone wants different things.

If you want the strain of relatively uncomplicated heroism that has been explored in most, if not all, of the previous Star Wars movies to continue, this movie may not be that satisfying for you. Those who don’t want that will tell you, or at least imply, that you are wrong to want it.

The thing is, Star Wars has not really always been uncomplicated in its heroism. The entire prequel trilogy followed a hero who would turn out to be one of the most infamous villains of all time. If that’s not complicated, I don’t know what is. And since we knew that was what was going to happen, we were okay with it. If Star Wars had started with Episode I and sent Anakin Skywalker on a Walter White-style descent into evil, we might have felt much differently about it. (Though we shouldn’t have been surprised in Breaking Bad, either, as it’s all there in the title. To follow a protagonist who is going to turn bad, you kind of need to know it from the start.)

So I don’t think those of us displeased with the character arcs of the main heroes necessarily demand a lack of complexity in our heroes. A little complexity is great. A lot of complexity may be too much, and may ultimately feel depressing. The Half in the Bag guys talked about this being a movie where everybody always fails. On a basic cinematic level, that’s disheartening.

But the pro Last Jedi faction argues that we should want these people to seem more human, if not only because it’s more realistic, then because it gives the Star Wars universe more space to grow. Rian Johnson clearly did not want to be imprisoned by everything that had come before in this saga, and boy did he show it. So that’s what Johnson wanted, and what those who have loved this movie (including most critics) clearly wanted.

But it doesn’t mean that it is, by necessity, the right thing to want, and that anyone who doesn’t want it is intellectually stunted in some way. The success of the MCU has showed that we like movies to be fun, and I would argue that this is not a fun movie. But are we to be derided for wanting something to be fun?

The conventional wisdom is that fun is good in a superhero movie, as the continued rejection of the DC superhero model has proven. But if we want Star Wars to feel more escapist, suddenly we aren’t holding ourselves to a high enough intellectual standard. 

Which makes The Last Jedi even more complicated, because its attempts at slapstick humor are some of its most derided elements. So The Last Jedi is trying to be fun, and in some corners being derided for its attempts to follow the MCU model, but it doesn’t have a natural sense of how to be fun, which is what I would argue is one of the best attributes of The Force Awakens. So it's an unfun movie trying to be fun but dwelling on depressing things. It's kind of one of those situations where it seems like you can cherrypick the elements of the movie that most directly speak to your argument, ignoring ones that directly contradict it.

The reason this resembles a political debate is the sense on both sides of how wrong the other side is. If you want heroes to succeed, and fail only because they are trying so hard to succeed (which is kind of what happens with Poe), you think the movie and the people who love it have no respect for the grand history of Luke Skywalker, one of the most prominent heroic figures in modern popular culture. If you want heroes to be human and Star Wars to surprise you, you think the people who don’t like the movie are shallow or intellectually inferior.

But really, it’s okay to want different things from Star Wars. We all do. And we all should. 

And wanting something I didn’t get doesn’t make me a hater. It just makes me a spurned lover.

And part of the reason I may not go again to see it in the theater is very simple:

I know that nothing different is going to happen this time around. 

Star Wars, or something

I just listened to the Slate Spoiler Special podcast on Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and even though they obviously included spoilers in that, I don't need to spoil anything here today. (Or, only very, very minor spoilers.)

Instead, I want to talk about how they talked about it.

The panel was composed of Slate Culture Gabfest host and Slate film critic Dana Stevens, and two other Slate writers, Forrest Wickman and Sam Adams. I don't know those two apart from each other so I will refer to them interchangeably in this post. "Samrest" seems like as good a portmanteau as any.

Dana Stevens, bless her heart, is not a Star Wars fan. She's a wonderful personality and a great film critic, but when it comes to basic Star Wars terminology, she's hopeless. When one of the guys talked about how the training of Rey by Luke on Ahch-to (that's not a spoiler) was this film's version of Dagobah, poor Dana thought that Dagobah was a method of training Jedi, not the planet Yoda lived on.

Dana has to be on every show because she's the film critic and the host of this series. The other two, though, were on the show specifically because they were thought to have substantive thoughts and opinions on Star Wars from knowing something about it.

Well, it's questionable.

Actually, I won't say they don't know anything. I'll say that they undercut the things they know by having a strangely dismissive attitude toward the conventions that define the world's most popular entertainment property.

Instead of projecting confidence in the things they know, they would undermine it by saying "or something" after every plot development they discussed. "The rebels are trying to use their bombers to take out the dreadnaught, or whatever it's called." You know it's called a "dreadnaught," Samrest, if not because you just saw the movie and loved it, then because you're a dutiful journalist and looked it up if you were planning to talk about it. But we know it's really the first option.

What I felt as I listened to it was a reluctance to take Star Wars seriously. If a planet is called "Cantonica" in the newest Star Wars movie, you don't have to make a Hannukah joke, which Samrest did, saying that today was the third day of Cantonica. If the movie chooses to call one of its planets Ahch-To, just call it Ahch-To, don't say it's called "Ahch-To, or something."

I could see that dismissive attitude if they hadn't liked the movie, but both professed to love it, despite not being able to rein in their snark. Maybe it's kind of what I discussed in yesterday's post, how loving Star Wars and hating it are strangely intermingled emotions. You love it so much that you can't help but hate aspects of it. But the names of the aliens or the planets or the spaceships are no goofier in this movie than in any other movie, and to say "or something" after you produce the perfectly accurate name for that thing is just disingenuous.

Then there were the times that Samrest just got something wrong. Samrest raised an objection to how these new movies killed the "happily ever after" of Return of the Jedi, saying something along the lines of "You defeated the empire, and then ten years later, here they come again." Isn't the passage of time between Jedi and The Force Awakens thought to be about 30 years? Being wrong by two decades on that time estimate was either a careless mistake, or an intentional case of getting it wrong, which brings us back to the unaccountable dismissiveness.

And as much as I am in the bag for Dana Stevens -- I attended a live recording of The Slate Culture Gabfest in Melbourne back in May, and had my picture taken with her -- she didn't help matters by introducing every new plot point with kind of a giggle about the unfathomable absurdity of it all. So both the people who like Star Wars and the people who like it but have purposefully learned nothing about it let me down in this episode.

I am reminded of the words of my seventh grade English teacher, Mr. Murray, who had a theatrical way of making points about not only the English language, but the world. I considered him a great teacher, but the fact that he had already forgotten me like two years later dimmed his star a bit. Anyway, Mr. Murray was once talking about the right level of enthusiasm to have for something, and gave a person's reading of the beginning of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address as his example. The first person was a turnoff by being too invested in it. "Four score ..." he boomed in a way that was frighteningly earnest and intense. Indeed, it was a turn off. But then the person who thought he was too cool for school and barely spat out the iconic opening words in disinterested fashion was equally problematic. The right way to do it was to read the words with seriousness of purpose and with feeling, but not too much or too little of either.

I don't really know what point he was trying to make, but his words stuck with me, and they feel instructive here. If you start getting into the nerdy details of what Star Wars canon says to be the case and what creatures came from what homeworld and whether anything they did would be realistic in the scope of the Star Wars universe, you turn people off. But it's equally a turnoff to pretend that those details don't matter. It's best to discuss Star Wars with seriousness of purpose and with feeling, but not too much or too little of either.

At this point I think we all must accept the fact that Star Wars is serious business. You can laugh it off as a lark, and indeed, sometimes the movies themselves invite you to laugh at them, either because they robotically try to insert laugh lines (see the prequels) or are genuinely funny (see these recent films). But if you don't take them seriously you fail to meet them not only on their own terms, but on the terms that legions of fans have come to view them.

So get over the fact that these things have "silly names." A porg is a porg, and it would be no more or less silly if it were called a flerg, a fur-penguin, or a space bunny.

When you laugh at Star Wars, you laugh at the people who have devoted their lives to it. Laugh with them, but not at them.

That divisive new Star Wars movie

Have you had enough time to see this movie?

No?

Then stop reading. I will SPOIL. And I won't repeat the spoiler warning like five more times in the next three paragraphs, because if you haven't seen it, you are intelligently on the lookout for spoilers and don't need to be told twice. If you do need to be told twice, well, I have no sympathy for you.

Here goes.

This may happen every time a new Star Wars movie comes out, and if so, the premise for this post is off base. But I can't concretely remember the last time I heard people arguing that the new Star Wars movie was either their favorite in the series, or their least favorite -- with equal vigor on both sides, and about as many voices.

Critics don't seem to be very divided, as the Metascore in the high 80s would attest. But audiences are a different story.

In the past few days of discussing this movie in various formats on Facebook, I have heard both of the following comments:

"I hated it."

"Star Wars: The Last Jedi > A New Hope, Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi combined."

That second comment is patently ridiculous and probably should be thrown out as an outlier lacking in credibility, but it does say something about just how passionate some people feel about this movie. As does the word "hate" when describing the others' equal passion in the opposite direction.

Me? Glad you asked.

I gave it a 3.5 stars. I felt inclined to give it four. But when I talk about it, my words are more like a three.

Simply put, I am far more compelled to talk about the things I didn't like about it than those I did. That should not be mistaken with standard internet negativity or holding the film to an impossible standard. I'm a guy who felt like I was walking on air after The Force Awakens, my impression of it only tainted by the fact that I was depressed over Han Solo dying. I can be just as forgiving of a Star Wars movie as I can be critical of it. Since I am actually a critic, what I hope emerges is my genuine feelings toward a movie's strengths or weaknesses.

Here I am more focused on the weaknesses. I did not laugh much in this movie. I did not feel swept away by it. I felt two of its three plots had serious momentum and relevance issues, with only the Kylo/Rey/Luke plot feeling like it truly grabbed me. However, that plot also contains the film's most bold choices, including the deaths of Snoke and Luke, which both felt premature to me. So even while that plot was the most interesting to me, it also contained potentially the most problematic developments in the larger story. (A piece I read suggested that by getting story beats from The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi out of the way now, it free up Episode IX to be truly original -- though I'm still struggling with whether I think that's exactly what I want.)

And yet I'm giving this movie 3.5 stars, and seriously toyed with four. Any given Star Wars movie is doing so much and has so much going on that within the context of cinema at large, these things are worthy of celebration. They suffer more within the context of Star Wars.

At least I'm not as bad as that guy who said he "hated" it. I noticed that on Letterboxd he gave it four stars, as, presumably, he could not bear to give a Star Wars movie any less. ("Marge, this gets my lowest rating ever: seven thumbs up.")

I guess I have to consider that I am a person who has trouble letting go. This weekend we packed up a lot of the books we used to read to the kids when they were babies, and only the most insipid could I really bear to part with. A hoarder wants everything he has ever had to remain accessible to him. Therefore, a hoarder wants Luke Skywalker to still be around, should he need him.

I guess I'm struggling with the idea that the old Star Wars needs to be purged to allow for a new one, which is one of the most direct themes of this movie. I like the old Star Wars. I'd like to keep it in the attic so I can take it out and look at it whenever I want. But that's not good for me, this movie says.

What I'm struggling with is this: Purge the old Star Wars so we can have what kind of new Star Wars? Isn't the next movie the last "new Star Wars" anyway? Oh, they'll keep exploring the Star Wars universe forever, of course, but are these characters we're going to keep following beyond the next movie? Daisy Ridley has said she's done playing Rey after the next movie, but did they plan to keep following Rey anyway? Something like that makes sense to me in a movie like Star Trek Generations, where Kirk had to die to pass the baton on to a new cast who were going to go make another three movies. But as far as I know we're not getting three more movies with Rey, Finn and Poe. So why do I have to purge the old Star Wars at all?

At this point I don't think this post can be anything more than my disconnected thoughts. I'm obviously still processing the movie, though the big difference between this and The Force Awakens is that I don't feel compelled to have a second theatrical viewing be part of my processing. It doesn't feel particularly likely that I am going to like it a whole lot better.

But there are still plenty of arguments I am undecided on, decisions in the movie that are not clearly either strengths or weaknesses. You'd think that a second viewing would help decide those, but to be honest, watching The Last Jedi was not a fun experience for me. I never gave myself over to it like I did with The Force Awakens, and the things that were good about it felt good for me, like medicine. They felt like they were supposed to be good for my soul, but I want a Star Wars movie to be more than medicine. I want it to be an upper in parts, not a downer throughout.

When I started writing this piece I felt an urge to catalogue some of the things I liked and some of the things I didn't like, the way everyone does on the internet all the time, just to be on the record about those things. But I think I'm going to leave off without doing that. I'd like to say how good I thought Mark Hamill, Adam Driver and Ridley were, or how wasted I thought Finn and Poe were in side plots that weren't worthy of them. Or how I feel like characters like C3PO, R2D2 and Chewbacca are being kept around specifically to be given the short shrift as a way of further differentiating these films from their forbears.

But I'm not going to. You've seen the movie and either liked it or not liked it -- more likely loved it or hated it -- and you know where you fall on those topics, whether they play a role in your feelings or are things you overlooked because of everything else you loved about it. I don't bring you to The Audient to repeat everything you can get everywhere else.

So I guess I myself didn't love or hate it. Even the movie I did sort of hate, Rogue One, I could bear to give no lower than 2.5 stars. I love Star Wars, and I hate not loving any particular movie. And sadly, I don't love The Last Jedi.

Another Star Wars opening, this time with mates

For the third straight year, I’m going to know what happens in the latest Star Wars movie as many as 48 hours earlier than you will.

This time, some mates are joining me.

The “crazy scheme” – well, crazy for a 44-year-old with kids – of going to the first midnight showings of Star Wars: The Last Jedi has been cosigned by two friends who used to work with me. Then again, one of them isn’t working at all right now, and the other isn’t starting work the next day until 1 p.m. So I still “out-crazy” them.

If it’s possible, I am even more ignorant about this movie than I was with either of the previous two since Disney bought Star Wars. In those instances, I never saw a full trailer, but I did see snippets of footage here and there, due to the difficulty of fully avoiding that type of thing. This year, I somehow never found myself in front of any footage, never needed to avert my eyes. Even though I’ve been going to the theater at least once per week, and certainly haven’t been consciously avoiding the types of movies that might expose me to these trailers, I have not had to cover my eyes or plug my ears even once.

I wonder if it’s been easier to avoid temptation because this is the first of the recent Star Wars movies not to contain anything “new.” The Force Awakens had new characters, plus the first glimpses of what the old characters looked like at this age, in their familiar duds. Rogue One had an (almost) entirely new cast of characters. The Last Jedi would figure to involve mostly characters we met last time, and even though we didn’t get to see Luke in action, we did see him, so he’s not a huge novelty either.

On the other hand, I can’t believe the temptation hasn’t won me over simply because of how good I expect this to be.

You got the sense that Disney was confident in J.J. Abrams, and rightly so – he delivered a very satisfying Star Wars movie, one that was probably safe in some respects but actually quite risky in others. However, at that time, Abrams was not tasked with directing any other movies in the series. (He has since replaced Colin Trevorrow on Episode IX.)

With Rian Johnson, we have the recent announcement that he is going to be directing three more Star Wars movies. No creative personality other than George Lucas has been given this much control over the vision and trajectory of Star Wars. In fact, if all goes as planned, by the late 2020s Johnson will have directed as many Star Wars movies as Lucas did.

I hardly think that kind of commitment would be warranted if this movie weren’t fucking awesome.

Unfortunately, it’s also fucking long, the longest in the series to date. When you factor in trailers and commercials, the 152 minutes of The Last Jedi will be dumping me out on the street, blurry but hopefully giddy, at 2:53 a.m. And I need to be at work at 8:30.

You know, maybe I’ll skip that midnight viewing of Solo: A Star Wars Story.

Either that or planned to be unemployed.

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.

I don't have trailers, but I have these

Damn.

Star Wars teaser posters are the things that will get me through to December, as I steadfastly refuse to watch the trailers (one of which has just become available, presumably for this Star Wars celebration that's marking the 40th anniversary of the franchise).

And this one for The Last Jedi is, simply, great.

I don't know what else to say about it.

The traditional route would probably have been to show Kylo Ren with his mask on, but how much more powerful is it to have him meet mano-a-mano -- humano-a-humano -- with his one-time mentor and trainer, Luke Skywalker. Unlike Darth Vader, Kylo Ren -- the erstwhile Ben Solo -- is a mask remover. Which may ultimately be the thing that's key to his salvation, even though he killed his dad.

In googling for this image, though, I also found another poster that captivated me, even though it's just a fan mock-up. It was nicely done enough that I thought it was worth showcasing it here:

Will a star destroyer actually be coming to Luke's secret island?

I guess we'll find out in December.